Mark Bell's Power Project - Breathing Secrets That Will Transform Your Strength Training!

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

Discover the breathing techniques that can completely change the way you approach strength training! In this episode of Mark Bell’s Power Project Podcast, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and special guest Bill Maeda dive deep into powerful breathing methods that can boost your performance, improve recovery, and help you lift smarter.Bill Maeda, a fitness expert with decades of experience, shares how breathing impacts your nervous system, strength, and endurance. Learn practical tips to breathe more effectively under the bar, calm your mind, and gain better control over your body during intense workouts. Whether you're new to strength training or a seasoned lifter, this conversation covers strategies you can implement today to feel stronger and train with greater focus.Don't miss episode 1139 of Mark Bell’s Power Project Podcast for insights into how mastering your breath can elevate your fitness journey and build a stronger, sharper version of yourself. Tune in to learn from the best!Follow Bill on IG: https://www.instagram.com/billmaeda/Special perks for our listeners below!🥜 Protect Your Nuts With Organic Underwear 🥜➢https://nadsunder.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 15% off your order!🍆  Natural Sexual Performance Booster 🍆 ➢https://usejoymode.com/discount/POWERPROJECTUse code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!🚨 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🥩 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!Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained:   ➢ 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/@iamandrewz

The breathing is a barometer for what I'm doing. It's a rhythm that has to fit within whatever movement I'm doing. And that rhythm, that cadence, I feel allows my nervous system to index my muscle recruitment patterns so that they're even and consistent. And the breathing and the breath holding and the Valsava, I'm training the walls of my arteries.

This is an arterial contraction for me. I want to have arterial walls that are steadfast. I believe the guys that can just grind that wrestler strength, that I believe that a lot of that has to do with the arterial walls. You don't hear anybody talking about that, by the way. Oh. Like I'm training my arterial walls.

If over time, you just match up your breathing with the intensity of the workout You're gonna start to find and you'll start to be able to kind of hone in on exactly what you just talked about But I'm just trying to generate as much tension. Let's pause and let's talk about that part, right? Okay, happen to catch you right at the right time. You you caught me at the perfect time I was just about ready to get on the plane So thank you. Yeah, it's like we, we got a podcast with Bill Maeda again. Yeah.

Yeah, it's been what? Two years. Yeah, about that long. So that stuff that you were sharing with Insema and I was mind boggling. I mean, I never have seen anyone pay so much attention and be so meticulous with their diet. So maybe you can kind of lay out some people,

for people, you have this book that you're writing about the details of the diet and how you stay so lean all the time. Single digit, probably around like maybe seven or eight percent, all the time. Just all the time. I have no idea. I know, you know, you asked me to get a DEXA scan and you know, I actually reached out to a few radiologists that I know and you know, right now, I don't think, and if there is a functioning Dexa scan on Oahu, and they're listening, please help me out,

because right now, I couldn't get that by the time I arrived here. But I have no idea what my body fat is. And you have no idea why the hell you're so lean. You know, I was kind of a plump kid, up until probably, May 5th grade, that's when I started to kind of change. But yeah, I had a little Buddha belly and I had a round little melon head.

And my eyes were all closed. And then around, probably around sixth grade, that's when I started, I got, you know, for a Japanese kid, I kind of sprouted up. And by the time I was in seventh or eighth grade, then I started to kind of, I was starting to just develop muscularity. I posted pictures of me when I was like 12 and stuff.

And you can see there was already, there was a little foundation of- I'm just gonna move this a little closer. You just try to stay on mic. Oh yeah, I'm sorry. Sure, hang out here. Yeah, so, yeah. I tell people the way I look,

it is not, I don't look this way because of what they see me doing on Instagram. My genetics were actually kind of a bigger, I was big for a Japanese person, but in my younger years, I was kind of smoother. I was muscular, but I wasn't very ripped. And it wasn't until maybe the last, I had cancer when I was 42,

and it took a few years to get through that. So maybe it wasn't until I was around 50 that my metabolism kind of changed. And I started just getting lean like this, but it's to the point, it's almost, it feels like I'm battling or swimming against some kind of a wasting thing because I have to balance my energy output pretty carefully.

Like everything people see me doing, number one, it takes kind of a lot more for me to work up to that little short video than they might imagine. And I never do any, like, okay, that stone thing yesterday. Oh yeah. That's the one time I would say I've put, that for me would have been a maximal effort

because I have literally never lifted an Atlas stone in my entire life. I've just wanted to try that. This was literally my first time ever lifting. So that was for me a maximal one RM. I gotta say, just quickly, being able to get your forearms to the ground like that, that's fucking awesome.

Well, thank you, yeah. You're not a young buck over there. No, you know, and I was, I had no idea if I could, if that thing would move from me or not. But honestly, you know, Chris Chamberlain, Coach Chris Chamberlain, I told him yesterday to his face in front of his son that he is probably, well, not probably, he's one of the best instructors,

if not the best instructor and coach I've ever worked with. Oh yeah. And he brought out positions and movements that I thought were forever gone in me. In three days, that guy just brought me back to life. I mean, I cannot give more credit to a coach that I've worked with than coach Chris Chamberlain. He is, yeah, that guy's just,

so yesterday was my last of three days working with him and he just gave me his, I mean, that guy just gives, he trains with his soul. I mean, when you're just in a bubble with him and he can just speak right into you. And so he was just about ready to drive me to meet my wife and my daughters at Ikea because he had to go Sunday

and he and his son, they gave me like pretty much their entire afternoon. And his son, by the way, is the nicest little guy. But anyway, at Tordesiana, I've been looking at that stone all weekend, and I was like, fuck, fuck, fuck. And then I was like, and after working with Chris, and he had done other stuff, I'm gonna, sorry, let me get closer.

He had also had me do other things prior to that that have nothing to do with lifting an Atlas stone, but just the way he activated me from that stuff, something inside of saying, you can do that. So before he turned off the lights, he's just rolling down the, pulling down the door. And I said, hey, Chris, let's just do this. And so he, and you can hear his coaching.

I mean, it wasn't just me going and lifting that up. It's the way he prepared me. And then just the encouragement he gave me and then just the encouragement he gave me as I'm doing it was, yeah. I just can't say enough about Coach Chris. But yeah, but overall, going back to the thing, my training is submaximal. I rarely test maximal loads.

I don't sprint until I can't, you know, I always, for me, I always stop basically very unsatisfied with what I did, but that's what allows me to come back the next day because there's so many skills and attributes I want to cultivate and maintain that I can't go balls to the wall and all of them every day. Otherwise, yeah, I think we discussed this last time to maintain that I can't go balls to the wall and all of them every day. Otherwise, yeah, I think we discussed this last time.

What I look at these exercises as skills and my workout as a practice. Yeah, so I still even spend some years, but it's even more so now that, yeah. On the idea that you mentioned of not going to your highest intensity, I've heard you mentioned the idea of using your breath as your measure for progress.

Can you explain what you mean when you're doing that within a lift? Yeah, sure. So there's, the type of lift, I kind of had to adapt my strength training to the progression of, or the direction my joints were taking

over the last few years. I was just due to improper loading and recovery intervals and just lifestyle things, I was just breaking myself down faster than I was recovering. So a lot of the way I, shit, you know what? We're talking about breathing. Yeah, I'm sorry.

You know what I'm doing there, it's kind of a little fucked up. Oh, I'm sorry, man, ADHD. But the breathing is a barometer for what I'm doing. I cadence it in a certain way that it has, it's a rhythm that has to fit within whatever movement I'm doing. I sometimes will call it a double compression breathing.

Like if I'm doing a pushup, I'll take a breath at the top. Tsss. Tsss. Tsss. Tsss. And that rhythm, that cadence, I feel indexes my nervous system or allows my nervous system or allows my nervous system

to index my muscle recruitment patterns so that they're even and consistent and symmetrical left to right and front to back. And when I apply that breathing methodology to what I'm doing, I learned the word interoception from Coach Chris. And it allows me to interoceptively connect. So like in this here, I am breathing in a way where the exercise becomes a reason to practice the breathing. I'm not using the breathing to help me

push those weights away from my chest. I'm not using the breath as a way to hack the bench or the chest press. That exercise is an opportunity to practice controlling my breath and taking breathing under duress. It's another thing I like to do. I got a little sidetracked. What I was saying is, and thanks for bringing me back,

is I have to go slow to accommodate some of my joint. I have to allow these, I have to, I go slow to give my muscle and my nervous system time to figure out what strategy and response is gonna do. So as these things are entering parts of my joints that could be compromised, if I go slowly and I breathe,

other areas can kind of take over where that, and I end up being able to move into ranges of motion that if I was cold or not using any specific breathing, I would not be able to get there. Like if I just do a pushup right now, just a random pushup, my wrist would hurt, my right shoulder would feel stiff. But if I use the breathing that I just showed you,

I would do as close to a perfect pushup for me as I could. And it's just, yeah. And one other thing is if the breathing tells me when to stop, when I can no longer connect that breathing pattern to what I'm doing, I start like my heart rate starts going faster than I can apply the breathing to it, and I start getting winded,

unless the intention is to get winded, that when the breathing pattern starts to degrade, that's my governor switch of when to stop. What if you find yourself holding your breath? There are times when I specifically hold my breath, I, this is called a what, a Valsalva? Yeah. When you, okay.

And my understanding is there's a lot of negativity around that word and that and that practice Which I don't understand I feel Maybe there's somebody clinical who's discussed something like this, but When I train like any of this stuff you see me do I don't I no longer care about my Muscles, you know like like those muscles on my bones. I mean, I'm glad I have them.

But like this and the breathing and the breath holding and the Valsava, I'm training the walls of my arteries because you can take the strong, and I think they've done this with some world's strongest men, competitors who volunteered or, they put, what are called called vasodilators.

They gave them some kind of a drug that just made the walls of the arteries relax. And they tested their strength. And these guys, they tested them before and then they gave them this drug and tested them out. And apparently there's a huge, huge difference, a huge drop in their force output and their ability to generate strength and tension.

A lot of people say that, you know, if you hold your breath and you strain against a deadlift or a squat or anything, jujitsu opponent, that you're gonna have a stroke or an artery, I would argue the opposite. You know, there's all of your arteries, they have little defects in them. All your cells do. I believe if you really test the walls of the arteries

under high pressure and load, like here, this was a lot of pressure here. Like my arteries, this is an arterial contraction for me. The whole purpose of that, I'm trying to curl the weight up while I'm being pulled into it, while I'm kind of pushing myself into that squat. So there's a lot of internal pressure here.

That's why some of the comments will say like, literally, well, you look like you're gonna die, or that's what I look like when I'm taking a shit or something. But the whole point is for me to, I'm training my arterial walls. I want to have arterial walls that are steadfast. You don't hear anybody talking about that, by the way.

Oh. Like I'm training my arterial walls. Yeah, because as soon as though, that's why some days like, you know, on some days you'll try to, I don't know, deadlift anything. Yeah. And you just go, and it's like as much willpower

as you have, when you hit that, it sags. I feel that has something to do with the arterial walls on that day. You know, some days you can get up from a chair, you just like get up. Other days you get up and you're like, for whatever, I don't know what the science is, but I just like every other thing in the body. I believe the arterial walls,

they have good days and bad days. But for me, the strength, because that isometric, and you know, in jujitsu, sometimes when you're really having, like you're not supposed to use strength, but sometimes, sorry, it's just gonna be, right? It's just gonna be, and that ability, I believe the guys that can just grind that wrestler's strength, I believe a lot of that

has to do with the arterial walls. I think a lot of times we're gonna do things wrong. Like our default system sometimes is like quote unquote wrong, sometimes when you go to come up out of a heavy squat and your knee caves in, sometimes that's a little bit quote unquote wrong because it's maybe not the most ideal and maybe you could over time end up with an injury.

But there's also like a reason why your body's reacting that way. And I think when it comes to breathing, I think that if we can find, you and I were talking a little earlier about optimal weights rather than like maximal weights. And that's kind of a hard thing to find when you're a young guy.

Like when you're just getting into the gym and you're learning how to train and stuff. And even with all the variable exercises that you do, it could be very difficult to try to find optimal weights. It's pretty easy to find maximal weights because a maximal weight is something that you just can no longer really move or some weight that's like super close

to getting to failure. But all of what I've seen in my entire powerlifting career, 30 years of powerlifting and coaching many people and coaching myself and so on, I haven't really seen anybody that I coached, helped or otherwise. I haven't seen anyone be very strong by continuously missing lifts

or even coming close to missing lifts. In fact, the people that would miss lifts and the people that would be right on the edge of missing lifts, they were terrible power lifters. They were very shitty power lifters. They were very shitty powerlifters. They had a really hard time recovering. They'd end up injured a lot. They'd end up frustrated.

They ended up having to try to start their program over many times, and it just ended up being the same story. They ended up running into the same thing over and over again. So our inputs are really important, but I think from a breathing standpoint, if people are getting confused and they hear all this stuff about breathing

and they hear Wim Hof talking about breathing this way, we're talking about breathing a specific way, they might get a little confused. But if over time, you just match up your breathing with the intensity of the workout, you're gonna start to find, and you'll start to be able to kind of hone in on exactly what you just talked about right there.

I've done sets before where I've laid down on a bench press with some dumbbells, and I've moved the weight around, and I've been like, oh my God, like that, I mean, that does not feel good in my shoulder. Lighten the weight up a little bit, practice what you said, work on breathing, because breathing's gonna move our rib cage around. If I'm breathing all up into my shoulders

and into my fat face and everything else, then my shoulder's gonna be kind of sitting forward. It's just not gonna feel very good. So the way that we breathe can massively change the way that we feel on any given exercise. Oh, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, no, that breathing component, it is, like I said, it's my governor switch.

Who's that? That would be me. That's you? Holy, look at that chin. Well, of course that's. There's one, two, three, seven, eight, nine, 10 chins. Wow, man. But hey, there's 150 pound dumbbells.

Yeah. Not bad. When was that? Last week. Last week, right? That was probably like 12 or 15 years ago. I have a question for you about this. I wonder sometimes when I see your posts,

like you have like this consistency of putting the date and your age, and is that some sort of learned copyright skill? No. Or is that just like you just saying, this is sort of the facts? Like rather than trying to come up with something fancy or something cool to write, you're like,

it's this day, I'm this age, and this is what I did. Okay, I love that question. So because yeah, people ask that. And I started this in 2020 after Hawaii went on lockdown for the pandemic, we, my daughter and I just, after a month of being at home, we kind of challenged each other to step outside our comfort zones.

Doing this is very nerve wracking to me. I'm, you know, despite what it looks like, the first year and a half I was doing this. So from 2021 to almost 2022, I didn't say a single word. I posted every single day. But yeah, so this whole thing started just kind of as a, it was kind of just as a goof, you know? 2.2 million followers later.

Well, yeah, but I'm sorry, Mark. Your original question was what? It's just you posting a mind bullet. I'm zooming right now. Steals your soul a little bit. Yeah, I could have gone from zoning. Okay, so. The date and the. Yeah, I could have gone from zoning. Okay, so. The date and the.

The date and the time, thank you. So, okay, also so I can remember myself when I did shit. But no, the date and the time, this was my, back then, I was posting videos for my online clients. They wanted to know both that I was working out at home myself like I was telling them to and they wanted me to record those both for proof but also so they can model what I was doing

and I was just posting them to my YouTube channel and those videos started to take off and I would put the date and the time so that those, so my clients would know that it was fresh bread. It was not like some crap that I had banked months ago. And it was encouraging them to them. And then, I don't know, man, within a week of doing that,

a few of them started taking off and I started gaining a lot of followers, or subscribers on YouTube, like fast. And people started wanting these, they said, like they wanted one every day. So literally for over a year, I was doing a 10 minute video, you know, like kettlebell and jump rope,

interval workouts, you know, and did that for a year and a half. So, but, and then later on, as I started caring more about my video quality, it actually was so that I would know if I liked the lighting, I would know what season that was and what time of day, but it was mostly just because for my clients and then later on people who were following this

during that lockdown period, so they would know that I was doing it every day. And I wasn't just like doing eight workouts in one day and then serving it up over eight days. I wanted them to know that every day and what time it was, because a lot of people in Hawaii were following it, and so they would see it and they'd go, oh shit, this was 10 minutes ago.

And they'd go, fuck, I'm going to go outside. Literally guys would say, brah, I just saw that. Because it would be a rainy day in Hawaii, and I'd do some burpees in the rain. And the guy's like, you fucker, now I gotta go out, because everyone uses the rain to stay. Hawaii people, man, it's raining, that's like, forget it. But yeah, so that's why I was doing it.

So they'd know that I was doing it every day, and some people found it, it was helpful to them, even if they didn't get out every day, that, you know, they could come here and just see this old fart doing, you know, yeah. And just shaking and quaking and doing whatever. I think it's cool how you find things that are just difficult for you

and then you practice them and you work on them. A lot of what we see on Instagram, there you are picking up something with your teeth, which is pretty cool. Oh yeah, there's poo in the back. A lot of people, a lot of what we see on Instagram, there you are picking up something with your teeth, which is pretty cool. Oh yeah, there's pool in the back. A lot of people, a lot of what we see on Instagram is like it's either some sort of crazy feet or it doesn't really get views.

But in your case, a lot of these aren't necessarily crazy, they're challenging and they're difficult sometimes because of the type of movement that you're doing. But I think a huge attraction to it is your physique, just how you're built and also how you move, which is I think kind of awesome because you're not responsible for lifting 900 pounds on any given day.

Yeah, I know. And Mark, thanks, you kind of brought up a good point because oftentimes people say- But that looks hard right there. Pull-ups with fricking kettlebells in your feet, and you're flexing your feet. You could also. And it looks like it hurts too.

You could totally do that. Yeah, but no, people say like, okay, if you're doing this every day, and you're posting, and you're not a single one of these workouts, there's no sequence or order or logic to what I'm doing. I love it. At this logic to what I'm doing. At this point, what I tell people is,

look, I spent about easily over three decades building my foundation with barbell squats, barbell deadlifts, pull-ups, just the basic, what everyone else was doing. That's what I built my foundation on and later on kettlebell swings. So now at my age, people ask me like, well, how do you get motivated to do this every day?

I just will pick something that I feel like I'm, like usually if I don't feel like doing it, that's what I'm gonna choose because that's what I need to do. If I'm feeling sluggish and like I don't feel like doing it, that's what I'm gonna choose because that's what I need to do. If I'm feeling sluggish and like, I don't wanna run or jog, that's when I'm gonna jog. Like days when my shoulders are feeling kind of cranky and tight and weak, that's what I'll do,

either pull-ups or this kind of stuff. But I'm just trying to generate as much tension in one repetition as I can. So it's kind of a weird, it's like Mike Menser-ish, but I'm not, I take out the failure component and I take out the maximum weight. Let's talk, let's pause and let's talk about that part right there, like how do you do that?

What is that, like an internal, because to me, I can sometimes feel if I get something right, especially when it's power lifting, I kind of almost feel like a superhero. I can almost shoot out a fucking fireball. Is that sort of like what you're feeling from the inside? You're feeling like you're flexing

and maybe internally and externally rotating and flexing, opposing muscle groups and externally rotating and flexing, opposing muscle groups and stuff, sort of all at once? While relaxing at the same time? It's so funny that you're asking me that because I was thinking about lifting that Atlas stone and why, like for me after, as I was doing it and when I put it down and for many hours afterwards,

I literally felt like I took, like I took this. And, some mind bubbles. Yeah. And no, I felt like, no, and it's always been like that. It's been a, it's a drug. And I feel going back once again to the tension and the pressure that in something about generating a huge amount

of internal pressure and tension, just, you know, Schwarzenegger talked about, you know, in Pumping Eye or something, like he's working out and it feels like he's coming and coming, okay, well, not to quite go in that, he said it better than I ever will, but in a way that tension that you build in these lifts is, it's a drug.

It's, and that's what I'm, like, you know, it's terrible, you might see some guys, you know some guys when they hit the bong, they're like, and you can tell they're a clone, they know how to hit a bong, right? Well, that's what I'm trying to do with one rep. I want a one hit wonder. I want that just, just, yeah.

And then when I combine breathing, if I'm gonna do reps on the breathing, I want to get so embodied in the breathing that if you were to ask me how many reps I did, if I'm breathing properly, I shouldn't be able to tell you. I should be so, the breathing becomes so much, it takes so much more of the conscious effort that the actual movement is a byproduct of it.

Almost a little like an out of body experience in some way. When you get done with your set, you're like, I'm not sure how many I did or what I did. Well, you know, we're talking about our buddy, Thomas DeLauer. Yeah, so Thomas and a guy, Drew Manning and myself, we're gonna be doing a little thing on the big Island on March 1st.

Of course, you guys are welcome to join us, but yeah, it's, and they're calling it mind-altering fitness. Or we're calling it mind-altering fitness. Are there substances involved? No, not that I know of. But was it troposuticals? Troscriptions.

Troscriptions, yeah. Maybe they might be bringing some methylene blue. Okay. That's, yeah. Uh. Yeah, yeah. Blue tongue. But yeah, we're going back to this, yeah.

The whole thing behind the arterial walls and that tent, for me that generation, that feeling of, it's power. It's just, you're just kind of just generating this bolus of power in your body and then you express it out in what you're doing and then the breathing. And when I'm done with that, because that's a common question, is how many sets and how many reps?

Number one, it's really hard for me to answer that because my ability and my need to generate that varies from day to day and hour to hour. So someday it's going to be more than others. I want to just explain to everyone just for a second here, whether you're doing a five by five powerlifting style routine, or whether you're doing a bodybuilding routine,

or whether you're doing sprints on the track, kinda almost doesn't matter what routine that you're doing, but what you're trying to do is you're trying to get yourself to a certain point. So three sets of 10, hopefully during eight, nine, and 10, you start to feel it. And during the duration of those three sets, you're gonna feel it a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more.

When you do your five by five, it's gonna be the same thing when you're powerlifting and you're using 225 pounds for 25 reps. Each set is gonna feel a little bit tougher, but they're all gonna be manageable. But what you're doing is you're just sort of knocking that Each set is gonna feel a little bit tougher, but they're all gonna be manageable. But what you're doing is you're just sort of knocking that out and you're getting yourself right into that

position for that one, not just one rep, but for that one set with a handful of reps. Yeah, it's like, if I'm, and once again, if people are listening, I wanna separate what I'm doing and my purpose is from how I appear because this strategy works well for me based on, I believe after the chemotherapy, something did happen to my ability to recover.

Turned into a superhero. Well, it's weird. Like I said, I didn't really start getting kind of the more defined until, I don't know if it was just because of the pandemic and I started posting more, but if you saw me just a few years, like in 2018, 2000, I wasn't really that like this.

And I think it was just posting every day from 2020 on is kind of, you know, but it also kind of broke me down like a lot. And so over the last year and a half, most of my, a lot of my content, it's not quite as fun as it used to be, you know, but at the same time, I'm trying to bring a different message that I kind of went a little too hard.

I'm just a social media thing. And during the pandemic, I had a lot of issues myself that I was trying to work out through these videos and the workouts around them. But I also forgot that I'm kind of an aging athlete and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym

and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym and I had to go to the gym depending on what you, you're able to gauge when you need to stop, right? Yes. In these times where you were mentioning that you were doing a bit too much, what signs were you not paying attention to? Like were there feelings where like you knew you shouldn't work out on a certain day

or you knew you should do something very minimal and you just did it anyway? What do you mean? Yeah, thank you. That's okay. So, you know, I started doing the YouTube thing and you know, for the first, I'd say year from, so I did that for about a year, just going out every day and I kept it to 10 minutes.

I would do usually some interval of jumping rope maybe and cleaning jerk with kettlebell or just some interval thing. And, sorry, Nseema. That's all good. Can you fire that at me again? Just more so like when you were going a bit too hard

and you were noticing how you had to back off now. Right. What was happening? Oh, okay, thank you. Yeah. All right. My feet, which have been up until, okay,

the chemotherapy I had back in 2012 for my cancer, it did peripheral nerve damage to my feet, the nerves in my feet and in my fingers, and I guess to my, probably even my calves. And so that, my feet have always been extremely tough, And so that, my feet have always been extremely tough, but I started getting bunions, my ankles started swelling, then my knees started to like, and I guess that makes sense, right? If the feet start going, everything upstream starts falling.

So both knees and my knees have been to my strongest joints. Like just when I was 50 years old, I could like full kneeling, sit back and that supta, vadra, whatever. And yeah, so my knees and my ankles rapidly got bad. And then my right shoulder started getting bad and my left wrist and this was kind of damaged

from punching things and jujitsu and everything. So my joints just started falling apart and I had chronic fatigue. Every time I sat down, I could fall asleep. I could take a two hour nap, I wake up. You don't feel like rested at all. In fact, you feel groggy and just worse. Getting out of a car, if you saw me get out of a car,

I'd go downstairs backwards for a year. But I'd go out there and warm up and do my shit. Yeah, and then fire off just a few reps. And then go inside and I was just broken. And then I was kind of realizing, I did that probably 2023 is when I, and I just realized that's not, that's wrong for me to do that for myself,

and I'm also, in a way, I'm kind of bullshitting people at this point, because then my workouts, I was just going out there to survive and just do something, because I didn't want to break the cycle of posting every day, and just like,

you just got caught up in the same thing everyone else does. And it wasn't fun anymore. That was the main thing. It wasn't fun and it didn't feel like it was coming from my heart. And so I pulled back on it and you know, it's understandably, there was a change

in some of the metrics in my social media and that's fine. I've never done this for that anyway. So I, and I totally understood like people, oh, this guy's not bringing it anymore. Unfollow and that's fine. But I'm hoping that I, going forward, I'm bringing a more balanced equation.

Like we were talking about, there's a few posts on, I guess I did a podcast with a guy in Hawaii, his name is Evan Leong, and it was a very different kind of podcast where we're talking more about life and psychology and family and relationships. And, but I did reveal certain things about my having depression and certain other things.

And also how I got caught up in social media and just not just social media, but just my own mental issues. I was using my training to kind of manage that. Yeah. And then so, and I posted, and I guess Evan posted something where I'm saying, hey, I broke myself down.

And there's been, I guess, some certain influencers that are, and they've approached it in various angles, and I totally, some of them are, you know, it's a different, they're different perspectives, but, and people are kind of, there's a little debate on, on these other, what their take is on that, but my thing is I wanted people to understand that, because a lot of people think that when they meet me, I mean, just on the plane coming up here,

the guy next to me, I didn't know until we got off the plane that he follows me. Yeah. But they tend to put people like me and guys like you and in this God-like or kind of superhero light where they think everything, our lives are perfect and everything we do is just right. And we just know, and I wanted people to understand that

on that podcast and on podcasts like this, I'm very, very open and almost feel like it's kind of, I owe it to people to let them know that's the other side. Those are the mistakes I made and I'm trying to correct them right now, but yeah, no, I got caught up just like everybody else. I still do have a lot of insecurity that I was kind of using that to compensate for.

And, but at the same time, I have no regrets. It's a process. And I feel like I have a better kind of understanding of social media and how it affected my own training culture. So. Well, dude, you're supposed to be perfect all the time, so it's perfectly honest. Yeah, I know.

But you know. Yeah, this is, we should just probably trash this show because I didn't know all this and now that I know this, we should probably just discontinue. Yeah. Is this something we want to? All the time we got. Yes, we saw the post from some people

over at Functional Patterns. They had some particular things to say about you. So if we can kind of play that, I think it would be interesting to get your take on it. This will be eclipsed again. That's Nadi, is that his? Is that how you say his name, Nadi? Yeah. That's get clipped again. That's um, that's naughty. Is that his? That's how you say his name? Naughty?

Yeah, that's his company. Yeah. Yeah. And you'll never do it again. And you'll think that the movements, the thing that messed you up. But if you can maintain the capacity of doing the movement without constantly trying to increase the load forever, which is what a lot of people do, which is why they fuck themselves up.

A good example, we got Bill Maeda, uh, lifting with Bill Maeda lifting with kind of a slower technique. I do think that you can squat bench deadlift and do a lot of these movements for the rest of your life. It really does depend largely on the loading. It depends on how much weight we're talking about because I think that to grab a barbell and to be able to deadlift 45 pounds or 135 pounds or what's gonna feel kind of light to whatever person. Like it could even be up to 405 or 500 if that still feels light to that person. It's the question to ask is if they if he worked on being able to sprint better would

he be able to push this way farther? Like again the probabilities the probabilities. Okay, he's getting away from like he's getting away with or he's able to do it but it's like could that be like a lot better and if he doesn't want to do that that's fine but it's more like at least let people know that just because he's doing it and he looks like that doesn't mean that that's gonna apply to the average person I suppose two to three times a day for four years I I did that. Four years later now I am so broken. Physically, neurologically, everything.

My nervous system is fried. My tendons, my ligaments, my arches are completely collapsed. The workouts I was doing I knew deep in my heart weren't in any way going to make me better or stronger. To yourself and you'll never do it again. So I'm sorry, that fellow was... That guy, this page is Rodney. He's one of their coaches.

Him and Mike Mucciolo came onto our podcast to explain the concepts behind functional patterns. Something he said there was very, very correct. I've been very clear about this. I've said this, I've been very clear about this. I've said this on other podcasts, and I do completely agree with him that, and I just mentioned earlier, that the things that people see me doing

on my Instagram or whatever, those are not what got me, those are not foundational to what, to my development. Those are things, those are skills and patterns that I now practice with now that I have, but yeah. But he's right, yeah. And I've never ever said, I've never said once that if you do this infinity lunge,

then you're gonna look like me. I've never, cause. That's maybe why you put the date in your age. Yes. Cause you're not trying to like say, you have to do this like me. No, not at all. Yeah.

But the thing is, is like when like, that's not what any of us are saying when we show concepts or movements. We're not saying do this to look like me. That's what he chooses to zone in on for some reason. But we're not saying if you do this, you'll look like us. It's just the thing that you practice. It's your movement practice.

Yes, yes. But I would imagine if you see, I don't know, any of these videos here, like that guy just holding that bar, right? When you see the muscles moving, right? You see all these, everything's just shimmering and just busting out. Is that Stacy?

I think he's a pro football player. He's one of their new athletes. Okay, I can't, man, I need glasses. But yeah, when you see those muscles moving, I would imagine just a natural, it would be natural to just associate that movement and implement with, because it's very, because you see those muscles moving

and there's like people like, wow. Yeah. It's a natural assumption of sorts, but yeah. no, I'd be the first to tell them that unless they share a similar genetic and epigenetic patterns. One thing you did say, which is interesting is that like, maybe you would have better outcomes if sprinting was your, you know,

kind of a main thing that you were sort of after. And you know how we were talking about that before? I would agree with him in that regard as well, because that for this 2025, if we're gonna talk about resolutions, I wanna start sprinting like you. No, seriously, I've watched your journey. Thank you.

For the, I mean, and you've been relentless on it and you're looking, I mean, you're looking good. And I had to stop running for almost a year now. And I just had to run, when I was having dinner with Encima the other night, you know, I had to run and get my wife, couldn't help her park in the gas lab district. And I couldn't believe my running felt like,

I know how to run. The funniest thing is your brain is saying, what the fuck, but it's like, you got somebody else's legs. No, I'm just just like, tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk. You got somebody else's legs. There's a great quote.

Yeah. Great quote. So, yeah, that is sprinting. That's coming back this year. And that's another reason I've been posting more on my, you know, just hitting the heavy bag. Every one of those videos, you know, I'm slow and I'm not that great at it, but those are, the days that I do that and I post it, that's like a little celebration for me

because just six months ago, certainly a year ago, I could not do those. I couldn't hit those positions and the impacts. I couldn't take any of those. I couldn't even, even footwork hurt my knees and everything. So yeah, things are getting better. People being addicted to fitness is definitely a thing, and it's definitely a trap that people fall into,

whether it be the diet. I think diet-wise, it's maybe easier to identify. It's easier to look at. Somebody just has a really poor relationship with food, whether they end up binging or whether they end up throwing up their food or whatever to try to end up having a certain look or result. I mean, we've heard a lot of people talk about

how they've damaged their hormones and things like that by not eating enough. So that's like a little easier to like see, I guess. But with lifting, I think that we just kind of look at it as being positive almost all the time, but we're not really understanding that. In some cases, it can be an addiction and sometimes it's something I remember seeing

Chris Bumstead talking about people going to the gym and how the gym means so much for people. And he was like, I think that's really cool and it's nice. However, if you don't really work on your problems, they're never gonna be resolved because you're working and you're working on something and you are working on yourself in some ways, but you're not bettering your finances,

you're not bettering maybe these other things that you're stuck at in your life that are really kind of just weighing you down every single day, you're not even really, maybe you're not even that conscious of it. I think we see that a lot in fitness. For sure, yeah, yeah. That's me, man, I'm still poor.

So, but, there he is. Okay, this is pretty cool. I feel a sense of responsibility, because fitness is a big world of men who are, I think usually get into fitness on some level, maybe feeling lost, and then can feel a little bit safe. And I heard a lot of people be like, I can go in the gym and just forget about everything. Like, that's great. The gym is an amazing tool for that. But you still need to go back and feel that shit eventually.

It's not going away. A good workout doesn't make the stress at home better now. It's still just buried under that fucking dope mean rush. Sick pump you got in your chest. I do feel that. That's why he's fucking champion right there. That's really well said, I think. All right, Mark, you're getting leaner and leaner, but you always enjoy the food you're eating. So how 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. We've been talking on this 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 is another one that comes to 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-finished ground beef. I might get bacon.

And there's other days where I kind of do a little bit more bodybuilder style where the 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 all the time. It's satiating and helps you feel full. I look forward to every meal and I can surf and turf. I could cook up some 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 I it's hard for me to lock one down, but I really love the bavette steaks Yeah, and then I also love the rib eyes as well You can't go wrong with the rib eyes So guys if you guys want to get your hands

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So Mark, with your running, is it sprinting that you're trying to get? Because I see you're doing some distances as well, but I notice now it seems like you're doing more speed work. I kind of feel like I'm in this, I just kind of call it my three sets of 10 phase. When somebody's lifting, if some 12 year old kid asked you a bunch of questions about lifting, you'd be like, just go to a gym

and do three sets of 10 of a bunch of different stuff every single day and do that for the next couple of years. And then when you come back to me, we can talk, you know, more intellectually about. So for me right now, I feel like in a fortunate sense, I'm so poor at so many different things when it comes to running, that it's a good idea for me to work on a lot of aspects of it.

So it's good for me to go and run a handful of miles here and there, it's good for me to work on shorter distances. So basically anything that I do is going to make me better. And so for today, I did something I've never even really tried before, but I was trying to do these like, I didn't really intend for it to be this long this way,

but this is just how it worked out. I was doing these like three minute intervals, these like three minute, they weren't sprints, but they were at capacity for me because by the time I got to the top of this hill, man, I was toast. But I'm also, I know enough from lifting that I know that doing those maximally,

as we pointed out earlier, is a big mistake. So I only did a couple sets in that maximum way. So yeah, I'm working on all different kinds of things, but the main goal is to be able to like really, boom, take off and be just fast, flat out fast. Explosive, yeah. Explosive, yeah. Can I get another water?

Yeah, well, you can take this one, boom. Thanks, sir. Cool. Yeah, and it's taken me a while to be able to kind of work into this, but as we were talking about earlier when we were saying that you get yourself to these situations where in your workout you get warmed up, you do all your stuff, and then you get yourself to a situation where you do five, six reps where it's maximal.

It's not necessarily the weight is so heavy, but it's your effort and it's your intent that you're now taking that weight and you're making it a really difficult, really challenging exercise. And that's kind of exactly what I did today when I was doing my intervals on the overpass over here. As I got towards the end, my legs were burning, my lungs were burning.

I haven't had that many sessions of training with running that have been like that because I was doing some marathon stuff before and then getting into sprinting, it's like I'm not holding on to the sprint long enough to where shit's really burning. Kind of like what we did with the tank today. Oh, the tank. I got us burned. Okay, so you did all this tank today. Oh, the tank. That got us burned.

So you did all this stuff and then you did the tank. God, I did nothing and the tank just blasted me. The tank will light you up. So I still need like just basic stuff. I just need to like be in better condition, be in better shape. Well, so do I. I mean, that tank is, that thing is just, I love that thing.

That was a lot of fun. We were messing around with the torque tank, and then also it has a, like a stretchy cord slash cable, and we hooked that to the harness that we have for that slingshot, and we just towed the thing backwards and forward and did a bunch of different things with it. And we just towed the thing backwards and forward and did a bunch of different things with it. And for some reason, that rubber cord

just has a very like particular feel to it. Yeah, yeah, no, that elastic component, it just, it makes that an already unrelenting exercise more so. Yeah, you were saying sometimes with the rope, you can sometimes just lean and sort of use your body. You're just kind of camp out there for a little bit. But that thing, if you try and just do that, it just kind of lets you go.

So you got to keep moving on it. You got to maintain a certain amount of tension and it keeps you on your toes. What, where did this idea of of training your teeth come from? What are you doing with that stuff? Sorry. Everything, all of the lifts that I do have to in some way make me or somebody else better

at some aspect of combat. And to me, training for combat, obviously you wanna be able to deliver strikes and to be able to grapple and to exert energy, but as or more importantly, especially if you're not a great fighter like I am, is the ability to absorb or attenuate punishment. And to me, the foundation of especially being able

to take a hit to the head starts from the jaw. I understand, I started training my neck with traditional harnesses. I have the Iron Mind neck harness and to this day, I love that is to me the best. Yeah, the Iron Neck is beautiful. Right. And this is just might just be me,

but I've come closer to hurting myself, training my neck with a harness, than by just biting down or attaching that weight to my neck through the jaw. Cause to me training my neck with a harness is like doing curls with a weight taped to my wrist. I don't have that grip component to activate the upstream musculature.

So to me, I'm not contracting, especially with training the extensors of the neck. I'm not, the cohesiveness of the muscle contraction I'm not, the cohesiveness of the muscle contraction is incomplete and I feel like it leaves gaps that allow my neck to be compromised more. When I bite down, I can lift much more weight, holding with my teeth than I could strapping it to my, to a harness.

And that bite, by the way, you know what we're talking about? I try to get up, when I lift, I wanna get high. All right, I mean that, cause I've never been able to tolerate alcohol and there's only so much cannabis and stuff someone could use, right? But no, I wanna get, and if you ask people that train their jaw,

they will tell you there's nothing like training your neck and your jaw that leaves you, that it clears your mind. You feel different. There's a feeling in your face too. In your face, literally. And by the way, as you, I don't really do this for this reason, but a lot of the way people look,

what makes people look old is when they're, was this your mandible? Yeah, I think so. When that starts to demineralize and starts to shrink because the masseters that attach to it, they get weak. And I believe, because I've always said, what makes people look old? And I kind of look at before and after pictures

of celebrities and I always noticed the jaw, that mandible string. I think you're gonna look the same when you're 125 years old. Well, you know, and you know, just biting, and not just biting, but like, Wek has this little ball, right? And if you just put that ball on the table

and you press it down with your neck. We're big fans of the Wek faces. And you go, ah, ah, ah. It is a powerful exercise for, yeah, it's just like opening, you know, like this is great. Everyone's doing this all day long, but you gotta put that rubber band and same thing, yeah. But yeah, for me, the neck and the jaw,

it is more important for me to have a strong neck and jaw, grip and forearms, calves and feet, than anything inside of those areas. Like, I don't care if my chest is that strong, or if my lats or whatever, but yeah. Everything that sticks out of my shirt or my clothing when I'm in Hawaii, my neck, my forearms and my calves, my feet,

those have to be as strong as I can make them. Well, let me ask you this. What do you think has been some of the best exercises or concepts you have for the grip and forearms? For grip and forearms, climbing ropes. Ooh, yeah. for grip and forearms climbing ropes. Rope, yeah. Now, I gotta give you two answers because

that is, in my experience, one of the best accessible things without having some super high tech device. But the kind of grip training that I like to do, like it's handling things like sandbags or, because I don't know what, okay, there's different types of grip, right? Like there's grip that allows you to hold a rope and not have it come out this way. And then there's grip that allows you to farmers carry.

And that's a different grip, right? Yeah. Looks like you'd have a good grip. You got like a big old meaty thumb. See how his thumb comes way out? Well, I've always. And then he's got like big tendons on his, next to his. I've always wondered what the kind of grip,

like to go under a ball, right? Or take a, hold a guy. Yeah. And just this, the scoop grip. You know, like this kind of, that kind of strength in the hand, that is. So like just taking a kettlebell, I call it a melon curl or something like,

or a crush curl where you just squeeze something heavy. And just like this kind of grip. Yeah, you do that often in your videos. Yeah, because this grip is nice, but like this would be like end range strength or something in a way for the grip. And this is something that's just a little more important to me now.

I know I got a lot of this. Kind of attached to like almost like the Latin stuff too, like you're squeezing. Yeah, that's another thing. Bearing down. I'm using like crab, I'm using my pecs and my, and you know, Chris Chamberlain taught me, was it internal torsion?

Yep. Where you're wrapping your lats, like you're just wrapping around, I didn't know what that was called, but that's like when I do goblet squats, I don't just hold the kettlebell. I, you know, I gotta see my lats, I gotta see the striations here.

It's not a- Almost like a bodybuilding crab pose type thing. It's basically- Most muscular. Yeah, I tell my clients and people, starting position, if you can start your curls, your overhead press, everything, if you, you know how they stand on stage?

Yeah. They're as tall, as narrow, and as wide as they can. That is, I tell people, start like, this is where you should start from. Because number one, it takes all the slack out of the system, so it ensures that you're gonna be a successful. Tall and narrow and as wide as they can.

Yeah, and you've already taken slack, so all the joints are positioned as symmetrically as they could be, because sometimes when people, sorry, sometimes when people curl, they might just be standing there and like maybe more weight is here. If you're about here, here, here. And then, and another thing,

when you're fully extended and presented this way, as soon as the weight enters your system, if all of the bow strings are taught, as soon as something touches it, they can register that. So they're ready to contract. And you can also pull through a much longer range of motion. Yeah. So, yeah, it sounds crazy, but I encourage people,

you know, like guys would rather admit they jerk off than admit that they pose in the mirror, you know? And no, I encourage people to do that because, yeah, it's just, to me, that only helps. That muscular control is a skill. It is, like this, what these guys do, that's no joke. And one of the things I... We're watching video of Chris Bumstead

and he's just making it look so easy. Yeah, and you know those people, like Hicks and Gracie, he used to be, and these yoga people, they can do that with their... Yeah. Fuck, if I could do that before I die. Like, Jill Miller showed us like the loaf of bread thing with the belly.

That's the craziest thing. Or to like roll your stomach. You know, before I wanted to be able to do a back flip, but I think those days might, but if I could somehow, that thing is just, wow. I can show you how to do it. I started learning about how to do that. You can do that, man?

Yeah, yeah, I can do it pretty well now. That's another reason to hate you. Yeah. Yeah. It's adding up, isn't it? Yeah, man, this guy, it's just everything, man. But yeah. No, but it's easy to get the hang of,

like, with a few progressions. Really? So yeah, I'll send you some stuff. Okay, please, I would, that kind of control is like, yeah. I've kind of heard recently that, like, chopping wood, you know, like chopping down a tree, like how much testosterone, something like that, yeah. I've kind of heard recently that chopping wood, like chopping down a tree, like how much testosterone, something like that, builds. And you think about holding a weapon

and just what's involved, and then we're talking about breathing, and you talk about all the different things that would be involved in being able to do that, and there's a lot of your eyesight, a lot of coordination. There's a lot of power, but there's also a lot of finesse. Like once you kind of, if you chop wood

and then you're trying to like split some wood, there is definitely like a strength that's involved in doing that. But there's also like a certain type of finesse of really catching that sledge coming over and then hitting the wood and stuff like that. Mark, you must have seen that guy on, I see him on Instagram.

I'm speaking of Mr. Perfect. This guy is Mr. Perfect. Yeah, it's all the women that just have the wet signals everywhere. And he's like in the rain, he's got his shirt off. He's got the giga-chat, and he's just perfect. He's from around here. I've hit him up before to try to get him on the show.

I'm in love with him. And, but, wow, you want to see a guy split wood? He's no joke. I mean, that guy is like. You want to talk wood, you got to talk about this guy. Yeah, no, that guy, and he's got like, I don't know, eight million followers, all women. Those women love watching him split that wood.

Man, that guy. Yeah, you gotta get him here. That guy is like. It's great because he plays it up so much. You know, like he's got like a shirt on, he's got like some stuff on, and then he takes like the suspenders down and he chops, I've watched way too much of this.

He'll go like, he'll have to go up like, you know, like it's a, you know, like give it a bit, and then he'll. Yeah, he spanks it. He's just, he's got it down, man. That guy's got it down. He spanks the wood. I never even thought about that. But his ability is legit, though. That is the thing that, see, I mean, to do what he does,

like, yeah, he'd never want to get out, have that guy, like, fight a dude like that. That's just that kind of power and his precision. Yeah. So it's just broad. Yeah, that guy's got it. For guys like us, it's like, whoa, that is impressive. And then of course the ladies.

So do you feel like broken down and busted now? Or did you- No, I feel much better now. Yeah, but it took like kind of all of last year. I remember I got back from Japan around this time last year and I was broken. And even in Japan, usually on New Year's day, I like to go for a run and I was in Tokyo and there's just sidewalks to run on and usually that's okay. But I literally, I think I ran and I tried after two blocks and it just felt like there was like glass.

You know when you chew tin foil? No. And you're like, oh, that's kind of weird. That's what it felt like. It felt like my kneecaps were chewing tin foil. Like every time if I hit the wrong one, it's like that squeaky ice sound. it was just, yeah, it didn't work out. So that was about a year ago. And I knew, okay, this is bad. And yeah, my energy on

that trip, everything was terrible. But now I'd have to say, yeah, just the fact that I'm able to, so I'm starting with the kicking and a lot of the kicking, just trying to get my hip mobility back. And I've been doing a few runs, just starting to introduce that. But running is gonna be a much, much bigger part of it. Are there things that you do that we don't see? Like do you stretch or something? Do you have some other routine or stuff that you do?

You mentioned running, but like, are there some things like off camera that we don't? Yeah, okay, yeah. Myofascial release or? Okay, I do, you know, the body lever. Everybody knows the body lever. I do that pretty much daily. I have a red.

Kind of addicting. Yeah, I have a, you guys turn me on to the EMR Tech red light therapy. I do that daily. I love that thing. That is a regular part of my thing. I use Katsu blood flow restriction bands regularly. Just when I'm going about my house.

Arms and legs or just arms? I will either have it on arms or legs. There's a few times where I do it arms and legs and I guess that's not recommended, but once again, you know, the arterial pressure. A little dangerous, maybe? Yeah, kind of just, this is so stupid,

but I've kind of said, when you kind of have those things on you, you feel like a body boner, you know, this is like, cause you just feel like, you know what I mean? It's like your, it's like a, sorry, it's like a cock ring for your, your limbs, right? Yeah. And you just kind of feel like,

now I know why those Muay Thai guys, they tie off their upper arms when they come in and, cause don't they look strong? They do. When they come in and they got those on those left way, they have those arm bands that are tightly wrapped and they just come in looking yoked and they have them around their legs too.

And I think those guys had BFR down way before, you know. Maybe, but yeah. And I hang. I do kind of a lot of hanging from my shoulders because that's really helped kind of just with my mobility. Yeah, you're saying your right shoulder's a little. Yeah, my right shoulder, I had back in the 80s, I had what's called a Bristol procedure,

and this was before arthroscopics. So they just cut like this much in your shoulder, just spread it open and kind of like take one thing and screwed into another thing. So I think like part of my bicep is now acting like a pack or something. And that was 40 something years ago. And it's done all right, but now, you know,

like all the things you kind of broke when you were young and it seems like they forgave you. No, man, they come and call them later on. They're like the Mossad, they never forget. And you can hide, but they find you every time. And so, but now that I'm, but you know, back then, or, you know,'m, but back then, my entire life I've got four to five hours of sleep.

And then after cancer you'd think, okay man, this guy's gonna wise up and stop eating ice cream and get, no, I went right back to just being a dumb ass. So only over the last year have I been now getting six or more hours of sleep a night? And I'm 56, yeah. I thought the four to five hours was only because

you could only sleep four to five hours. That was just. Kind of as well because I trained, my nervous system just kind of got like, five hours felt normal, I'd just kind of wake up. But I believe strongly that's why I got cancer. I mean, I had some family issues going on at the time as well, but everyone has family issues,

but my sleep was just terrible. I remember I'd wake up with whatever my favorite pre-workout was, Jack 3D, but I'd add a Sudafed to that. Just, and that'd be like my morning before I drink coffee. And I don't drink a small, yeah man. And I was doing that in my 40s and shit. I can see why on your Instagram, how many times you say, hey, don't really necessarily listen to what I'm showing you.

I'm just showing you this because it's fun for me and I like it. Exactly, I mean, please, I am not, I'm flattered by people, but I'm not a role model of sorts at this point. A lot of what I do, I don't recommend, a lot of it. And because yeah, my metabolism is kind of this strange mix where I seem like I look like,

people think I work out a lot to look like this. I have to limit this. I don't think this has changed from the last time we talked. My workouts cannot go longer than 30 minutes. And there's long rest intervals between them and yeah. But you're on your feet, right? Cause you work out. Yes, and that's another thing. In my. Yeah. But you're on your feet, right? Cause you work. Yeah, see, and that's another thing.

In my entire life, I haven't so, I'm a personal trainer. I call myself a retired one now. But for, this was not a second job for me or a fallback. I've always worked in a gym with P. So my entire life I'm standing and moving. I I'm moving, I'm not working out with, I used to work out with my clients when I was younger, you remember those days, but now,

but still just moving stuff. I'm standing many hours a day. And I think my body just kind of adapted to that. If I had to say there's one thing that, you know, that would account for the metabolism I have is I've never, all my jobs, I've always been standing or moving. Yeah, so. Just never stop, just keep moving.

That's it. Yeah, yeah. But at the same time, it's, you know, people think like, based on how I look, like, I would be like the most, like at a picnic or something. You know, sometimes people think that I should be able to just do everything and, you know, like, yeah. Like right now, somebody saw me run.

Like if we were all just go out and like throw a frisbee, it would look, you would see a 56 year old guy. Yeah, yeah. Right now, my legs are just clunky, but I can kick, and I can do stuff, but my running is just right now. I think it's cool that you're getting into running, though. We were talking earlier, and both of us

had some experiences long ago, maybe like almost 30 years ago, with the little tiny bits of Jiu-Jitsu. And you were mentioning like, well, investing in that is like investing in Facebook. Like if you would have invested in Facebook early, but imagine if you and I just even did some small amount of Jiu-Jitsu from back when we first tried it

in like the mid or late, for me, it was probably the late 90s for you, might've been the early. Early, yeah, yeah, I know. But now you're starting running, but imagine 10 years from now, 20 years from now, you're still running, maybe you'll move better in your 60s and 70s than you did when you were 30.

Yeah, that's another thing, that's a good point you bring up because a lot of- Might be able to. Yeah, because a lot of people are, not a lot, but people might notice that my content is now, without me saying so outright, but it's focused more on movement. And like when I kick, when I strike, they're not great.

I'm slow and I'm making a lot of mistakes. But for me, that movement, being able to just do that and these are places where my body hasn't been in a long time and just being able to refresh all of those different neurological patterns and positions and it's just, so I know that's gonna bring me back to being able to run. Because to me, running, if I can't run,

because once again, my thing is it's all about martial and combat ability. And running is very much a part of that, right? And so it's important to me that I get that back. And I was working with Chris Chamberlain on also my, you know also the back bridge. Just being able to just put my, I would have never thought to put the band, I mean, it's such a simplest thing, and I never thought I'd be able to actually bridge back

like that under control. And I did one with him yesterday. He improved that by giving me a preparatory exercise, which I'm gonna post. So the one I'm gonna post later on of this exercise is you'll see that it's a huge difference. And that's what he does. I mean, within a day, so I knew what that felt like.

What was that? Whatever. And then the day after he saw where I was deficient here and he had me do a bow suit ball drill. It doesn't, well, I guess you can see the resemblance, but I was like, what the fuck, why are we doing this? And then when he put me back here, it was like that arch position was.

Not related to gait. Yeah. You can't do it. But yeah, so. Yeah, so I'm just trying to, I'm focusing more on movement, getting my movement back, getting my, being able to kneel on the floor properly.

Being able to, I used to be able to, just a few years ago, I could sit in a full lotus position, and now my cross-legged, sitting cross-legged on the floor, you can tell I'm, yeah, it's just not there. That's one of the reasons why I like how you're mentioning these things, because you're paying attention to these things that you're noticing are deficiencies, and you don't, you're not afraid of going towards them. I think a lot of people, if they're not good at that, they would kind of just avoid it,

right, or not show it. But it's great that you're showing that, because again, just like you and your running, like, a few years from now, when you're really proficient, people can see how that happened. Right, right, yeah. No, it's just, yeah, right now it's just, I'm trying to just kind of back away from all the super heavy, just crazy stuff

and I'm just learning more about how to manage, you know, my energetics a little better. Your sleep got a little bit better, you were saying. Is there anything else that improved that helped you get away from being in so much pain and feeling like your kneecaps were chewing tin foil? Yeah, I still consume a good amount of carbs and sugar. I still consume a good amount of carbs and sugar,

but the amount of junk that I eat, I still love ice cream. But I'm also realizing, even now, I don't get fat from these things, but I get very inflamed. Yeah, and so. Not getting fat, I think, in some way, can be a little bit of a curse for some people, because you can get very inflamed, yeah. And so. Not getting fat, I think, in some way, can be a little bit of a curse for some people, because you can get very sick, unfortunately. Well, you know, in a... At least if you get fat, you can be like,

well, I can see that this is causing some damage, and when you're not gaining body weight, it's kind of hard to know how it's registering. Well, yeah, and you know, so gosh, I'm going to, I was talking about, he explained it to me, like, he said, you know, the problem with the body that I have, when he said the problem with your kind of body is,

you know, it might look good on the beach, but a lot of people don't realize that fat is also used to dilute toxic load that accumulates within the body. And that's why some certain people, as they get more toxic, they appear to gain more weight. That's a defensive mechanism that the body has. And if you don't have a lot of that body fat to do that, whatever toxins you take,

they get banked into your vital organs. So that's why you have guys that look like me, or you know these thin marathon guys that are just chiseled and unfortunate. Yeah, you know. They have a lot of organ fat or visceral fat. Visceral, and you know what? I suspect that I probably have,

that's why I gotta get that DEXO for that too. So that'd be a really, okay. To find out, you know what my visceral fat would be. Oh, you guys, do you know that Steve Cotter? Yeah. He passed. That, yeah, that guy, he was, he was one of my RKC instructors back in 2009.

That guy was just, he was like, you know, all those RKC instructors back then, they were all like, you know,, they were like X-Men. Each guy had his own superpower. To me, Steve Cotter was like the Wolverine. Okay, he was like, to me, they were all bad dudes. Dave Whitley and just all of Brett Jones. They all had their super fucking,

but I think Steve Cotter was, yeah. A lot of people just, yeah, he was the guy. Yeah. Good looking stud, fucking pistol squatting up and down tables and chairs and that guy was just, yeah. And he's the nicest, nicest guy. I mean, last time I was in San Diego that I saw him. So that was about 16 years ago.

And we went to Mexican restaurant and Steve was just... He was on our show. And then within the timeframe of recording the show, and just before we released the show, he died of a heart attack. I know. Yeah, pretty crazy. Yeah, he and David Weck were good friends.

Yeah, that's what David was telling me. Yeah, they're like buddies. Same birth? Yeah, yeah. So rest in peace, brother. He's a good man and he really contributed. He had a lot to do with my kettlebell culture and he was a big inspiration to me.

Yeah, because I knew he wasn't a big guy, but he was so strong and the stuff he did was, and he was a fighter, right? He was, I mean, they all were, but Steve was, yeah. All right, we've been trying to build up our feet for a long time, trying to make some changes to our feet. And Seema, what are some differences you've seen with wearing some Vivo barefoot?

Yo, well, it's kind of crazy because I was a soccer player my whole life and I thought I had strong feet until I started actually doing foot exercises and strengthening the feet and wearing barefoot shoes. And first thing I want to mention is like, when you guys start wearing barefoot shoes, have other options because these shoes are flat,

which allows your foot to like really work on the ground. They're flexible. So your toes are going to be curling more when you take each step, right? And they're wide. So your foot's going to be getting more action than ever. So it's a good idea to, you know, have your barefoot shoe, but then have something else that allows your foot

a little bit of a break. But man, for me, in jujitsu, my feet now work like hands. So now when I'm playing my guard, my feet are grabbing the opponent. That's a little scary. It is, it is. And people feel weird when my toes grab onto them, but it's because every single day,

I walk around in barefoot shoes, and they're getting stronger as I just take my 10 minute, 20 minute walks. I think it's amazing. You know, I've known a lot of things about fitness for a really long time, but I did not know what a weak point my feet were. And my feet used to hurt all the time.

I had like a callus thing on the side of it that was always just bugging me. I tried to get wider and wider shoes. Plantar fasciitis. I went all the way up to getting like a 13 and a half shoe, which I don't need a 13 and a half shoe. I got no business wearing that size, but I was trying to make up for I needed like more width But most of the shoes don't have it and people like Chuck Taylor's they like vans they like Nike's but almost all those shoes are

Fairly narrow and they're kind of hurting people's feet. And so you want better feet get yourself a pair of Evo's And Seema, do you run? Oh, yeah, I do sprints you do sprint. Yeah I don't do is like I don't do like distance running like Mark does I don't enjoy it at all Yeah, but um, yeah, I do a lot of sprinting spring. Yeah terrifying Yeah Actually, I'm curious about this. Yes, because you've been getting into rope flow. I've seen you do that quite a bit.

What are you noticing with yourself? I mean, for as long as you've been doing it, do you notice? The rope flow? Yeah, what do you notice for yourself as you're venturing into it? That rope flow, I'm just very basic. I'm what is it, a matador, and then underhand, sneak,

or, you know, like, this is my internal rotation on my right shoulder. This is, well actually, see I can do this, but you know, just those patterns, even my, on this shoulder, this, both directions, internal, external, they're bad, but by that spinal engine stuff, by combining the spinal movements and coordinating them with the scapular movements,

it's a huge difference. This doesn't look great, but for me to just cold do this, have you had Edwardis on your show? No. Okay, so Edward is one of Chris Chamberlain's guys. Edward Trois, and you know Alex Kanellis. Oh yeah, we have him on. Okay, right.

So you wanna see combat martial strength training, you gotta check out Edward. He is, yeah. Yeah, but he was talking about how he was broken and busted up and everything. And I see that guy just, 200, what was that, 203 pound kettlebell? Just everything with that.

And he said he was broken and it was a rope flow. And then when I was talking to David this weekend, he was also making a very specific point to the group of all of us that he says, that rope is the foundation of almost everything else they do. So my shoulder, not just the mobility, it's the synchronicity of the movement

and how you just kinda, and you can connect that to the feet and the hips. I think that David said it integrates and it does. And, you know, it's not static patterns. When I watch you, so okay, if you wanna, so my inspiration for the rope was you. Because I've seen a lot of people do really cool things with it, but sometimes, I'm not the biggest guy, but I'm kind of big in my body and for me, moving that way is difficult.

So when I see someone like you, who I know is way bigger than I am, and you're just perfect on it, it's like, wow. So that's why I said, basically, I wanna look like Encima because, I mean, bro, the way you do that, and it looks like you're having fun. It's super fun.

And it just looks like, and you're not even, you're just somewhere else, man. I mean, I can just see in the way that thing is moving, you're like dancing with it. And yeah, and then, but then the way Edward does it is just like nunchucks. Yeah. I mean, it's just fucking, if you, yeah, that guy can just.

So that's what I like. It's like a hard style and a soft style. It's like a martial art. And like Chris Chamberlain was telling me, what movement can you do, especially for upper body, that you can cycle for thousands of reps and those reps progressively make you better rather than breaking you down?

And I think he stated it well. And that this device here, that's, you know, Egan Inouye. Is that the Synapse? Is that that thing or what is this? No, that's a Jet trainer. So Egan, my buddy Egan Inouye, who a few people know him. This is his thing. his son, Jet, is my daughter's classmate and a great baseball player.

And the whole family's into baseball. Egan's into everything. So Egan made this for his son. Yeah, and I kind of use it because my throwing, especially in my right arm, it's terrible. Like it's just shameful. My throwing is so bad, you know when they have these guys throw that first pitch and I get nervous,

like I was thinking, fuck, if I ever went out there, I'd be so embarrassed. But this thing is nice, I like this device. I saw there's like, people post all this stuff about John Daly all the time. I don't know if you know John Daly, the former golfer with the bright whitish blonde hair and the beard and he's super fat and super out of shape and drank a lot of alcohol for years.

The guy can play any sport. He kicked like a 50 yard field goal. Like there's all these videos of him doing like all this crazy stuff. So I showed him throw like a first pitch and it was like, I mean it wasn't like the most amazing pitch ever but it was pretty damn good. Like how the hell, very unassuming. I just saw a guy on Instagram, I don't know who he is

but his whole thing, his whole thing is he takes a huge swig of, I don't know, vodka? And I don't know if it's a weed or a cigarette, takes a giant, and while the smoke is still coming out, he takes, I think it was 150 pound kettle ball, cleans it, side presses it, squats it, and the smoke is still coming out. And every one of his videos, imagine like like me taking a bong hit before I do

and then going out and doing one. That's his shtick or whatever. And it's- Maybe that could be you in 2025. You know, I'm not a- Hey man. But it's amazing. He literally, and it's like every one of his videos,

he just drinks and smokes, but then he does something that is really impressive. Oh, here's John Daly. And it's a straight on field goal too, which is like way harder to kick that way. Kicking a field goal, by the way, if no one's ever tried it, I mean, I'm sure if you have some sort of

kicking background, maybe it's, I would assume it's a lot easier. But kicking a field goal is like impossible. It's so difficult. It's dumb how difficult it is. It's a lot easier. But kicking a field goal is like impossible. It's so difficult. It's dumb how difficult it is. It's like very frustrating. Yeah, where do you find the sweet spot on that ball? Wow.

There's a guy who's able to just tap into some of that athleticism. How old is he? He's probably like 60 or something, I don't know. What are some things that you learned from like getting into the lat? Cause I saw that exercise that you were doing with Chamberlain and it looked like you were, you know, kind of twisted and you've been training

for a long time, you know, but you're, you've never learned anything quite like some of the stuff that David Weck and Chamberlain are sharing with you, right? So my first introduction to that coiled position was through Junior Leoso. He's my friend and he's a really big, he's a great influencer, but he's also a huge advocate

of the Hawaii fitness community. He organizes lots of events and he's also a landmine coach. So I first learned about that coiled position and some of the principles from landmine university through junior. And that weekend course I felt was life-changing. The landmine is the only thing since the kettlebell that I feel would be pivotal in my future training efforts.

What I learned about the landmine was just, it was just powerful, yeah. So I'm sorry. And in doing that coil, like getting into that position and like kind of getting into the lat. Have you tried to run with some of that coil? You know, David was just showing me using the pulse trainers, you know, how to apply that and everything.

And okay, so with this, you know, the only time I really ever, I would do, you know, just kind of, and I really focused, I didn't know that I was coiling at the time, but that position is extremely powerful. I also in like a bent press, you know, David was showing me how, you know, if he tries to push me forward like this, and he was going over some striking things. He loves to fight everybody. Oh yeah, oh yeah. He was just, we're banging forearms with him.

And he's like, and then as he shifts, and then he basically side presses me away. Yeah, he's, there you go. All those, and I worked with Chris on these pulse trainers too, and he did some, that stuff for the abs. Oh man, that just cooked me. And these are fast.

It's like sprinting. It's like sprints for your abs. I've never had exercises that were so fast, yet, yeah, very powerful. So, yeah, I was, but no, the landmine principles and some of this, you know, these coiling and the spinal engine, I've always, if you look at most of my videos, it's,

they tend to be asymmetrical in some way. So I've always known and felt the benefits of asymmetrical loading patterns, which the coiling positions seem to be part of, but I didn't really have them, I didn't think them out to the degree that David and Chris and all these other guys did. And so, yeah, I said in one of my previous videos

that the intersection of what I know and what I learned from these guys is what I think I'll be posting in the future because these principles are, they are foundational and very significant. So yeah, I just like, I've always known about feeling that, and you know, just, but I just called it side bending.

You know, I just had a real, you know, an anti-lateral flexion or yeah, lateral flexion. And that's just kind of how I, but I never really pegged that, those principles. You said pegged, we have to point that out. Pegged. You know, it's interesting,

like you can move your body around for years and years and for decades and you can lift and do all these things, but sometimes you don't even recognize that the body moves in so many different ways. Sometimes when I see you do a movement, you might do like a curl and it might be with kettlebells and it might be from like a slightly different angle, maybe there's bands on there,

maybe the weight's oscillating around, or sometimes you're like moving your body into the curl or sometimes you're moving your your body like into the curl, or sometimes you're moving your body away from the exercise. So. You mean the eccentric squat, so as I'm kind of going into an eccentric squat. Yeah, exactly.

That. It's pretty cool, like there's so many different combinations of a way that you can move that we just sometimes don't even really think about or consider. That is. That's not optimal.

Yeah. But you know, for me, like that, that we just sometimes don't even really think about or consider. That is not optimal. You know, for me, like that, that's one of my favorite curls is pulling myself down into because to just stand and do curls, like I understand the benefit, but I need more than that. I gotta feel like I'm in a fight. You can also do a curl where you like hip hinge. Have you done that before?

You mean where I'm here and then? Yeah, so like if you stand straight up and then you hip hinge downward into your curl. It's like death-defying, because you're trying to flex your arm as you're getting into this unfavorable position. Hey, there's something called, I posted a video called the Jefferson Curl Curl.

Yeah, and that is, I guess people kind of like that one because it's the longest, but usually the curl is a pretty short range of motion, right, but if you do the Jefferson curl curl, that curl, it feels like it's just going on forever. And it- It probably helps you get down there too, because the weight helps you leverage.

It really helps. That's cool. And you just, and you end up in a, oh, sorry, you end up in a very, a very strong, narrow stance front squat position with a reverse grip. I don't know, it's not showing up. But yeah, with the curls, I try to do anything I can do

to make the curl a full body application. I'm gonna do that. So yeah, is it not showing? Yeah, I don gonna do that. Is it not showing? Yeah, I don't know what the joke is. Is it a recent post? It's kind of recent. It would be way before that. It just called, let's see.

It was in, let's see, I'm standing on a BOSU, no, was I standing on a BOSU? No, I'm standing on a BOSU, no, was I standing on a BOSU? No, I'm standing on two black boxes. Shit. And actually, you know, that's your messaging the BOSU ball, when most people. I think it's the one on the left, sorry, in Seam. Oh, you're good.

Yeah. Yeah, so we go into a nice Jefferson curl, and then I'm using that Lumbodorsal fascia Stretching that and it's kind of like a seesaw where it almost feels like you're you know Like the way you pull on up like when you're deep sea fishing. Yeah, it kind of feels like that and it just is the longest Pull through the biceps and it just is the longest pull through the biceps and it just feels very integrated.

First you're gonna get this great and use the stretch at the bottom to help kind of just some. And right there, we're arterial wall strength. Yeah, because the pressure here is pretty high, which I like and then, okay. You know, last question I have for you, you use the BOSU ball quite a bit. You're also standing on the BOSU ball

when you're doing certain squats. When some people see that stuff, they see it as just like a party trick, right? Yeah. What are you looking for when you're doing that? What are you thinking? A party. No, I'm only joking.

The BOSU ball, because it's unstable in, I guess, 360 degrees or whatever, and you're basically standing on a big blister of air, or a dome-filled, or air-filled dome, And you're basically standing on a big blister of air or a dome filled or air filled dome. Standing on it is like you get a seesaw effect that can go side to side front to. So when I'm, I know David and they like people to,

you and David did one, right? Where you got to squeeze the shit out of the boss, right? And I fully understand that. But when I'm just kind of on the apex of the dome, it's a small kind of unstable surface. And I'm not, I'm trying to move in a way where somebody watching me would think I'm not standing on that.

So I have to go very, it can't just be like, wah, wah, wah, wah, like, you know, not like the earthquake bar thing. So I'm focusing on how my feet are communicating with each other. You know, if I shift too much on this leg, of course the other one's gonna come up and that's pretty easy to feel.

So I'm trying to enter that range of motion at a rate and in a way where we're getting a very, I'm trying my best there, but we're trying to minimize that because all those different, it's just pushing me into areas that normally I wouldn't access on a more stable platform. So, and because of, I also feel like, because of my joint pain,

literally working on these surfaces gives me little bailout plans. Like if there's a part on the floor that my knee or there's something somewhere that it's just, it can't run away. That I either gotta stop or I'm gonna have to kind of do something not great. But on the BOSU, I can kind of just

like sneak around certain things. And I don't know exactly what I'm doing, but I feel like ranges of motion that would hurt on a hard floor, especially when I'm narrow stands, they don't. I can just kind of steer, and that's another thing. Because a lot of my lifting is trying to figure out a strategy to do these things that doesn't hurt.

So, yeah. Thank you so much for your time today, Bill. Appreciate it. I'm glad you were able to make the trip. Mark, thanks for having me, man. That was, yeah, I was so happy to be able to come up here and hang out with you guys. Threw down some methylene blue

and had some shot of espresso over a temple coffee. And then some mind bullets. Yeah, no, I'm kind of- We're stacking stuff around here. I'm like planing out because for, I don't know how long we've been doing this, but at least maybe an hour ago, I was like. I'm like, woo hoo hoo.

Yeah, but no, this is cool. This is very, very nice. I didn't get much sleep last night, and for that, that's really. We'll get a tank sent out to you so you can start doing some cool stuff with the tank. Very, very, yeah, it's very cognitive, so, but yeah. Strength is never weakness, weakness is never strength.

Catch you guys later, bye.