Mark Bell's Power Project - Best Tips To Maximize Your Workouts: Build Strength, Muscle & Endurance

Episode Date: October 20, 2025

Discover the workout and diet secrets Jon Jones’ coach uses to build incredible strength, muscle, and endurance. Learn why running might be the worst thing for athletes over 200 lbs and what you should do instead for superior conditioning.On this episode of Mark Bell’s Power Project Podcast, hosts Mark Bell and Nsima Inyang talk with Jordan Chavez, the strength coach for MMA legend Jon Jones. Jordan shares the story of how he began training the champion and reveals the exact training methods he uses, like the conjugate system, for fighters. He also gives his best advice on nutrition and lifting for heavy athletes who want to build a powerful body. This episode is full of simple, powerful tips for anyone serious about their fitness.Follow Jordan on IG: https://www.instagram.com/mr_nfpSpecial perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!🧠 Methylene Blue: Better Focus, Sleep and Mood 🧠 Use Code POWER10 for 10% off!➢https://troscriptions.com?utm_source=affiliate&ut-m_medium=podcast&ut-m_campaign=MarkBel-I_podcastBest 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎➢https://emr-tek.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast➢ https://www.PowerProject.live➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerprojectFOLLOW Mark Bell➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybellFollow Nsima Inyang➢ Ropes and equipment : https://thestrongerhuman.store➢ Community & Courses: https://www.skool.com/thestrongerhuman➢ YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=enFollow Andrew Zaragoza➢ Podcast Courses and Free Guides: https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz/➢ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamandrewzSupporting What You Believe In

What do heavier people need to think about differently when it comes to training versus people who are lighter? Most of my bigger guys, if I have you ride a bike for 10 to 15 miles, it'll do just as well as if you were to run my miles. If you're over 200 pounds, you have no business running that much. So you can utilize certain exercise techniques that you can still train really hard, still get an awesome training effect, not leave any negative residue on you. My perspective on things is I want to be as strong as. is the biggest guy in the room, but I want to be as fast and as agile as a smallest guy in the room. Having the capabilities to do all these different things is what allowed me to find enjoyment in training. At the end of the day, if you could show up every single day and maintain or

get better than you were yesterday, that's a win. Jordan Chavez, great to have you here in person. Thanks to finally get me in here officially. Yeah, I appreciate it. So you train the baddest man on the planet. And maybe like one of the baddest men to ever walk the face of earth, John Jones. Yes, sir. How'd that happen? How'd it come to be? John was actually a walk-in client. Let's stay a little closer to the microphone.

Okay. A walk-in? Yeah, he was officially a walk-in. Wow. So when I first started working with him, I was actually working with a client at one of my old locations. And when I had some guys dragging sleds outside, he happened to be walking around the neighborhood because we're pretty close to the original Jackson Wink. And when we went over there, he was walking around on a phone call, saw people dragging

sleds, decided to come in. He pops in underneath the garage door. When he walked in, I obviously knew who he was. But I'm like, hey, how's it going? How can I help you? And he's like, hey, you know, I saw this a gym. I'm looking for a new trainer. I'm like, oh, okay, cool.

I was like, yeah, I could help you all. When would you like to come in? He was like, oh, well, I don't really have anything going right now. I could come in tomorrow. I was like, all right. Well, what time you want to come in? Is he like the champ at the time? He was currently the champ.

So you're thinking like, this is bizarre. Well, a little bit bizarre, right? Yeah, no, it is definitely strange. It's like he walked into like a planet fitness. He's like, you have a personal trainer? Yeah, basically. And so he walks in and I'm like, I was like, yeah, I can work with you.

I'll make it work. Like, I know exactly who you are. And so when he came in, I was like, all right, well, what time you want to come in? He was like, well, I'm not really a morning person. Do you have anything like around two or three? I was, oh, come in at two. I'm like, all right, come on in. I'll see you tomorrow too.

And he went about his day. So mind you, I'm like, okay, yeah, this guy's probably not coming back in. You know what I mean? Like you're not just showing up to a random gym and being like, oh, yeah, no, you, I want to work with you. Yeah. And so. He's never seen you train anybody. Did he even ask you a lot of questions?

We spoke maybe for about 10 minutes. And so he was like, all right, I'm going to trust this random individual that I have no idea who he is. And so lo and behold, he shows up the next day at 2 o'clock. I'm like, hey, okay. All right, well, all right, let's just start moving. fast forward that I end up working with him at the time he wasn't even on social media so if you didn't come into the gym at two between like two and three 30 yeah you would have no idea like I'm never been the person like oh hey guess who I was working with today like that that's never been me and at the time I didn't even have uh Instagram I didn't I didn't have any social media and so he came back, trained him for probably about eight months. And he came in four days a week religiously, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. And so we were training. And moving forward,

he was like, hey, I think I'm going to get back on my Instagram. I was like, oh, okay, cool. He was like, oh, you should make one. He was like, it would be awesome. It would be good for your brand, I was like, yeah, no, absolutely. That's cool that he's looking after that. You know what I mean? No, yeah, no. He's definitely genuine down-to-earth guy. Like, for as big as he is, he lives a very quiet life. And so he, for the most part, if he's in town, he's at home. And if he's not at home, he's at the gym.

And if he's not doing that, then he's training with his dog. He's shooting, just doing some other stuff where there's not a lot of people around. And so he ends up putting up a post. And if you look back, my very first post was a training video of him. And so from then, the rest is history. And we trained. First fight I had with him was with St. Prue. That was his first fight back.

I'd been training him about a year and a half. And then we've been training pretty much from that point on. And like the amount of hours I tell you that I've worked with him trained with him is crazy so like it like we have plenty of days where it would just be me and him and we're literally in the gym for hour hour and a half boom getting after it and then that was it and next thing you know everyone's like oh well what's john doing and so he's very much he likes putting stuff out but he doesn't want a lot of people knowing so for a very long time aside from you guys are doing some unconventional like you guys are doing

some straight up power lifting stuff which is unconventional in the mMA world you don't see that many guys do some some guys do but you don't see that many guys lifting the way you guys are lifting no and i think a big part of what he likes is he's always been strong and everyone first thing anyone that fights him they're like oh my god like this guy is really strong and so and i think that's always helped him because I'm like, well, you're pretty strong. I could get you crazy strong. And once he started seeing that, seeing his body transform, like, he was like, okay, there's something to this. I could, I could really go with this. And so he just found love with my style of training. And so from there and forward, he was like, oh, yeah, you're my guy.

Go ahead. Let me ask you this. What are like some of the intents? Because, like, I think, you know, you'll see something that's online and people use John Jones as an example, but they don't realize, like, just because you see, like, his calves look like this, like, that's not, that's not what matters here. The dude's body's a weapon. So, like, what are those intangibles that people don't notice just when they look at the guy? I think when most people look at him, especially when you see him in person, they don't realize how big he is. Yeah. Like, he's a big dude. He's got two brothers that were in the NFL. Yeah, if you see like, yeah, you got Art and Chandler, both phenomenal NFL careers, and you see them on the field, they're big, where most people look at NFL guys,

you see them in pads, they're like, oh, these guys are monsters. Well, you see John, he's big, and when you walk up and see him, you don't realize that, especially when you're watching him in the cage, you're like, oh, yeah, he's skinny, he's this, sees that. I'm like, but when you see him in person, he's significantly bigger than what he appears online and in person. And like, even there's been plenty of times we're training and art comes up and he's, uh, uh, I see art and Chandler at the fight. And Chandler's like, bro, look at John's neck. Like, look how big he is. Like, when I have his brothers freaking out on how large he is, I'm like, that's how you know. And these are guys that,

have known him his entire life. And so his ability to just be able to move the way he does at that size completely changes the game. Are they older brothers? Yeah. So I believe art is older and Chandler's younger. I believe John's three men. I probably get his ass peep by both of them all the time when he's kid or something like that. Well, and so I think part of it was part of the reason with Bones, I'm pretty sure it.

is that he was always skinny. He was the skinny brother. Yeah. Where art a little bit shorter, definitely bigger than him. And then Chandler, about the same height as John, if I'm not mistaken, but he was always a little bit bigger. And where John was the skinny one. And so he wrestled. And so especially with wrestling, he's not getting much bigger.

So what do you think about the conjecture of like there's people, I've heard this brought up on like Joe Rogan show and heard it brought up in a lot of other places. places that people start to see what you guys do obviously they're only seeing glimpses of what you guys do but to like one rep maxes like that's not good for him and then he like tore his pack a while back and like see like he's bench pressing like i think he's lifting the wrong way and all this different stuff like what are some of your thoughts around that i think looking at it like the nice part about the gym is it's a controlled environment so we could follow movement patterns that are monitoring it and

I wouldn't have him max out on something that I didn't trust he had efficient movement patterns on and so when you look at some of these things I'm like I could control everything in the gym it usually does a lift easily I'll say yeah yeah and it looks safe to me yeah and for the most part like well I'll let him touch a max effort on the day but

I'm not going to push him to the point where it's like oh like I don't real sketch yeah exactly Exactly. I'm like, as long as it's looking correct on my end and looking like it's efficient, then by all means I'm like, yeah, we could put some more weight on, put some more weight on. But I'm also not going to put him in a position where I'm like, I don't think you could get this where I don't ever load anything where it's like, oh, this is 50-50, John. Like, good luck here, buddy. I'm like, no, like if we put it on, I'm a firm believer in, all right, you'll hit this, you'll be fine. But, yeah, like, everything that you see online that he posts of what we do is less than 1% of the actual training we do. And he was like, oh, I think I don't want to film this one.

All right, cool. We'll film maybe 10% of the stuff that we actually do just because he's like, oh, this should look good. I think the fans will like this. But he'll watch it. they're going to say something about how my my toe moved right there oh they're going to say something about oh my my hands were too wide too narrow like he's an extremist at critiquing himself how damn good of an athlete he is doing that shit oh yeah yeah and like how many at this huge at this point he's probably 250 something at least i'm pretty sure uh during this point of training camp he was sitting right about 255 two 60-ish But yeah I'm like

For him to be able to move And do some of these things Like I said People don't realize how big he looks Because you look at anyone online You're like oh yeah no he's Probably not that big Where you see how wide he actually is

Like how broad his shoulders are How large his legs are Like I mean you said he's 6 4 with a 7 foot reach Yeah Yeah Yeah 6 4 I believe it's 84 inches officially.

Wow. He's doing a lot of unconventional stuff. I've seen him like hiking. Did I have seen him on a bike before even? Yeah. Yeah, like mountain biking, right? He actually got really big into mountain biking, but yeah, I told him, especially when he was going up to heavy weight, I'm like, bro, I don't need you running this

much. Like you're 250, 260 pounds, like your ankles, your knees, your hips don't need to take this kind of beating. A hike is good enough, right? and a hiking yeah yeah i'm like and when he goes on these hikes and these uh rides like we're we already live at elevation and he goes at foothills significantly higher i'm like you're getting plenty uh aerobic work like you're fine actually this makes me kind of curious because um you know you you work john jones you also work with gable stevenson you work with

like big like heavy dudes right what are some things you think because i i know we have a lot of listeners that are on the heavier side too. So what do heavier people, heavier bodies, need to think about differently when it comes to training versus people who are lighter because, you know, in martial arts, road work is a thing. It's like a staple of being a martial artist. But when you're 200 and something pounds, should you still be running five miles every morning, you know? Most of my bigger guys, like, I'm fine with roadwork, but if I have you ride a bike for 10 to 15 miles it'll do just as well as if you were to run my miles and so the beating that it

does to the body at a lighter weight like you look at most long distance runners how come none of them can squat for 500 pounds well because they're built to squat hopefully 100 pounds and most of them weigh anywhere from 100 to 135 pounds because of the beating that it does to the body and the amount of pressure that their joints and everything is taking during these long distance runs, like these big individuals have no business doing that kind of running. And so my first thing I tell them, I was like, how much you weigh? Okay, if you're over 200 pounds, like unless you're doing high rocks or something that involves that amount of running, you have no business running that much.

And so let's put you on a bike, whether you want to get a road bike, recumbent bike, whatever it might be, you could get the same amount of benefits for your health as you would if you're doing this run without the aches and pains that come along with running for the next three to five days because I think everyone here has tried, oh, hey, I think I could do a 510K just fresh off your normal training and a mile and a half into it. You're like, oh, my God, my calf is cramping, my foot's cramping, my hip is hurting a little bit more my hip flexors kind of like all the things that start coming with these extreme runs like let's try to eliminate these injuries and that are just happening purely because you're

doing a movement pattern that you're not built for so if i want to get that in jump on a bike and you could get the same amount of benefit without your legs will be burning this that and the other but it's not my joints aren't killing me for the next three to five days yeah i think a big guy too can get a ton out of like that like zone two stuff whereas a smaller guy we might need to push different zones more a bigger guy you know rucking or a bigger guy hiking or going on a bike or doing these things that are maybe a little you know quote unquote easier they get a lot out of it a lot of times because they're not efficient there right whereas a smaller guy who may already be somewhat efficient in some of these areas he might that person might get

more benefit from doing stuff that big guys normally do Yeah, no, absolutely. I think when you're a bigger individual, your zone two stuff will carry over a lot more for you because how often are they doing more zone two stuff? Like, their heart rate's already spiking significantly off. Getting off the couch. Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, like, hey, they go, why do you take the elevator?

Oh, because I'm on the third floor and that first flight, it gets me. You know what I mean? And so where dabbling. on either one will allow them to be able to be significantly better as an individual whether they're smaller or they're bigger and that's why you have to kind of do things that don't fit your normal lifestyle so your bigger individuals like all right you need to be able to do some more prolonged movement where the lighter guy lay you go run for a mile but i go put double your body weight on a back squat and you're like oh uh uh knees start shooting in and next

and you know they're struggling for extreme output. So with a lot of the different fighters or just athletes in general, I like them, I'm like, all right, well, what do you normally do? All right, let's start mixing stuff you don't normally do. So like in conditioning sessions after like a training, I prefer significantly more sprints. I was like, I need you. Your body's already fatigued from training.

Let's see what we could do in high output, 15 to 20 second sprint, whether it be sled, bike, just whatever it might be. Sprint with something. Yeah, sprint with something. That's actually really interesting because the safety of it goes up a little bit because the governor's taken off because you got them at the end of their workout. They're already a little fatigue, so their ability to tap into their central nervous system is declined a little bit. And so therefore the stress that they might put on their hamstring or Achilles tendon might be like a little bit less.

Oh, yeah, for sure. And then by putting them on a sled or a rower or a bike, now I'm not having to have these extremes with a sprint on a hard surface, which is an ideal. Most gyms you go into, got rubber flooring, or if they're sprinting out back, they're running on pavement concrete, which is not ideal for anyone. And so we eliminate a lot of these movements and these areas where it's going to put us in a fatigued state and increased risk of injury. Well, let's eliminate this risk of injury by setting it up so that I'm like, hey, put you in the best position possible, get the results that you're looking for without ever being like, oh, yeah, no, this guy had me sprinting before and sprinting after and we're running on pavement. Now I got shin splints coming from who knows where. Like, yeah, these are a lot of things that we could prevent as long as we're not just trying to be like, oh, yep, let me write this down. Yeah, yeah, this sounds like it'll be a good workout.

Like everything needs to be planned out and a little bit more methodical. Is Johns Jones, is he lucky? I mean. It's all luck. Yeah. No, no. What I kind of wonder, though, is like, because I think, I think there's. some people in the world that so john jones is the man right he's the guy yeah i think subconsciously

he kind of knows that he's a guy he strolls in to your gym or the gym that you work at and just happens to get like a really amazing coach right and so i think that he has in his somewhere in his circuitry he has the understanding that like someone's looking out after him or something and that these things like have you witnessed this before with him like does this happen a lot So John's really good at reading people. Ah, okay. So he's really good at reading people and he's a firm believer. If he gets a bad vibe from anyone, like he has no problem, like, okay, yeah, no, we're not going to work with them.

We're not going to associate with them. And so for him, he's very lucky in the sense of him being able to read individuals because, like, very, I've met probably a handful of individuals in my life that are. are being able to read the characteristics of a person with just the very first time they meet him. And so there's plenty of times. We'll meet people and it's like, oh, yeah, I know. Hey, cool, cool, blah. And next thing you know, he's like, no, we're not working with them.

No, I don't like them in there. Interesting. Too many times I see people, they're like, oh, yeah, no, I'm going to bring so-and-so to train with us to the gym. And if it's not, Like, you don't invite just random people without announcing it. And then next thing you know, it's like, just because you trust someone doesn't mean we're going to trust them. Yeah.

And so I've seen plenty of times where people have come into the room, to the gym, whatever it may be. And he's like, yeah, how do I say this in a nice way? But, yeah, you can't come back. You know, that actually makes me wonder, how does someone like that? and the other athletes you work with like how do you find people to I guess give them a challenge without being stupid

because when you're someone of that caliber an athlete that there's a target on their back people want to be training room heroes you know what I mean and it's so how do y'all navigate that because there has to be a way to he's got to level up yeah so with that

is if anyone's bringing And any coach or anyone that brings anyone in, they need to vet them basically on their own and make sure it's like, hey, like don't be bringing in, no, oh, hey, I'm coming in to knock this guy out. And so that, hey, don't know why. Yeah, exactly. And so I could go home and tell my friends and I could post it on my social media with 200 followers. Like, you know what I mean? And just so I could be, oh, I have something to talk about at the barbecue on Saturday.

like you have no idea what I did to this guy in training room like like everyone that goes in there they know hey you come in we're here for quality training controlled training where we're here to get better and we're not just trying to have the glory for tonight's training session and so making sure that anyone that brings anyone in they should have already vetted them make sure they don't have those characteristics because there's plenty of times that individuals have shown that they someone oh i don't have those characteristics and the moment their true colors come out in the training room all right make sure you tell that guy not to come back to yeah then so yeah just cutting them off i forget exactly what the circumstance was but there's

some weird form of transportation at lax where you there's no other way to get to this terminal without taking this uh bus you got to take this like tram uh to get to the next like flight and i I can't even remember where I was flying to, but I go to hop on this bus, and the bus is full, and, like, I'm the last person on. I kind of look around, and I'm like, oh, there's a seat. And I'm like, I know the person that I just sat next to. I'm like, holy fuck, it's Bones Jones. I was like, I got to say what's up to him, you know? I just turned to him like, hey, man, what's up?

I was like, I know your trainer, and I know Jordan. And so we just got talking a little bit, and this is before he turned heavyweight. Okay. And he was talking about, like, gaining weight. I was like, I know a lot about gaining weight. I could show you. I was like, you're just, you know, I just landed right next to, you know, this guy that wants to gain weight.

And, you know, here we go. So we just got talking a little bit. And he was super nice. He talked to me when we got out of the, uh, off the bus and stuff too. And he talked to me like in the airport. And, um, he was like insanely kind. And he was, uh, he was talking about, yeah, gaining weight. So I was like,

let me set you up with my buddy Stan because gaining like you can't just gain weight yeah like you're going to need to gain weight and it's going to need to be like strategic and i know you know jordan and everything so that's going to be really helpful but the nutrition side of it's going to be a big piece of the puzzle as well and uh i was like you're going to need to like you're going to need to be heavy for a while you can't just like get heavy and then fight you need to like be heavy for like a year probably and then maybe fight you know so anyway yeah i set him up with Stan and that's kind of how that some of that relationship got underway but i mean that's why i mentioned to you about like luck um and it seems like uh it seems like a guy like that

just ends up uh but he said he's good at like reading people it seems like he ends up in some pretty good positions and pretty good spots sometimes you know yeah yeah no definitely um and uh i know john is a big part of he's a big believer big Christian and he thinks in his mind like he was put on this planet for one reason, one reason only be a greatest MMA fighter there ever was, there ever is, ever will be. And so like, and at the end of the day, he's a firm believer in, he's here, he's doing his purpose and he's fulfilling his purpose. And so whenever you're that locked into who you are, what you are, and understand who you are and what you're supposed to do on this planet,

then I think luck can play a role into it on like, hey, I'm going to just make this happen. And for him, it's been able to be all those things because he has one goal. That's all he focuses on whenever he's working towards something. And then depending on your... beliefs, he's like, hey, I'm in every position I'm in, it's for a reason. I'm going to end up on this bus to go get our vehicle. I'm going to run into Mark Bell. Hey, if I'm on the, like all these different scenarios where certain paths are created

in his mind, that's where he's supposed to be. And I think that's part of why he's been able to be lined up with all these different individuals because it's part of his path. And he's just here to walk it and fulfill it at the highest of his capability. Let me ask you this. Because I think there's so many athletes that are trying to gain muscle. You know, over at my jiu-jitsu school, there's a few people who there are like 21, 22. They're like, man, I'm trying to get bigger. I'm like, okay, you know, just don't rush it. Interesting thing is, no matter what anyone wants to believe, John, he gained weight quickly, but people want

to think that, oh, he used PEDs. Dude's probably getting randomly tested by the UFC so many times, or you can't just, like, you can't just hop on shit and think you're going to be okay. So, no matter what anyone wants to believe, all right. But if you were talking to somebody who they're not, they're not to gain

a certain amount of time, wait in a year, and they have some time to put on quality mass, how would you maybe outlined that for them? Like, how would you outline that for them? If they wanted to put on maybe, let's say they're 180, and And they want to get to so excited he's getting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The eyes are lighting up as a power lifter. He's like, yeah. They want to be like 220 or 230, but solid, right? Yeah. How do you look at that, time frame and everything? So I'm like, if you got plenty of time, first thing. So, like, I even experienced it myself because there was a time after college. I played college baseball, and I would sit around about 185, 190.

So after college, I sat right about. about 195, 200 pounds. Then one day I'm like, you know what? Like, I'm moving pretty good. I want to be bigger. You know what I mean? Because I've always been the skinny individual. Like, I'm like, I still look at myself in the mirror.

I'm like, dang, you're small right. I know. What are you doing? Hey, I walk in. Mark, uh, insulted me with, oh, you're looking pretty lean. I said, yeah, he's like, oh, I mean, I'm small for right now. I'm like, yeah, I'm going to go to Waffle House real quick. I'll be right back.

I definitely didn't say anything about small. It's like lean. They look lean. Hey, but you know, as an individual in this space, the moment someone says you're lean, you're like, shoot, I'm small. Like, I don't know anyone in this space that lives in the gym that's like, oh, yeah, I can't wait for someone tell me you look lean, especially in the performance base. You're nice and trim. Nice. Yeah.

Oh, oh, you look like Pilates? Dan Green says no skinny champions. Yeah, exactly. 100%. And so, but back to your question, I think everyone that I come across that has that question, first thing that I tell them, I'm like, all right, where did you eat today? Yeah. I had a banana and then I had a cup of coffee. Oh, okay.

So what else do you have? Oh, well, I had a salad with extra dressing and I was, oh, well, did you have? Protein shake. Well, no. Oh, well, did you have any chicken or anything on it? Oh, I didn't get chicken today. I'm like, oh, okay, well, how much protein did you get in today? Oh, well, I'm going to work out now, and then I'll have a protein shake after.

And then, oh, okay, well, what's for dinner tonight? Oh, I don't know. I might pick something up on the way home. Okay, cool. I was like, all right, well, let's start there. So, being that you don't eat any protein. Let's start by everything that you just told me are let's try to eat four times that. I'm like, I just need to teach you how to eat because at the end of the day, like, I don't care.

I don't even get into macros with them because this person just has no idea what it's like to consume the amount of food that is needed. So I tell everyone young, old, don't matter. If you're trying to gain weight, I need to teach you how to eat first. Hear that on med? Yeah. So. Are you listening on that? So, and I know I had called in on this before, and I had said how I got too many times where I have men eating like women and women eating like men.

So I'm like, all right, let's try to reverse these roles. Do those two, those women. Yeah. Hey. So I need to bring some of those women on teach these men how to eat. Yeah. And so I tell them, I'm like, look, I need you to just be able to get calories in on a given day. And then once you learn how to consume the amount of calories needed just to support your actual weight, now that you're used to eating, all right, now let's put you with some more calories.

All right, you're getting used to eating more calories. All right, now I need you actually pay attention to your protein consumption because from the looks of your breakdown you gave me over the last two weeks, you're averaging about 125 grams of protein a day. and I'm like, that's not it. I know a guy, like, I know a few people right now that I'm telling the protein thing and they're like, I'm so full with that much protein. Like, dog, you're 180 pounds. Yeah. Hey, you're 180 pounds that's been eating like you're 135. Like, hey, I'm sorry.

Like, that's just not going to help you in any way, shape, or form, especially if you're trying to be a performance athlete. So if we're trying to do these, I need you to consume food. Once you get used to consuming food, now I need. need you to be able to be in a calorie surplus. Cool. Once you're in a calorie surplus, all right, now we can start monitoring. All right, make sure you're eating X amount of protein a day, X amount of carbohydrates a day.

Like, all right, what is your physical output on a given day so that now we could monitor, all right, are we increasing your carbs, are we increasing your fat, what is your body respond better to? And then that's where it becomes a little bit more individualized on our nutrition side of things. But at the end of the day, I just need men in general to eat more and then don't be sitting on your ass as much as you normally are. All right, Mark, you're getting leaner and leaner, but you always enjoy the food you're eating. So how are you doing it? I got a secret, man. It's called Good Life Protein. Okay. Tell me about that. I've been doing some good life

protein. You know, we've been talking on the show for a really long time of certified Piedmontese beef And you can get that under the umbrella of good life proteins, which also has chicken breast, chicken thighs, sausage, shrimp, scallops, all kinds of different fish, salmon, tilapia. The website has nearly any kind of meat that you can think of lamb. There's another one that comes in mind. And so I've been utilizing and kind of using some different strategy kind of depending on the way that I'm eating. So if I'm doing a keto diet, I'll eat more fat and that's where I might get the sausage and I might get their 80, 20. grass fed grass finish ground beef i might get bacon and there's other days where i kind of do a little bit more bodybuilder style where the uh fat is you know might be like 40 grams or something like that and then

i'll have some of the leaner cuts of the certified piedmontese beef this is one of the reasons why like neither of us find it hard to stay in shape because we're always enjoying the food we're eating and protein you talk about protein leverage it all the time it's satiating and helps you feel full I look forward to every meal And I can surf and turf You know I could cook up some You know chicken thighs or something like that

And have some shrimp with it Or I could have some steak I would say you know The steak it keeps going back and forth For me on my favorite So it's hard for me to lock one down But I really love the bovette steaks Yeah

And then I also love the ribbyes as well You can't go wrong with the ribbyes So guys if you guys If you guys want to get your hands On some really good meat You can have to goodlifeproteins.com and use code power for 20% off any purchases made on the website, or you can use Code Power Project to get an extra 5% off

if you subscribe and save to any meats that are a recurring purchase. This is the best meat in the world. I know, you know, someone like John Jones is going to get, like, picked apart, you know, every little thing that he does or you guys do. Or, you know, I think maybe for one of the fights are like, he's got a dad ball, like people. And still kicked out. People are like, well, no, it's not.

He's not like in some sort of bodybuilding show. And I thought he looked great anyway. Like he, so what? Someone has a little bit of fat on him. It's not a big deal. And for putting out on the weight that fast, like, shit's impressive. Right. And I mean, he's holding onto a lot more muscle mass, right?

I mean, I'm trying to stick up for him because I'm a huge fan. But I'm sticking up for him because I'm a huge fan. Yeah, no, absolutely. And what everyone doesn't realize is you look across the board in the heavyweight division, everyone has fat on them. Yeah. The only ones that typically don't have that much fat on them are at 205 and under. So you look at across the board, all these guys in every single division, even the women, they're all walking around anywhere from 20, 30, some of them, 35 pounds from their fight weight.

Right. And so, of course, if I take each one of you, myself included, all right, hey, we got eight weeks. We're going to cut 25 pounds each. Of course, we're all going to be shredded, not an ounce of body fat on us and look phenomenal, right? But that's not realistic for anyone. Like, if you're every single person listening and watching, go to the mirror, take your shirt off, look at yourself. And I guarantee you, unless you have a fight coming up next Friday, you probably don't look shredded every single day. Why out here making people have body dysmorphia, bro?

Like, what was it? Hey, because I have the most body dysmorphia in this room. I felt like, oh, hey, I'm happy to come out here, have this podcast with you. And I got insulted by Mark by how small I am the second I walk in. Francis and Gano looks pretty good. Yeah. Well, granted, we also have our genetic freaks out that don't worry. I have plenty of individuals that I've come across that, how do you eat?

Oh, I didn't eat much. Or, oh, I still go eat fast food every single day, once or twice a day. and they walk around with a six-back. I'm like, oh, let me see your kindergarten picture where you're playing sports. Just as ripped as ever. I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. You're gifted from jump, and that's why.

So, like, some of these individuals that are walking around looking like absolute specimens, regardless of what they do, how they train. Like, I met this individual. He was in the Air Force. Buddy would party six, seven days a week. and like barely ate and we're going in the gym absolutely strong as an ox oh you want to run i don't feel like running today he go run be better than everyone else that dude's unlocked how to use oxygen as

yeah exactly exactly yeah no he gets it and the way we can manipulate that is we need to capture him and so that's that motherfucker man yeah catch it that's a unicorn catch him let's uh study him and then Let's try to figure out what the key ingredient there is. But, yeah, aside from a very select few that you can put your hand on, and because I think all of us as individuals have met one or two individuals in their lifetime that are just absolute specimens. And outside of those, vast majority of us actually need to pay attention to how we eat, how we train, and our calories consumed.

What about a little bit of a dirty bulk? You're a fan of that? Like get the calories in if you need them. So I think everyone can get away with if it's easier for you to just get calories in, I tell people all the time when I'm trying to get people to gain weight, I don't care what you eat. Oh, well, I'm going to go McDonald's. All right, well, where did you get at McDonald's? No, I got a 10-piece chicken nugget.

I'm like, make that 20. Well, hey, I got 30. No, hey, I tell him, I was like, all right, well, what you need to do, go to chicken. Flay, you could order a 60-count platter, and I need you to put that thing down by yourself. 60 by myself. I was like, hey, I've done it. If I could do it, it can be done. I like this.

I like, yeah, I'm like, a little double order. No, like we need to have a little absurd amount of calories consumed, and we need to have that done on a week-to-week, month-to-month basis. Come see me in six months. I don't care if you do that once a week, twice a week. I was like, I just need you to get bigger. And then once you get used to that with your training, then we can worry about, all right, well, are you putting on muscle? Are you just putting on only fat?

Like, all right, if you're only putting on fat, you're obviously not training enough to facilitate the need to put on muscle. So then now we need to look at your training. I'm curious, like, how you help people in martial arts. Because one thing I noticed is that martial artists tend to, the sport and the training can be so tiring. Even if you're not like an MMA person, even if you're just a jiu-jitsu person or a wrestling person, like the sport itself can be so taxing that when now it comes to doing some level of lifting, et cetera, it's hard to want to push yourself. And it's hard to actually even have the energy to do so because a lot of athletes also feel like, if I have, if I'm going to go hard in the gym, then I have to take away from my sport training. And what are your thoughts in that? Because, like, sometimes maybe it isn't that bad to take a little bit away from the sport training.

Well, I'm glad you asked that because I have this conversation with guys all the time. And the biggest thing I tell them is, like, I need you to understand too many times athletes in general under eat. Oh, yeah. Because, and so they're like, oh, well, I'm able to do this training, but I don't have energy for anything else. What would you eat today? Oh, well, I had a six. egg whites before I went to MMA practice.

Okay, well, what else? Oh, I haven't eaten since. Eating like a bodybuilder on prep. I'm like, it's four o'clock. How do you... I didn't know a chance to show it. Yeah, I'm like, so with them, it's getting these guys, because

you look at the most coaches in these given fields and just across the board, all of them are usually significantly older or even the younger ones have learned from older style coaches where they're like, oh no, don't eat, don't do this, don't like, so they're so used to training when they're basically starving themselves that they aren't able to do multiple sessions where I'm like, hey, look, let me give you more food

and you'll be surprised how many sessions you get in a day. Because now if we're having adequate sessions every single day and we're able to do two, three, four sessions a day, now your weight's not going to move because A fighter's biggest or in combat sports, their biggest issue is, oh, well, I can't, I don't want to miss weight and, oh, I don't want to get tired. Well, if you're not fueling yourself for either, both are definitely going to happen. Yeah. Because you could be in phenomenal shape, but not fueling your body accordingly. Well, you're still going to be tired.

And so understanding, it comes with a sport. you will be tired but how well do you respond and handle being tired so um like we had a conversation earlier is like having these individuals that the moment they hit that moment where their ears are just pounding heart rate is through the roof first thing they do okay i need to slow down well if your body is fueled to be able to push in those areas where you're like oh no i'm still moving fine, then you're comfortable with maintaining this high heart rate. And so if we're able to fuel these fighters better, give them more food during training, now they're able to dabble into the training.

Now they're dabbling in all the other aspects that they need in order to be successful. And so I tell everyone, I'm like, all right, if you want to mix something in, all means do it. but don't think you're going to be great at something brand new when you first get into it. Oh, well, I don't want it to take away from this. I was like, it's not going to take away. Like, you're not going to be good enough when you hit the gym when you've never hit the gym for it to take away from there. You're going to be learning movements more than anything. And so I tell everyone, don't, oh, I only want to lift so it'll help me for grappling.

Well, how much grappling are you doing when you're lifting? Oh, I decided to take six months off. well, now you're losing six months of skill work that you need to be working on. So keep doing what you're doing and then just start adding in pieces. Like, I don't go cook a steak and be like, oh, yeah, no, I cooked a steak. It was phenomenal. All right, well, what else did you eat with it? So same thing.

Oh, yeah, no. Well, I could only finish a steak. Well, I need you to put some rice in there. I need you to put some potatoes in there. Go ahead throw some veggies in if you want it. Like, you don't just have a meal and only eat one thing. Typically, you're going to have multiple things of it. First time, you might not be able to finish everything, but you do that enough next to you know, oh, hey, I'm clearing my plate.

Oh, hey, I'm able to add to my plate. Same thing with training. Oh, let me add this. Now let's add this. You start adding all your sides to your training. Now we're able to, once we get our body becomes accustomed to handling everything. Now it's able to, okay, now I could push in these each and individual training sessions without feeling like, oh, it's taking away.

Now that's when you really grow. Because too many times people want to grow in one avenue at a time. And then when they go revisit the first avenue, they're like, oh, well, I'm not as good as I was. Well, because you stop doing it. You stop doing anything. You're going to have decline. So don't worry about how low one is and how high the other. other is keep doing both of them until your low one starts climbing and then now everything will

grow we saw john doing some of those sprints on the on the treadmill there and um it's just a reminder that so many things are about recovery like the sprints on the treadmill or someone sprinting on a beach or sprinting up a hill all that could really look great but you can only do it so often it is a great exercise it's it's absolutely fantastic thing to explore but you also might want to use the assault bike. You also might want to use the rower. As you were indicating earlier, there's things that you can utilize that might be safer bet.

And your recovery, you know, a lot of times I think people think that your recovery is mainly like sleep and mainly your food. And those are really huge aspects. And you have to make sure that those are sound. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to really do much else. But exercise selection and the way that you exercise is really, really critical. the way that you do some of your

MMA training and stuff for you that might be up to some different coaches right and I'm sure you communicate with those guys and have a good idea of what John did for the week

and what the other fighters have done for the week and so and so on but when you think about pushing a sled you know my mentor Louis Simmons made the sled a popular thing

you think about like you know pushing a prowler or some of these other things and you're not sprinting with them you're just walking with them you think about what a great activity that is because of how long you can do it and because it really it's costing you something from an energy standpoint but if you you know if you told me on

the phone and I'm like in fight camp you're like yeah we're going to hit the sled tomorrow we're going to do some stretches and we're going to do you know a couple other things I'd be like oh cool like a piece of cake workout you know it's great because I'm beat to hell right so you can utilize like exercise selection and you can utilize a certain exercise techniques that you can still train really hard, still get an awesome training effect, and not have it have any negative, like, not leave any like negative residue on you, basically. Yeah, no, exactly. I think exercise selection is huge, monitoring volume is huge.

And understanding that when you're working with individuals like this, they have multiple coaches. In the MMA, you're there, most of the guys have at bare minimum two to three coaches that are doing certain things and so making sure that we're one person isn't trying to take away from another and making sure everyone checks their ego at the door because it's like I'm not going to walk in and be like oh yeah no I'm going to hit it hard today with him I'm going to smoke him so that he knows he had a great workout and next thing you know I get a call from striking coach hey John couldn't lift his arms like what happened today like what do you do we were trying to do

reverse curls you get jacked yeah i we're max we're doing one rep max easy curls on up against a wall like it was great like no it wasn't great like the dude can't do anything for two days now he's wrecked yeah and so i think making sure you have everyone that's on the same page with understanding like look we're trying to get this individual better peeking for a fight in four weeks eight weeks 12 weeks whatever it may be so that it's everyone's job to put their little bit of ingredients in and to get the individual better without giving them too much because it's like, I would rather, again, with making sure everything grows, making sure that we're dabbling, pushing the envelope a little bit, but getting to the position where, okay, I'm not taking away

from his swimming. Swimming is not taking away from his kickboxing. It's not taking away from grappling. It's not taking away from his boxing. It's not like, so everyone needs to understand it's like, hey, it's not. My name that we're, I'm trying to promote. We're here to train John or we're trying to train Gable. We're trying to train whoever it might be and understand that it's what's best for them,

not what's best for your ego. So if you're concerned with your workout, this, that, and the other, how many likes you got? Like, all right, we got bigger issues because, like, like, at least for me personally, I'm not a big social media guy. Like, at the end of the day, I go up, I put something, gym oriented and that's about it. And so it's understanding that trying not to get caught up in making sure and being worried about, oh, do people know who I am? I'm like, nah, I enjoy the quiet life. I've gone with John to New York. I've gone with John to Vegas. I don't want that. I'm like

where we show up like during fight week and we're basically doubling as security because people are bum rushing him waiting for hours on end we get off the plane there's people waiting out the exit with stuff i'm like crazy yeah no i'm so interesting too because it's like it's like it's not like he's not intimidating no yeah so you like go running up to and you're like oh wait a second well there was a instance when we're in new york so we're they had a little bit security not enough but they had a little bit and we're waiting to get him on the elevator so mind you it's him and we probably got about about six to eight of us just trying to keep people away from bum rushing him.

Next thing you know, corner my eye, I see a flashlight barreling towards me. And I was like, I went, grabbed them. Thankfully, I didn't hit nobody. But it was some woman. I'm like, you don't run up. So, A, don't run up on anyone like that. Yeah.

B, thankfully, I recognize that you were a woman because first instinct I had was close. clothes line, double leg, like, or I'm just cracking them. They're walking into a straight right. Like, all these things are playing through. And I'm like, oh, thank God, I didn't do that because there was another hundred cameras right behind her that would have gotten front row seats to me taking off some lady's head. And I'm like, mind you, at the time, I'm about 225.

So you figure 225, I'm not no fighter by any means, but I can hit some. if I need to hit someone, and hitting a 135, 145 pound lady running, like, it would have been a bad scenario. Yeah, reputation gone, RIP to any social media. I would need a new alias, a new face, like the whole night. And so thankfully, now I'm like, hey, you don't run up like that. Like, that is big no-no. thankfully it didn't happen on fight day because fight week he's in a certain mindset fight day like you're looking at a completely different animal the focus that he has like is extraordinary you mentioned swimming and i'm curious about that because like uh you know you don't at least i don't hear many fighters doing that or martial artist doing that a lot of people would think that that's just like more excess energy spent right but do you you guys notice any unique carryover from working in the pool to recovery, et cetera.

What do y'all notice? Biggest thing for him is he's able to have, so he's, during fight camp, he swims twice a week. Nice. And so, mind you, when we have a coach's meeting, there's eight or nine of us in there, coordinating schedules and coordinating what's best for breaking up our training sessions so that Everyone has obviously their time with him, but it's not taking away from anyone else either. And so he swims twice a week and biggest carryover that... Freak and smooth.

Oh, yeah, no, he's actually really good. When someone moves like that where it kind of looks like they're moving slow, but he's actually moving very well. Yeah, yeah, no. So, and these, he's probably just doing anywhere from 50 to 100 repeats here. So no kind of sprinting or anything right here. But recovery-wise, or at least, he's able to get benefits of significantly longer runs without the beating up his body. And so now we're able to get the same benefits aerobically and without any of the aches and pains that running would cause. So he has his long swims and stuff that he'll do with his coach.

and then so that's what allows him to basically continue to be at a high level because everyone has the same understanding of hey make sure he's not smoked he has two to three sessions after you so his morning typically starts anywhere from about 10 or 11 like during fight camp and he'll have four sessions a day minimum and that's Monday through Friday Yeah. Sheesh. Yeah, swimming seems to be so smart. Again, another type of exercise that you can do that's moving you forward, but it's not beating you up. Yeah, and it allows him to be like, oh, I'm a little sore from last night's grappling. All right, well, go get in the pool, work through that soreness. And biggest thing, staying moving, like too many times, oh, I'm sore.

I'm not going to do anything. I'm like, no, the more you can stay moving, the better you feel in general. because I'd much rather be sore from the gym than stiff and now I can't do anything. Oh, I'm going to sit down. Oh, well, what happens? You're sitting from an hour turns into sitting for four hours to, oh, every time I went back to a gym today. I tried doing a deadlift and my back went out. Well, where your hamstrings firing, where your glutes firing, was your core firing?

Like, how much sitting did you do today yesterday the day before? Oh, well, uh, yeah. Like, I'm like, all right, get off YouTube, get off all your things that you want to sit there and not be active. And I'm like, go be active. And the more active we could keep individuals on a given day, the better and longer quality life that we could all have just in general. I will never go to a doctor ever again about my general health. All they want to do is put you on pills. Really well said there by Dana White.

Couldn't agree with them more. A lot of us are trying to get. jacked and tan. A lot of us just want to look good, feel good. And a lot of the symptoms that we might acquire as we get older, some of the things that we might have, high cholesterol or these various things, it's amazing to have somebody looking at your blood work as you're going through the process, as you're trying to become a better athlete, somebody that knows what they're doing, they can look at your cholesterol, they can look at the various markers that you have, and they can kind of see where you're at, and they can help guide you through that. And there's a few

aspects too where it's like yes I mean no no shade to doctors but a lot of times they do want to just stick you on medication a lot of times there is supplementation that can help with this uh Merrick health these patient care coordinators are going to also look at the way you're living your lifestyle because there's a lot of things you might be doing that if you just adjust that boom you could be at the right levels including working with your testosterone and there's so many people that I know that are looking for they're like hey should I do that they're very curious um and they think that testosterone is going to all of a sudden kind of turn them into the Hulk. But that's not really what happens. It can be something that can be really great for your health because you can just basically

live your life a little stronger, just like you were maybe in your 20s and 30s. And this is the last thing to keep in mind, guys, when you get your blood work done at a hospital, they're just looking at like these minimum levels. At Merrick Health, they try to bring you up to ideal levels for everything you're working with. Whereas if you go into a hospital and you have 300 nanograms per deciliter of test, you're good, bro, even though you're probably feeling like shit. At Merrick Health, they're going to try to figure out what things you can do in terms of your lifestyle. And if you're a candidate, potentially TRT. So these are things to pay attention to to get you to your best self. And what I love about it is a little bit of the back and forth that

you get with the patient care coordinator. They're dissecting your blood work. It's not like if you just get this email back and it's just like, hey, try these five things. Somebody's actually on the phone with you going over every step and what you should do. Sometimes it's supplementation, sometimes it's TRT, and sometimes it's simply just some lifestyle habit changes. All right, guys, if you want to get your blood work checked and also get professional help from people who are going to be able to get you towards your best levels,

that's AmeriHealth.com and use code power project for 10% off any panel of your choice. With the power lifting that you guys do and that you do for your athletes, are you using powerlifting for a lot of your clients as well, just like, because you train other people other than just fighters, right? Yeah, so all my clients that I work with across the board, whether they're young, old, I use a conjugate system very depending on the individual,

the goals, everything like that. Can you explain a little bit what the conjugate system is and how you use it? So conjugate system is basically we have our max effort, we have our dynamic effort, and we have our repetition method. And so depending on the athletes, We'll have our max effort days, upper and lower, our dynamic days, upper and lower, our active recovery days, and then we'll follow everything with accessory work.

So our max effort stuff, we get that in. That's what everyone gets to see John do. Cool. No one ever sees the, excuse me. The speed work and the repetition work. The speed work, no, the repetition work. Like, no one wants to watch him knock out 20 pull-ups. like no one wants to watch him get his lateral raises in like no no one wants to watch

oh yeah no especially when you're 260 yo yeah so like no one that doesn't get likes that doesn't get people interested in staying in tuned with what they're doing so with all my clients I do that same method and then depending on the individuals depending on the sport whatever they're trying to do I also mix in Olympic lifts with those. So like even in my own training, I have a slightly different model than what most people have, but I do my max effort lower on Monday, my dynamic upper on Tuesday, my dynamic lower on Wednesday, active recovery on Thursday, max effort upper on Friday, and then I do my dynamic

Olympic lifting on Saturday. So, and then on my dynamic lower day, I do my max effort Olympic lifts on those days. Dude, you got it down. Like, you really do. You got it down with a lot of these different movements and these different exercises, and you've had it for a long time. You know, we've seen the explosion of kind of the hybrid athlete, and I'd let you do some crossfit and do some high rocks and stuff like that, too.

How did you kind of discover some of this? because you're not just proficient at, like, a deadlift. You know, you're proficient at a lot of different things. And you have a, I mean, yeah, you just clean and pressed, clean, front squatted, and then pressed and then, yeah, holy crap. Yeah, impressive as hell. So, yeah, like, I don't know, like, how did you kind of develop this? Because Louis Simmons was talking a lot about a lot of the stuff that you said,

but he didn't really do a lot of these other movements. and he certainly really wasn't like running and some of his other things. I think for me is I look at everything as I'm an ex-athlete. I enjoy being able to still be. I don't see that shit. You're still an athlete.

Okay. I'm still an athlete. I could still move a little bit. But at the end of the day, I enjoy being able to do anything. So like I look at it as like if I want to go grapple with some of the guys, I'm in physical shape,

be able to go grapple with them. If I want to go play a pickup game of basketball or go play flag football or go go play some sport, I'm physically capable of doing it. If I want to go in the gym and, all right, it's empty and all I see are a bunch of heavy power lifters, I want to be strong enough to go and be able to actually be a valid training partner, not just, oh, hey, all right, well, I'll see you guys later when they're still warming up. So for me and my thought, my life, my perspective on things is,

I want to be as strong as the biggest guy in the room or at least be able to push them in one way, shape, or form. But I want to be as fast and as agile as a smallest guy in the room that can do this, that or the other. So I could go in and press 405 and then I want to be able to go do muscle ups with a 145 pound dude that's knocking out anywhere 20 or 30 muscle ups at any given time. And so just being able to mix all these different things between trial and air of what I think is important to me personally is how I've been able to have all these things carry over so that I could go in and I show up to a CrossFit competition. They're like, all right, this guy's too big to be a Crossfitter. I show up to a powerlifting. Oh, this guy is not really built for powerlifting. He's kind of small.

And then I show up to a Hirox event. this guy's way too big to be a runner like and so having the capabilities to do all these different things is what allowed me to find enjoyment in training every single day and find ways to push myself every single day and moving into like i had one of my clients he's a retired marshal and he's like he competed in tactical games last year hey i think you would do great at this I'm like, I don't shoot like that, bro. And so he was like, oh, no, I can help you shooting. We just get you shooting.

All right, cool. So we go show up and surprisingly, like, did pretty well shooting. Nice. And the physical aspect, I did phenomenal. It was, and so, and at no point of it was I, like, ever, like, oh, I was dying or I need to do this, that, or the other. Where it's like, for me, I like being able to just say yes. Yeah. know what I mean so if I show up and all three of us going to gym what do you want to do today I

I show up and say I don't care I'm just here to train at the end of the day so we go in and I have my training partners they meet me at the gym all right what conditioning do you want to do all right cool let's do it yeah we do it hit our conditioning all right well I know all you smaller dudes like doing the conditioning all right now let's go do the fun part let's go lift Do you feel like the conjugate system helps you to like brush up on all those or at least the way that you're doing it? 100%. Because you're not doing like any one thing like all the time every single week. You're following like methods every week but not specific exercises or things I guess you'd say.

Yeah, no, no, absolutely. I think the nice part is it allows me to fit everything in without ever being like, oh, we can't do that. We're on a 12-week program. I'm on a, this online coach just gave me 16 weeks. So I have to follow this religiously. Oh, we're doing a periodization and this. Oh, I could only do 72.5% this week. I'm like, I've sent people slingshots before.

And I'm like, hey, do you get around, get an opportunity to use it yet? They're like, no, I'm in a cycle. Yeah. You know, and I'm like, what is that? What kind of cycle are you into where you can't like just try it out like during a warm up or something? Yeah, exactly. And I'm like, for me, I'm like, Like I'm, like I said, I'm a firm believer and yes, what do you want to do today?

All right. Hey, I wanted a press today. Oh, my shoulders kind of buggy me. Hey, don't worry. Go grab one of the slingshots. I don't care which one you grab. Oh, okay. So, like, for me, I don't ever let anyone have any kind of excuse.

Oh, no, I can't do this today. I'm like, I'm definitely the individual in there like, no, you're training with us today. You're not stepping out of today because it's not in your willhouse or whatever. Or like, I'm here to try to make sure and we could fit anything for anyone, especially with the conjugate system. Like, all right, I don't care if you're not pulling 700 pounds. Like, what was your, what's your best pull? Oh, well, 385. All right, cool.

I don't let's go. We're going to pull off blocks today. Did your deadlift last week or two weeks ago? Yeah, I did. Oh, okay. Well, what did you do? Oh, I just did a conventional deadlift. All right, cool.

Well, we'll do a block pull. today. Okay, cool. Like, and so where I don't, my, I tell everyone, I spend so much more time on all my client's stuff and with my own stuff, I just show up. I just show up and all right, well, what did we do last week? All right, we pressed. All right, let's do some overhead pressing. Okay, let's do some straight. You want to do a strict press, push press, push jerk, seated overhead press, back supported, not back supported, like whatever. I don't. I was going to give people just a tiny synopsis of what you're talking about because it makes programming even your own workouts it makes it very easy so basically when you do west side barbell style training the conjugate system you have like a main event for the day it might

be a max effort movement or it might be some sort of movement that you're trying to lift for speed it could be a bench could be a squat could be a deadlift or it could be any variation of those that would be the main event um you you get out of the main event what you're trying to get out you whatever the intent is you're trying to do three sets of three you do your three sets of three you're trying to do you know an actual max effort and just do one set of one then you get out of there and then once you've done that let's just hypothetically say that you did a um say you did a good morning for your heavy exercise like we saw you doing suspended good mornings which i have a few questions on how to you do you do a suspended good morning and then all the other exercises that

you're going to do you're just going to fill them in with exercises that you think uh would assist in any sort of like deadlifting or lower body movements to make you more proficient so So you'd be working your hamstrings, your quads, your calves, your glutes, any of it would be fair game. So once you do your good morning, you can then do the glute ham raise. You could do 45 degree back raise and you could finish with like the sled. It makes it, like I know I just rattled that off and I've been doing the conjugate system for many, many years. And I was fortunate enough to have Louis Simmons be my mentor. But it really does get to be easy.

Once you learn, you're like, okay, I'm going to bench press. okay, what are other exercise they're going to increase my pressing power? And like, you know, you kind of root back. Why am I doing this? Okay, well, I'm a fighter or I'm this and that. And I'm trying to increase my strength when I punch. And we can go back and forth and figure out like,

hey, this is it really increasing your strength when you punch? Or whatever. But you're in the gym and you're training with this very specific intent. And when you start to utilize the West Side stuff, there is a, there's all the books from Louis Simmons and everything, but the easiest thing to look at is the periodization Bible part one and two.

I reference it all the time on EliteFTS.com written by Dave Tate. It's the greatest training article ever written, I think, because it explains that style of training and it explains periodization as well. But it explains it so specifically that if you get through that article,

which the two articles together might be like 20-something pages long, you will understand how to train yourself and other people forever. Yeah, no, I completely agree. But I think biggest issue that people have is everyone online, first thing they do, oh, I'm going to do this eight-week program. Okay, well, what are you doing after that?

Oh, well, I'm going to go over and try this one. No one is ever invested enough of their time to actually stick to something and see it out and see how much it works because we're not doing this for, eight-week results. I'm trying to do this as a lifestyle. And so I want to see what I can do, what I could accomplish in one year, two year, five year, 10 year. I want to see the moment I hit 40, all right, well, of all this stuff that I've been

able to do, how much of it can I still do? Yeah. And at what level can I still do it? And so that's when the way I look at training and the way I think more people should is understanding like we're not doing eight week programs and then you're going to get results of someone that's been doing it 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 plus years and they're like, oh, like I had an individual one time

oh, watch, give me six months and I'll be able to do everything you do. I said, you can do what I can do in six months. I will let you train here for life and I will train you every single day for life for free. Don't worry. It's been about two years and he has yet to touch anything of what I can do. And so I think in this day and age, everyone is so used to instant gratification with,

oh, I want something new, new stimulus, this, I'm scrolling, I'm doing this. Oh, and they think, oh, four weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks. That's all it takes to do what these individuals that they idolize. are doing. And I'm like, you have to understand the years and time these individuals have put in to be just where they're at and they're still not satisfied. That's, it takes time. It takes effort.

It takes, all right, having your peaks, having your valleys in training because everyone's like, oh, well, how did you know that this was the problem with this or my overuse injury of that? I was like, I've screwed myself up plenty of times in order to. to be able to fix myself, continue to train, where everyone's like, oh, do you ever take time off? I'm like, no. I'm like, I'll become stiff, weak, and small. So I think at the end of the day, it's getting them to understand.

Like, this is, if you step into a gym, it should be a lifestyle thing. But finding your why and your reasonings for actually doing it. like are you doing it just to satisfy this current need if so like stop wasting other people's time with oh yeah no i'm gonna do this and be able to do that like no one cares if you're as good as me but there's also individuals that do care about that and i'm like all right that's that's your own problem but at the end of a day if you could show up every single day and maintain or get better than you were yesterday, that's a win. As long as we aren't declining, if the moment you start declining, all right, well, there's something we need to change so that you can continue

to improve. I had a client asked me, oh, is there ever a time where I won't get stronger? I'm like, no, you'll always get stronger. You'll have times where, all right, your body may not necessarily beat your one-rep max, but if we can maintain that and all your other stuff keeps improving, like you're getting stronger. And so we just use these max efforts. as points of reference to like this is me showing you see whatever you're doing is working continue to do that and so long long story short this individual um she wasn't like a a gym person at all like didn't like anything about it like she just wasn't a gym person got talked into coming in found love i've been working with her for almost two years now and so but same thing

I'm like, just keep doing it. Don't worry about what family, friends, random people are telling you everything you do, do it for yourself, do it because you like how it makes you feel, how it makes you look, and then just keep going with that and block out the rest of the noise. Anyone that isn't happy for you, isn't satisfied with what you're doing for yourself, that's someone that's truly not in your corner. Let me ask you this. What has been the thing that has allowed you to continue training up until this point? Not just continue, but enjoy it. Because I think one reason that a lot of people fall off, it's like, you know, you look at athletes who they were always training when they were playing their sport. And then they stop playing the sport.

Just get out of shape. They never find their way back, right? Because they don't, they didn't enjoy the training. Right. So what keeps you enjoying training? And then what would your advice be to somebody who, let's just say that, they don't. joy aspects of the gym? For me, like, growing up, I felt like I was always the skinny little brother.

Gotcha. And so every day I wake up, I look in the mirror. I don't like the way I look. So my own body dysmorphia is what partially fuels me. So, A, and thankfully I'm able to funnel that towards something good. Okay. But also, I enjoy being able to move the way I move. And I enjoy being able to, regardless of the age gap in the gym, I can move and train with basically anyone that walks in.

I can walk into any gym around the world and be able to fit in one way, shape, or form. And what allows me to push myself every single day is the ability to say, hey, okay, I'm going to be. just sign up for, like, my first high rocks. Buddy was competing. I was like, oh, here, I'll see if I could jump in. It was closed. And then I jumped on a waiting list. I was like, it's our first event in Vegas.

I'm definitely not going to do it. Well, I get an email. Oh, hey, you're able to get in. Here's your link to sign up. I'm like, okay, cool, signed up. I had three weeks to train for it. And so I'm like, all right, well, I guess we got to do this. So, and went out, competed, did the thing.

had to deal with a little bit of calf injury leading up to it because the amount of running you're running on concrete is an ideal. And so if you're not used to that for an extended period of time, like something's going to start grabbing, something's going to go. And so my love for some form of competition and being able to jump into these different fields has allowed me to enjoy this. And then furthermore, like, I look at it is for me to be physically active and capable, like, I have kids. So I always swore I'm not going to be the fat dad.

Yeah. So when whether my son is running around and be like, oh, yeah, no, just keep going to run around. If my son wants to go run around circles in the parking lot, I'm going to be physically capable to go run circles around parking lot. Whereas kids don't get tired either. So it's extremely crazy to me to watch kids that they're like, oh, yeah, are you hungry? No. All right.

Well, what do you want to do? Oh, we're going to go run around. All right, cool. They're running around for hours. Are you hungry yet? No. Keep running around. So for me, as a father, looking at I want to be able to be that physically active as they grow up.

Yeah. I want to get to a point where I could be a training partner for them, whether they're 8 years old, 12 years old, 16, 18, 20, 22, however long they're in a position to be physically active and need it for whether it's sport or whatever avenue they'd want to be in. For me personally and selfishly, I want to be able to be able to do that with them. It'd be like 60-something years old and you'll still have that dad's strength over them. Oh, yeah, no, absolutely.

Yeah, so definitely. That's why I told I had someone there like, oh, they say, so they're like, hey, ready, are you going to beat up your dad in 10 years? I said, oh, no, he's going to lose a lot. I was like, he's going to lose, and the day he beats me, he'll be about 20 to 24,

and that'll be the day that, like, when he wins, it'll be a genuine win. That video we saw, was it Harrison from the Steelers beating the crap out of his kids? Like, yeah, he was wrestling with his kids. They were playing around. Oh, yeah, they're horsing around. James Harrison.

Yeah, he was like, you know, he's big. You know what I mean? His kids are getting older. So, like, he, you know, he had to like, you know, how to show them. Yeah, it still has it. Yeah, he had to really kind of like manhandle him and put them in their place. Yeah, I think it's great that, you know, the conjugate system, you know, ends up allowing you to plug a lot of different things in. in your own training like where do you plug in like a run where do you plug in like

because you know you got the max effort method and the dynamic effort method are you still going on with the stuff in the gym while while running and doing some of all the other cardio or is it like spread out over the course of two weeks or how do you manage that so you don't get all effed up so the way that I kind of manage everything is kind of how earlier I explained And if you want to do something, just plug it in, see how it works, see if you need to move it accordingly. So Monday through Friday, I'll do some sort of like conditioning session. And I start all my training. So I've messed around with doing my max effort, my accessory, then my conditioning.

I've done conditioning, max effort, accessory. I've done max effort, conditioning, accessory. And so I've shuffled those things around numerous of times just to see what I was having better benefits at, able to have carryover. So right now with the way I do things is I will do my conditioning, give myself about 15 minutes to recover from that, go into my max effort, my accessory. But part of the reason I started doing that was because usually if I'm doing some sort of conditioning, running, doing three different exercises, whatever it may be, I'm taking up a lot of space. So I could get away with doing my max effort and accessory with other people in my gym. Whereas an ideal scenario for me, I would like doing my max effort, do my conditioning, do my accessory. That's the one I felt worked the best because I could get the most out of my max effort and I could get the most out of my conditioning.

When you're fatigued, under fatigue, your accessory, your body could only push so much because you're so fatigued. So do you do a heavy lift and literally just go outside and run a 5K or something? Yeah, I've done that before. Yeah. Yeah. So that would be like if a breakdown or like for instance, say I'm doing some sort of like ideally on a. a max effort Monday. If I had a perfect world, I'd go in, say we want to go do a block pull. I'm going to try to pull six, 700 pounds. All right, now we want to do the conditioning. All right, cool.

We got 10 rounds. We're going to do 200 meter sprint. We'll come back in. We're going to move a sandbag five times and go do five muslups. Cool. All right, do that 10 times. All right, it took me 20, 30 minutes. And then, all right, now everyone. on smoke normally they leave i'm like now i get to do my accessory now like that's the fun part i get a pump like and so being able to mix all these different things in i felt the best but being that if i'm doing 10 rounds of something you're looking at 30 to 40 minutes of movement so by that time people start coming in they're taking up space i'm like i don't want to be that person to be like oh yeah You can't use any areas I'm in.

Bro, you're taking up three quarters of a gym. Like, where am I supposed to train? And so that's part of the reason why we do our conditioning first and then max effort or our dynamic effort and then followed by accessory. Power Project Family, how's it going? Now, over the years, I've learned a lot from guests that have come on to this podcast. And I've taken the time to learn many different movement practices. So, for example, if you wanted to learn rope flow, which is a practice I think is just beneficial

for everyone. I have a free Ropeflow Foundation's course at school.com slash the Stronger Human. Now, the Stronger Human community actually has over 11,000 members, so it's a great community there, but you'll also be able to learn rope flow for free, along with many other things I teach in there, like kettlebell flow, kettlebell juggling, all that good stuff. So head over there. Along with that, if you're looking for where to get your equipment as far as ropes, maces and clubs, sandbags, all that good stuff, you can head over to the StrongerHuman. Store. And on that side is where I have all of the different functional fitness equipment that I use to become a strong human. So check those out. Let's get back to the episode. What's some of the conditioning look like? So there are various,

it depends on the day. We literally go in on the day and I'm like, hey, guys, what do you want to do? Because there was plenty of times, I would just write out the week and be like, all right, hey, this is what we're going to do. And the next thing you know, it's like, all right, well, I go look back the last month. I'm like, oh, well, I wasn't mixing this movement in. I wasn't mixing that movement. So I let my training partners decide, what do you guys want to do today? So that I'm never just cherry picking anything. And then vice versa, all of us will discuss it.

It's like, oh, hey, this guy wants to do 100 burpees today. I'm like, I'm not doing 100 burpees. Like, show me where a burpee is going to make me a better man. And then maybe I'll mix it. Like, this research just came out today from Harvard. Yeah, I'm like, yeah, what did the look of all these recipients that did the research and the people that actually, yeah, they were just benefiting from actually moving more. It wasn't the burpees, I promise.

Right. Yeah, so, but like on a typical day, mixing in, like, so on Thursdays, I jump on my active recovery days. And so, like, trying to mix in my jumps, trying to mix in my sled work, trying to mix in my sled work, trying to mix it all in. And then going back to what you're saying is so, like if I have a high rocks coming up, normally what I do on my Monday is I would do like some shorter run stuff, more sprinting. Then after I do that, then I would do that before my partners would get in. They get in.

All right, what conditioning you guys want to do? We'll do some interval stuff. All right. Once we're done with that, all right, let's go do max effort. All right, once we do our max effort, hit. that so mondays and fridays are like my run only days so i'll have a run workout shorter one and then i'll do my lower half stuff um fridays i'll do like my longer run and then i'll go in and if i do a conditioning with them cool if i don't it's fine i just ran for an hour like

my conditioning's cool and then i'll go do my max effort upper my accessory for my upper and then like mixing in my Olympic lifts because I'll do my max effort Olympic on Wednesday so the way that day would typically look is I will do my conditioning I will do my dynamic squats

so get my nervous system primed with my squatting and then I'll do for my second movement of my pool will actually be my max effort pool with either snatching or cleaning and I've mixed in between banded cleans which in the weightlifting world

it banded cleans banded snatching gets oh it messes up your pools it misses up this that and the other I was like you do realize when there's constant tension on the bar it'll show you exactly where you're slow and you're weak

oh well it messes up my third pool when I'm getting under this that and the other I'm like bro just because you read some book or listen to some coach talking about first, second, and third pull, doesn't mean you know what you're talking about. So it might not be a nice way to go about it, but I'm like, how much do you snatch? How much can you clean?

Oh, my best clean is $2.45. Okay, cool. Well, I just hit $350 on Friday. So how am I going to listen to you about how to properly pull when when like I do your max effort for reps and so

I'm like trust me if you can snatch clean and jerk under band tension I promise you you'll be faster every single pull

will be quicker and you'll become more proficient in it because now you have to move now rather than oh hey oh yeah you're lazy

on this pool well how do we get better at that pole oh I'm just going to do block work and pull I was all you want to know the fun thing about bands it's pulling down always so if you want to get under it faster it's going to force you to either get under it quicker or you're going to miss it's also just an exercise yeah I'm like are you training for the Olympics and Olympic lifting and you know it's like yeah I'm like how many gold medals do you have oh you don't have any that's right you you you've competed once at a local competition where you took 15th out of 16 athletes got it noted Louis Simmons was something such a genius, you know, with bands and chains and the sled. I mean, it's just like

the reverse hyper, it's all the innovation and invention that he's had has been freaking unbelievable. No, yeah, no. And I, uh, I appreciate him to the max. And one of my mentors actually had bugged Louie in the 90s. So he had old school power lifter. His name's Anthony Treheel. I met him when I was 12 years old. And so I was able to learn a lot from him I still see him to this day and we're able to bounce ideas off, this, that, and the other. But a quick story on him is in the 90s when he had his powerlifting team out in Albuquerque. He used to call every single day until he could get a hold of him. Well, mind you, this probably went on for about one or two months.

And they're like, I'm pretty sure a secretary told Louis, hey, that guy Anthony Trujillo's calling you again. and he was like, oh, he wouldn't take the call. Well, finally, he took the call. He was, oh, hey, finally, I'm glad I got a hold of you. I got a powerlifting team out here, this, that, and the other. All right, cool. Long story short, they used to videotape their training sessions, mail VHS tapes to Ohio. Louis would watch them, and as both of them are watching these videos,

Louis would talk to them and critique them and do this, that, and the other. And so he was actually the first person to bring the conjugate system. system to Albuquerque and the southwest portion of the United States, because in the 90s, other than Louis, no one was doing it except Anthony Trujillo out in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I'd love for asking both you guys this question. How old do you think he is? This guy? He looks like he's in great shape. He's in phenomenal shape right now.

61? He's 60. I believe he'll be 63 this month. Wow. No, no, he looks amazing. I think the only thing that gives it away is a beard. Yeah, the way of the beard, you know what I mean? Yeah, no.

And that's why I told him. I was like, T, if you, because in his older stuff, you could see he used to not rock the beard. And we used to him like, no, you look good with the beard. Like, let it go. So. And it's like the beard just because it looks good. It's a very good looking beard. And that's how he told him, I'm like, if you have, like, when his beard's dark, he looks significantly younger.

mind you his beard's obviously gone lighter as the years have come on but like if you see him he's in phenomenal shape what do you guys both think of uh you know exercises maybe specific for like mma type stuff like are there exercises that sort of stick out i know just you know just be strong and like you know go to the gym and find exercises that feel good work on your weaknesses and stuff but are there specifics i see you doing the good mornings i see you doing the box squats we talked earlier about utilizing specific exercises that are going to allow you to recover and not beat you up. I think a box squat is a great version of a squat that allows for that, you know, allows you to not get your knees and hips and stuff so beat up. So yeah, you have, what are some

your suggestions on some of the best exercise, do you think? I'm a firm believer in box squatting. Good mornings. Definitely for the lower half. And because ultimately, I tell, of them. I'm like, you're not a power lifter. I don't care. If you're not feeling great today, I don't care about, I'll put you on a 20 inch box. It doesn't matter to me. Because ultimately, if you find yourself below parallel on the mat, you're probably being put on your ass. And we don't ever want to be that in any athletic atmosphere. And like you look at a football player, at point of impact, the person that has their hips below parallel is being put on their backside.

And so I prefer parallel or even above parallel for athletes because in every position where you're the most powerful, you're never below parallel. And so I think for lower half for sure, box squatting and good mornings are a must. And I think too many times we have strong. Strength and conditioning coaches, trying to simulate movement of any given sport. And ultimately, I look at it as like this, these individuals just went into the gym and repeated the same movement 500,000 reps today. Why am I going to go do a sports specific movement where I'm just adding a band to the exact movement they did that's already being overtrained? So for me, I look at everything, exercise selection for athletes, as what can we counterbalance what you're doing?

So if you're a boxer and you're doing rounds and you're getting 2,000 reps of striking every single day, all right, well, let's try to counter that with getting you 2,000 to 4,000 pulling exercises in the week. Now, that doesn't mean I need to be pulling 400 pounds every single day. Like, go get you a light band. All right, go hit 200, 400 reps of just face pulls. All right, go get on the seated cable row. Go hit eight sets of 15, super light. I don't want you to fill anything tomorrow.

So anytime we do our active recovery stuff, typically we do a lot of pulling just to try to counterbalance how many reps they're throwing forward. because if they're striking all the time, I need you to try to pull to counterbalance and develop the backside, develop your brakes, so that we can have any, so we could try to eliminate or prevent any overuse injuries

because it gets me every single time I have a sports-specific coach and they're over here doing some sort of banded punching and this, that, and the other, I'm like, are you the striking coach? coach? No. Okay. Stop doing it. Because now if I have someone holding a band trying to throw a punch, trying to throw a kick, and now they're fatigued, but they still have 50 reps to go, 80 reps to go, well, now we're going to have 50 to 80 reps of poor technique that now your striking

coach is going to come, hey, why are you throwing a punch like us? I don't know. Well, go look at the movement patterns in the gym. They're trying to have these sports specific movements where they're doing these things, these movements under fatigue, and now because they're such good athletes, they will accomplish it because they're so good at overcompensating. And so the better the athlete, the harder it is to decipher when they have an impingement or something is just wrong

because they're able to mask it and you'll never know. But so quit trying to be in a lane that isn't your lane. Stick to the basics and you'd be surprised by monitoring their volume and keeping it basic, how much more benefit they have. Because ultimately, if I get each one of us stronger, what is your confidence like when you step on the mat? What is your confidence like?

So if you've spent six months a year in training and you've been grappling, and all of a sudden, you're starting to see the results of the gym, you're feeling significantly stronger. Also, you go roll with this individual's been doing it, for five, ten years, and all of a sudden, next thing you know, you're like, oh, I'm moving them a little bit easier than I used to. Oh, I'm able to do a little bit better against them than I used to.

Well, that's when the carryover of sports specific stuff that have just, excuse me, that's a carryover of basic stuff that's going to have to just your overall strength and your ability to move your own body because a good athlete moves their body. very well and now if they're stronger now that their strength that they have gained is going to carry over in their natural ability I'm not trying I can't teach John Jones how to throw a spinning

back kick efficiently by tying a band to his hips and Tyna a weight to his ankle like no he had to practice the movement basic strength and let that go over but on the same note you might have an exercise

that it might show up later that he's a little stronger, a little better because of some sort of balanced stuff you worked on with him or single leg or walking lunges or whatever, right? Yeah, absolutely. And that's where I think coming out with normal movements that are, all right, everyone just in general needs. Right. And if we get better at all these movements, it'll carry over to their athleticism.

The athletes will continue to be a better athlete as long as their body allowed. them to do it. And so making sure their body's in the best position possible physically and how well they move, then let them go move with their individual coaches. And now it'll become even better. I first started hearing about transcriptions from Thomas to Lauer. And, you know, Thomas is somebody that's an animal with working out. You got a chance to work out with him. I worked out them and he's kind of always on the front lines of like uh you know finding out about these new companies that have cool things and i but i didn't really realize that transcriptions was the first company to put out methylene blue and now look at methylene blue it's so popular it's

everywhere it's one of those things if if you guys listen to this podcast you know i'm very iffy with the supplements that i take um because there's a lot of shady stuff out there you got to be careful the great thing about transcriptions is that when people want to get methamthony blue usually they'll go on amazon they're going on there these other sides. It's not third-party test and it's not it's not dosed. A lot of people end up with toxicity from the blue that they get because there's no testing of it. Transcriptions, they have third-party testing for the products. It's dose so you know easily what exact dose of methylene blue you're getting in each trokey. So you're not making some type of mistake. There's not going to be anything in it.

It's safe. You can have it dissolve and you can turn your whole world blue if you want or you can just swallow it. They have two different types of methylene blue. They have one that is, I I believe, dosed at 16 milligrams, and they have another one that's dosed at 50 milligrams. So make sure you check the milligrams. I don't recommend anybody start at 50 milligrams, but the 16, I feel, is very safe. You can also score the trokies, and you can break them up into smaller bits. Yeah, so I do. And in addition to that, on top of the methylene blue, they have a lot of other great products of stuff as well.

They got stuff for sleep. They got stuff for calming down, all kinds of things. I got to say, I use it about two or three times a week. I use it before Jiu-Jitsu. And the cool thing that I've noticed, and I've paid attention to this over the past few months, is that after sessions, I don't feel as tired. So it's almost like I've become more efficient with my, with just the way I use my body in these hard sessions of grappling.

And it's like, cool. That means that, I mean, I could go for longer if I wanted to and my recovery is better affected. It's pretty great. I know Dr. Scott, sure, we had him on the podcast and he talked quite a bit about how he recommends methylene blue to a lot of the athletes that he works with. Yeah. And they're seeing some profound impacts.

And one of the things I've heard about it is that it can enhance red light. So those are you doing red light therapy or those of you that have some opportunities to get out into some good sunlight. It might be a good idea to try some methylene blue before you go out on your walk or run outside or whatever activity is that you're going to do outside. And this stuff is great. But please, like first off, they have stuff for staying calm. They have stuff for sleep. But remember, this stuff isn't a substitution for sleep. This isn't a substitution for taking care of nutrition.

This is supposed to be an add-on to all the things that we already should be doing, and it's going to make things so much better if you're doing everything else too. And I think this is just a little different, too, than just adding some magnesium to your diet. I think this is a little different than, you know, treat these things appropriately. Make sure you do some of your own research, but. Oh, if you're taking medications. Yeah. To SSRIs, you better talk to your doctor first.

Don't, don't be popping these things. And if you're taking any medications at all, it would be good to double triple, quadruple check and make sure that you're safe. Transcriptions has a lot of great things that you need. So go and check out their website when you have the opportunity. Strength is never weakness, weakness, weakness, never strength. Catch you guys later. So I think everything said there is really good. I'm going to also reiterate like the box squats and low range of motion movements that you can work, slightly heavier loads.

It could be a barbell back squat or barbell box squat. It could be a sandbag box squat. It could be a sandbag floor press, barbell floor press. You can move more load if you can decrease the amount of range of motion. The joints have to move through. There's the other side where there's also a benefit, especially of my sport of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. You get in a lot of deep joint angles. And you want the joints to be able to be resilient in those deep joint angles.

But the thing that the athlete needs to learn how to do is that I'm not going to move the same types of loads. I move in my short ranges like my box squats in something like a reverse Nordic, where you're on your knees and you're moving backwards with a light load or an ATG split squat where you're having a dumbbell in both hands and you're moving into the deepest range of motion in the front knee and extending the back hip. But having some of those movements within a weekly program, meaning it could be done once a week. It could be done twice a week. It doesn't need it done every single day you train to the gym. But a day where you touch deep joint angles with reasonable load, that's going to be helpful for building the structure of that joint through that range.

And especially in Jiu-Jitsu, there are so many times where you get into these positions with people where you have deep knee flexion or they have your knee in an odd position, but you can actually train strength in those positions so you don't feel as wonky when you get there. So there's that. Having sometimes where, and all of this comes within the realm of structure building. So it builds muscle, it builds tendon, it builds joint resilience. that's all structure building. That's good to do. I would also say to pay attention to the areas like your neck, right? These areas that for grapplers get attacked a lot, a lot of athletes don't train those areas. So I pay attention to joints like the neck, wrists, wrists, ankles, knees. I do things for that. Obviously, squats are going to hit that, but I think people just forget about that area. So just don't forget about the neck. the next category that I kind of look at

outside of structure building because structure building is what we all do but then there's also movements that can train I look at it as they can train your movement ability of these joints while also allowing you to work with some load that's where the gimmicky type movements like the maces and clubs and the ropes come in I think because there seems to be like a

within fitness strength conditioning, martial arts strength conditioning in general. There are people who like look at maces and clubs, um, what other type of implements would be kettlebells, right? They look at those things and since it can't be loaded and it's being used to move fluidly, it's seen as a total gimmick. And it's either you're in the party of strength training and compound movements or you're in the party of the, the maces and clubs and the gimmicks and the kettlebells and that type of stuff. And I think that's just like really That's

Unnecessarily divisive Unnecessary so because these things Have different benefits Maces and clubs Are not going And kettlebells will not build Necessarily as much Muscle as working with

heavier implements like heavy sandbags Dumbels Isolation work with kettlebells But the thing that they do Is that they help you work specifically the joint of the shoulder within its full capacity. So a lot of times when we're in the gym, we're moving something up and down or we're moving it forward, an bench, or an over-ed press.

But when you're swinging and implement, you're able to actually work the shoulder within the ball and socket through rotation, getting that shoulder in different ranges of motion that you wouldn't be able to handle, along with also getting good amount of rotation of the scapula. And then over time, you can load that. one one thing I look about at these like that type of practices is it helps train the core with dynamic rotation because and when I say dynamic rotation I'm not going to spend too long on this because I want us to get back to what you were talking about but when I say dynamic rotation I think of something like a squat and when you're squating or you're doing like an ab roller or you're doing a leg raise you have a stable fixed core you have to keep it stable and fixed but what you're When you are swinging any type of implement like a mace or a heavy club or whatever that is, you now have to stabilize that dynamically in relation to the rib cage and the scapula, right?

So one thing that people find after doing stuff like this is that they have better function of the shoulder, they have better function of the scapula, they get good movement of the rib cage. And almost like swimming or almost like these types of practices, you're able to work with load, you're able to keep the load moving, but afterwards you almost feel better than when you did before. You don't feel as stiff. You don't feel as beat up. You don't feel as rigid. And you can progress that load over time.

So the benefit of that is that it can help all these areas move better. It can help increase the resilience of these areas. And it doesn't beat you up as much as potentially your structure building work does. Right? Because if you're a martial artist, you're doing so many things that make you feel more tired afterwards than before, that it's good to have practices that can move your body in the right direction without taking too much away. But you still need the structure building side. I think that's what people miss.

That's why people call the kettlebells, maces clubs, etc. Because you can beat yourself with kettlebells. Don't scare me wrong. You can. But the reason why they think those things are gimmicks is because they look at these things in a vacuum. It's either, I only do this or I only do this. And when you're someone who only does the kettlebells, maces clubs, etc., you're going to notice that that, typically comes with a,

these, most of these people look a certain way. But when you can mix that with things that can allow you to build your structure, you can add sandbags in the mix, you can do kettlebell isolation work, or you can do barbells, et cetera. If you mix these things together, you can get the best of both worlds. But then comes learning how to auto-regulate these things,

where, you know, how often, like the one thing I like about the kettlebells, Maces, clubs, ropes, et cetera, is that these things, they can cause a lot of fatigue, but a lot of times you can get some benefit from them without having to beat you up too much, which allows you to still get the benefit of the structure building work, right? Where it does bring a high level of fatigue potentially, does tax muscles, tax joints quite a bit, but you can still benefit from both. And yeah, that's kind of, that's how I kind of look at it. I think, I know a lot of combat sports.

Different buckets almost, yeah. I know a lot of combat sports coaches who like their whole thing online is like kind of shitting on those things as being gimmicks. I'm just like, dog, you're missing things. You're looking at like the, you're thinking that the athlete only should do this. Have you had experience where, because you're actually doing jiu jiu jitsu and you do it at a high level. Have you had experience where you've been in class and then you've been, you know, practicing and you move and you're like, Oh, that's from the training I've been doing the last couple of weeks or months. Like, you ever felt something click like that where your hip maybe moves a little bit better

or somebody goes to tap you and they're doing something to your arm and normally you would be in a compromised position, but maybe because of some of the stuff you're doing, your arm can maybe go. I know technique is probably the hugest thing when it comes to Jiu-Jitsu, but have you sort of noticed anything like that or being able to have resistance or being able to go with a flow a little bit easier. So you understand the concept of leverage when it comes to wrestling, martial arts in general,

and especially with Jiu-Jitsu, leverage plays a big role. And the category that I would, the reason why I call these things gimmicks is just because coaches love to call them gimmicks. So I just kind of played into that. Especially if they don't know anything about it for a thing, oh yeah, that's a waste of time. It's a gimmick, right?

but the one unique aspect of working with those types of tools is they teach you how to leverage the whole body while moving. When you're doing a deadlift, you're leveraging your body against a low to efficiently hip hinge and lift it. Same thing when you're doing a squat. You have this, you have this structure that you make when you go up and down so your body can be this strong structure to push it up, right? So it's a direct force leverage. But when you're working with a club or a bell or even like when you're working with a rope, you learn how to leverage your body dynamically with that load. You learn how to position your body differently against that load. And I've, the way that it's helped my jujitsu is I'm better able to get, I'm getting better at leveraging, finding those leverage points against opponents. People are going to hear that and be like, bullshit. But like, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I can tell. I can feel it when I'm rolling with people.

I'm, I mean, again, I don't know shit about jujitsu, but I would just imagine, like, if you're like, dude, you got to really, you know, Mark, you got to really work on your hips. You came to practice last couple weeks, and you're progressing, but you're, you can't keep people in your guard or whatever the thing is, right?

My hips don't move. It's hard for me to get my knees, it's hard for me to be below parallel while I'm on my back, basically, right? Knees, you know, heading back. Let's just say, hypothetically, I'm like, okay, well, I do some mobile ability stuff, say that I do some leg presses. And I start to get my body used to that position.

I can have the weight sort of force me there. But I also learn how to pull lighter weight down so that my legs can go back a little further. And the way that I'm imagining it, if I do that over a few weeks, maybe with some Jefferson curls, maybe with some neck work, when someone tries to stack me up, I don't get like so effed up from that. Horse stance squatting. Like, that's the thing. It's like. And it might help a little bit. And the actual practice of jujitsu would probably help the most, right? And then actually just being in those positions and getting your ass kicked in those positions probably be the most helpful. But we also have a side thing that I can work on in a controlled environment, which is what you mentioned in the

beginning. Yeah. And, you know, from athletic side of things, it's like the coach and the athlete learn how to, because I think a lot of coaches sometimes they look at some of the different practices and they're like, where's my athlete going to be able to spend the most time to get the most bang for their buck? Because that's a legitimate thing. And I think sometimes coaches will look at things like a kettlebell or a club or whatever

and they'll pretty much say the amount that they're going to get out of that versus what we're doing in the gym, what we have to do with striking, what we have to do with actual sparring and practice of the sport. This shit's just not going to fit in. But that's why, like,

that's for for me being because I'm my own coach and I have to like I'm looking at this in a long longer context is like if I want to be able to do this for a long time I also have to have practices that give my body benefit but also it's kind of like this it's kind of like swimming like what I would imagine that not only is John getting good fluid movement out of swimming but it also brings his body a level of decompression because of the water so it's pulling and restoring the joints he's also able to challenge his cardio vascular system a bit without it actually taxing his body too much, right? So it's one of those practices that it can bring a benefit even and it's restorative at the same time. Not that training in the gym isn't restorative, but when you, it can easily tax the system and make recovery a bit harder, right?

So that's why I think these things all work together in terms of allowing personally for me, right? we're gonna I'm gonna stop talking about me but allow me to have a longer career while you know not feeling aches and pains I want to add one more thing in there too

and I know that you'll have awesome stuff to say on this but I think what you're referring to is something I would put in category as like a mimicer like what's something that I can mimic when you think about track you see a lot of track athletes do all these drills or football players do drills

and even in jiu jitza they do drills right everyone kind of hates drills but a drill is it's a mimicer right it's to mimic and stimulate some of the stuff that you're supposed to get when you're doing the actual thing but you can't always just do the actual thing we talked earlier about the treadmill like it looked great when Jones was hauling ass on the treadmill looked great when he was doing his sprints but you can't just do that all the time you have to have other tools that mimic what it is that you're about to do yes no I agree and to your point I agree with everything you say I'm I've always

said don't say no to anything until you've tried it and given it a valid effort. And so I think away a lot of different athletes and coaches and myself included that could implement significantly more of that. Like if you don't think, oh, I don't want them wasting one of their training session on that. Okay, well, let's use it as a warm up. Let's use it as a cool down. Like you want to do all these other things to help them recover, help them move better. Well, that is the direct carryover of what these things are supposed to do. So implement these things in a warm up and a cool down. You're not taking away.

It gives you 10 to 15 minutes. Your body, like you said, when you finish it, your body feels better. You're moving better. That's a whole point of a warm up. If I go tell you, oh, go do a warm up, oh, okay, I'm good now. Okay, well, we start moving. Are you really good now? Or do we need a, oh, do you got to go roll out?

do you get like what's bugging you because you're not moving like you're good well at least these movements between uh rope and all these other things that you're discussing it'll allow you to actually move better and so you could be in all these odd end ranges so that you could feel all right do i feel good when i rotate those my shoulders are they opening up the way i need to or my hips opening up the way i need to and now that'll allow you to i think for everyone to allow that to break into and merge these two different things. So you got

instead of you shitting on this one, you shitting on this one, why don't you implement a little bit what I do, I'll implement a little of what you do and let's find some common ground. And the interesting thing is like, because these things tend to be dynamic, what I

typically do when I'm working out since I have everything right there in my garage is like in between some like back extensions, I'll go do some, I'll go do some mace work, right? And then, like, let's say, I'm doing weighted pull-ups. In between that, like, it doesn't take away. It actually feeds into everything. So I think some people look at it as like, this has to be one whole mace workout that you do for not. Like, it really does not, and I don't think it should be that, unless you want it to, this is the thing. If you are someone who you don't want to be working on the gym at all or doing

any of that type of stuff for some reason, okay, go do your thing. But if you're someone who does a combat sport, if you're someone who does something where you have to build the structure of the body to be able to last with this sport for as long as you do it, you need that stuff, you know? Yeah, no, I agree with you 100%. And like I said, I think kind of like when I was talking earlier, everyone's worried about taking away from this, that, or the other.

You're not going to be good with any mace work the first time you do it. Nah. So why don't we just put it in? Do a little bit, spend five minutes to try to learn the movement. All right, go do your stuff. Next time you do it, all right, let's do two sets of two minutes. Do two minutes here. Go do that.

Do another two minutes there. So now we're actually working this new movement in. We could do it, work on it fresh. We could work on it under fatigue because being good at something when you're fresh and being good at something when you're fatigued, night and day difference. So by now we start, you're doing it to start. Now you do it start and then in the middle of something. Now you do it start, middle, and to finish something.

So now we have three different phases of how your body is moving and we could see how you function at all three phases. So by mixing in and again, just when in doubt, plug it in and let's see how you move. because your ability to implement it through your entire workout. Some people, oh, I like it more at the end because I could use it as a recovery. Oh, I actually, I usually come to a gym stiff, so I'm going to use it at the beginning. Like, there's not a wrong, right, a wrong way to do it. The biggest thing is the more you're able to do, the better we can be, the longer we could be able to do this. And so, again, mix everything in whatever you see.

desire in and stop looking at the other person like oh you guys are doing it wrong like there there's more than one way to skin a cat so find what works best for you and don't be afraid to implement it just because one of your training partners is like oh no you shouldn't do that like who cares this is working for me I'm enjoying it let's run with this like because I'm going to keep doing something as long as I see benefit yeah I don't need to worry about who else does or doesn't see the benefit in what I'm doing because ultimately like there's plenty of people look at me oh you're crazy I could never train six seven days a week I'm like well I've been called worse so thanks I appreciate it take it always as a compliment I'm like I'm just

here to keep moving like at the end of a day your path is your path my path is my path and I'm going to continue on mine, whether I'm applauded, whether I'm discouraged, whether it doesn't matter across the board, I'm going to keep putting one foot in the other. I'm going to keep marching. How is John Jones getting better despite you trying to cripple his athleticism with power with him? Don't worry. Have you heard a lot of people talk about that? You're messing up, you know, his coordination, his athleticism. Yeah, I just tell him, I'm like, yeah, no, I really messed him up so bad that he had a spinning back kick and put

steepe down. But ultimately... That's pretty messed up. Yeah, I know. I should have... I shouldn't have messed him up as much so that kick would have been different. He's such a great athlete.

He can overcome the training that you're doing. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm... Basically, I'm trying to program everything to make people less... To try to mess him up. Yeah, less physically.

able and yeah that kick was disgusting that had to feel weird on his heel probably felt pretty good because you're competitive you know but well and even with it going straight like you gotta think the heel was going into the body

so did he brick or rip I'm pretty sure he did yeah broke his pancreas it looked like one other question that people have too is like hey isn't isn't this guy strong enough like you see John Jones you know

doing some of the especially deadlift movements and he's you know ripping up like six or seven plates and then you and then the logical thing that you hear from like fighters and people in mma and i'm sure you've seen and hear a lot of it um well the other guys aren't doing that you know like so-and-so who had the belt for four years like anderson silver didn't train that way like it's on a little unconventional still which is kind of amazes me because like hard training like i mean i know how hard training's always been there but like heavy lifting it's just um it's just not as common as you would think yeah i i think the biggest reasoning why heavy lifting is like frowned upon in a lot of athletic spaces because

first thing everyone's so afraid of injuring people that they avoid so much and i'm like The spine needs to be loaded in order for it to be strong enough to stay and handle all these awkward movements, all these different positions that they're in. Well, everyone's so afraid of hurting the back that the first thing they do is, oh, no, we're not going to do that. You'll probably hurt you back. So you go to Home Depot. What do you see on all the proper demonstrations? Big inch. Yeah, on how to properly lift this box with two persons.

Well, I usually take that as a challenge because I always try to lift it by myself. But it's like, oh, make sure you don't bend over and use your back. I'm like, no, I actually need people to use their back. Like everyone that's claiming that has the weakest back possible and their force production is next to non-existent. And so for me, I look at it as the probability of someone hurting themselves on a one-way max is significantly lower than if I go have them do a 10 rep max because movement patterns change under fatigue. And so every single rep I add, that's adding a different variable every single time.

So by working with these heavy loads that are dangerous and going to hurt a lot of people, well, those are the same people that are repeat customers to your local chiropractors that are, oh yeah my back went out again well how much have you been training like how much have you deadlifted oh no that hurts my back well have you ever hurt your back in the actual gym oh well no well how did you hurt your back oh it was bending over to tie my shoes i'm like well if you don't know how to properly hinge and all of a sudden now you're hinging to go tie your shoes i think there's something to that or like you're you go to walk upstairs and you can't walk up the stairs because it hurts your body too much.

Well, maybe you should start squatting. Maybe you should start doing lunches. And so with loading him, I always tell everyone, I'm like, there's peaks and valleys in everyone's training. Is someone able to, like, when you had your biggest squat, were you squatting that for every single week for how many weeks? No, you hit it. It's like, all right, cool.

Well, what happens? all right, no, I hit this feet. All right, let's work on other things. It doesn't mean that you could always squat that. It doesn't mean you could always bench, always deadlift that. So there's peaks and valleys in these training and in everyone's training. And so just because you hit a certain number, you could always try to get stronger because now you're like, oh, I hit this feet.

I want to try to accomplish something else. So now, okay, I want to bench three plates. I want to bench four plates. Okay, cool. Well, what happens? you're spending a little extra time focusing on your bench, whop in my squat. Oh, it fell off a little bit.

So, okay, well, all right, let's try to mix that back in. Oh, what happened to your deadlift? Oh, yeah, I haven't done any of those. Okay, well, let's start deadlifting. So you're only seeing snippets here and there, and it's like, oh, well, someone's strong enough. Well, you could always be stronger.

I mean, you say it all the time. And so that's why I tell everyone. I've never met anyone, John, all my athletes, that got stronger and showed up, yeah, yeah, that didn't play well for me. I was way too strong for that person. I think I wanted to give them a little bit more of an up and be a little weaker. It sucked how the guy couldn't get out of my crib. I felt so terrible that I went in, I won, and now I'm making millions off this win. Like, I don't know a single person that's the only people that I've ever come in contact with that have been like, oh, yeah, no, you're too strong, aren't very strong.

I'm like, they're weak individuals, whether that's physically, mentally, typically it's both. But I've never once been like, yes, I'm way too strong right now. I need to chill out because every time you look at the bar, there's always room on it. so well what else can I do why does anybody ever agree to get kicked by bones Jones you ever see people do that they're like oh yeah just give me like they I don't see any of those I've seen like people

well yeah if you pull it up there's plenty of people that have been kicked or even at like they're like yeah yeah I just want to see what it feels like why are you out of your mind he probably takes percentages way like oh yeah it takes away from that kick too oh don't worry those kicks are only like 50% He's just like, usually like a little tap.

Oh, good. This is like a kid. Yeah, no, he didn't, yeah. No, no, he, he was easy. He was like, put a little more on it. Look at how smooth just his little jab like that he did. Oh my God. Is that real?

Yeah. He goes, all right, you want more. Does he have people sign waivers and shit? Because, like, I feel like this is like. I just don't think he cares. I think he gives a shit, right? He's kind of like that, right? I think...

I'm like, like, you know... Do you want to get fully set? So thankfully, every time this has ever happened, it's always been filmed, and it's them asking for it. So, hey, you know, we got... That kid even picked his leg up a little bit. So the kid took the cushion off of that.

I mean, he cushioned it a little bit by picking up the leg. Have you ever, like, have you ever grappled with it? Have you ever like, or you're just like, nah? He tries a grapple or shadow box with me every single day I see him. Of course. And I tell him, John, no. I'm like, he's like, oh, come on.

I'm like, you are literally the best person ever on the planet. Like, so I already told him. Yeah, what if he just goes in like full fight mode? Because like you hit him a little bit or something. Oh, no. That's why I said. I would never do it. Every single day we're in the gym.

I'm like, John, there's only one thing I would do if like you were trying to come at me. Run. I was all, no, well, first things first. See that five pound dumbbell? I can throw the heck out of anything. Well, I played, I played college baseball. So I'm pretty good at throwing things or swinging things. So I told him, I was all, you see that five pound dumbbell? I'm grabbing that. I'm going to hit you and then I'm running. I was all, because I know I'm faster in you and I will keep running. I was like, I run enough to, I know you won't catch me. And then, So it's either A or B, I'm pretty sure I'm probably going to butcher this, but it's like some tie fight sticks or something he has in his garage. I was a or I'm getting one of those and I'm hitting you and then I'm running.

Either way, it ends with me running and you're going to be very mad because A, I would have hit you at least once because I could hit you at a distance with an object. And then I'm running. So now you're like, oh, hey, he hit me and he took off. And I didn't get to get about this. Oh, yeah, no. Hey, well, like I've told him, like I said, I see him five days a week. So, and we've been working together over 10 years. So I've, every single time he tries shadowbox, well, every time you come in contact with a fighter or wrestler, first thing they want to do, they come grab your wrist.

They'll come try to grapple with you, shadow box. They'll do something. Do you ever seen him be asked that question? Give her, what is the guy, the guy asked him a question about, are you a bad person? person trying to do good or you uh like we ever seen that before yeah yeah i've seen that clip yeah i've seen that clip what is your kind of interpretation of how of how he is because he just like yeah i think i'm a bad dude i think he's he is a genuine good person very down to earth i think the issue is at his level of fame he has so many people saying i want this i want that

like with their handout it's like at some point every single man's going to break me like stay away from me he doesn't really have any real people except a couple people like yourself yeah so he he has a very good tight-knit circle and but at the end of a day like and like i said earlier he has very good intuition on quality individuals and lesser quality individuals And so for him, he's a believer and definitely follower of Christ, Christian individual. And so his beliefs run deep, and I think he's a good individual. I think he's a very quality individual. Just like all of us, I think none of us are perfect.

And all of us have made plenty of mistakes. And so ultimately, all we could do is try to be better. every single day. Yeah. And that goes for myself, that goes for everyone on the planet. He has a killer instinct that seems to be a little different than even some of the best. You know, it seems to be like he's able to switch into a gear. Like that stuff that he said to Daniel Corme, you're just like, oh.

I'll kill you. Yeah. You're just like, I remember. I remember. It's like, oh, we're going to go back and forth. You're like, all right. And Seema's going to talk smack or I'm going to talk some trash. We go back and forth.

But then he's like, I'm going to kill you. You're like, oh, my God. Seems so real. Hey, you got to, I mean, I feel like you have to be scared the fuck I'm going to do. That probably scared Daniel. Well, I think ultimately, like I said, he knows his purpose on this earth and he's seen it out. So when it comes to being in that mode, when I look at you or he looks at whoever is across the cage from him, it's personal for him. Because ultimately that person is standing between him and who he is meant to be.

And so his ability to tap into a completely different mindset from what we see day to day to once he steps into that octagon, it is night and day about what he is capable and what he's willing to push himself to be able to be the best individual that he's trying to be. Yeah, MMA fighters are different They gotta go there Because like MAA isn't like Jiu-Jitsu And Jiu-Jitsu, even when I go compete I'm not trying to hurt my competitor I'm just trying to make him tap I don't want to break

Like I go for a sub I don't go for the break Like I'm getting them in time These motherfuckers are trying to like Make each other bleed Break shit You know on purpose So the fight ends

Or do you call it a match? I call it a match Yeah People also call it a fight But, like, I mean, there are people that... In my head, it would be a match. But this is the thing. In competition, there are a ton of guys that don't have the same mindset I do for a jujitsu.

Like, they want to go out and break people. Right. I don't want to do that. I just straight up, right? So, but that exclusively, every single guy needs to go out and hurt the other guy. They have to be the other guy, you know? So it's just, they're different. They got to be.

Well, I've never come across a single fighter where they're like... they don't got a little bit of crazy. Because ultimately, you go into a fight, obviously, I don't want to be hit. Will you be hit? Absolutely. And so you have to be a little crazy to take a hit and be like, yeah, I want a career in this. You know what I'm saying? So, like, you have to have a little bit of, I might be a little off the rocker where I think all of us are a little off the rocker to a certain extent because,

to do some of the extreme stuff you do, to do some of the extreme stuff you do. We all have a couple screws loose. Myself, definitely. Like, I've been called crazy more than one. So, in order to be successful in any given field, you have to be a little off the rocker. Where I feel like to be a fighter,

yeah, you're a little off the rocker, but you are, it's a different version than some. Because, like I said, to be, have that instinct. to be like, all right, I'm going to run through this person. Like, and it's not physically, I'm going to, I'm going to physically hurt you, head to toe, and I'm going to mentally break you because by the end of this, my hand's going to be up, not yours. And I feel like in order to be the best and compete at that level, you have to be able to tap into that ability of, I don't look at you as a person anymore.

once that gate closes, you are basically trying to take away from me. You're trying to take away from my family. I'm not going to let that happen. Coming up or sometime in 2026, you got some competitions, you got your particular goals. What's you got going on? So right now I'm going to try to get in possibly a CrossFit competition at the end of the year. And then I'll more and likely try to do a high rocks event early, 26.

And then hopefully in about March, I want to do another powerlifting competition. So I plan on trying to compete in the three of those within the next six to eight months. What's your best lifts? How much your bench? My best bench is 405. My best squat is 565. My best pull is 705. and then my best snatch 275

my best clean only 365 clean and well I never did like a direct clean and jerk it was the one you showed earlier where I did a clean front squat and then a jerk at 350 but mind you I wasn't training for a single on a clean and jerk because I was doing a lot of CrossFit stuff at the time but I think if I put forth the effort I have the ability to get to a 405,

which isn't bad for someone with my levers aren't ideal for basically a lot of lifting. What the hell do you think is going on with power lifting with how strong some people, like the men and the women, I mean, it's like next level. There's all the weirdness with the deadlifts and the sumo deadlift and so on. But just in general, people are just getting crazy strong. Well, I think the biggest thing with whenever there's certain feats that have never been hit, it's like oh yeah it's untouchable the moment one person does it they're like now you create believers oh i could do that so next thing you know now you have some of these people that are capable of

that pushing the envelope to get to those so that biggest thing first time someone does it it's like oh it hasn't been done in x amount of years never been done ever all of a sudden out of the woodwork You start having 10, 20, 30. It seems like every time you open your Instagram that someone is squatting over a grand. And it's like because there's people that are capable, but they have yet to find the belief in it. The moment they find the belief in it because they've seen someone to it, oh, that guy's built like me. I'm the same weight. Oh, I'm actually stronger than his deadlift and he was able to do this at this point in time.

Okay, so I know if I apply myself, I can reach these certain feats. And so now it's just creating that belief in one in order to accomplish these things. Because being able to set your mind and believe that you could do something is the first step in order to accomplish these things. And so now once that belief is set, all right, go run wild with it. And I think that's why in powerlifting right now, you are seeing absolute freaks at all ages. just doing crazy things, men, women, everything aside. And that's why I look at it as like, don't worry, I do all this stuff for fun. I'm nowhere near going to, I don't plan on doing, I'm not going to be a world record holder and this, that, or the other.

And so everyone's like, oh, well, you should, you should really focus on this or really, I'm like, I do this for fun. I enjoy what I do. I like the way you do it because it sounds like you get fired up. You handle it for a couple weeks, maybe a couple months, and you move on on the next thing and you go back and forth, right? Yeah, I just dabble around and I enjoy it. It keeps training fun. It keeps it fresh.

And I'm able to continue to touch all these avenues with ever having any fallback on anything else. Like I could at any point in time jump in any single one of them and be competitive at any given one. Yeah. Well, thanks for all the support over the years. I really appreciate it. You've always been amazing with the slingshot stuff and all your support there. Thank you. Oh, yes.

No, absolutely. It's been awesome to see the banner, the slingshot banner, like on sometimes a UFC pay-per-view. Yes. They'll show people training at your gym. And I'm like, there it is. Yeah. Yeah, no, I've always appreciated your support.

And like, yeah, no, I'm a firm believer in your products. And I always tell everyone, like, if you need this, that or the other, these are products that I recommend. And for me, I don't recommend anything I don't believe in or I wouldn't use myself. And so, you know, we love your products in my gym. Awesome. Thank you. Strength is never a weakness week.

This never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.