Mark Bell's Power Project - Ben The Bounce - Olympian Teaches You How to Use Jump Training For More Athleticism || MBPP Ep. 790

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

In this Podcast Episode, Ben Simons, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about how jump training can help you gain and maintain your athleticism during your career and as you age. Ben Simons, aka Ben The Bounce, is an Olympic Bobsledder from the UK. He is one of the springiest dudes we've had on and is proof that jumping is a sign of great athleticism.  Follow Ben on IG: https://www.instagram.com/benthebounce/ Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://boncharge.com/pages/POWERPROJECT Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off!! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject Code POWERPROJECT20 for 20% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://eatlegendary.com Use Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject  ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en  Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #BenTheBounce #JumpTraining  #PowerProject

The fake accent's cool, especially considering you're from Ohio. No one could understand what the heck I was saying before Peaky Blinders came out. And then they're like, you're from here. And I'm not from Birmingham, I'm just here. Do you think jumping is safer in general than maybe something like a sprint? So I think in general, there's probably more stuff that can go wrong with jumping. I mean, we've all seen the blooper reels on Instagram of people falling off boxes. wrong with jumping i mean we've all seen the blooper reels on instagram people falling off boxes but typically there's more chance of a muscle tear in sprinting i love it when they coach

is the person that's practicing the thing themselves or they're doing stuff where i'm like shit man i'd love to be able to do some of that or some vert or some even my own version of what somebody like this is doing so i love to learn from different people and that's kind of how we got you here yeah it's um but yeah that's that weight so 212 is heavy for me i was saying to you guys before when i first ever tested for bobsled i was 171 what about something like a squat bench deadlift those kinds of things you think they're important yeah so i mean they've been the staples throughout my whole career. Most bobsled is a very big squat. The full squat is just a staple within bobsled.

What do you think are concepts so people can maintain athleticism? So the ability to jump, the ability to not just run, but to potentially sprint into older age. Because that's the thing that you see people just lose. Yeah, definitely. I think getting into a lot of varied planes of motion sprint into older age because that's the thing that you see people just lose yeah definitely i think getting into a lot of varied um planes of motion and ranges of motion uh we hear that oh once you turn 30 you're uh like the percentage of your achilles tears like goes through the roof or some shit like that but i'm just curious how yours are doing like getting out into a park

fuck the track yeah yeah I'd rather just... Jesus Christ. Yeah, I'd rather get into a park. What's it like being in the Olympics? It's really quite hard to describe. Like, it's an absolute dream. And what actually happened was that when I was in college

and I was studying school science, I went into my training center and there was a poster on the wall. It was like, could you push your country in the Olympic Games? And these four people were just like, so you see these guys, this is my team, here's the wall. It was like, could you push your country in the Olympic Games and just throw people out of the slot?

So you see these guys. This is my team. Here's the one. Thickies. Yeah, yeah. Well, you're some tight pants. Wow.

Those boots were super kicked up. Yeah, yeah. You kicked up, bro. Yeah, like, Andrew, stop showing this video, bro. My bad.

Yes, pause. I was like, get off this road. I can't handle it. I can't handle it. I can't handle it. Pack Project Family, how's it going? Now, you know that we incessantly talk about sleep on this podcast and sometimes it's a little bit too much, but the reason why we do it is because we know how important it is for your lifestyle, your health, everything. That's why I've partnered with

Bond Charge. Now, they're a company that has all of these different products that helps you have a restful night's sleep. Primarily, they have blue light blocking glasses, and they also have different glasses for daylight. But I want to talk about the blue light blockers initially because blue light isn't bad. You know, when you go outside and the sun is out, you get blue light. It's not evil. But at nighttime, in modern lifestyle, it's something that we get from our screens. It's something that we get from our light bulbs and our TV.

But the thing is, is your body still thinks it's daytime. So you don't start producing the melatonin you need to produce to be able to go to sleep soundly. So when you put on blue light blockers, they will block the blue light from those screens. And we all noticed when we put on our blue light blockers a few hours before we go to sleep, we start to feel tired quicker because our body knows it's nighttime. So this is something that you guys really need to get your hands on and venture through their site because they have so many other tools that are beneficial for sleep, like the sleep masks and all these other things. But

Andrew, how can they get it? Yeah, absolutely. So you guys got to head over to bondcharge.com slash power project. That's B as in boy, O N charge.com slash power project. And at checkout, enter promo code power project to save 20% off your entire order. And if you guys notice, I wear prescription glasses on a daily basis. I also have prescription blue blocking glasses from Bon Charge. That's something that you guys can do. So don't think that because you wear prescription glasses that you can't take advantage of this. Head over there right now and get yourself a pair of these blue blocking glasses and start getting better restful sleep.

I'm ready. Are you? Do I look ready? Do I still look high? Yeah. Yeah. We were learning how to fucking bounce around this morning. It felt good.

Learning how to jump. Yeah, it was a good time. You guys did really well. It's interesting trying to apply those concepts to people from a different sporting background, especially from the extensive strength background. Stay a little closer to this. I think Andrew just yelled at you about this, and you're already fucking up. It's okay.

Guys chewing gum on the microphone, all kinds of stuff. Chewing gum, eating the tasty pastry. The fake accent's cool, especially considering you're from Ohio. Yeah, not from Ohio, from the Midlands, Peaky Blindy blinders central ah that was a good fucking show yeah well no one could understand what the heck i was saying before peaky blinders came out and then they're like you're from near and i'm not from birmingham i'm just like oh i understand you now so i've been coming to america for years and all of you think I'm speaking in gobbledygook. You're a gypsy, too? Maybe, somewhere along the line.

Who knows? Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. Thank you, Peaky Blinders. You can understand me. Thank you for making the trek out here. That's a long-ass flight. Yeah.

Yeah, it was a good flight, but I couldn't turn down the opportunity. Thank you guys for inviting me out here. We've wanted to come out to the U.S. and do this side, me and my friend Jim, for a few years, and so it presented this great opportunity for us to come out, see you guys, and do a trip up the West Coast after. So, yeah, we're having a good time. This is day one.

We've already been jumping around the gym all morning. You guys did really well, and it's really cool to apply some of the concepts that I really like using to people from different backgrounds. So, yeah, thank you. Do you think jumping is safer in general than maybe something like a sprint? Because I think maybe when people think about a sprint, they just think about that top-end speed,

and it does require something to jump, but there's so many different box heights you can choose from and so many different kinds of jumps that you can choose from so i think in general there's probably more stuff that can go wrong with jumping i mean we've all seen the blooper reels on instagram people falling off boxes but typically there's more chance of a muscle tear in sprinting um plyometrics like-level plyometrics are somewhere in between. So you can get a lot of muscle tears still with plyometrics. Probably not the same as top speed sprinting, but then the impact forces then become the problem. So you're going to get

more joint stress fracture issues with the high-level plyos. Where did plyometrics come from? Do you know? Do you know some of the background on it? Yeah, most people argue the Russians. So the first time I think it was out there in literature was maybe 60s, 70s. And then Verkhoshansky and Sif wrote a load in like super training, and that's when it really kind of blew up.

But the thing is, people have been jumping and bounding around for years. The triple jump is a plyometric. So people have in plyometric since the dawn of time you just put a semi-great work word on it yeah it's a new training concept but yeah people have been jumping since the dawn of time right how did you get involved in it well with plyos themselves i suppose i always jumped around quite a lot as a kid. So, like, I've got that genetic element in there that I'm pretty springy. And I really did quite a bit of track and field as a kid as well.

But any typical hyperactive kid, I did all sports that were out there. It just happened to be that I could sprint pretty quick off the mark and I could jump pretty high. So, football, soccer, as we call it, rugby, track and field, but probably my best thing was the horizontal jump. So I was a pretty good long jumper and triple jumper as a child. So that's really how I got into the jumping. But I was really lucky that a coach that I met that lived in the same kind of area as me was he'd been to, I think, four Olympic games at that point with high jumpers. Wow. And he had, when a local indoor track had closed down,

he moved all of the running track out of there. It was an aircraft hangar. He laid it in his back garden. And so he was a scholar of jumping. And so I went to him from probably 16 years old. So I learned then to have a real eye for for jumping i think so i learned a lot from him as far as jumping goes because i think there's more to it than people really realize yeah the mechanics it's the same as running mechanics right you can get into

real depth of running mechanics it's a little bit less out there i think with plyometrics so i just i learned a lot from him there really and then then really took it on from there. And at this point, I don't do a lot of plyometrics in my training. Really the jump stuff is basically a result of the power stuff that I'm doing for my sport, which is bobsled. You know, when some people look at your Instagram and then with what you just said, we're like, oh, it's genetic. I've been doing this since I was a kid. They'll automatically be like, well, then there's really no way that I can start jumping or I can build this skill. Right. But you've worked with a lot of people and you've seen a lot of people have those types of transformations. So do you think that like if somebody is trying to increase their hops as a teenager and it's really not

something that they've done before, can they actually have substantial change? And what should they think about as far as timelines to see change in their jumping ability like do you believe it's a genetic thing or even if you don't have the genetics can you become a good jumper there's definitely a genetic component i think that's hard really to deny okay but everybody can get better at jumping because there are there's a large spectrum to jumping as we've seen this morning we did like the box jumps which is like a long ground contact time all the way to like bounding um long jump takeoff triple jump which is much quicker in ground contact well with the slower ground contact jumps is very reliant on force application. And force is one of the things that we can really improve quite a lot.

So if people improve their ability to produce force and then improve their ability to use it quickly, they end up jumping higher. So I think everybody can improve their jumping ability. And I've seen that with, I work with a lot of clients from athletes to general population and a huge age range. And from 15 to 45, I'm seeing improvements in people's jumping ability. Mostly just through mechanics like we did this morning, teaching them principles, making them jump more efficiently.

Yeah, so everyone can improve it. Okay. You mentioned being springy. Can you get everybody to be springy? That's more difficult. That is more difficult because so much goes into that. It might have to do with a lot of stuff that you did when you were six or seven years old. I think that's a really, really big part of it.

And there's always that genetic component, but I think, yeah, childhood development and exposure to multiple ways to play and multiple sports and movements is is really important yeah and I was a very active hyper kid and one thing that I've only realized recently is in my living room when I was a child there was a set of open stairs around the corner that my dad had built so you know like the open stairs are not boxed in so you could like hold on to the steps and chin-ups okay yeah and each of them were like a different height going up to the ceiling so from like five years old when i could do my first chin-up because my dad was a rock climber originally so he was always big on me being able to do like a chin-up can you do

this i was like i was like five or six yeah i can do a chin-up on the stand and then basically every year i grew grew a bit taller and i could grab touch another. Yeah, I can do a chin-up on the stairs. And then basically every year I grew a bit taller and I could grab, touch another step, grab onto another step, do a chin-up. So throughout my childhood, these steps were like a height check in my house. Your dad's like, don't put a banister on that. Don't put a railing on that thing. Well, he had to actually box it in because me and my brother were like falling out the side.

But you know, you need a bit of risk, right? Can't be risk averse. So yeah, that was a factor. And and the other thing is it's quite interesting me and my i have i have a full brother a younger brother and i have a half brother older brother me and my younger brother we both had the same genetic test and it was interesting because we display very different qualities he was always a long distance middle distance runner and very good engine good endurance and i always had this kind of explosive power i thought there's going to be a huge difference on our certainly the gene expression on the power side but on the genes that they tested

we had all the same variations on the power side he just had better variations for vo2 max so really if you looked at both the readouts, you'd be like, there's the athlete there. Yeah. Yeah, my older brother, half-brother, who we didn't actually test, he's like crazy explosive just naturally. Like never done any sport in his life. But when I was like, he's 10 years older. When I was like 17, I was getting into my sports science. I had a tape measure out in the yard

and I was doing standing broad jumps. And he kind of walks out from the computer with a coffee and a cigarette. And he's like, what are you doing there? I'm like, yeah, standing broad jump. You want to go? And he's like, yeah. Puts his cigarette down 10 feet.

Did he play a sport? Never, no. Goes back inside. Picks up his cigarette. Goes back on his computer. It's crazy. Yet my younger brother who, he was attracted, his friends' group in school.

One of their fathers was a distance runner. He went to a Commonwealth Games and trained his son in distance running. So my brother got drawn to distance running. He obviously had the genetic component VO2 max. So it was kind of both like, he had all of the power variations that i did or certainly the ones that were tested for at that time this was back in 2015 um but he had the exposure at a young age and the ability through the vo2 max variations polymorphisms that he had and so that was a double

whammy so he got much better at endurance exercise whereas me i hate endurance and I kind of was already that explosive twitchy kid. So on a football pitch, first couple of steps, no one was beating me. So I just got pulled towards those explosive sports. So it's a bit of nature and nurture and it's hard to really tell which one it is. I think with explosive sports, nature is more important, but childhood development, which is something that hasn't been researched, I don't think, as much. I think that's a real big factor, especially in this generation where there's going to be more sedentary kids.

There's more risk adversity. You know, people don't want to take risks. All the play parks have spongy services. Some of those, when I was a kid, if you fell off the swings, you knew about it, right? You don't do it again. You know where your limits are. Finding limits is important.

I remember getting those rocks stuck in your hands. Oh, damn, yeah. Falling off your bike or whatever. Do they still have tetherball? Yeah, not as much. I don't see as much.

Yeah, that used to hurt. Tetherball was great, but sometimes you just get, but you know what tetherball is? We don't have that, but I've seen it on cartoons from the US. Yeah, you have this pole

and then there's this string and this hard ball where you hit the ball, and then the other kid has to hit the ball back. Oh, no, we had that with tennis rackets. So it was smaller, and it would spin around. You ended up just taking each other's head off, man. What do you think kids are going to do? Funnest game ever. Yeah, yeah.

But we didn't have the tetherball. I think i've seen that though on like cartoons and stuff do you mess around with any longer distance stuff now like you do 800s or you run a mile two miles anything like that do you know what's interesting when i when i came back from the last competitive bobsled season um i've been so explosive and linear with all of my movement for so many years and over the last couple of years i've started trying to expand my movement again so it's almost like if you think of an athlete's career it tends to be periodization wise you start quite general with and develop all the general abilities and capacities and then you're specifying a specific it's like i'd kind of max that out i need just to

get back into the general stuff to explore those movement options ranges of motion different planes of movement to actually kind of start reducing injury and see some improvements again the general stuff to explore those movement options ranges of motion different um planes of movement to actually kind of start reducing injury and see some improvements again and that's what i saw so it's the same with distance and when i came back from the competitive season this year my thing was i wanted to run a mile barefoot i don't know why i just did so i got to the track i did my warm-up i like to do my warm-up on the grass barefoot and then i just got on the track and just started getting a really slow two laps three laps four laps and then managed to get that mile without while still being able to like walk in

the morning but yeah all of those little muscles in my lower legs got really stiff and tight but that was kind of my distance thing i just thought i want to be it's like a lot of people who train they do like general population they'll do a lot of endurance work might run a lot of people run distance and they kind of miss the athletic side yeah for me like everything i've done has just been so much explosive power i just kind of missed being just going along the longer distances so i did a bit of endurance work but um mostly with the sprint stuff, it got to the point in my career where sprinting at real true top speed was so intense. It would take so much out of me that I was basically lengthen that and bring the intensity down. So if you think of it from a gym perspective, it would be like going more towards volume than towards intensity in your lifts so yeah i'll do like 120 meter sprints 150 meter sprints but at like

87 to 90 intensity rather than trying to hit 90 plus all the time and i found i wouldn't blow up so much i won't get so fatigued so like that's how i kind of from a sprint perspective did the more endurance side stuff even though i only run like 40 50 meters on the ice when i'm pushing a bobs sled yeah yeah do you have you noticed when you did any of that longer distance stuff or potentially when you do do you find that it takes away at all from your explosive ability or from your athleticism I haven't found that at all and this is um that sounds like a good thing, right? But it's been a frustration of my career. I've never found the perfect formula for myself.

Yeah. And it's because every stimulus that I've thrown at myself, I've reacted to. Like, I've been completely, really badly injured and had to stop running for, like, six months and go into, I was lucky enough to be in the Olympic Association rehabilitation unit, residential stay, give you all your rehabilitation work,

lots of low-level core and stuff that I just saw as like the antichrist to being explosive. Came back off that. I was still developing in my late 20s into my peak. I had, at that point, I was more more stable less injury uh prone and i came straight back in and ran around got like a broad jump pb 30 meter sprint pb and i found that ever since even as like the like a primer the day before 24 hours before an event a lot of people will use like an explosive primer and it's like i've been always trying to find the right primer is it power clean is it just a warm-up is it a heavy squat some of the swiss will use like a really heavy squat like

24 hours before they push i was always trying to find this and then one day we were training on a military camp and one of the pts put us through a military fitness test the day before we did some like 30 meter sprint testing i thought i'm going to be ruined tomorrow i went around my best like time that i'd run in like six years and i'm like why is this and the more i find that if there's a novel stimulus i just react to it and some people do have this they they're called what quote unquote a super responder it's like if you're um genetically meant to do something like if you know they say sprinters are born well sprint programming varies massively between different schools of thought people seem to come out with similar results as if they're genetically talented enough you keep them injury free so yeah that's a trick though

how do you keep them injury free that is the real trick i think that is that's the main thing with really high class coaches certainly with sprinters and really high level power athletes because they do tend to be injury prone keeping them healthy is the more important thing like pushing adaptation like their ceiling's so high if you keep them healthy their trajectory's right they're probably going to hit that someone less talented you're probably going to have to be thinking about adaptation more and how you're really going to push this and get all the positive adaptations to allow them to have the output to do what you're trying to achieve. So that goes back to really our question about also can everybody jump higher?

We have people that aren't genetically predisposed. You might need to be a bit more specific and really push that envelope a bit more. Whereas for people that are born to jump, they're going to jump. You jumped high today. You've been doing jiu-jitsu for six years hardly jump much you do a bit of jump rope i mean you're like you high percentage fast twitch you jump high today yeah born to do it oh shit i was gonna say um you were mentioning uh that uh one of the greatest marathon runners of all time can barely touch his feet. Is this kind of common amongst long-distance runners that maybe they are kind of, I don't know, maybe just beat up from all the miles they run? Hard for them to be athletic, maybe.

Yeah, I think it's like,'s like just such adaptive organisms, right? If you're going to run, God, I mean, how many miles are they running a week, really? Like marathon runners. Yeah, they can run 50, 60 plus miles per week. It's crazy. That's a lot. It's a huge stimulus on the body. Your body adapts to it.

And it's like if you're in that position so often for so many strides, why do you need to touch your toes? Yeah. It's like if you see um cyclists and they're bent over all day like tour de france cyclists their posture is they have this kind of really big extended like rear rib cage pulling all that air into their lungs and that bent over position it's like that kind of adaptation and you see sprinters they've got that big lordosis well it's adaptation to running powerfully all the time pretty tension on the hamstrings yeah yeah so it's like i think with that flexibility thing in the thing is you get big individual differences with to running powerfully all the time. Pretty attention on the hamstrings. Yeah, so it's like,

I think with that flexibility thing in, the thing is you get big individual differences with flexibility. I know powerful people in sprinters that can like get their, like a door can get his foot up by his head, right? One of the most powerful people that ever lived, explosive, like elastic people.

Yeah, I know sprinters that can't touch their toes as well. So I think there's a, there are individual differences there. But certainly with marathon running, I think it's such a huge stimulus, like repetitive stimulus on the body that you're probably going to adapt to be a little bit less flexible. That would make sense. Yeah, probably easier for the sprinter to adapt to other things

than it is for the marathon runner to. Yeah, I think just the amount of time training, right, as well. And there seems to be a little bit more spread of activity that they do. Because if you're running 60 miles plus a week, it's a lot of time in each day. How much room have you got left for other stuff? Whereas, you know, sprinting is so intense, like the actual intense part,

the amount of sprints that you do above like 90% intensity. If you take the actual time spent doing that, it's not a very long amount of sprints that you do above like 90 intensity and you take the actual time spent doing that it's quite a it's not a very long amount of time because the sprints are going to last if you're running top speed like six seven seconds acceleration even shorter there's more room in that sprint program for other elements your strength your power and your fastest speed just probably really isn't probably really isn't expressed all that much anyway because you're not probably if you're real high level you're not going above 90 percent yeah no that's often what i see yeah and we talked about it earlier people kind of talk about these athletes that they think look lazy when they come to training but a lot of the time they're kind of

going through the gears because they don't really need to hit super high intensities in training like they're going to get there so when it comes to competition day that's when you really see the turn up yeah and i've seen that time and time again it was like a good friend of mine um a guy called craig pickering he was a teammate for a while really really intelligent guy sports science guy but he also ran the hundred i think he ran 10 i think he ran 100 10.09 windy. So he's very good. He was an Olympic 100 meter runner. But he was one of the few that was really well schooled, sports science background.

And he was so diligent with his training, just so diligent. And he said to me once that he could have done with being lazier in his career because he looked at some of his teammates that were a little bit more laid back with it. And it was not just the attitude and the kind of relaxation and lack of stress in life around all of the elements that you have to get done. I know people that have made themselves like crazy with all the stuff they need to do, all the prehab.

Just completely left it. And there's some guys that can just leave training at the track. So psychologically, it was quite important. But also those guys just knew it was time to turn up when it's time to turn up. And they'd go through the motions as much as they needed to in the meantime and you see that with speed very different in training for other events you can't afford that in other things but in speed you do see it there's a parallel there though when it comes to strain training like the athletes in terms of

training anybody wants to develop very quickly so athletes who are power lifters they want to get strong fast athletes who are spr, they want to get strong fast. Athletes who are sprinters, they want to develop speed fast. So they pile on as much as they can into those training sessions. But when you pile in so much and then you have a lack of recovery, but then you just keep piling, keep piling, keep piling, you'll either just burn yourself out or you'll get injured, and that'll be the thing that slows you down massively.

So it goes with all sport. But was that an aspect of what you were talking about with the injuries that slows you down massively. So it's, it goes with all sport, but was that an aspect of what you were talking about with the injuries that you had? Were you doing too much too often? Um, or was it just, you mentioned the overuse injury that you had in the gym. How, how was your athletic career through the things that you did? Yeah. So I was, I was super diligent and driven as well. Yeah. So I did, I probably did too much, but I'd probably chased too much with full intensity. Because like I said before,

if you're genetically predisposed to produce so much power, you can kind of pull yourself apart as well. There's just more forces going through the body, right? And I remember saying this to, we had a guy on the team that was actually a doctor, a medical doctor. And I'd been to the, I'd got a load of scans done on my pelvis

and I had like sacroiliitis and all sorts of stuff. And they were quite like, they were testing me for all sorts of genetic diseases and stuff because they're like, you shouldn't have inflammation there and the sacroiliac joint and stuff. And like this doctor, Henry, his name was, he said to me, they don't quite understand how much force you're putting through your body. At this point, I was 200 pounds. Henry was like 240.

He's a big guy, and we're hitting the same weight sled. I'm just producing so much force on such a smaller frame. They don't understand the forces that are going through there. And one thing I learned to do is, one, stop getting pulled into man tests because it was always a competitive environment. And probably until 25, I could deal with all of those man tests, and I'd be good. And then after that, it could deal with all of those man tests and I'd be good. And then after that, it was like,

you've got to pick and choose your battles because if you're going full intensity on every man test that gets thrown at you every day in the gym, every jump, every sprint you do, you're just going to pull yourself apart. And it was those guys that were able to kind of rein themselves in. It's not that their egos get ahead of them. And yeah, actually consider the consequences

of every rep they were doing they tended to be on the safer side with things so it's actually interesting i'm curious about the man says you're talking about because when you know gota was in here right they're not big fans of the gym and they explain why and there seems to be good reasoning how it can potentially make an athlete move in a worse way if they're putting a lot of poundage on their back. Yeah, just for example, I spent decades doing squats, and you figure there would be some sort of extension. You figure there would be some sort of follow through with the hips.

But when it came to jumping, it was hard for me to demonstrate that. So there are some parallels where you're like, yeah, well, sometimes training in the gym doesn't always seem like the most beneficial for everybody. Yeah, but for you, you mentioned, and I've heard this from other track athletes, I know specifically college ones that just burn themselves out, um, how they just end up just tearing themselves apart. So you wonder, are you tearing yourself apart because you're not strong enough to handle those forces? How does one build the strength to handle all of the forces you're putting through your body? Well, I think first things first is the recipe. It's the volume and the intensity and the way the program is put together. Right. And if you've got a good program, that's not going to overload you so much that

you're going to pull yourself apart. And the components are all going to work in synergy and work together and work as antidotes for one another. So let's take heavy lifting, for example. If you do as a sprinter, 40 squats a week um some sprinters will do 40 squats a week and that's it but a good enough intensity to get adaptation stimulus versus how many sprint contacts like 10 000 how much difference is that going to make to their posture really because the emphasis is on the speed work. Yeah. The gym is supplementary. And then you've got the side of it where the adaptation you're getting from the gym works as kind of like an antidote for what you're doing on the track. Just to point out just quickly, like if it's 40 really shitty reps, then you can say, okay, well, I could see it could probably have detrimental effects. But if it's 40 reps where it's clean and it's with a reasonable percentage probably has zero negative impact and probably mostly positive yeah i would say so and i think

the way you see speed athlete squat is slightly different i mean and i'm not talking about range of movement here i'm talking about probably the top end of the movement most of them will be really explosive to the top yeah and they'll also sometimes add bands and make it more ballistic or at least go through the range of motion work lower full range and then move to higher range of motion squat top range of motion squats so yeah they kind of work in hip extension more so in my experience track coaches will drill hip extension at the top in squats whereas powerlifting coaches won't so there will be an element of they're looking for the transfer from the gym. I don't know whether that transfer exists.

I mean, just improving strength to a certain point will probably transfer if you're a beginner or you have low strength levels. But past a certain point, it seems to fulfill a very different need. So if we take how the tendons adapt to sprint contacts, when you do a lot of sprint or running contacts, most people run into overuse injuries, tendinopathies, et cetera. When you get under a heavy load,

what you get in the tendon is like the opposite. It doesn't stiffen up. You get a stress relaxation, tendon creep, and you get a nice even load across that whole tendon. Remodeling can take place. So that's another reason. That's kind of like an antidote to the speed work you've done, which is what people don't really see lifting as.

And one of the reasons why that volume changes when you get close to competition so you want the tendons maybe to be a little bit stiffer so that's a kind of new that's more recent that research that's coming out about tendons and how they react to heavy load and so people are now looking at how sprint programs are set up and how people often lift straight after running in a lot of good sprint programs and it's like the concept behind it often the concept isn't explained because it's something that's been found out through experience with the coaches that used it this worked well for my guys and that's what's taken on it's handed down to the next coach that's where what's cool is when science kind of comes in and can confirm that for you

so yeah i think it's really the um's really the recipe and how you put it together. It's like if you do like old block periodization and we're just going to do strength for eight weeks. Yeah, almost certainly have some postural changes and you're going to get into trouble when you try and transition to sprinting. A lot of people, it tends to be more of a concurrent approach nowadays. You still keep speeding for the start. The emphasis of the block might be slightly different keep speeding for the start the emphasis of the

block might be slightly different but all the elements are in there to some degree so quick question about that you mentioned doing the lifting after the sprinting session so the intention of the lifting is to loosen up potentially loosen up and lengthen the ligaments because they were so stiff within the sprint training session the tendonsons, yeah. So that's not the intent at this point, I believe, from most coaches. Yeah. A lot of coaches… But that's an effect. I think that's an effect,

and I think it's an effect that hasn't been really thought about. And it's more researchers and physiotherapists that are seeing that effect now and why they're prescribing heavy leg press or squat for distance runners after they do their interval reps to try and help the tendons so i don't think it was a way to decompress in a way yeah yeah which doesn't sound yes but yeah yeah so like posturally it's almost different because maybe the um the running itself

is quite expansive so you can afford some compression afterwards um but it's more i think the effect at the tendon itself and i don't think it was the intent behind it i think most time it's more, I think, the effect at the tendon itself. And I don't think it was the intent behind it. I think most time it's coupled because Charlie Francis came out with a high-low idea, where at least a lot of coaches put their high-intensity elements on one day because the CNS needed a little bit longer to recover. And evidence is changing around that as well. Some people can have more frequency. Some people can do high- stuff every day. But that was really, I think that really shaped a lot of training thought processes

behind a lot of sprint coaches. Like Charlie's book back whenever it came out, when he first introduced the high-low concept. I think that really drove coaching practice and speed. And so that's why they were coupled more than anything. And then a lot of the time, I think from what i've heard from some collegiate coaches was just like gym time available gym time so well the footballer in tomorrow football team are in like you better get in and lift right we better rush in after track practice power clean and squat

and we're out of there we'll do conditioning next day i think ben johnson wouldn't he lift before he ran too i've heard i think heavier lifts before he ran. I don't remember, but I thought that's what it was. Yeah, I've heard so many different things here, which is crazy. Like I've heard Charlie say it didn't happen. Well, certainly through the forum. I didn't actually speak to him myself. I've heard other coaches say, yeah, it did.

I've heard coaches say they definitely saw Valerie Boers off, the Russian, squatting before running. Like I said, I know I've seen Swiss athletes squat the day before doing pushing and bobsleigh. I know that Kaylee Humphries, who's like she's the most successful female bobsledder of all time, she would at one point power clean, I think it was five hours before her competition

so they kind of worked out where her point was to get some potentiation in the system so rather than like what we think of pap post-activation potentiation which seems to occur anyway anywhere from like three to eight minutes after a rep of squats it's where the complex training stuff comes from when you jump in between your squats and stuff it seems to be a bit different from that because it's like hours beforehand and um i remember asking stew mcmillan her coach like what he was doing with the activation stuff and he was very much saying and it is very individual you know some people have different need different things and i think rana uh i might get his name wrong rana raider with with some of his group. Like if there's somebody,

some people come in off a day of rest and they're flat, real flat. They need just some tension in the system. Some people are good. For the most part, elite athletes need a bit of something the day before they're going to compete

at a very high intensity. So for him and his, Stu McMillan will do a potentiation day on the Monday. So Tuesday's really good quality. And I've heard with um rainer um that he if he's got guys that get a little bit flat after a day's rest he'll just do like a work capacity day on the first day so they get something in the system but they still get like a training effect to work capacity training effect so yeah that's a bit of a long-winded

answer there but yeah some people will benefit from strength training first to really activate the system. Some people are not good. It tends to be, I think the more bouncy elastic people, probably not so much. People are real force guys. And you see that spectrum within sprinters as well. You have this spectrum that's talked about.

It's kind of like, um yeah strength sprinters or elastic sprinters it's like guys that want to just use ground contact and guys want to pull off the floor and use just elastic contacts it's hard not to get caught up in like what somebody does you know uh ben johnson charlie francis they like change sprinting forever even though uh ben johnson you know was uh caught with steroids or whatever he they found windstroll in his system or whatever the hell happened there um they still changed uh the way that people thought about sprinting for many many decades after um and then even in like your case like scouring the internet looking at different people um and coming

across your page and watching you jump. It's like, well, I want to learn about like what that guy does, but you might, like you might, or anybody else might, they might do something despite themselves. Like they could have a horrible training program or one that you would never advise to somebody else. So it's kind of hard sometimes to say like, this training program is great because look at how fast this guy is, or look at how far this guy can jump, or let's look at how the way that Ben Johnson trained. It's like, okay, well,

not that performance enhancing drugs are in track anyway, and we know they're pretty prevalent, but it's interesting like how we decide and pick and choose. We want to learn more about Usain Bolt. What's the thing that he's doing? And there's not one thing. It's not because Ben Johnson squatted 400 pounds before he sprinted

that made him able to run sub-10-second 100-meter sprints. It's an entire career of stuff uh that that led to some of that so it's it's hard to kind of sift through andrew can you bring up uh some of the jumps off of his instagram where he's doing some of the stuff especially with the like straight legs and some of the different things that he's doing oh yeah so some of this is kind of how you got here. Like we saw some of this. I think we've, I don't know if it was in SEMA or myself or the both of us kind of communicating with Ben Patrick a little bit too on some other folks that we should have on the show. And we heard nothing but good things. So kind of here you are. But I personally like it when somebody has either a handful of people that are experiencing the programming and flourishing from it,

or even better, I love it when the coach is the person that's practicing the thing themselves, or they're doing stuff where I'm like, shit, man, I'd love to be able to do some of that, or even my own version of what somebody like this is doing. So I love to learn from different people, and that's kind of how we got you here. That's wild. Yeah, it was crazy to see that you guys had pulled me up on the podcast. I was really surprised, and it was cool.

It was nice. And then for you to ask me to come over was like a byproduct of that, and that's the power of social media now, right, for all of its pitfalls and its positives. I also i also gotta say when you first came to the gym i don't know how i said it i'm like oh you don't look small what i meant to say was oh you're bigger in person because it sounded like i was dissing you but like in your videos i'm like maybe it's like five eight five nine or whatever but you're six two two something two ten two big yeah well i'm like i'm probably like 202 now so i was i was 212 back in in february and when you're on the gas usada he's really 230.

we're joking don't worry they know i'm here they know i'm here um regular tests and all that so yeah clean sport guys they're all jokes guys. Yeah. But yeah, that's that weight. So 212 is heavy for me, man. Like I was saying to you guys before,

when I first ever tested for bobsled, I was 171. I was, I was so light. And it's because many years ago was that, how old are you? I'm 35. And I tested when I was 24,

25, I think it was 2012. And yeah, I was, I was 35, and I tested when I was 24, 25. Wow. I think it was 2012. And, yeah, I was doing track and field at that point. I was studying. I was at uni. I was studying sports science at college. And I was doing a bit of track, and I was a pretty talented jumper.

I had a lot of injuries, a lot of operations, and was sprinting at the time. So I was, like, trying to keep my weight artificially low, and I think this is something where people can't see the woods for the trees. With individual differences, everybody's got an ideal weight too. And me trying to stay down at 171 pounds was ridiculous. And I put like 10 kilos on in 12 months, just basically dropping the tempo, low-intensity running volume, five times five in the gym.

And boom, it just went on. It just went on. And the crazy thing is I got faster. So I was just artificially keeping my weight at the wrong place. Some of the stuff that you're doing in the gym, like where you're doing some, we saw some videos of you doing cleans

and some things like that. Do you think these are things that are assisting your explosiveness? Are they things that you that are assisting your explosiveness? Are they things that you feel have increased your explosiveness? And maybe you noticed that with some people that you've helped or some people that you worked with during your time, you know, bobsledding. Because some people are like, hey, these lifts are great to help improve explosiveness. And other people kind of don't think they help.

What's your opinion on it? Yeah, so I wasn't a big power clean fan before I started bobsled. And it's funny because the coach that I mentioned, Dennis, the guy that I worked with when I was younger, he didn't really like Olympic lifts too much as well. Because he was very much high jump based. When you see an Olympic lift, you see it here, obviously you get triple, you probably, you get some hip extension anyway,

and then you get triple flexion. Whereas what he was looking for in high jump was always just holding full extension off the takeoff. And so he didn't like it drilling in, you cutting that contact short. So he saw too many people Olympic lifting bad and cutting their hip extension. So he's like, I don't want this leaking into my athlete.

So he'd often use like high pull without the catch just so we get a full extension. But what I found was I wasn't jumping anymore and it was just sprinting. Well, what you see with elites and that's only really coming out recently, you don't really tend to reach triple extension in an acceleration. It's all about hip extension and then going into triple flexion pulling that leg back through and you do see that in a power clean whether that transfers mechanically who knows but i can tell you the intent behind the power clean like if i've got to pull a pr power clean i've got to be absolutely hyped whereas i can get under like something that's a probably pr level bench press. And I might be a bit worried

before I've got spotters. It's like, I'm cool. But if I'm walking up to that power clean, it's like a PR. I'm like, I'm nervous, man. Because it's like all of those components have got to work together so quickly. And then the thing is with Olympic lifts is when you start getting really heavy, sometimes when your technique isn't drilled well, your technique goes out the window and it's like incredibly frustrating. So I think if you've got a long you've got a good amount of time a full career to develop it great tool to have in the arsenal because also all the different variations you can use from from hang from hip full catch power catch you can get a lot of adaptations from that from one exercise and i'll find this with a lot of people are all on the the kind of trap jump trap bar jump

high rather than a power clean they're like oh well we can get triple extension easier with this well firstly it's not all about triple extension and um yeah it's like you you've got more that you can do with an olympic lift it's more posterior chain chain dominant as well yeah and i think the what i see with trap bar lifts a lot is people get really knee dominant straight in the knees and they just keep that butt out the back leave the hips behind and then with the if you don't get the hips into the power clean you're going nowhere so i kind of switch my viewpoint on that which i've done constantly throughout my career yeah which i'm happy for i've never been too polarized either side i've been flexible and at this point i feel like i've come to a pretty good recipe with how i coach my athletes so yeah with some guys if it's appropriate i'm not going to

power clean them if i get an online client they've got no background in olympic lifts they are not getting the power clean from me they're going to do dumbbell jump or a trap bar jump yeah because if i can see somebody in person and they want to commit for some amount of time like i've got a i've currently got a figure skater in that comes in trains with me like three times a week which has been great because those guys need to jump yes to get all of their twists and stuff in in their routines and like his his movement acquisition is really good because he's like had a ballet background his like body awareness is really cool he's olympic lifting really well It's like body awareness is really cool. He's Olympic lifting really well.

He's a 19-year-old guy. I'm like, I'm potentially working with this guy for while he's in the UK. He's actually an American, but he's at university in the UK. I'm working with this guy for an extended period of time. It's like, I've got time to teach him the Olympic lifts and the positions. So I have done, and he's really benefiting from them.

But yeah, there's always context to all of these questions. The big aspect about the Olympic lifts when it comes to those athletes is like, number one, it's hard to find a person like yourself that knows how to really execute these movements correctly to make sure that number one, the athlete doesn't overload with bad technique. Cause you know how athletes are,

they wanna load as heavy as possible, right? So a lot of times you'll end up seeing athletes doing some of these lifts and it's just like that technique is bad. And even though you have some impressive load on there, the carryover may not be what you're looking for. So you got to be careful who you choose to teach you those lifts. Absolutely. I've seen some terrible power cleans and I was a terrible power cleaner myself when you were a younger athlete oh yeah it was just like basically i started lifting out of a weightlifting club and they're like you're you're not power cleaning like that in here so like the typical track and field power clean like some are better than others again there's a big continuum depending

on what coach you're working with it's just like pull that bar up straight at the knees and smack it off your thighs and just bounce it up to your, like reverse curl it. No shoulder mobility, front rack's terrible, wrenching your wrists. And it's like, yeah, they're not getting as much. Some coaches are like, well, it doesn't matter. There's a stimulus in there. I don't really know exactly what it is. I like to be a lot more finicky with powerlifting technique,

especially since I've learned to do certainly the power clean better it's not it's not perfect i don't fall clean um i only really snatch from the hip um but i kind of nailed the power clean and it's like i think working out of a weightlifting club and then being around weightlifting a little bit more made me understand that so i'm really grateful of that now it was just me um being in another environment where obviously the technique was paramount yeah and i even like judged a couple a couple of competitions i needed a judge in for the local competition so i like took the online course to judge like good lift no lift it's just learning right so i got to learn that the um olympic lifts much much better and so then i was confident coaching them.

So I can introduce them for athletes that need them. And that's not every athlete. What about something like squat, bench, deadlift, those kinds of things? Do you think they're important? Yeah, so I mean, they've been the staples throughout my whole career. And they are the staples of strength movement.

Like if you can squat, hinge, and press, right? As far as like the strength of the organism goes, you're going to increase it, right? So they're the most potent lifts. So if you're going to spend your time in the gym doing something and you want a strength stimulus, why not use the most potent lifts? What I will say is I've come away from the squat

because it just didn't agree with me personally. Most bobsledders are very big squatters. The full squat is like, it's just a staple within bobsled a full squat like olympic style full squat so early on i really tried to full squat a lot and a lot of the teammates that i was with that were kind of sprint based guys long femurs stuff like that they tried to do the same thing and most of them didn't get on as well with it as some of the guys that were built differently who'd been squatting for longer and kind of shorter legs stuff like that yeah um but i came away from squats just because it just for whatever reason i didn't particularly agree with me like i just don't feel good after squats

i ran into a lot of injury issues that i don't know there was always a correlation to me that i was squatting a lot and that my lower back si joint groins would get a little bit banged up like maybe i just didn't have the stability for whatever reason at the bottom of the lift to do those so towards the end of my career i've been a lot more uh strong on the hinge and initially i didn't like to do that because what i learned unlike the charlie francis forums years ago was like he liked to squat because it was um it was essentially less competitive on the posterior chain than like a power clean or a deadlift. It's like if you're going to go and sprint,

your hamstrings need to be relatively fresh or you're going to blow up. I just didn't find that rung true with me. If I'm doing a heavy hinge movement, I'm usually good to go, and I don't find my hamstrings blowing up from it. So I've mostly deadlifted. So, yeah, this was probably the last time I did any sort of heavy squat movement. Joel Seidman would love this.

Yeah, I was going to say, I think that movements like this make a lot of sense. I don't, you know, people get upset about the range of motion, but I think it's, I don't know, I think it's smart. So there's a context behind this. This is like, I needed like a final stimulus before our push testing so this was like just before our olympic so for a bit of context we have a dry

land push track in the uk that you push a sled on wheels on and it's the time you get on that that gets you in the team so this was like a final stimulus i needed something different a little bit more anterior chain dominant because when you hit that sled it can be quite quaddy um before going into that testing session probably a couple of weeks later but what i did find out was i hadn't learned from my mistakes and um after doing this for a couple of weeks my si joint got a little bit grumbly and then an old groin injury kind of reared its ugly head and i had to then manage that for the rest of the season yeah so it's like it provided a good stimulus for me but I didn't kind of I kind of didn't learn from my

mistakes on that in that little period there when I was going back into the squats so this is this is an interesting interesting thing because like with all the different people we've had on there are going to be some people that have like really um uh really they're going into the go to philosophy and there's a lot of good stuff there but they they'd be like, oh, you see what those lifting weights heavy did again? It brought up these injuries, and it brought up those old nagging injuries, right? One thing I'm curious about that we can go back to is I want to know kind of how you would have adjusted your lifting when you were within your career so that maybe some of those things wouldn't have happened. But seeing as doing that for a bit did give you a little bit of stimulus that was beneficial,

but then it brought some bad injuries back. How can somebody navigate lifting within sport and stay the fuck away from getting injured? Because that's not the sport. That's supposed to help you with your sport. But if you're doing it and it's bringing injury towards sport, it doesn't seem it doesn't seem that beneficial at least in the immediately right so what you've got to

understand about my sport is it's an absolute number the same with track and field yeah um our push test if we don't place well and it's time, it's like five to 45 meters pushing the sled. Yeah. And they time that. That's where you're ranked. So any percentage on there, so here's the push track here that you can see, and we're doing some double pushes here.

Like you can be out of the team by a hundredth of a second. You need that max output. So it's like there are risks you have to take yeah it's different in in a sport that's like a field sport uh-huh right you can get around that you don't have to be like that one percent quicker you can get around that whereas this this is absolute this is about absolute output and if if i was one percent off i wouldn't be making the team i had to go above and beyond especially like i wasn't built to do this my competitors are 220 to 240 pounds some of them

have run sub 10 for the 100 meters yeah i was not too built to do this i had to go above and beyond to really be successful here and i'll push myself to the absolute limit this is very different yeah this isn't the same type of sport. You're not moving in lateral directions. It's different. Yeah, that's six seconds in a straight line. You're going right through that force velocity curve because that sled there is about 160 kilograms. So on your own, you've got to hit that off the block.

And then by the time you get over the hill there and you load, yeah, you can be at max velocity. So you've got to be artificially through all of your gears by the time you load, which usually in like a sprint, you do over 60 meters if you're elite. And then you've also got a massive weight in front of you. Yeah. How does that simulate the real thing there?

Because obviously there's no snow, there's no ice, but how is it compared to the real thing? Yeah, it moves very similar. It's slightly heavier. So basically once it's, there's so much less friction on the ice. And once you hit it, that thing's just going. So we do sometimes,

basically a lot of the other countries will have an ice house set up. So there's one in Lake Placid here in the US. It's just been built, amazing facility. There's one up in Calgary. So it's exactly what you see there indoors and they've just laid ice on there and it's refrigerated. So you'll just push sleds on there,

practice in the summer. So it's very similar. So for the push element, we can train really well in the UK. And then the way it works is we just go out onto the ice in October out in Europe, US, and then we just kind of tour around the world until February. Do you think you noticed real specifically gym lifts helping you or other people around you, or is it just too hard to narrow down?

Some people, yeah. I remember speaking to some of the guys, just literally some of the bobsled guys lived by the squat. One of them was a guy called Lasalusas brown who was originally a jamaican breakman he then switched to canada and he's one of the most successful breakman of of all time i think he went to his last games in his 40s he's a real freak of nature but there also might be some guys that don't care about lifting and don't really lift at all yeah so a lot of people get pulled in and it's like there's there's a there's a culture within bobsled to be strong big and strong right you feel like your ego needs to be big and strong as well and um there's some of the guys that are a little bit um i think stronger in

their own opinions kind of just don't get pulled into it and i mean it might be a mistake for some of them they don't get strong enough and don't progress but some of them have done a few people recently i know um there's a german friend of mine eric frankie who came from a sprinting background became one of the best um back handle guys so that the rear handles you just saw on that push sled yeah he became one of the best in the world and he he lifted less i think than a lot of the other people around him as far as I know I didn't see his training background um breakdown but from talking to him because it's quite nice I always talked with my competitors it's a sport where people get along because it can be quite dangerous right so people do there's camaraderie between the teams yeah I would speak um you know training concepts with him so I think that changed a little bit there was definitely a culture of lifting and being strong and you have to be strong like you you can't deny it like you've got to be

able to produce force because you're just not getting that thing moving the four-man sleds um 210 kilos so what's that in pounds it's like 440 i think it's 450 maybe 440 450 yeah yeah so it's heavy you've got to get that thing going like you've got to hit that and also it's 450 maybe. 40, 450, yeah. Yeah, so it's heavy. You've got to get that thing going. You've got to hit that. And also, it's a gravity sport. There's a maximum weight of the sled. So the athletes, basically in a four-man,

if you've got four athletes at 105 kilos, which I don't know what that is in pounds, maybe 220-something. 225, I think. Yeah. Then you've got a good maximum weight team that are going to have the right weight in the sled. And then in the two-man event,

because there's a two-man and a four-man event, small sled, big sled, the guys are close to like 110 kilos. So earlier in your career, when you said you caught a con to those man tests, what exactly did you mean by that? Like what kind of things would they do that was just, you look back at it, you're like, that's fucking dumb.

Everything. Everything, okay. Absolutely everything you did, every one of those pushes the clocks would be on so you always wanted to hit a better time every sprint uh in the gym like that environment i mean it can make you or break you and i do see it being positive as well um i hit some of my best lifts and outputs but hey maybe i was just more brittle than some of the people and I needed to step away. I saw the Latvian team. The Latvians are one of the more successful bobsled teams. Such a small nation, but they have a real tradition

and some really big, strong guys. I remember seeing them train and they set up a bar, whacked some weight on, and then one came up, lifted it, power clean. Next came up, power clean. next came up power clean they went all the way around and basically when someone couldn't make the next weight they just like dropped out of the line kept going until the big dog came and hit the biggest weight and he was like he was like

king of the jungle that day yeah god dang yeah and that's the stuff that used to break me yeah yeah but that makes a lot that makes a lot of sense, especially within those sports. And we talked about this when it came to athletes training in the gym. The weight training should not take priority over the sport. And it's hard with the sport like bobsled because you need to be so powerful. You need to be so explosive. So there's a skill component that you probably should get with the barbell. But it's figuring out where's that place and where's that frequency. For example, you mentioned squatting just 40 times a week. If those squats can be quality, if it's not too high intensity, it might not really end up being something that messes with the athlete, but it's when you really try to push that intensity

and push, really try to get too good at it, that could fuck you. Yeah, like I say, it's the recipe. And I hear this analogy a lot with like training programs like the recipe certainly for speed and power sports there's a lot of different components right you've got your strength you've got your track or your field work um you've got core work your plyometrics you've got this recipe going on and it's like people talk about it like getting the perfect soup or something all the right amount of spices and stuff. To me, it's more like a cake.

If you put the wrong amount of something, actually the whole thing will blow up. You know? So it's like you've got to be really careful with that, the way the athlete's getting pulled in all these different directions. It's like I've heard the analogy like filling up a cup with water. You want to fill it as close to the top as you can without letting it overflow.

If it overflows, you've fucked up fucked up right and the consequences are huge but also in an absolute sport like we're talking about now with the times here on the pushes and in track and field of like 100 meter time it's like if you've undercooked them and they don't make it then you fucked up as well because then they miss out on like for example like in our sport, in Olympic sports, they're often funded by the government. So we have to hit targets to get our funding. And there's a lot of people employed by that funding. Your head coach, your technical coach, sprint coaches, mechanics, all of that. So all of it's off because all of it's a man test.

So if you don't hit those times, don't get that funding. Yeah. So, yeah, you've got to to take some it's got to be calculated risks everywhere yeah yeah so i with with team sport athletes i'll take less of a risk yeah it's as simple as that yeah how about the i was curious about this since we were talking about in the gym but your foot and the surgery that you had on your split foot because of like you said like the shoes you were wearing they they, I don't know what they caused, but there's a stretch fracture that you said that you dealt with. How, how was your recovery after

that? And how would you have like, like, how would you have navigated that if you knew what you knew now? Yeah. So I think unfortunately the real problem for me is I went in to get an x-ray on it and the nurse that looked at the x-ray or whoever looked at the x-ray didn't spot the initial stretch fracture. And so then I got a lot of varying diagnoses on it to the point where I didn't believe it was a stretch fracture, so I kept running on it, and then it broke. And I do think I was jumping in track spikes that were a little bit,

I've got quite wide feet. Yeah. And it's kind of weird, and I was long jumping at the time. You just don't want extra material at the front of your foot because it will hit the plaster scene, right? You get no jump. So you'd be over the board in long jump. And so I was always trying to make the shoes as small as possible,

as snug as possible. And that was just compressing my foot a bit. And then I was also probably supinating a little bit too much. Like I'd smashed that ankle up the year before too. And so I'd like ruptured the ATFL on that side, like a typical ankle sprain. Probably wasn't getting enough physical therapy around like the calcaneus,

some of the smaller bones in the foot. So I was probably stuck a little bit in supination. And then you just get that repetitive jumping off that. So like kind of triple whammy. I was like compressed in the foot so it's probably stuck a little bit in supination and then you just get that repetitive jumping off that so like kind of triple whammy i was like compressed in the in the shoe ankle that was moving badly then a misdiagnosed stress fracture and then it just went boom and literally like broke in two places so i had to get a pin drilled all the way back through right down the metatarsal from top to bottom. So that's still in there in my foot. So I keep setting off the odd metal detector.

I don't know whether it's actually that, but I keep saying it is. And training right now, because you're doing all this jump stuff, and you can obviously see all this stuff on Instagram. Training right now, you don't feel it anymore? I don't. I tell you when it got a bit sketchy was, you know, I got my EMS unit out, the Neurocorn unit, earlier to show you how I, i like stim the perineals like through charlie francis's teachings i used to use ems quite a lot early in

my career and one thing the russians used to do is stimulate the feet strengthen the feet so you know that like arch work we were doing earlier like taco feet well you kind of put a pad across the forefoot and then one across the heel like and then you really amp that thing up yeah it just contracts the foot and you get like a big you know strength stimulus in there and i was doing that after the operation like i'd done years before and i was just feeling like the current feeling a little bit sketchy through that foot and i was like oh damn is that like metal rod conducting the electricity here i need to stop doing that and that that's the only time i feel like I've felt it, honestly. Since, it's been fine.

Every now and again, I'm like, oh, I've got a lump of metal in my foot. I don't want that in there. But like literally, I've not felt it since. And it's one of those, getting a stress fracture in that point of the fifth metatarsal,

there's not a lot of blood flow there. So one of the reasons the pinning is quite successful is it creates so much trauma that the body's like, right, we've got to heal this up. So I was back. I did a lot of things wrong in that rehabilitation process, but I was out of the boot in like six weeks. Wow. Yeah. I was running in probably 12. Um, didn't strengthen

my calf up, started getting my first few bouts of Achilles tendinopathy. It's just young and dumb, you know, I just thought, right, I'm good to go and started running. How are your, uh, how are your knees? They're pretty good. Um, no, I have like, um, I did good to go and started running. How are your knees? Are they pretty good? No, I have like, I did a quite long podcast on this with Jake Tura about knee because he's very big on like, he's like patella tendon guy now. The meathead dunker as people call him. But he does a lot on knees. So mine's like, it was originally patella tendon pain as I was a youngster. And then it became like classic patella femoral pain

as I got a little bit older, which is a pattern you tend to see. But I manage it well, and a lot of it comes through, A, just doing hinge movements. If my posterior chain is really on, the knees feel good, and then I do a lot of release and self-therapy work. I do a lot of the RPR work, get everything activated um i release that kind of lateral quad get the tib fib joint moving um one thing that happened is i got i got run over when i was nine years old and i knocked off my bike and i broke my left leg pretty badly and it's weird like i've compensated ever since

and like hindsight such a beautiful thing. When you start to understand everything, it's taken my 30s to kind of understand how everything moves and how that left leg didn't move properly. That's the side I get the knee issues. As I've understood that more in the last couple of years, I've started to see more optimal movement

through that left side. But I thought it was never a problem, but it kind of reared its head. I broke that leg when I was nine and then was still a good athlete in my teens and early 20s. But then like the pain start coming in on that left side and you're like, oh, and you see how it was just like the way I used to look at it.

That left side moves different. I broke that leg when I was a kid. It is what it is. But it was actually like if I did enough like therapy through there and I had a very good physio, Dara, who got through and would kind of release the foot and ankle complex,

get the tib-fib joint moving because you can imagine it was a tib-fib break and the tibia came out of the leg, you know? Yeah. I actually, you know, I was scared I was going to get told off

for hitting this car so I tried to run away and obviously my leg wasn't working, looked down and there's a big bone sticking out. It was quite a a it's a bad injury but i was nine years old you heal quick right yeah but yeah the compensation from that and the movement patterns and the way this left leg works has been very different my whole life and yeah i kind of started to see changes in the last like two years with that with understanding it better um so i think that

was what led to a lot of the knee pain was that and dan path uses i've heard him use this analogy uh dan path track and field coach that it's like you're injured coming out of the womb and it gets worse from there it's like birth is a trauma a trauma humans and especially athletes really good at compensating. So that's one of the reasons RPR is really good, because you kind of get rid of some compensatory movement patterns and get the kinetic chains working better and activated. And it's similar. I had that traumatic injury when I was nine,

and that left side was just working a little bit differently, compensating, and then that left knee gets grumbly. But I manage it quite well nowadays with a few different things, some of which I got from ben patrick actually like he was really kind like years ago probably 2017 like giving me access to atg when it was in his early days um use a lot of the flossing and some of the reverse dead mill stuff that he gave me yeah um would i would chat to him online he was just super giving really open and i don't use all the concepts don't use the split squat for example like the classic atg split squat but yeah i've certainly kept the reverse dead milling and the flossing in there from from his system and

just so people know the reverse dead milling as you explained earlier it's when you're breaking the treadmill i was gonna say when you break a treadmill yeah i just don't have the big uh a gym large enough to do the reverse drags too often so yeah yeah to be fair the gym i'm in now is a powerlifting gym and like that's got a bit of turf unit 16 in sheffield and a reverse drag on there but the gym where i first was introduced to ben's concepts just had a treadmill so just sat in that treadmill and walked backwards and i didn't break it as far as i know you don't know how to dunk um i so yeah this is a good good conversation i've never played basketball so everybody like everybody um it's always like yeah where's your dunk content it's like well i don't know how to hold the damn ball so i can dunk basically and like what i've done recently is take like a football,

like an American football and like dunk it. Be like, is that the way it works? Yeah. Seven points. Sort of home run. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, my ball handling is just terrible. So I tend to just stand under the rim and just like dunk off or take a step in and do it.

Because it's fun, right? Yeah. And I've got enough vert to do that. But it's it's fun right yeah um and i've got enough to do that but it's like i just think my skill in that would be so low that i'm never going to be able to do the really cool stuff but i like to just turn up and do it because it's a cool thing to be able to do right so um a lot recently on my story i've posted it a lot because i've had more time to actually get one of the big things in my career was i just never had time to have that component no i couldn't i've just done i'm trying to max out the intense side of training.

I can't let go and then do some dunks. So, um, yeah, I just turn up to the yard basketball court with a ball and yeah, just do some really basic dunks, which has been fun. I've been putting that on my story recently with people have been enjoying, um, I need to start doing that. I need to try. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It yeah yeah it's it's really i mean the hardest thing for me was like jumping with that arm swing because i'm holding the ball that was like i was like this is so alien and then i started trying to do like everyone's like you've just got to do it off a lob yeah learn to do it off lob and like speaking to like a few people about how to do that and yeah my coordination with the it's just so terrible with the basketball that i've not been

able to do it as yet but watch this space everyone wants that content so i'll make i may do more of it yeah if my old hide will allow me to do that anymore but at the moment i'm enjoying just turning up every now and again um and just dunking off there or with a step just as a little bit of fun yeah do you measure some stuff do you do like long jump or broad jump or uh vertical that kind of stuff so we measured broad jump quite quite a lot during my career so my best broad jump is uh three meters 58 which is quite good i'm not sure what that is in feet um we can probably check that out but it's feet or something. I think it's over 11. What was it? 3 meters 58.

Or maybe 10 feet. We shall see. It's definitely over 10. 11.74 feet. Yeah, it's 11. So that's, I mean, you can see on the NFL Combine that they come out with those every year. So that's a pretty good standard, actually. Like broad jumpers was probably a good thing

that we've got a good standard in. Never really measured vert. Back in the day, I did, like, a height touch when I was, like, a long jumper. I was about 21, 22 with my old coach. And I got, like, I mean, some people say, well, the height touch isn't accurate, but it was, like, we measured it at 46.

It was, like, touch to where I touched on the board. So I was, like, 75 kilos. well the height height touch isn't accurate but it was like we measured it at 46 it was like touch to where I touched on the board so I was like 75 kilos so that's pretty good as well but that's with arm swing like no ball in hand

like it's just turning up and doing a touch so yeah that was pretty good as well yeah technique was awful as well even like the jump technique because it's like

kids that don't have a background in basketball or volleyball don't know how to jump off two feet. They do this little weird stop jump in two feet or they jump off one foot. And so in the UK, you get quite a lot of that because there's a little bit less uptake of basketball and volleyball

compared to like soccer and rugby. Yeah. So yeah, I just didn't know how to jump off two feet. So yeah, I just turn up now, stand under the rim and like see if I can still dunk off third. The more years I can do that, I just didn't know how to jump off two feet. So yeah, I just turn up now, stand under the rim and like see if I can still dunk off dirt. The more years I can do that, I'll be happy. Pat Prochek family, I hope you guys are enjoying this bite.

Did you know that cocaine increases your dopamine levels by two and a half times above baseline? Okay. Why is this important? Why is this important, Antima? Because, you know, a really cool thing that we learned from Andrew Huberman is that getting yourself into cold water, cold water exposure, like the cold plunge, does the same thing.

Two and a half times above baseline, and you have those sustained dopamine levels for up to four or five hours after cold exposure. This is why we love cold plunging so much. I cannot say this enough. It has been one of the best additions to our daily routines. If you can't already, just take cold showers. But if you want to take to the next level, get the cold plunge. And Andrew, how can they do it? You guys got to head over to thecoldplunge.com

and check out enter promo code power project to save $150 off. I keep saying it. I'm going to keep saying it till I'm blue in the face and not blue from the cold, blue from holding my breath. This has been the absolute best thing I've ever done for my mental health. I just, like I said, I can't say it enough. So again, thecoldplunge.com, promo code POWERPROJECT. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes.

Let's get back to this podcast. You know, how would you tell somebody, because we were talking about this earlier, you know, there's a lot of people trying to maintain strength into old age because that's beneficial, right? But maintaining athleticism is something that you've really been kind of going down the rabbit hole because you're 35 now um how do you feel you compare to when you were 25 and then also what what do you think are concepts so people can maintain athleticism so the ability to jump the ability to not just run but to potentially sprint into older age because that's the thing that you see people just lose yeah definitely i think getting into a lot of varied um planes of motion and ranges of motion

most people don't play enough either so for a lot of people like people will say like if i tell them what i do and they'll be like oh how do i get fit you know what have i got to do in the gym like a lot of um probably people in their 30s or 40s general population might probably go and join a five-a-side football team first or five-a-side soccer team do something you enjoy that's that's playful and working in all those different ranges of motion yeah um yeah and so I get people moving athletically um through different ranges of motion doing doing jumps, throws. People don't throw a lot. People will either go in the gym and lift,

just try and stay in shape, or do miles. Again, probably just to stay in shape. You're going to spend that time doing it. You may as well have some fun with it too. And I think a lot of people crave that and people are missing it now, which is why some people come to my page and like doing what I do. And that's something I think I've been quite conscious of recently, knowing that I'm, you know, in my mid thirties and, um, doing some more athletic stuff. So I kind of, I put up like a highlight reel the other day of just some random stuff I've been doing,

like backflips, like jumping over fences. You can do a backflip? Yeah. Why didn't you teach us that earlier? Um, that's tomorrow, mate. That's tomorrow. We'll get some pads out and we'll get everyone backflipping. You got to show me the backflip. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to do that shit. Yeah.

I'll tell you where the best way to learn it is. If you turn up to the athletics track and get on the high jump or the pole vault bed, soft bed, that's the best place to learn. That's how I learn it. Or into a swimming pool. Yeah. But it's just like, if i can still do that now then then i'm happy and long may it continue but the thing is with having a professional career in the

sport you you're going to be banged up like i don't care what anyone says that's more impact through your system than a normal person would be taking yeah or even our ancestors like there's a lot of intensity doing what i did at a very high level for 10 years day in day out putting a hell of a lot of force through my system and more often than not people retire through getting injured they're not doing and retiring on their own terms and i've been very lucky that i've got to this point here and yeah i've not been carried out through a major injury i think the play aspect is not examined enough by people, you know, because like if you are to go and do like a sport,

even if you're just to shoot some baskets, throw around a football, play some soccer, even just something like when you go to make a shot in basketball, the ball dinks off the rim and goes flying, you're most likely going to try to chase it down. And what I think maybe people don't realize is they may not have a great ability to sprint. Maybe they're not super fast, but they got their own version of speeding up. And I think even with the amount of people that can get hurt from going out and trying, you know, a 40 meter sprint or a hundred meter sprint out of nowhere, most people can sprint at least for a half second

just to react to the ball because they're shooting some hoops with one of their family members or something like that. So I think the element of play is really important. Somebody throws you a football, and the goal now is to run underneath it and try to catch it. I don't know, it just gives you a target. It gives you something to do, and it is a lot of fun. It can be a lot catch it. I don't know, it just gives you a target. It gives you something to do, and it is a lot of fun.

It can be a lot of fun. I think so, yeah. And I think having another element involved, like a moving object, if you have, there's a lot of elements to pain when you have, most people will develop injuries throughout their lifetime and throughout a sporting career. And that pain will reside sometimes without any damage left in the system.

There's a psychosomatic element to it. And having a ball and a moving object in competition and people around you takes that away quite significantly. And so that's an important factor as well. And what you find is people are capable of more than what they thought. It's like, I see a lot of people using like, is it spike ball with a little trampoline?

It's like a water. Yeah, absolutely. On the beach, yeah. And people are like falling over and rolling around and stuff and you'd be surprised it's like you'd be surprised seeing a 40 year old falling over rolling it off and jumping back to his feet again unless you know just jiu-jitsu or judo or something everybody's capable of that it's like you did that so much when you're a kid it does not leave you and i find that even recently like I was starting to get a bit stagnated in my training like two years ago so when I came back like my general prep period I came away from

linear sprinting I did a load of agility runs and stuff I hadn't done in years and I felt like a fish out of water at first but yeah after a few weeks it all started to come good and a lot of things changed actually I started to get the like internal rotation in my hips was improving when I was running and stuff. And I was like, okay, I use all these specific drills. But actually, if I run in a circle now, that might not have been the case in my early 20s. But in my 30s, I haven't done it for so long, that's almost more valuable to me than a specific drill would be. Yeah. Yeah, just run in a field, do a figure eight.

Right? Figure eights was exactly what I did, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, just run in a field, do a figure eight. Right? Figure eights was exactly what I did, yeah. And I found that it really improved a lot. It improved my hip internal rotation. I felt good. I was a real good warm-up. My back felt good. And yeah, you can hit it at pretty good intensity,

but you never get to a high enough velocity that you're going to pull anything. Yeah, and you get that with people doing, it's like five-a-side football. You've shrunk it all. Five-a-sidea-side football you've shrunk it all five-a-side soccer sorry you shrunk it all yeah and so people don't have to get up to that really high top speed that's where you get older guys who've played football their whole career yeah they join a five-a-side league and they're good yeah that's what i gotta do but i'm gonna give this is another advertisement for all of you who've been wanting

to do jujitsu go fucking sign up for it because all the non-variable movement that you get within that all the weird shit that your legs and your upper body are doing yeah you're not jumping or whatever but that weird movement that you get with grappling i'm really trying to think of something else that will allow you to do that it's there's a cool community aspect just go fucking do it if you've been interested in doing it because the movement in itself, the movement benefits for young people and older people is just fucking good.

You have to react to somebody else. Yeah. Right? And deal with their forces and stuff. My physio has been trying to get me into JITS for so long. He's a big JITS guy. He's like, you need to do it, bro. Why don't you?

I will do it soon. Yeah, yeah. Hey! I'm going to take him up on the offer. He's going to, yeah, he's going to school me and make me feel like a little boy. You'll feel like that for a while, but it's fun, man. Yeah, yeah, it's something that I've always been inspired to have a go at. Never had the opportunity to do it, so maybe now.

Maybe now, we'll see. How are your Achilles doing? Asking because I was looking at, you know, a bunch of your different videos on your Instagram, but like, I mean, that drop in there, I'm not sure what it's called, and then you jump, but your heels don't touch the ground. Yeah.

You land and basically at the bottom of your jump and then you spring out of it. I mean, just like when we went running barefoot in a field during the summer, a couple of months back, uh, my, my Achilles felt like it was like just completely detached. Like it was in a lot of pain, but I haven't done that. Right. So I don't, I don't do that. You do this all the time, but I'm just curious because, you know, being in your thirties, uh, we hear that, Oh, once you turn 30, you're, uh, like the percentage of your Achilles tears, like goes

through the roof or some shit like that. i'm just curious how yours are doing yeah so then they're not too bad like i've had recurring achilles like tendinopathies um but they've never been unmanageable so it's never stopped me it's just been kind of sore but the thing is like a few years ago they the doctors like blanket ultrasound scanned all of my team's patella and achilles tend few years ago, the doctors like blanket ultrasound scanned all of my team's patella and Achilles tendons. And some of the doctors were like shocked. They were like, if I saw this, you wouldn't be running. And some of them didn't have any pain.

So it's like there's always, with people that are competing at that level, putting that much force through, then it's unusual there's not going to be any amount of degradation in those tendons. So it's been something I've just had to manage. And it's like, that's the interesting thing about being elite in a sport is you, injuries become a huge learning arena and you become an expert on that.

So I've known basically how to handle my Achilles. And there's always individual differences. Again, like the gold standard for Achilles tendinopathy is holding isometrics. Whereas for me, I was better moving through a range of motion in the calf so actually i did actually worked on calf capacity which was more successful for me and it took me a while to work that out and i was luckily led there by my physio and that's another aspect i've always been very lucky with the team around me yeah um and i've been very open to learn from them and that's been a huge aspect of my career being successful as well because i used all of those practitioners and coaches

and really immersed myself in their teachings um and so my achilles have been manageable for sure and they they do they're more grumbly than like in my early 20s, for example. But that's like a typical thing that you're going to see across a career. You're probably going to get more Achilles pain as you get a little bit older. I've got friends that are marathon distance runners who would run miles and miles and miles every week and run marathons every year because that was their thing all throughout the 20s. And then they hit the 30s and they're just like, can't do it anymore. But then they're working full time.

They haven't got the time to do the prehab, the rehab around the Achilles. You know, they might jump into the clinic and get a load of shockwave and kind of come back for three months, but they're not doing the prerequisite work to actually work out why the Achilles is getting overloaded. And yeah, you need good people.

You need to invest in yourself for starters. Like your PT bill is going to be higher when you get a bit older. And it's as simple as that. loaded and yeah you need good people you need to invest in yourself for starters like your pt bill is going to be higher when you get a bit older and it's as simple as that and even if it means they lead you to the solution then it's money well spent yeah was that a depth jump right there yeah it was so yeah i was at the track training i saw that i thought it'd be cool to do that keep my heels tell us more about jumping down from stuff. Yeah, so, yeah, the depth. That's usually not a great place for people to start, right? It's definitely not the best place for people to start.

It's more intense than what it looks. It might not look like a lot, but it's a lot of force on your body, right? Yeah, it's hugely intense and it's a lot of impact. So, yeah, the depth jump stuff, I really like using depth drops. So, obviously, I've jumped out of that, but with a depth drop, you literally just jump down.

And I don't like sticking the landing. I just like to decelerate as quickly as possible. And what you'll get is that still augments the stretch. It still kicks off the stretch reflex. So you get a little recoil. So you kind of just spring back into your standing position. So you've still trained that to a degree, but you don't go through the huge muscular tension

that comes after that coupling phase on the concentric. And so you can get a higher volume in, but really start training the stretch reflex. So yeah, that was the highest depth drop I ever worked up to. Some people take this pretty far. I've seen people jump off the side of their garage and shit like that. Have you seen some of these parkour athletes? Some of them are doing things that to me is superhuman.

I don't even understand how it's possible. It's like, oh my God. I look at them and I'm like, humans are apes. That is incredible what you're doing here. They're jumping off these things that should be impossible to land from. Obviously, they have great technique. They tend to roll it off. But there's this one kid, I can't remember his Instagram handle,

but he just drops off two stories, something ridiculous. And he just lands and he doesn't even roll it off. He just goes into a full squat and bounces out. It's crazy. And there was a viral video of i think like a japanese jumper dropping off like a seven foot box and like he didn't even do with a depth drop higher drop you usually bend your knees a lot more and then jump up whereas a drop jump you're a lot stiffer well this kid in this viral video he just drops and he just hits the floor and bounces

off hands on hips as well every it was going crazy because everyone was like, how? How is that possible? I mean, but there's a lot that we can do. It might not be advisable, but there's a lot that we can actually withstand, right? Yeah. What about when you're doing your actual jumps? What do you usually recommend for people? Jump back down or, you know, if they're jumping onto something high,

do you recommend that they go down very carefully? Yeah, so for me, I'm quite strict with that with the guys I coach. Because people get lazy. They jump up and then they don't pay attention and they kind of just haphazardly jump down. It's like, ooh, I don't know about that. Yeah, one, you're jumping backwards, which is a little bit harder to coordinate the landing.

But two, it's like if you're prescribing a certain range of jumps, say it's a box jump, and they jump down. So if it's 10 box jumps, they've done 10 depth drops as well. And as a coach, you need to factor that in as overall volume because they've just done a load of landings, a load of eccentric rate of force development. It's going to put a lot of stress on the system. So I'm always like, if you're going to box jump with me, step down,

unless you're factoring that in. Because, yeah, overall contacts you need to take a look at as far as volume goes. So they're just getting more contacts in every time they jump on and off. But then, you know, you can build that in. Here we go. I just pulled it up on YouTube, but this kid is fucking wild. Look at that.

Oh, that's Dom. I think his name is Dom Tomato, something like that. I'm going to try that. He's crazy. Well, you know, he's named dom tomato something like that i'm gonna try that he's crazy well you know he's just going into sand that's what makes it so easy just do it off one of the cliffs in bodega his shirt is pretty baggy too it's catching catching air if i had an umbrella be perfect this is simple that's not really5 meters, you know. It's a no roll. Damn. Jeez.

You know, like, so kind of following off of what Mark said, how does one kind of train their landing? Because some people don't know how to dissipate that force when they hit the ground. And once they, if they don't really jump often, boom, everything just goes right up. That's something people lose because we all jumped off climbing frames when we were kids we all jumped out of trees and that's the whole thing when people say you need to squat two times body weight before you do plyometrics i jumped off the top of the climbing frame when i was eight because it was a challenge and i did it

it's like yeah you lose that ability and it's funny when you come when you jump off something high yeah it's like you feel scared and then when you land it you're like oh yeah and there's funny when you come when you jump off something high yeah it's like you feel scared and then when you land it you're like oh yeah and there's a bit of a reminder it kind of just reminded me a bit of being a kid like you start to like you're in this gym mind so you're like right i'm gonna drop into this beautiful squat and just like stick it here and stand back up but you end up like dissipating the energy and kind of bouncing off forwards and rolling off your feet because you're getting back into that kind of childish head space. So I think everyone can do it.

It's just like you just see people be really tentative because they haven't done it in so long. So for that, it's just like, yeah, gradual overload. We should all just start parkour. Like just start running. That's what little kids do. Yeah. Little kids do that everywhere.

I was watching my nephew. We were coming off of a boat and there was like uh these stairs that you went up to get off the boat that were kind of connected to the dock and then the last step was kind of steep you know and i'm just watching people like just you know uh i like to kind of watch that kind of stuff because i'm like this is so connected to people's uh psychology of how they feel about themselves the way that they're going to step down

from this step and older people would kind of turn around and they would go down very gingerly and they would like hold on to the railing and they would

go real slow it's also kind of it was also kind of wet so like people were like you just don't want to get fucked up but you watch a little kid a couple little kids

they like they were like they were so pumped like their eyes lit up and they were like and they just like they just jumped right off of there and my uh my nephew he like saw it as like a challenge and he like jumped and spun in the air and then he kind of halfway fell and caught himself but yeah it was just interesting to watch everybody kind of getting off of there and the more that we practice this stuff, the easier it's going to be able to, the easier it's going to be able to, the easier it will be for us to keep it in for longer

if we just start to implement some of it now. How often do you recommend like people, if they're going to do some jumping and they're going to really start to incorporate it, how often, how many times a week? Yeah, that's difficult because I think context is key there really. But I think for most general population, you don't need more than two times a week? Yeah, that's difficult because I think context is key there really. But I think for most general population,

you don't need more than two times a week really. You've got a lot of other stuff you want to fit in and probably jumping high isn't going to be your main priority in life. And you can microdose it quite well. So for some people, you put it at the start of your session as well. And we've talked about this before, a bit of novelty before you go and train. I think the gyms are a drag for a lot of people or whatever training they're doing especially when you've been doing it for years and years like same old workout i'm gonna do same old gym so

today we're gonna drop off some boxes and see how quickly you can slow down and then see how quickly you can how high you can jump onto a box with one foot or something like that something a little playful or even skipping yeah yeah that was great The skipping you had us doing for length and for height, like that's something that, I mean, I don't know if some people may need to warm up beforehand, but if you add that component in. Just see if you can skip. Maybe you forgot how to do it.

Yeah, most people weren't like, oh, we're going to skip. I'm like, okay, I think I remember how to do this. And you both did remember how to do it, right? It's a very natural thing. You can start off super low intensity, do it with your arms down, just like swinging at some blood flow, and then you just pick it up, pick it up, pick it up, anything like that. So I think for general pop, either two times a week or just microdose it.

You don't need to do much. High volume would be a bad idea, and you really don't need much for stimulus. You don't need much at all. I mess around with it when I run sometimes because especially like some of my runs are just supposed to be slower anyway. So I'm like, why not run backwards? Why not run sideways?

Why not jump up on the curb? Why not jump up on the bench? And just, I've just been messing around with it. It's a lot more fun that way. Yeah. Do you know what? It's funny. I've kind of been going down the same route with,

I've liked training away from the training center more so, away from the gym and away from the track. I like getting out into a park or in the woods. Oh, the track. Fuck the track. Yeah. Right? Jesus Christ.

Yeah, I'd rather get in the park. I'd rather get in the park and do some stuff outdoors and use some of the features around there to do some exercise i did it this morning i'd like we're staying in a motel down the road and obviously jet lag woke up early it's on google maps park there people that are like i'm gonna do eight four hundreds or something like that you're like man all right go for it man i'll tell you what's worse you're not gonna see me there there's people running on treadmills when it's a nice day yeah looking out the window i do not understand that at all. No, get outside, man.

So, yeah, I've done a bit more of that. And, yeah, might do some pull-ups on a tree branch or something. It's just good fun. But, yeah, people can incorporate it, of course. Yeah, microdose it in, have some fun with it. The main thing is, like, don't really set yourself too many limits there. You just go and have fun. So that's what I'm tending to do at the moment

because I'm not constrained so much by my sport now. You know, I can just go out there and have some fun with it. You were having us do those box jumps in the gym and a lot of times you'll see videos of like lifters where, you know, once somebody pulls the box up, everybody's trying to box jump, right? But when you see most people jump, they jump and then it's like, oh, how much, how close can I bring my knee and my body to get

over that box? Is that helping anything? And how can they maybe adjust it to actually benefit their jumping skill? Yeah. So for the most part, when people are box jumping, they're just aiming for the box. So they just, they just pull their knees up and they don't actually change their center of mass very much so their hip displacement isn't particularly high they're not getting much vertical travel and that's more just a psychological thing they're just scared of not getting their knees up to the box yeah and you see it with weightlifters they used to dropping into a squat so they kind of just do their jump like they're dropping into a squat so not really hitting what they need to which is vertical force production so yeah for the most part i start off with encouraging people to have a straighter leg landing not necessarily the old like full

straight legs like i do that's a nice challenge yeah but at least just what i'll often put is just a sub max box height i want you going for a maximal height just trying to get as much clearance you land on the box because what the box actually achieves there is it breaks the fall. So you can get more contacts in because you're not falling from your maximum height and then landing again. So that's the main reason boxes are used

because it reduces that landing impact so you can get more reps in. But that's not to say that there isn't a training aspect of triple flexion when you pull your knees up. So people hate on maximal box jumps, but if you're getting full extension and vertical hip displacement, training triple flexion is still probably going to give you some performance

benefit because you see triple, triple flexion a lot within sport, any running or power sport. That loaded box jump is interesting. Oh yeah, with some weight in your hands. That is really interesting to do those. It sometimes feels like an advantage a little bit. If you swing them up, yeah.

Like I extend in that med ball there. Yeah, even David Weck has talked about that before. You'll actually see him. He'll have dumbbells in his hand and he'll do broad jumps and the weight will actually help him have faster and stronger arm swing to get a little bit more distance I think another awesome thing about stuff like this is you don't have to do a lot of reps like we're talking about maybe doing a couple sets of three to five reps right yeah you don't need much you need to sit there and do three sets of ten or something like that right yeah well it's like that with high intensity elements right and you can get really intense with this really

easy it's quite easy to jump full intensity um once you've got the technique down and you don't need many reps at all do you let me ask you this are you because you talked about the difference between strength uh jumping or sprinting ability and elastic right would you say that you're more of a strength individual or an elastic individual because and and you know one would assume like you want to build elasticity like there's the ability to just move spring and not think can you build that or do you believe you can build that yeah you can certainly build it the interesting thing about that concept or that um spectrum or, however you look at it, it's like some of the sports scientists or biomechanists might say,

well, that's bullshit. No one's going to use their muscle more than their fascia or their tendons. It's like everyone uses it all. But it's been a very useful concept for coaches to pigeonhole their athletes and their biases. So if you looked at it from a biomechanics perspective, it might just be somebody that uses a shorter ground contact time when they sprint versus somebody that uses a bit of a longer ground contact time um that guy the longer ground contact time guy

would be called a strength guy they just seem to like applying force more whereas the elastic guy likes to bounce off the track a little bit more um I think I'm definitely a little bit of a hybrid there. And I think within my sport, within bobsled, I'm probably more of an elastic guy because the guys are very forceful. Let us try some of that nicotine gum, huh? Yeah, yeah. I'll get it all for you. Get on it.

That's two milligrams. That's a pretty low dose. But yeah, it's as good as... Two milligrams is low. I've never had it before. Let me do a two. Don't do... Mark, chill, is quite a bit of nicotine like it actually is please don't throw up on air man four milligrams is quite a bit of nicotine i brought some nicotine lozenges that are two milligrams and i break it in half because i'm a pussy and i only want to do

one milligram because i don't want to be addicted to that shit. Does your mom know? Check this out. Oh, what's this? Dude, he's got moves. Watch this moonwalk that he did. Oh, yeah. Dude, that looks like you're going to float up a set of stairs that aren't there. That looks funnier actually on camera than what I remember it feeling like.

That's not a bad demonstration, if I say so myself. Talented. Well, it took a lot of practice. Yeah, that's just a bad demonstration if i say so myself i'm talented well it took a lot of practice um yeah that's just a dribble drill and we were talking about how velocity affects how your foot hits the ground when you're doing drills and that everyone's trying to get onto the toes and forefoot when they're doing drills at like walking pace well everyone's trying to mimic like a sprint you know so people here like run and they're thinking like i gotta i gotta run like a olympic level sprinter and it's like no uh that's actually probably not a great idea yeah not a good place to start just start moving yeah definitely and then get you know do the best to stay off your heel yeah yeah i mean the the midfoot is for me is the key um people are either too toey or they

heel strike for general population anyway for the most part and yeah getting into that mid foot or at least dorsiflexion well during the swing cycle to the last moment just creates more tension in the calf complex i'm feeling fucked up from this already you look wired your pupils are gone wow that feels amazing oh yeah what's this thing you're always running with yeah Exogeny

great system pulley system that was developed for NASA guys for astronauts to actually use they just pull it back and forth

look at that arm swing but I love the caption because it does feel that way when you're running in a dream and you can't go anywhere absolutely yeah

that shit drives me crazy that's when i love how you get on your toes like that and you you do coach that a lot right yeah so with a sprint for sure right yeah i'm teaching that mechanic so there's you can see like the the shin roll here the way the shin rolls you kind of roll the shit what do you mean so the shin drops forward if you watch it here, drops to the ground before the ankle takes off. So it tensions up. You know when we did the dorsiflexion walks earlier?

Right at the start of the warm-up in that squat position? Oh, I see. So the shin rolls forward and then as you start to produce more force, you start to straighten back up just a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. Because you're leaning. The shin drives towards the ground so you'll see this in elite competitors yeah we had cory slushinger on here who trains the phoenix suns and he said some of the best athletes that he's ever seen have a low shin angle in like most sports yeah i've never heard anybody say anything like that before and i was like that's a real that's a real key to acceleration so it's massive in bobsled.

Dude, that looks fun. Yeah. Popping up off the ground. So this is what I'm trying to put out there. Like everyone thinks

sprint mechanics have to be these super technical drills but that for example coming from a press up position. I want to do some of these with you. Yeah,

we can go and do them man. That'd be fun. Really, really fun because when you come from like that press up position you just find the right angle to take off from for yourself because how many times did you pick yourself up off the floor when you were from like that press-up position, you just find the right angle to take off from for yourself

because how many times did you pick yourself up off the floor when you were a kid and go running after something? If you played football or if you played rugby, you always get it. I can already tell. I'm going to be great at this. I wanted to ask you how much of a problem is obesity in the country that you're in and in the area that you're in? And also it's my understanding there's like a tax on some sugary foods or something like that i don't remember what that was but yeah so it's it's

quite um uh a novelty for me to come over here go into a fast food joint and be able to get like coca-cola no actual sugar filled coca-cola like they only sell zero now in most fast food chains in the uk that's great yeah you need that are ahead of the game man really there you go well we have a national health service right so it's crippling when people so how does so can people get regular soda yeah but just from the supermarket or there's a levy on it so at some restaurants like you'll pay like 30p more for the full sugar version so what how do you feel about that how do you personally feel about that like you don't seem to have a weight problem yeah well I don't for you i never drunk a lot of sodas okay yeah i was it was good but if i do i'll drink the full sugar one just because it tastes better

really yeah like i don't i don't need to worry too much like i'm i'm pretty good with my diet i think people get being too strict is usually going to lead to binging. So for me, it's like I've got all of the main elements nailed. And it's like if I want a full sugar Coke one day because I'm out eating at a restaurant or I just fancy it, yeah, I'm going to go for it. But it doesn't bother me paying 30p more. I think that's better for the population in general. But, yeah, obesity is really bad in the UK. I think it's the worst in Europe. It's not as bad as the U.S., but we're heading that way. It's not as bad as the US, but we're heading that way.

How much is 30 pounds? US, we're still thriving. We're still number one. I think you're still number one, guys. Yeah, but I've seen the portion since I've been here. Like, yeah. Well, we always enjoyed- We gotta take you to Black Bear.

Yeah, yeah. It's a restaurant. Okay. What are they serving there? The breakfast is like a volcano. Volcano, yeah. It's just like, I think three or four gigantic pancakes, a big old slice of ham, all kinds of bacon, sausage, eggs, hash browns.

Might be five pancakes. Whatever it is. You should look it up. It's really, it's a great pre-workout. When you say 30p, what do you mean? What is p? Pounds. Pounds. Pounds. Because I was like, pounds? That's 35 bucks. Okay.

I was going to say, we're going to be importing some fucking full sugar. So what else have they done that with? Have they done it with other stuff as well? So they put the, they put like the macronutrient breakdown on the front of the wrappers of things in a supermarket. And you have like a, like a traffic light logo on it.

So like red, yellow or or amber, or green. So if it's like high salt, it'll say salt and it'll be red. Because a lot of people just didn't understand the numbers, which you're not going to. And it's like, yeah, so they put it on so people can at least see that. I don't know whether there's any positive change yet. It's probably too young really as a policy to see any change. Is there something for sugar?

There's salt, but how about sugar and other stuff? Do you know what? I can't be certain because I don't tend to look at them too much. Well, you're in shape. Yeah, I think there is for sugar as well. Yeah. Yeah, I think there definitely is for sugar as well. It's a really interesting thing.

I think if we were to do that here in the U.S., it would be like bastardized or something in some way. People would talk about, get pissed about judging, right? Yeah. And, but it would be like one product versus another. There'd be like controversy over like, this one has industrial seed oils and this one's still bad, still shitty. Or this one, this one only has nine grams of sugar instead of 10. You know what I mean? It's like. Well, I think now as well, there's so many different narratives being pushed online as far as diets and what healthy diets are.

And obviously the government guidelines are always based off whatever those health organizations are saying. And people are going to argue whether that evidence that they're using is correct or not. But I think for the general population that are a huge percentage of them are obese, yeah, just putting a sugar levy on or putting a traffic light colored thing with the macronutrients on the wrapper is probably a positive thing, right?

It at least gives people the power to easily make their own food choices. You give someone the power to do it in their own choice whether they do it or not, right? Whereas if there's that excuse, well, I didn't really know, it was too hard for me to work out, then yeah, so who knows? or not right. Whereas if there's that excuse, well, I didn't really know. It was too hard for me to work out then.

Yeah. So who knows? Do people get upset at the, like the, I guess the added tax on the sugar? Has there been like a fight back? Yeah. Because I would imagine here in the States,

there'd be a lot of like, people talk about like when like COVID was happening, like, oh, it's going to be a civil war. Well, if you put tax on our fat foods, people will flip and lose their shit. I've seen no fight back on that at all there was initially it wasn't really fight back but do you know do you guys know jamie oliver the british chef

i think he did some stuff in the u.s a few years ago i don't really know if he sounds so he did this british show called's School Meals because like high school meals were typically pretty shite in the UK and so shite you've heard

I mean I guess I know what it means but explain that word to us um yeah is it like shit

yeah it's when you're trying to like soften the word shit oh gotcha gotcha soften the word shit by shite

yeah yeah so you say you say shite I thought you would have heard gotcha. Soften the word shit by shite? Yeah, yeah. So you say shite. I thought you would have heard that in Ireland last week. I thought they say shite in Ireland quite a bit. Probably, I don't know. They swear a lot. And feck.

Yeah, they say feck out loud. Yeah, just feck. Feck, yeah. It just softens it. You're not actually... Feckin' hell. There you go. You got it. You're ready.

That's not a real profanity. That's cool. You get away with it. That's awesome. So yeah, just softened that for you guys learned some great stuff on this show thank you ben the bounce it's all right i've got plenty more where that came from so jamie all he's making a chick a proper chicken pot pie so yeah he did a show called jamie's schoolals or something like that. And he led a campaign to make school meals healthy.

And then basically nobody could buy any sugary stuff in school anymore. Shit, we need to get this guy on the show. That's awesome that he did that. He started that? Yeah, he did, yeah. Fuck yeah. That's awesome. There was parents passing McDonald's through the fence and stuff.

But he tried to do in the u.s he ended up crying on his show yeah it was like jamie uh u.s school meals this must be 10 years ago he tried to do the same thing in the u.s why did you cry made him cry because everyone was absolutely against it like he just got such a fight back he was like are we so fat like he just got such a fight back he was like are we so fat what the bro this man comes to try to help and they're like you what they hated him doing it taking that food away from them this british guy he was so offended a foreigner taking stuff away yeah he got he's basically a terrorist imagine if there was like an age for the soft drinks too, you know? That would be interesting.

That would be great. 18 and up. How old do you have to be to buy energy drinks out here? There's no age. I don't think there's an age. Yeah, you've got to be, I think it's 18. Pretty sure it's 18. If you scan a Red Bull at the self-service checkout,

it usually flags up and someone has to come and approve it like alcohol because alcohol is 18 in the UK as well. So Red Bull and like, ah, that's, yeah, so it's an energy drink. Yeah, basically energy drinks and alcohol are treated the same at a self-service carrier. You mentioned you have some family members that are from Wales. What are some, did you grow up eating food that's from that area? Or is that,

was that common in your household? Or is it similar to? So the Welsh cuisine is pretty similar to the English cuisine. So yeah, that was just pretty standard. But we had a mix because my, my granddad was Italian. So we had quite a bit of Italian stuff in there as well.

Like bolognese and pasta dishes and things like that. I don't know. Cuisine is so worldwide now. We were always eating so many different things. It wasn't just traditionally British the whole time. But yeah, the cuisine in Wales doesn't like... I lived over the border in England, but it was just not much different to what you'd get in England.

Yeah, the food in Ireland was interesting. I mean, there wasn't too much extravagant stuff. to what you'd get in England. Yeah, the food in Ireland was interesting. I mean, there wasn't too much extravagant stuff. You've had that Irish breakfast, right? So that's really close to full English, as they call it. I don't actually know what the difference is, but that's a good hearty breakfast, yeah. The black pudding and white pudding. Yeah, how did you find those?

Fucking amazing. Yeah, I love a black pudding. It's meant to be a superfood as well. It was basically like a sausage mixed with liver. It's just all the offal just smashed in, every bit of the animal that you don't want to eat. But it's fucking good. It's really good.

It's loads of blood in there as well. And Seema, you ever have black pudding? Nah. I don't have any black pudding. But it sounds like it'd be pretty good. Got a little niggle on my chest, man. Again, dude, you can't go with the hard L. Yo, it was so good with our Bomi.

Jim? Yes. Jim? Good. So Jim was just, you know, we were just talking to Jim. He's like, God damn, I got this. I had this little niggle on my back. And I'm like, yes.

So it looks like they use the word niggle in the UK. And it's just cool. It should be cool. There's nothing wrong with that word. I thought you were going to beat his ass. We don't know why the hell you were laughing at me. What's this inside joke? And Siebel will do that

and then when you're confused, it makes him laugh even harder. And then so he doesn't, he can't like catch his breath to explain it. And I've seen it happen a couple times it's fucking awesome hey what do you think of that tasty pastry over there did you get a chance to eat it

I got a chance to eat half before we came on out it's really really tasty I can't believe you made me have this nicotine gum this stuff sucks that's how peer pressure works how do you feel right now do you feel any difference it gave me like a little burn weird at the back of your throat.

Yeah. It gave me like a little burn. Yeah. The back of my throat. It's like this weird tingly. Is that throat cancer? Remember those commercials? Do you guys have those commercials in the UK?

When she would swallow the smoking. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The smoking commercials. What's weird here though is seeing pharmaceutical commercials. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The smoking commercials. What's weird here, though, is seeing pharmaceutical commercials. Oh, yeah. You don't have.

You absolutely don't get that in the UK, no. What do you mean? We consume like 90% of the world's pharmaceuticals or something like that. They don't have ads for it. No, no. They're not allowed to have ads for it. No, no, no. It's crazy.

I remember when I first came over a few years ago, and there was one on, I think it was a cancer medication and it was really pulling on the heart strings you know some people at the end of their life and it's like you can extend your life with it and I'm like guys look at watch this all day long there's shit for

all the commercials they say moderate to severe and people watching are like that's probably me well yeah of course you're in that category of moderate to severe. And people watching are like, that's probably me. Well, yeah, of course. Of course you're in that category of moderate to severe. Yeah, it's always an antidepressant or like a boner pill. Moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis.

I'm not making fun, but the ads are weird. Yeah, we were super shocked by that because our health service is so different, right? It's like nationalized. We have a national health service, so we don't pay for anything. We don't have insurance. So they don't really need to advertise

because you get all of your prescriptions just because you're a citizen. So yeah, that's why we don't have them. It's just, it's a culture shock for us when we see that. It's just a different thing, right? That's really cool. You were mentioning earlier in the gym how the document at Icarus,

you know, how they tested all those individuals. Apparently, you were in the room when people were getting tested. Now, what do you mean by that? Well, I got tested in the testing room there at the track. So that was my first Olympics, competed in Sochi. And then, yeah, a few years later, the documentary came out about the Russian state-sponsored doping and how they'd put a hole in the wall at the Sochi Games

and passed all of the samples through from the Russian athletes. And, yeah, I got taken for a test. Come on, the Russians can't be that bad. Like literally after our run down the hill, I got taken for a doping test in the main doping room, which is at the the track and that's where yeah things were getting passed around that's where you tested positive absolutely never tested but i wouldn't be here otherwise you get tested a lot

yeah yeah so um i think they have to test me like uh maybe six times a year like minimum all kinds of stuff too right oh it's like you caffeine and all kinds of shit right um caffeine is fine we get a lot of really good education from in uk in the uk uh uk anti doping is is really hot like they you're on i'm on full-time whereabouts so they know where i am all the time and there's an hour of every day where i must be in the place i say i am for them to come and test like we're going to make sure this fucking bobsledder is clean as fuck. They do. That's literally it.

They can't have anybody competing for GB that isn't clean because it's like a disgrace if you get caught. So, for example, this morning my hour is at the motel when I'm staying. So UCAD and WADA, World Anti-Doping, know that I'm there. And, yeah, they come around and test me all the time. So they'll turn up at my house where I train after competition. and then yeah you've got to give up your sample blood and urine often and then you get your throughout my whole career if I log on to my account I've got all the tests from like 2012 onwards so it's really cool you get it they've got like a blood passport now

so they see any like changes across your career in blood markers and stuff like that um so yeah as far as like um like the anti-doping authorities in different countries the uk is like really really strict really up there really hot on it all so yeah we were all put on full uk anti-doping years and years ago as soon as we started competing at a elite level basically it's a shame they're so negative about it so works works out so well. Well, it worked out that way for the Russians, but until the whistleblower came out, and then they lost their medals,

and GB team got bumped up to a bronze. So the GB team got a bronze medal, but it was like five years later. So those guys that had worked so hard, they didn't get their moment on the podium. And the other thing is government funded, Yeah. It's all based on results. You'd have had a big influx of money from the medal as well. And so what you did get at that influx of money at from the post medal that you guys got, or you didn't? No, no, no, no, they didn't,

they didn't give it. Um, so those guys, um, that got that medal, like they didn't have their moment on the podium and yeah, also the sport lost out on probably a significant amount of money because of that, what had been going on. The crazy thing was for us, we kind of like knew and suspected that that team were doing that stuff. But it was just like,

it's like you just know and just deal with it. It's like, yeah, they do that. What aspects? Just because of how they performed? No, more like culturally. There'd been conversations between athletes about the different culture and the way they saw that, the way they saw doping was very different.

Whereas we in the UK, we're taught, we get like anti-doping education as athletes from a very young age, literally from like junior squads in Olympic sports. You get like anti-doping education as athletes from a very young age, literally from like junior squads in Olympic sports. You get an anti-doping education and you're getting tested from young as well. They encourage you to maybe lean towards other means, like good nutrition, good sleep, good recovery protocols, because that would seem to be the route to go. Like this stuff is not allowed, but because that stuff's not allowed, I want you guys to be educated in these other practices that will actually really help you a lot. Absolutely. So that is what they say. They always say when they give us these lectures every few years, it's like nutrition first,

because they're even quite, you've got to be really careful with your supplements as well, because a lot of people have been supposedly popped for contaminated supplements Right. So what they say is you're responsible for everything that goes in your body So if you chose to take a supplement that's on you We recommend you get what you need to get from nutrition Obviously if you want that extra percentage, then it's your choice whether you go for a supplement or not, but follow these routes So we have an extra like layer of testing called informed sport in the uk so basically i can go to myprotein.com uk company and i want to buy some whey protein i can buy it for 18.99

or i can get informed sport which is like 23 pounds so it's a bit more expensive it's tested twice so they obviously have they have batch testing as a reputable supplement brand, but then they'll have Informed Sport on top, which is an independent lab that tests it again. So you can get that kind of another level of assurance from that. So that's what I've done most of my career is used Informed Sport supplements. And, yeah, I've been on the uh whereabouts for anti-doping throughout most of my career as well you mentioned you're getting your blood tested

uh coming up just have you done that before just to get i'm not not for drugs but to see uh where your testosterone levels are and all that kind of stuff yeah so a couple of times just very basic panels um from like the gp when i was younger and then a couple of times just very basic panels from like the GP when I was younger. And then a couple of times they'll run like some like creatine kinase, vitamin D, magnesium, bloods on us just to make sure all the main things are in order. But yeah, Merrick Health have been, you know, really helpful. They were going to sort me out with a full panel when i'm around this time yeah not to prescribe anything but just for me to know where where i am because

i've never got a full hormone panel done so i'd be really interested now in my mid-30s to see where it is and at least get a a marker for you know as i age and i start getting other panels and stuff like that it's going to be really interested in um mar. And I've been waiting to do a Maric Health panel for a long time. I've never been in the U.S. since 2018. So it's like as soon as it's coming out, I've got in contact with the guys and they're like, yeah, we'll sort you out. Are you scheduled to meet with Stephen Smokey?

Yeah, hopefully, yeah. So I spoke to Stephen. He actually trains here. I know he trains here. So he put me on with Jariaya, who's sorting us out. Great. And yeah, so I listened to the podcast with Adam. Hoshkiss.

Yeah, yeah. And I was like, yeah, that's so cool. So I reached out to Adam. And it's not the first podcast with somebody from Maric Health I've heard. And it's really got me onto them. But yeah, I'll be hoping to meet Stephen. Well, the cool thing is, too, is they can prescribe means that are natural still too. They can prescribe particular vitamins,

minerals, supplements, things like that. That's what I'm really interested in, yeah, because I think some of our supplement regimens are like unguided. It's like, oh, I want to increase testosterone. I'm going to take boron, for example. It's like, well, let's look where your actual levels are first and see what's going on.

So it was just interesting. It was interesting you guys talking about getting your tests done as well. So I'm like, I'm really interested to see where I'll be. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I want to ask you this because you kind of mentioned it earlier in the podcast, but you mentioned there's a phase in your career

where like you gained a lot of weight, but this was also a time when you were getting tested continuously and you gained a lot of weight, but this was also a time when you were getting tested continuously and you gained a lot of weight very quickly and it was primarily muscle. So how much was it? And what were you doing? Because people would look at the numbers you told us and be like, oh, he was sauced.

But you were getting tested that whole time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I came in, I did my first trial for bobsleigh. So I'll do it in pounds, 171 pounds, which is skinny as being like over six foot skinny. And in the first 12 months I put on like 10 to 12 kilos. So I went from 171 to 200 basically. And then in a year. Yeah. Yeah. In 12 months. Yeah. And it wasn't that difficult a process because I think I was artificially keeping my weight low because I was doing track at the time and it's just this thing that you gotta be as light as possible.

And so I was doing a huge amount of running, a lot of tempo running from the old Charlie Francis templates, like 2,400 meters of tempo, like three times a week. Um, just keeping my i was a student as well so i wasn't spending a lot of money on food and yeah my my weight was just artificially low for my height and what i did was just cut that tempo running volume and just went in the gym and did your standard five times five three times a week four times a week on the compound lifts and it just flew on like 5k went on really easily it was like super easy and then i started learning to just eat a little bit more and it wasn't clean it was whatever we could get because also when we go away on the

competitive tour we stay in hotels a lot so a lot of the time it's hotel food pizza yeah basically and like pasta and stuff and so we just desserts we just a lot of the skinnier guys who are in the team would just eat as much as they could and at that point i wasn't paying for my food because i was away on tour and i wasn't a student anymore so i just was yamming it down and doing those five reps and it went on real quick what i will say is when i got to 200 getting from 200 to 212 which was my peak weight was much more difficult and i used a number of different means there um calories were a huge one like having to have the calorie surplus to put that weight on with the amount of activity i was doing was super tough like i was 5,000, which for me was just really tough. I just wasn't a big eater.

And I used a couple of- 5,000 calories. Yeah, it's tough. It was real tough. Every day. I wasn't often, I don't think I was hitting that every day. I was probably ranging four and a half,

but it was enough to get up to that point. And yeah, one really good system I used was called hypertrophy clusters from a guy called Jake Tura I mentioned before. That's like um it was like what you were talking about doing reps like a lower percentage if you want rep max doing like fives but taking a minute in between and doing like eight sets and that worked really well and i stayed explosive off it too and then yeah i got up to that peak weight and that was in like Jan, February last year, um, came back and yeah, it just fell back to as soon as I started eating normally again, fell straight back down to

like 202. Um, but I feel a lot better at this weight really. It was, it was harder for me to carry around to, to 12 really. Um, so yeah, that was, that was a process really getting, getting bigger. I think a lot of it was cause I was keeping my weight down, but then yeah, it was simply just changing the emphasis on what I was doing in the training program, think a lot of it was because i was keeping my weight down but then yeah it was simply just changing the emphasis on what i was doing in the training program taking a lot of the longer reps running out eating more and just getting in the gym more as simple as that and just yeah good and good getting good intensity on the fives on compound lifts squat bench deads yeah still getting the power cleans in not even that much accessory work i might have done it different if i could go back but yeah it put that weight on quick enough and got me in the team so that was

the the outcome the goal what's it like being in the olympics yeah it's um that's gotta be amazing representing your country and everything i mean that's gotta be it's family members must be fucking hyped up like everyone must be really excited right it's um it's really quite hard to describe like it's an absolute dream it was never what i thought an achievable dream for me growing up it was just i was always inspired it was the little town that i went to school in actually had like this weird olympic link that when they were reviving the model olympics the guy that did it came to the town because they were running like a village olympics back in the 19th century so like the school i went to had this weird olympic lift um link and we had the olympian games every summer in the school which was on the playing field

so like from nine years old that was like my mini olympics wow and so there was always just this this like dream it was like a dream to get there but i never really thought that it was something that i could do. I just hadn't found my niche either. I hadn't found what I really excelled at. And so it was just like, a being a full-time athlete was all of my dreams coming true. And then going to an Olympics and then going to more than one Olympics was

just, yeah. Somebody just pick you up for bobsled or like, how did that happen? And you mentioned bobsled being created too uh by the brits yeah yeah um so basically i was very aware of the sport i think most kids are aware of it through cool runnings basically everyone knows what it is but you just don't think there's necessarily an entry in for you but i knew that you know a lot of people bigger

guys would go in and do it if they were powerful enough i honestly just thought i'd be too small i just thought i'd be too small and what actually happened was at my when i was at college and i was studying sports science i went into my training center and there was a poster on the wall it was like could you push your country at an olympic games there's these four big guys jumping in a sled and it showed what tests they were doing it was like 30 metres 45 metre sprint squat, bench

and a standing long jump I'm like I would love to go and try that you know turned up did really well at the tests and they gave me the nod

the coach there at the time Chris Woolley was like yeah you're coming along to the push track for the next phase I know you're light but we can work on that

went to the push track that you saw earlier you have to push a certain time to get onto the next phase got through that and literally went from there I know you're light, but we can work on that. Went to the push track that you saw earlier. You have to push a certain time to get onto the next phase. Got through that and literally went from there. And you were one of the undersized guys. Yeah, massively. Yeah.

That's pretty amazing. Yeah, so I was definitely hitting above my weight, that's for sure. So you see these guys, this was my team here. You're some fickies. Yeah, yeah. Some tight pants. Wow. Look at those glutes. Super kicked up. Yeah, yeah. Some tight pants. Wow. Look at those glutes.

Super kicked up. Yeah, yeah. Kicked up. So this race was crazy. We could have possibly won this world championships, but we crashed out in the third run down. So if you crash, we went from second to nothing. Damn. And then that's it.

I'm sure there's so much technique to it, but it just looks like you're just going fucking crazy. Yeah. Andrew, stop showing this video, bro. My bad. Pause. Get off the screen. Can't handle it.

Can't handle it. So much ass. You know what? So many people commented on that video. I should be doing this sport if I want to grow my ass. The DMs you must have gotten must have been wild. I know your wife's listening, but... No real DMs, just like weird comments,

which is fine. It's fine if you appreciate it. There's been requests for that. Not really for me personally, but there's a few Facebook groups like buying and selling sliding sports. So people are kind of selling equipment and stuff like a local selling page. Like people will come on there saying, yeah, I'm looking for speed suits, used spandex.

Used. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not washed. I mean, yeah, I need it for my bobsledding. I just need a hand-me-down. I can't afford a brand new one. I just think they've got a nice collection on the wall, you know. It must be the reason.

What's your training look like? What's like your running and like, how do you incorporate all this stuff? You can crack that open if you want. Go for it.

We don't care if you make some noise. Wow. It's like cracking open a Steve Weiser. Yeah, I know, yeah. This looks like a beer. It's not.

It's water. I'm not drinking on the show. Liquid gas. Although you might be. Is it informed choice? Informed. Approved? I should have checked, but as it's water, I'm just going to say it's okay.

So, yeah, running-wise at the moment, probably three to four times a week, I'd say. And I like to do a mix of Excel, top speed, and speed endurance or tempo, really. So the acceleration work will often be resisted. I'll do it hills or with that Exogeny that you saw. Warm-up will be slightly different. I'll be using different cues and stuff like that, like some of the stuff that you saw on that green there

with the different acceleration drills. Top speed is, yeah, typically obviously going to be a little bit longer working up to 60 70 meters maybe i sometimes use like wicket runs when you put cones down and you've got a step in between the cones so you know i've been big on trying not to queue too much and just force good positions in jumps and i'm the same with running you put something like wickets down it's a physical barrier or a constraint and you tend to just push people into good positions rather than just being like you need to do this because if it's video of that on your i don't do you know what i may do yeah um quite far back but if you youtube it you'll probably find it quicker okay what can i youtube so are you just keeping the cones like

close together are you stepping over them or yeah you step over them google wicket runs you can basically place the cones depending on what you're trying to get out of your athlete. So you can strain them to get their ground contact further underneath the center of mass and reduce their range of movement or casting of their shin. and then you basically, you extend or restrict those wickets depending on what you're seeing from the athlete. Yeah, there's nothing better than having some cues that are very intentional and deliberate. It's like you can't mess, I mean, you can mess that up, I guess, but once you go through it a couple times. They're just getting forced into good positions, right?

So it's like, that's a lot easier than just giving someone a load of A-skips to do. Wow, she's fucking flying jesus christ yeah so this is altis which um they do some great education uh yeah who are some people that we need to follow to get better at some of this stuff you were mentioning a legendary track coach that yeah that would be good for us so yeah dan path is a legend but he's not super active on social media. What I would do is follow Altus, but follow Stuart McMillan as well. Stuart McMillan. Yeah, Stu shares a lot of really good stuff.

And he coaches out of Altus and was lucky enough. I was lucky enough to do the test version of their new coaches online internship. And he was lucky enough to bring me in to do that kind of beta test of that back in the UK. So yeah, he's a good guy to follow. So yeah, I use those wickets and then with the tempo stuff or speed endurance, I just go lower intensity, trying to get some rhythm in and get some more volume just to try and get some contacts in the legs, get some of those chronic adaptations to lots of contacts, some of that reactivity in the legs and just get a bit of work capacity as well. So that's kind of what it's boiled down to at this point in my career. It was different earlier on. And obviously that

acceleration session changes into push sessions. So we might push anywhere from two or three times a week on that push track that you've seen. Yeah. That tends to come mid to end of the summer. So the earlier period we tend to go home and this especially happens in the u.s with the u.s team really they kind of dissipate because the u.s is so much bigger in the uk most people can travel to our training center to do a couple of days push it so in the u.s people have got to fly over from to placid from everywhere so they tend to go home dissipate to their own training centers then come back like end of the summer to get together

and start doing the push work. So it's kind of the periodization comes from when you can get in to start your pushing. Who are some of the real mutants in the jumping game that we should maybe pay attention to? There's so many. And this is the cool thing about social media because we mentioned like Cador earlier.

I remember trawling the internet when I was about 15, 16 to find his videos, like going on like LimeWire and downloading them and like scanning early YouTube. In fact, I don't think it was even YouTube. I think they had a website, maybe like Team Flight Brothers, something like that. Yeah, man. How old were you when you started LimeWire? You're 35 now, I'm 29. When'd you get on LimeWire? I'm innocent, mate. It was nothing I was downloading. Did you fuck with Kazaa? Yeah, I'm 29. When did you get on LimeWire? I'm innocent, mate. There's nothing I was downloading. Did you fuck with Kazaa? Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Kazaa. Oh my gosh. Kazaa. And Seamus' computer had some smoke come out of it. There was a lot of viruses getting downloaded. Oh yeah, I've destroyed laptops. Yeah, yeah. Napster?

Yeah, actually I didn't get a chance to fuck with Napster. I couldn't figure it out at nine years old. It was a family computer. So yeah, everything was clean that we were getting. It was literally boring dunk videos of somebody like Cador. But yeah, the freaks now, this is the cool thing about social media, right?

Because we've got access to all these guys that we wouldn't have access to otherwise. Because if you're not like an Olympic athlete in track or you're an NBA player, then no one's going to know who the hell you are. Yeah, there's people that are absolute freaks. Like you mentioned Dak. That guy is just – I think he may be the freakish guy that I've seen.

Yeah, yeah. Dak? He's a – D-A-K something. D-A-C. D-A-C? D-A-C, yeah. Yeah, he's a mutant. I should be following him.

Oh, that's right. You sent that recently, right, Mark? Yeah. He was going to come up here, but they had some complications. Complications. He just flies. Okay, it is King Dak. K-I-N-G-D-A-C.

Yeah, that guy. Oh, okay. That makes no sense. If you're on audio, sorry. Yeah, they're fine. It's just floating. Come on. I think he's measured the highest vertical in the world from an approach.

It's so rare to see someone get their body to move that high. You know what I mean? Sometimes you see someone do a high box jump and stuff like that, but look at the bottom of his feet are really far from the fucking ground. What is his vertical? I think he hit 50 plus at the Dunk Cup recently. Him and another guy called Isaiah Rivera both hit 50, I believe. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, what the fuck? He's built to jump. Look at those limbs, man. He is built to jump. How tall is he? Do you know? I think he's under six foot. I think he's 5'10".

What? Yeah, I think he's 5'10". I saw him explaining something. I was like, what's the deal with those hands? Fucking hands are monstrous. Yeah, so he's short, but his reach is good, so he can throw down some good dunks as well. So for the audio side, he just hit, what is that, 13 feet?

13 feet, yeah. Dude. He's 5'10". It's like above the backboard. I think, don't quote me on that. No, it says, and he's 5'10", right there. Yeah, I thought it was. And he's only 5'10".

That's crazy. I thought he was in the sixes. This is... Dude, that's crazy. And he's a long jumper? Yeah, he long jumps. I don't know how far he long jumps. Yeah, man.

Yo. There's a few guys. Isaiah Rivera, I think, hit 50 as well. Yeah, Kador told us about Isaiah. There's a guy called Riley Smith, who's, I think has hit 52. Who's, I think he plays American football. Is he a white guy? Yeah.

Oh, cool. I was about to say, do you got any white guys for us? Cause we want some, you know, we want some representation in the jumping game. Yeah. Riley, I'm sure it's Riley Smith. He's, he's freakish too. Obviously, I'm always looking to try and find

the highest jumpers to follow. Are you working on anything in particular right now? Like, are you trying to get your, you know, 100 meter time down or something? I was like,

eating a fucking sandwich off the rim. He's 5'9". Come on. You see, we wouldn't have known these guys without social media. He just kissed the rim. He kissed it.

Yeah, that is interesting. You're right. We wouldn't know about these people without social media now. Because it's a very specific skill that they're good at, which wouldn't necessarily get the airtime in the past that you can get now on social media.

Yeah, well, these guys, a lot of these guys are probably, you know, failed basketball players. Yeah. Quote-unquote failed basketball players. Yeah, well, these guys, a lot of these guys are probably, you know, failed basketball players. Yeah. Quote, unquote, failed basketball players. Yeah, it would be interesting to see, you know, something like Dak has that vertical, what his long jump is, because there'd be some elites in long jump that jump a lot further,

but his basic ability to produce that vertical force is ridiculous. There's also not, oh, XFL. Maybe he's getting it. Oh, he's going to enter the XFL draft. Okay. Let's go. Huh. Yeah.

You know, there's not a lot of incentive, though, to do stuff like that. You just get fucking killed. And you can just post stuff on social media and kill it there. Just hope to go viral, yeah. Yeah, this is a change. But there was a guy called, what's his name, Dexton,

who got like a college, but there was a guy called, what's his name, Dexton, who got like a college, he got a college scholarship of literally jumping across the road outside of his house, or at least it led to a college scholarship. Because the video went viral? Yeah, so he had a load of viral videos because he's a ridiculous jumper. Someone was like, you should long jump. So out of nowhere, he just gets pulled up to a track meet,

meets a coach, jumps pretty well, and then boom boom he's got like a college scholarship what yeah but i'm sure he dropped out to continue making social media videos which to me was a bit crazy but it's his choice you know it's funny i look at like jumping and all these types of things like even muscle to an extent because you've seen like you see nowadays young powerlifters doing some of the wildest things that you've you've never seen in powerlifting before at a young age but it's because they're able to see all these crazy lifters doing this shit i think you're going to see some like wild ass jumpers within the next few years because of guys like you and guys like this that are just showing how it's done you know yeah i would agree and also there being a platform for which you can share it if there's

an incentive for people to do it right they're going to improve and there's a financial incentive now because if you go viral and you grow a big social media base you can monetize that yeah and basically these people that have these incredible skills wouldn't have been able to do that in the past it's like they could show up to a basketball court and make a load of people impressed and show off but they can put that out to millions now which is really cool for me because that when we excel in sports all the sports that we excel in or at least the ones that get coverage and get you know good financial rewards are very specific the skills within themselves are very skill based there's a lot of very specific stuff that goes into them and it's like if you don't make it in those and you're going to be a nobody essentially even though like look at these guys

with these ridiculous abilities, like superhuman ability that we wouldn't have known even existed before social media. So that's a real positive about social media, I think, yeah. So we got access to these guys now. Have you ever hurt yourself trying to do something kind of for social media?

I haven't, no, I haven't. So I've kind of reined myself, I've had to rein myself in quite a bit. If I'd have got hurt doing something for socials and like coaches and the national governing body of my sport had found out, yeah, I'd have been pulled over the hot coals really. Yeah, that would be unacceptable.

So we had to sign contracts as well to say that we wouldn't do like certain dangerous sports and things like that too. Because look, if people are investing in you, you can't be reckless with stuff. That's a great thing though for you as a coach and as someone you know who's kind of leading the way like you're you're not opening yourself up to injury but you are doing extreme stuff that's difficult yeah i don't think i go past what my abilities allow me to do i've never done anything uh really stupid and got hurt doing it

um so i know my limits and if i do put anything out that is risky like that drop jump where i did it on the decline um i think that one of the things i wrote in there is this isn't a recommendation don't do this like i'm just demonstrating it's cool when you get to a certain point you have abilities to demonstrate what you can do. Like the guy, the parkour guy jumping off a 6.5 meter platform. He has the ability to do that, like show it off. That's amazing. We all want to see that. I'm not going to go and try it.

Right. Hey. Take us out of here, Andrew. There we go. We had to get one dunk in there for him. Yeah. It's the only one I've ever posted. And that was because I was forced to do it.

Someone was like, you better go. And that was in lockdown. I was like, right, where's the nearest court? I just didn't end up. That was during that hypertrophy clusters phase. I was doing like eight times five on deadlifts during that week. It didn't make me less explosive. That's good.

I'm going to start trying to dunk, man. Do it. Hell yeah. That'll be fun. It's a fun journey. I think you can get really good at that. You're super coordinated. When you were showing us stuff in the gym,

like when you were skipping and all the other stuff you were doing, it was like, holy shit. When he went to snap into something and do it, it looked very impressive. Yeah. I appreciate that. I think that's the childhood stuff again, right? I was just always playing when I was a kid.

And I just did every sport. Like my mom, bless her, I was a hyperactive kid. I was at a sports club every night of the week. Nice. Because it's the only club every night of the week. Nice. Because it's the only way she could calm me down. When I was a toddler, apparently she used to walk me two miles before bed. Because I wouldn't be able to sleep. Basically, yeah.

She should have put the reins on me and sat in the wheel. Like those kids with leashes. So parents be doing that. I got my son one. Yeah. I had the same reaction when I saw that shit too. I'm like, really? A fucking leash?

But dude, I don't want to be holding his hand. I want him to be able to run around, but I also don't want him to be like, oh, sick, a curb. I'm going to jump off and run this way. Because the little guy's getting fast. And I don't want him to be in the stroller forever. Dude, they'll run away from you. And it's scary because it's kind of like your dog too.

Your dog runs away from you and the dog's kind of playing with you and you're like, the street is not that far. And if I pretend I'm chasing, then they're going to. And your kid will do the same thing. And you're like, oh, my God, this is so scary. I don't know what to do. It's so funny. His little footsteps are so fast. He like that that that that yeah he took off

always looks like he's gonna fall right yeah leans a giant head forward and just and then he does that that anime run where he puts his hands back and he just takes off i'm like bro you're not fast enough to get your hands forward oh like he has a cape a cape on. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. It's awesome. It's called the Naruto run. I wasn't sure. I didn't want to get like the Shinobi sprint. He's got style.

Shinobi. The Shinobi sprint. Yeah. That shit's dope with the sword. Yeah. Yeah. I just play that shit all the time. All right.

Anyway, thank you everybody for checking out today's episode. We sincerely appreciate it. Please make sure you guys hit that like button before you head out and drop us a comment down below on anything that we've talked about today. We give you guys tons of shit to talk about. So we want to hear what you guys hit that like button before you head out and drop us a comment down below on anything that we talked about today we gave you guys tons of shit to talk about so we want to hear what you guys have to say by the way on Spotify we have video okay so I know the episode that we did on deadlifting didn't pop up there but there is a video now on Spotify so if

you're a listener on Spotify you can watch the podcast there too we just that advanced anyway Andrew Andrew did it for us and because it's main like it's spotify it's a technically a podcast platform it will show up there first before youtube so if you guys want to watch it first head over to spotify and then while you're there make sure you guys rate review do all that good shit down there as well and uh yeah subscribe to youtube if you guys are not subscribed and follow the podcast at mb power project on instagram tiktok and twitter my instagram tikt Power Project on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. My Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter is at

IamAndrewZNsema. Where are you at? Nsema ending on Instagram and YouTube and Nsema yin yang on TikTok and Twitter. I'm pretty sure Discord, which is in the description. Go join the community there because they're fucking dope. Over 2,000 people killing it.

So check it out. Ben, where can people find you? You can find me at my personal page, which is Ben the Bounce, or my business page, which is Sam Tech Systems. Let's go. I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Strength is never weakness.

Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.