Mark Bell's Power Project - Dan Green on Mastering the Sumo Deadlift, Training Through Pain, and Chasing Strength at All Costs

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

What’s the secret to legendary squats and deadlifts? Powerlifting icon Dan Green joins Mark Bell’s Power Project to reveal the training strategies, mindset, and nutrition tips that helped him dominate the lifting world. 💪🔥 🔑 Key Takeaways: - Dan’s proven methods for building massive squats and deadlifts - His unique approach to balancing intensity, volume, and recovery - Why front squats are a game-changer for strength and growth - Injury prevention tips every lifter needs to know - The role of hamstring and hip flexibility in unlocking power - Nutrition hacks for fueling peak performance CHAPTERS:00:00 - Intro00:48 - What Makes Colton So Good02:35 - Dan's Gymnastics and Cheerleading Career06:49 - Romanian Deadlifts for Hamstrings11:24 - How to Deadlift Techniques16:37 - The Deadlift Party Explained19:59 - Sponsor Segment23:24 - How to Execute the Deadlift Party27:50 - Building Muscle Strategies29:00 - Westside Barbell Training31:00 - Learning from Other Lifters37:00 - Upper Body Hypertrophy Techniques39:40 - Barbell Bulgarian Split Squats Discussion43:05 - Is Colton the GOAT of Powerlifting?46:41 - Xendurance Discount Code “KONA20”47:19 - Palovu Discount Code “KONA”49:00 - Injury Prevention Insights50:29 - Mental Focus During Deadlifts54:29 - Recovery Techniques57:38 - How Heavy is Heavy Enough?1:02:50 - Training for Strength Effectively1:04:49 - Nutrition for Powerlifters1:09:47 - Balancing Training and Fatherhood1:11:24 - Young Lifters: Strength vs. Size Debate1:15:32 - Discussing Neck Injuries with Lifters1:17:51 - Calisthenics' Role in Powerlifting1:21:00 - Bulletproofing Tendons and Ligaments1:25:00 - Larry's New Goals in Powerlifting1:26:58 - Good Life Proteins Overview1:30:00 - Training with Stan Efferding1:31:54 - Backyard Meet of the Century Recap1:33:12 - What's Next for Larry?1:36:27 - Keeping Hips Healthy in Training1:38:58 - Tips for Stronger Sumo Deadlift Lockout1:42:48 - Mindset Strategies Before Lifts1:47:47 - Volume Management in BBBC Routine1:50:40 - Inspiration for Getting into Powerlifting1:53:28 - Location of Boss Barbell Club1:53:38 - Where to Find Dan GreenSpecial perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!Best 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎➢https://emr-tek.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!

Whenever my front squats went up, back squats went up, and my sumo got stronger. Do you feel like for yourself, you just haven't quite reached your potential? Like is that why you're still doing it? I definitely feel like my squat and my deadlift, I can hit lifetime PRs, and so that is very motivating. I think I've gotten smarter

at how to increase my training volume, and I've kind of figured out how much like heavy lifting is enough and what's maybe too much. For me, it's always a matter of like, if I wanna lean out, I need to try it. If I want to gain weight, I don't do anything, I just eat. I think with a lot of RPE training, there's like a really good,

I mean, it's a really great concept, but a lot of people overthink it, and they basically outsmart themselves out of like training hard enough. The first thing, I mean, for me, the most important thing for sumo was always just doing the block pulls. In my mind, if I yanked the bar hard enough off the floor,

I would succeed. Dan Green, welcome to the show. Great to have you here today. Yeah, thanks for having me, Mark. Appreciate it. A little bit before the show, we were talking about some of these younger lifters that are coming along and they're just blazing a trail and like,

holy shit, these lifts that people are hitting right now are extraordinary. What do you think is some of the result of that? Like how come some of these young guys and girls are coming through and just smashing some of these all time world records? Yeah, I don't think there's just an obvious trend of like how I would break it down.

I see certain lifters that are just really phenomenal and each one kind of has their own things that they do that are pretty special that I would say are the factors that are kind of getting them ahead of everybody else. Yeah, we were talking about Colton, and when I first started watching him, I was seeing the weights he was lifting and the form he was lifting with. And I was kind of doubly impressed.

Obviously the weights he was lifting and the control was like, you know, this is like, wow, this is phenomenal. But what I also liked and appreciated, and maybe this is, you know, I saw some of the similar technique sort of that I use for myself, kind of the really wide open hips on the squats

and the deadlifts. Very upright position. And I was like, wow, this is like what I envisioned my form ascending to and he's like 24 and he's just got it dialed in like better than I ever did. He's like, how's this? But it's like, I see the, you know, taking advantage of like the flexibility that I utilized a lot and I was just like, wow, that's, you know, I see the, you know, taking advantage of like the flexibility that, that I utilized a lot and I was just like, wow, that's,

you know, I started lifting at 24 and it just took me a while to figure anything out and he's 24 and he's already the best total in the world. You started at 24? As far as like my first power lifting meet. Yeah. Okay. Before that I was just like going to the gym to get jacked. You know what I'm not, not far that.

And before that you were a cheerleader. There was a get jacked. You know what I'm not. Not finding that. And before that you were a cheerleader. There was a phase of that too, yeah. And cheerleading, like people might not understand, but there's some gymnastics to that a little bit, right? There's a balance, coordination, strength. Yeah, there's a pretty good amount of athleticism. There's one side of it that would be gymnastics,

just tumbling stuff. Not like, you know, you're just running across doing flips and tumbling. And then there's the other side, which is the stunts. That's where, as a guy, you're usually picking up the girls and doing either partner stunts, which is just like one girl in the air or maybe more, or kind of the pyramids where you're throwing

a couple people up in the air. So when I started doing it, I was like, this is different, but I had been a gymnast before, so even though I was pretty strong, I had a pretty good background in gymnastics. So it suited me well, I liked the gymnastics, and essentially it's like if you like lifting weights and you like women, now you're just lifting the women. So it's kind of like a, it's suited me well. You know, I like the gymnastics and essentially it's like, if you like lifting weights and you like women,

now you're just lifting the women. So it's kind of like a, it's a good combination. And you said you were going to do a back flip for us today, right? Right. At 270 pounds. And then the podcast will be over. Yeah, that's all the time we got for today.

Last time I did a flip off of our diving board, I was like, all right, I look like a grizzly bear who just fell over. So you were able to do all that stuff, I was like, all right, I look like a grizzly bear who just fell over. So you were able to do all that stuff. I was very good at that, yeah. Hand springs and all that stuff. Yeah, when I was like 215 pounds, so. And do you think that is something that prepared you

for powerlifting? Do you think that helped with being explosive or just coordination and strength? As far as the lifting, I mean, just generally being athletic was good. So any sport that you're doing is probably have a way of kind of making your lifting go better. The things that I definitely took away

were I had a lot of thoracic mobility. So I could really kind really extend my upper back. That's good if you want to have a good squat position or a bench arch. And I had a lot of hip flexibility, so made squatting in kind of a wide stance just feel really natural. Even though you would think it makes your sumo better,

it took me a long time to figure out how to pull sumo. And I think when I was doing it, it just wasn't as popular. So I don't really have any guidance. It just sort of like, I stumbled upon some stuff that just like worked for me. It seemed like it might've been important for you because you did have some good mobility through the hips,

maybe to build some size. And you have huge legs and a huge lower body. I mean, that must've been a contributing factor. And then what are maybe some things that you did to try to get your legs and hamstrings and stuff to grow? So the first thing that really was like, that built up my hamstrings a lot, when I was in college, I started doing Romanian deadlifts.

But I think that's kind of like a exercise that doesn't really have just like a clear cut definition of what it is. But the way that I did it, and the way that I think of a Romanian deadlift is that you're kind of like, you're hinging your hips back, and you typically start the lift from the top, lower weight. You could or don't have to touch the floor. I think the range of motion is totally debatable,

how much you should do, and then you return to the top. The way I did it was that I would. Sorry, one second, Ryan, go back up and click on that one in the middle. That gives you a good idea of what we're talking about with being able to have those hips that way. That's like insane posture, and then you're trying to almost maybe maintain that same posture

as you use the bar to kind of pull yourself into position is that right? Certainly trying to wedge the hips in there you know when I was early in lifting I got better by going wider so I would be pretty much like toes out to the bar oh wow chest up and then as I kind of figured out how to do more I was like very focused on keeping my back in a more like neutral or slightly rounded position. I interrupted your Romanian deadlift story, but if you can go back to, yeah, giving us a little bit more juice on that,

cause I think some people would probably be really interested in that. Yeah, there's a pretty old video of me doing like Romanian deadlifts on my, in my garage back in the, back in the YouTube channel days. But yeah, I would arch my back, so I never dropped the chest down, and I would stand on a tall box so that I could basically lower the weight down to the top of my shoes and then come up.

So my back was like arched, and that puts a lot of stress, stretch on your hamstrings. And so that really blew up my hamstrings a lot. Quick question, when you mentioned your back was arched, you know, sometimes when people are doing RDLs, they, uh, you know, they keep the rib cage over the hips, right? But when you say you're arched, did you like really accentuate extension? So were you like kind of open when you were doing it as in like, he like arched.

Yeah. Wow. Like, yeah, if you think stripper picking up money off the floor, arched back, that's, that's what it was. Because then you're not making a lower back, your lower back is locked. So it just puts all the stress on the hamstrings. Wow. Yeah, if the lower back is rounded, you're pulling a little bit of tension off.

It's not like the hamstrings don't get worked at all, but you're pulling some tension off of them. And the- As opposed to when you're arched. Yeah, and totally. And if the, you know, there's like a, I used to sort of subscribe to the idea that the more you could stretch a muscle

through a range of motion, then like, that's always better. It is better at times. And certainly for this, if you lower all the way where your, you know, my knees are not locked, but there's a lot of stretch, certainly more stretch with a barbell in your hands than you can achieve with just your body weight. So if you lower to the point where your hamstrings are really stretched like that and then you

ask your hamstrings to pull all the way back up, that's a really intense loading for the hamstring. But if you get into that position and then at that critical moment where the stretch is increasing the load, then you let your back kind of ease up, then you kind of diminish the load in that critical position. So being a stickler on the form was pretty key for that. So I did that for like 10 years, and my hamstrings were really, really well developed

from that. All you gotta do is do it for 10 years. Yeah, I can see your posture. We're watching a video, and your shoulders are sinking below your hips, which is a difficult position to try to get yourself into. Yeah, so this video is me doing stiff leg deadlifts. So it got to the point where I did 585

for a set of five RDL reps to my shoes. The RDL would be you being more strict and probably. This would be much more arch. Probably having more tension. Starting from the top. I see. I'd have a little wider, like maybe. And not a deficit.

Slightly wider, and I was standing on a taller deficit. Taller deficit. So basically I wouldn't touch the ground, the bar would touch my shoes. Yeah, and I got to the point where I was like, my hamstrings are not the limiting factor, it's my lower back. So that's when I was like, you know, I like the RDLs,

but I'm going to switch to stiff legs to try to make it a little bit more about the lower back so that's when I was like, you know, I like the RDLs but I'm gonna switch to stiff legs to try to make it a little bit more about the lower back and then You know and kind of just even though I like the RDLs kind of just remove them because it's you know, you're being If you're being you know smart about your training, you don't want to just do the things that are like your favorite like pet exercises Was one of your first meets was the at super training? There was like some sort of contest there, I think maybe some sort of deadlift type thing. And I think I remember you lifting there. Oh yeah.

Doing like a 600 ish pound deadlift and then years later you're Dan Green. Yeah. So that was sort of a, I was doing some stuff with kettlebells that was sort of just on the side. So they had these competitions called the tactical strength challenge. That's right. So I did it in 2009 and 2010 and it was at super training. Yeah. 2009 I think I did like six 50 as a conventional deadlift and that was

kind of the, uh, that was around the point when I was like done conventional lifting and switched over to Sumo. Yeah. You were pretty damn big. And I was like, who's this guy? What's going on with this guy? Because everybody else in there was like fit and everything, but you were pretty big. I was like, holy shit.

Yeah, the next year of 2010, I deadlifted 740, and this was like, I think it was my first time deadlifting on a deadlift bar, at least that I remember. So, felt pretty good. Yeah, so you would do like one rep max deadlift, and then you would do like wonder at max deadlift and then you do one set of pull-ups For as many reps as you could do like strict ones

I was in the elite category where you'd actually do weighted pull-ups you had like a 22 or 10 kilogram, you know weight and then the last event was like five minutes max reps on kettlebell snatches you know, but one thing I'm really curious about is, um, your development of your erectors. Cause I've seen you talk about like purposefully stretching that area, um, to cause more growth there. And the interesting thing about that is when I hear a lot of other people,

especially like guys that are biomechanical and they're talking about bodybuilding, they always mentioned you had deadlifts don't really work the erectors, right? So what do you think they're getting wrong about that? Because you've done that on purpose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think, I mean, going back to the way I was describing the RDLs, if you deadlift and you keep your back isometrically locked,

kind of like you'd see in Men's Health magazine where it's like this picture, perfect deadlift, you're basically just squatting the weight up. So holding your back in kind of like a shortened position might not be the best for growing the erectors. So that's where if you see somebody who's deadlifted with bad form, like rounding their back a lot for a long time and they've like survived it,

they probably built up their erectors pretty well. Survived, okay. But what I had read, what's the dude, Stuart McGill has a couple books. One of them was like the lower back disorders and then there was kind of like a sequel to that ultimate back performance and it was a pretty long title.

But I read through that, it's like a textbook, but he really breaks down the mechanics of rounding your spine, lower back and upper back. And so from that I basically was like, okay, you can round your thoracic spine very safely and you can round your lumbar, but it needs to be pretty controlled. It can be a little bit.

And when I say a little bit, you could sort of think if you have like five vertebrae in your lower back and the total rounding forward of your lumbar would be like 15 degrees. If you can do three degrees five times, you have a lot of skill and you're distributing the load pretty effectively. If you have like 10 degrees of rounding in one spot,

you probably just hurt your back. Yeah. And he even has like studies where he had like 40 lifters that are all lifting and they're lifting at like 400 pounds and stuff, so they're actually like decent lifters. And he kind of had them all go until there was an injury. And maybe that sounds like unethical, but I think there's, he kind of describes it.

He's like, yeah, the injury mechanism was that the control of the vertebrae is like, that was what was lacking. So you got too much flexion in one vertebrae, or one joint, and then that's kind of the injury mechanism. So I was like, okay. Yeah, so what I always saw is like, you know, I have pretty average length arms for my height

and if you see the guys who deadlift a lot with long arms, you're like, okay, well, if I round my upper back, it's like my arms are like three inches longer. So I would think about that a lot. Like how do I sort of, you know, kind of cave in my chest more and, and then really what I started doing is I started doing a lot of deficit deadlifts. If you, you know, I'd stand on like a three and a half inch box and I would just do all, all kinds of, you know, do singles. I would do triples. I would do sets of like five or eight volume. So, and the goal there, what I like about that is, one, it lets you experience like rounding your back, because you realize early on, you're like,

if I try to just keep my back flat, and now I'm getting into it, I'm just squatting the weight up from like, you know, super deep, it's not going to feel right. Once you learn that your back can kind of go into a little bit of a rounded position and be stable and then you can drive up the weight, you can start feeling like, okay, this is actually

really good and really strong. And so now your erectors are lengthened because your spine is rounded. And so it builds up the muscle much, much more when the erectors are stabilizing kind of a more lengthened position. Yeah, so that video you can kind of see. For me it was always kind of that like lower thoracic spot

that rounded the most, and that's where I have the most muscle on my lower back, or my mid-back. And when you deadlift normally, outside of the deficit, do you also allow some of that rounding, or do you maintain a more neutral position with a standard deadlift? Yeah, no you, I mean there's very few people that I watch who are like top deadlifters who keep their back flat.

Ah, okay, okay. Now if you think about this, when you bench, you're basically having to control your shoulders and your elbows, you know. That's, there's not a lot of joints. When you squat, you have to control your knees, your hip flexion, your hip like abduction, and then you've got to control your spine,

but you're never really trying to like articulate your spine. You're just trying to keep it braced. But if you take all 17 vertebrae in your spine and you can articulate them uniquely in a deadlift, you have a lot of options for how well your skill, quote unquote, would be for like creating leverage. So that's where you can deadlift a lot by improving your skill without needing to bulk up.

Because you can just increase your leverage. And that's what the deficit does, it lets you use a percentage of your max and round your back. Sort of like you're introducing a controlled chaos as opposed to only rounding when you hit 95% and suddenly it's like, surprise, will your back tolerate

lifting super heavy weights without practicing lifting in that position? So if you can repeatedly lift in that rounded position, then you will build up muscle to kind of stabilize that position. I'm so excited you came here today because I don't see a lot of interviews from Dan Green. You've always been quiet, you've always been humble,

but at the same time you've destroyed all time world records. And I think you're a favorite of a lot of people. A lot of people are huge fans of yours. I remember when you came to super training and I would ask you a question and I was always like, man, every time I ask this guy a question, it just turns out the answer is like a lot of hard work. You know, it's like, I want some different answer, you know, so I could like cheat code my way through life or whatever, but it was always like, it was always, you know, the deadlift party. You know, if you could explain the deadlift party to some people, because you like to party

a little differently than maybe everybody else is thinking. Yeah, well, one more point with the deficits. The thing I said, I was like, there's really two things to it, and I explained kind of the mechanical one. The second thing is that for me, when I did it, I was like, nobody else wants to do these, so it gives me like an edge.

So I was saying before, if you just SBD like everyone else, why would you assume that you'll be better? Unless you just have the genetic lottery winner. So if you're like, I feel like I have good genetics and good work ethic and I'm tough enough to deal with setbacks and tough training and stuff, but I feel like for all those things, there's better, more gifted people that I compete against,

so I need something different to give me an edge. So if I do things in my training that they're not doing, then I'm like, all right. I know in my, you know, my, I know that I've prepared to be better, you know. So when I can do something that works and I know that somebody else doesn't want to do it, that gives me a little bit of a mental edge, you know.

Now, the deadlift party was, so originally there was a guy that I wound up meeting, his name was Craig Terry, and he died, so rest in peace. But he had been the top deadlifter in his weight class for close to 20 years. He was an older dude, and I went and I saw him work out at a gym in Michigan. Now this is a guy who's built for deadlifting.

His arms are reaching down to his kneecaps pretty much. But he did a workout that was basically, kind of had one set of max reps of whatever weight it was from the floor. So it was probably doing like five to eight reps. And then he would put five inches of blocks under the weight and he would do a little heavier weight and he would do one set of max reps.

And then he would stand on like a hundred pound plate and do one set of max reps from a deficit with now a lighter weight. So it's kind of like you did three different AMRAP sets from the floor, from blocks, and from a deficit with now a lighter weight. So it's kind of like you did three different AMRAP sets from the floor, from blocks, and from a deficit. So I started doing something, and then after that he just did a bunch of one arm rows. So that was pretty straightforward,

but it was like, oh, that's a little different. I haven't seen people do it, and the dude's, he's a very strong deadlifter. And so I started doing that, and when I started doing that for sumo, I would do one set of sumo from the floor, one set of sumo from three and a half inch blocks, and then I would do the deficit set conventional.

And that's when my sumo really started to blow up, just because the block pulls sumo really built up my hip strength. Whereas before I was flexible, but it didn't really, didn't really figure out how to use my hips. So I've had people do all sorts of variations of that, you know, and that, and you know, I put the hashtag deadlift party, like some of my videos

and you know, so if you go back through the, not a lot of videos, not a lot of people are showing up to that party. There's like thousands of people with that hashtag and I'm like, hey, that's that's cool. I First started hearing about transcriptions from Thomas to Lauer Yeah, and you know Thomas is somebody it's an animal with working out you got a chance to work out with him I worked out with him and he's kind of always on the front lines of like, you know Finding out about these new companies that have cool things. But I didn't really realize that Troscriptions

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I know dr. Scott sure we had him on the podcast and he talked quite a bit about how he Recommends methylene blue to a lot of the athletes that he works with Yeah, and they're seeing some profound impacts and one of the things I've heard about it Is that it can enhance red light? So those are you doing red light therapy or those of you that have some opportunities to get out into some good sunlight It might be a good idea to try some methylene blue Before you go out on your walk or run outside or whatever activity is that you're gonna do outside and this stuff is great But please like first off they have a lot they have that stuff for staying calm

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and make sure that you're safe. Transcriptions has a lot of great things that you need, so go and check out their website when you have the opportunity. Strength is never weakness, weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. But that was the original version. It was kind of like doing multiple different deadlifts

in the same workout. And for a lot of volume though too. Yeah, certainly like with some intensity, not like just kind of going through the motions. Yeah. How many days a week did you do that? Was it one day a week you'd do this? Yeah.

Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, now if anyone wants to try that, what I would generally say is that that can be done about two weeks out of four. If you try to do it every week, it feels like it kind of works and then it stops. But if you're a little more conservative and you're not going for like AMRAP every workout,

you can pace it a little bit better. So basically it's a deadlift of some sort, deficit deadlift and a bent over row. Deadlift, block pull and then a deficit. I gotcha, okay. Three different styles of, or three different angles, right? Three different angles of hitting a deadlift. And so the thing there is like

when you deadlift from different heights, you're teaching your body to kind of learn how to just leverage itself. So when you start on the blocks, a lot of conventional pullers struggle with that. And I think it's because when you bend down to the weight, the natural lengthening of the erectors and the hamstrings creates passive tension.

So when you reach down far enough, it's easy to get tight, even if you're rounded over. But when you can't bend down as far, maybe it's like five inches or six inches, now you've got to sort of isometrically contract those muscles. So even though your legs are stronger from a taller position, it's harder to get all that

posterior chain tension. This also, this makes a lot of sense why you're so physically developed in a sense because. That's what I was thinking, yeah. If you do just one deadlift. Yeah, if you do just one deadlift in a certain way like yeah, you're perfect at leveraging that way But you said it perfectly you're learning how to leverage in all these different positions. Yeah activating in differently with at the initiation of each lift that was one day that was I had this one buddy who I trained with and he's the guy who would show up with like

135 pounds and he'd be be pacing back and forth, ready to just scream and like, I'm like, it's 135. And then he was strong, he was a 700 pound deadlifter. But whenever we would train together, I always wound up having some of the best workouts. Because he was so amped up. Yeah, I was just like, can I just kind of stop there?

So the day that I did the like thousand pound block pull off the, off the two, off the two by fours, that was, he was there. His sister was there and I was just like, okay, let's do it. It's a wild looking lift right here. Yeah. Yeah. So that was a, yeah, I mean, I can't say that that's necessarily useful. But fun. What's the weight on the bar there? That's 1,003. Whistle.

So yeah, that just sort of happened. Yeah, no, but if you do the block pulls, a lot of people will be like, oh, this is cheating, you're just doing it for ego. So usually I would do triples or maybe sets of five, and you can build up some serious muscle, especially for sumo it's a huge advantage. So I would always use just a three, three and a half inch,

two by fours or three and a half inches. So using that much height makes it so, you wanna kind of lift maybe 10% over your max, but not really more than that. So if you can rep 105 or 110% of your max, you can build up your traps, your obliques a lot. I mean, your traps will get huge from, you know,

repping super maximal weights, and your hips will get very strong, your what, glute medius, so. Those are all kind of the sumo muscles, and what I always also would say is like, pulling off blocks, you would think this builds up your lockout, but if you're just like, ripping the bar maybe, but I always felt is pulling off blocks, you would think this builds up your lockout, but if you're just ripping the bar maybe, but I always felt like pulling off blocks

teaches you how to brace for the start. The hardest part in blocks is getting it moving and then it's kind of a short stroke. Whereas the deficit teaches you how to finish a lift. You're lifting with your back in a compromised position. You gotta lift in that compromised position the extra three inches and then you've gotta to lift in that compromised position, you know, the extra three inches, and then you've got to lock it out.

So your erectors, even though you're being in a deficit, makes your erectors work from a flexed position. And so that is where it really builds your, kind of your finishing strength, all the posterior chain muscles. So it's a little counterintuitive, but you know, once you kind of think of it that way and you do it, you can realize, okay, yeah, the blocks, it's hard little counterintuitive, but you know once you kind of think of it that way and you do it you can realize

Okay, but yeah the blocks it's hard to get the weight just to budge off the platform and then it's then it's fine He used a lot of conventional exercises to make a lot of progress and I think at the time you were doing it it There was other people doing it but Westside barbell was pretty powerful at the time. And then I believe you wrote an article called West Side, right? And this was the Dan Green coming in with the steel chair, heel turn because all the West Side.

RKO out of nowhere. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, Dan Green RKO, I don't know. Oh my God. Yeah, because no one really touched West Side Barbell. You know, some people would, some people say it doesn't make any sense,

and you had Chad Wesley Smith and some people with their conjectures about what Louie did at the safety bar and the Cambridge bar, and all those guys are just on a bunch of juice, and whatever the case was. If speed work doesn't work, or whatever the different things were that talked about it. this article was really shook things up a lot and I remember because I went to Westside Barbell trained with them and Louis

Simmons was my mentor and so on and I just I was not mad about this by any means I thought that it was great because it's like we need this definitely stirred things up yeah it stirred the pot and you know I don't know guess how do you feel after you you you put that article out? I mean, well first off, I've met Louis a few times and rest in peace. He was a pretty awesome dude to run into and I did a podcast with him later on.

But one of the things I remember from some of his articles, he wrote articles about like, you know, who trains, it was like, who trains harder? Basically people who juice or people who don't. And he was like, you know, lifters who juice can train much, much harder, you know, no matter what. And then he goes, but lifters who are natural, they need to train much, much harder.

They need to build up their training and they need to train that much harder to kind of build up their ability to recover. And I was like, those are kind of like contradictory points. But then if you sort of just take the sort of the real between the lines element, which is like, okay, so lifters who juice can train harder, but lifters who don't need to train harder.

I was like, so the point is, you know, everyone needs to train harder. Oh, I thought the point was everyone should be on the juice. And, you know, so that was always one of the things that, you know, I think I've run into a lot of people where I'm like, it doesn't matter what your training program is, if you're not training hard, like you're right. If you're just expecting the,

the games to just happen because you're following a routine. One of the biggest deals about West side barbell was people training together and people with common ground, right? People who are probably not going to let you just kind of phone it in. Exactly, like people just working hard and critiquing each other on their squat form, their bench form, their deadlift form,

everyone there has the same goal, everyone wants to get better. We talked about it a lot inside the walls of Westside. We'd say, I wonder what would happen if we just did a different program. We'd probably end up with similar results because we're all trying to get stronger and that's all we care about.

Yeah, and I feel like, again, the flip side though is like whichever program you put yourself into, as long as it's reasonable, if you're like putting that effort into it, you're gonna make it work. Yeah. But as far as the article, the west to west side article, you know, one of the things that I had always done in my career, because I never had a coach, I did have Josh Bryant

helping me for a little while, but I wound up getting hurt, and so, not because of him, I hurt myself, dead lifting my shoulder, and so the bench coaching that he was doing for me, it was kind of like, okay, I can't really bench much now. But everything I learned was kind of from observing. You know, and there's always that thought of like, if you go to a gym like Westside,

or you go to a gym where there's stronger people than you, then you'll learn more. But I was always training at like Gold's Gym, and I was like, I was probably the strongest person. But I would always seek out competition in the form of meets. So, you know, I would be signed up to go to one meet, and as I'm training for it and I would see somebody

get a result that's better at a new meet and I was like, all right, well now I'm, you know, I've got my sights set. And eventually I went to, just back in the powerliftingwatch.com days, there was a listing for like, hey, we need American lifters to go and do this meet in Russia. And so I was like, well, I'm not really anybody at this point.

It was like 2010. And so I, you know, I was like, Hey, I'll, I'll go if there's an opening. And it wound up being just like three people. It was like me, Philip Brewer and Jeremy Hornster. And they're both like, you know, bench monsters. And, um, so I go over there and, you know, the whole situation of going to Russia where like nobody speaks English was like pretty daunting in the first place. I felt like I was in like, you know, the whole situation of going to Russia where like nobody speaks English was like pretty daunting in the first place. I felt like I was in like, you know, some movie like the hostel and get like kidnapped somewhere.

Who's like, well like getting in a taxi and they're like driving you, they don't take the freeway because the freeway is just like just gridlocked. They're driving you past all these industrial factories and stuff and you're just like, no idea where they're taking me hopefully to the hotel, but who knows? So when I went to the meet, eventually,

the people at the meet were all the best lifters in the world, like Zaheer and Andrei Milanochev. The meet was won by Andrei Belyaev. He was a 220 guy and he set the world record at like 2,093 pounds. There's another 220, Konstantin Pazdiev, he squatted the world record, it was like 815, and then he tried 859. So back in the day, that was the world record.

But I saw these guys, and I was like, they don't do anything like what I've thought of from West Side Training. They don't warm up in anything like what I've thought of from West Side Training. They don't warm up in the meat like I've seen at all the American meats. You know, when I was watching them warm up, the monolift, I don't know how many people watching, you know, have seen this for like lifted trucks.

But if you have a lifted truck, you gotta get one of those like special jacks to like lift your truck if you have a flat tire. The monolifts didn't just have normal hooks. They had like those like skyjacker like jacks to lift your truck if you have a flat tire. The monoliths didn't just have normal hooks. They had those skyjacker jacks installed on them. I was like, I don't know who made that, but it's kind of sick. I don't know why they couldn't just get a normal one,

but I'm like, okay. All the equipment was just kind of crude and rudimentary, but they're all just focused. My first impression was everybody looked like at some point when they were a kid, you know, they learned to crawl and then to walk and then to squat. And somebody taught them when they were probably like six

and they'd never done the squats incorrectly and then had to unlearn it and do it right. It was like somebody just taught them how to do it right from a young age. And it was so clear in the form that it was like, it's the same every time, all of them. They all looked like, you know, the form was just drilled into them from a long time ago.

You can see it in the warm up room with the bar. When they just had the bar, the American lifters sometimes with the bar wouldn't create enough tension to push them down or whatever, and American lifters just gonna kinda like use their back to do like the bar. The Russian lifters get right underneath there, no mobility problems in their shoulders whatsoever,

their hands are super close, they get right underneath there and they can do a full squat, whether there's 100 pounds on there or whether there's 300 pounds or 800 pounds or 900 pounds. Yeah, and also in the warmups they're like stoic, not hyped up, whereas in most American meets, I would go there and people are trying to lift 135 as fast as possible and get super amped up.

It was just like everyone just milling around kind of quietly and it was like, okay, this is different. Pantera isn't blasting for your warm-ups in a way. Yeah, people are not screaming at their training partner to get amped up for their 405 deadlift. It was like, oh, they're just waiting for the meat. I was like, that's so starkly different. And then watch the meat, and they're all squatting

these enormous weights. And yeah, I remember seeing, damn, these guys have huge quads. I never really, that's always like dis, de-emphasized in like, you know, kind of the West Side training. It was like, oh, quads are like, you know, post-terior chain, yeah.

Yeah, and so I remember I saw Konstantin Pozdyaev bench, and when I was going out to bench, I did like a triple take, literally, because I saw his quads, and like, I looked three times before I realized because I, I saw his quads and like, I looked three times before I realized that's his quads. It looked like there was just like the shelf of something over his kneecaps and I'm like, Oh, that's, that's a lot different than what I've ever seen. So I was like,

my quads look like they kind of taper from my hips down to my knees and his just looked like a cylinder. There's like no taper, just all thickness at the knees. And I was like, okay, that's a lot different. And so, yeah, so I kind of pieced together myself, okay, I need to be training my quads. And then eventually it was the same thing with the bench. It's like you got to develop your chest, not just your triceps and not just your lats.

So and it was pretty clear that a lot of the stuff that works in gear lifting probably works in a raw, but a lot of it is not good enough. And that was, you know, that was a lot of what West, the West side was, was just sort of like, hey, the things that work for geared lifting are maybe not the things that are gonna work for everybody for like, raw lifting, and here's some things

that I've noticed. So. How were you able to put on so much muscle mass? You did give us a brief idea, you know, with some of the stuff you did for your deadlift and stuff like that, but was there any attention to hypertrophy, like actual hypertrophy blocks where you would do, you know, sets of 10

and stuff like that, or did you kind of do some of that minimally? I think for the upper body, I, you know, I had always done a lot of high volume lifting before I was competing in power lifting, and then when I kind of reintroduced it, not in the sets of 10 necessarily, but like many, many sets of like five, sets of six, things like that, it definitely started to increase

my chest size. I did a lot of dumbbell training and overhead press training, dumbbell overhead press training. So a lot of like, I mean, I feel like bodybuilders figured out a long time ago that dumbbells make you bigger. So that's like, if you're not utilizing that, you know, you're kind of like missing out, I think. You know, I think a lot of top lifters have, you know, advise younger lifters to like gain

some muscle and not be skinny so much. And so I definitely did that. For the lower body, the thing that really worked the most for me was when I started training my quads, the first thing I tried was I'm gonna do some leg presses and that pumps up the quads. I don't know that it really made a huge difference. And then a few weeks after that, I was like,

I'm gonna do some front squats. So I did the front squats and it'll be kind of like after my back squats. And I found like some of the time I had a good workout, some of the time I didn't. And then eventually what I did that really changed the game for me was I put the front squats on their own day. So they were like the first exercise of the day.

And then based on some like conversations I had with Sam Bird, he kind of told me he does like a back squat day and then he does like a front squat day. Back squat day for him was more focused on speed and the front squat day was like kind of a bodybuilder day, like three sets of five to eight kind of thing. So I really just, I was like, you're doing more intensity on your front squats than your back squats

is what I took away from that. And so I started doing the front squats on their own day, trying to get in that like five to eight rep range and that just really never stopped working for me. I think I was at, when I started doing that, my squat was around 615 and in two years I was up to 815 and my front squat went from like 405 to about 600. So it was just a lot of never ending gains

from the front squatting and a lotending gains from the front squatting, and a lot of size from the front squatting. So the way I saw it for me was like the low bar training was you gotta master your craft. You also, you know, when you have sets of like five with a low bar, it's a lot of time with weight on your back. So your back gets strong from that. And then I would do a lot of high bar pause squatting,

and that also really helps you to like learn how to use the quads in a back squat. And also when you pause at the bottom, you, you really build your skill and confidence, how to be stable and how to be explosive out of the bottom. And then the front squat was like, it was the hypertrophy. That was the thing. So whenever my front squats went up, back squats went up, and my sumo got stronger. So it wasn't like there was a lot of attention

to machines or anything, leg extensions, leg curls, that sort of thing? Yeah, I don't think I did any of that for years and years. The only machine I would touch would be, I have a hack squat, and I'll do, sometimes I would do that, but that was never a staple. We have a, there's a ton of questions from people,

but as you were talking about this, I was looking for a specific question I saw, and I've never seen you do this, but someone who's apparently watched a lot of your training wanted to know what made you start doing barbell-burg-Bulgarian split squats? And I don't know if that was a big part of your training, but did you start doing that also in effect

to try to bring more size to your quads? No. No, okay, looks like not. No, but I mean that was when I was about 39. So that was when I was already, I hadn't competed in five or six years. I'd had quad surgery, I'd had bicep terasurgery, I had my elbow surgery for bone spurs.

Then I had three more kids, so I hadn't competed in like a long time. And there was COVID. So I started, you know, training for a meet. This was 2021, I competed, I think it was like December. And so during that training phase, I was pretty, it was pretty clear like my quads are strong, but like only my right glute was really firing,

and I'd be shifting a lot to one side. And so I managed to hit a PR of 804, and it was pretty clear that when I come out of the hole, I didn't hit that second gear, because it was basically above parallel, below parallel, just your mass rebounds you, you get that passive reflex, or you get that stretch reflex from just mass and the passiveounds you, you get that passive reflex, or you get that stretch reflex

from just like mass and the passive tension you build up. But above parallel, I would just shift to my right side because my right hip was strong and my left hip was kind of not really firing up. So in the next, I guess the next year, I was doing some training and I started doing the Bulgarians and what I decided was I was like, well if I always get stuck above parallel,

I'm going to restrict the Bulgarians to kind get stuck above parallel, I'm gonna restrict the Bulgarians to kind of like above parallel. Whereas in the past, I think I mentioned before, I've been kind of just like, it's always better to do more range of motion. And you know, one time I had done a lot of range of motion and it was like, I kind of felt the hip flexor strain. So I was like, all right, that's kind of foolish.

So when I started doing the split squats with a limited range of motion, that really started to turn my glute back on and then my squats kind of started shooting up. And so I was like, oh, this is pretty sweet. I was doing a lot of safety bar squats and I started hitting PRs on those. So I started doing that just more recently

in the last couple years, but I think they're pretty good and I think that kind of limited range seems to be better. There's definitely a tendency, just philosophically, to think, well, if I can use more weight and more range of motion, sometimes you need to pick the one thing that's more important and then not make it kind of get muddied up by trying to prioritize

more than one thing, which then, you know, you have this convoluted sort of priority thing. We were talking about Colton and him hitting those numbers recently and it looks like he's got room to hit bigger weights. Do you think that kind of just automatically moves him into being the greatest of all time or does he have to go and do it more? Certainly in one regard. It's like the best...

One of the things about powerlifting is once you lift the weight once it's like that's there forever you know. Yeah so that's the biggest total in history for raw lifting right? Yeah I mean there's a side of me that's like I want to prove that I can still lift but there's also a side of me where people come up and like hey you watched your lifting and you know I was pretty stoked about it so yeah those things kind of are there forever now. I mean yeah is he gonna do it forever I don't know that would be I mean the yeah, is he going to do it forever? I don't know. That would be, I mean, the more he does,

the more like that, that's going to be more remarkable. So it'd be harder and harder to catch up to him. I don't, yeah, I don't think it was catching up to him for a while, but just the, I mean, it's very impressive. So do you feel like for yourself, you just haven't quite reached your potential? Like, is that why you're still doing it? Still chasing after it?

That's a good question. I don't know I I Would definitely say that's that's part of it, you know Or maybe didn't like leave on your own terms sort of like ended up with some injuries and a quad surgery and stuff I definitely feel like my squat and my deadlift I can hit you know lifetime PRS and so that is very you know Very motivating that's awesome injuries from my neck that kind of like caused my bench to really really suck now or not You know just not be very fun to kind of like, you know train but Squatting and other thing I still feel like there's sort of new methods and you know new territory to kind of make

That I find motivating so and you curtailed your training a little bit because you already built the mass, you already built the structure, you already know how to squat, you already know how to deadlift, so I'd imagine maybe the intensity and volume doesn't need, I mean you still gotta kick it into high gear, there's no question about that, but have you been able to back down a little bit

with some of the stuff you were doing when you were younger and still get great results. Yeah, no, I think, I always, you know, it's always important to distinguish, like, yeah, when we say intensity, for me, a lot of times that just meant, like, pushing myself really hard, or maybe doing the most reps in a set that I could do

where it's sort of the more classic, you know, lifter definition is like percent of one rep max. So certainly for me, I mean the two things I think that you need to do if you're trying to peak your training or just improve your strength in the long term is you have to constantly pursue perfect form and you can't really do that without some amount of heavy lifting

and you have to increase your training volume. So I think I've gotten smarter at how to increase my training volume and I I think I've gotten smarter at how to increase my training volume. And I've kind of figured out how much heavy lifting is enough and what's maybe too much. So I'm definitely sort of trying to be more strategic. Also, I think with building the volume,

the other thing that I think is good is if you, unless you're just like built to squat or deadlift or bench, then there's probably a sort of a version of the squat or bench or deadlift that might suit you better for building volume. So if you like, Steffy Cohn, and you're like, your deadlift form is really perfect and you want to do like 20 reps of deadlifts,

that could be great. But for me, I feel like I need to do some variations of deadlifts to really build up my biggest strength. So a lot of times the workout would look like, you know, kind of one top set of deadlifts. And then I would use some secondary lift, like a pause deadlift or a deficit deadlift, and I would build up volume with that. So Mark, you have been loving wearing these Paloovas for a long time. Why is it that you like these shoes that look like this? I'm trying to get my feet to be jacked. I think it's funny how sometimes people will,

when I wear these shoes, they're like, oh, those are different. And I'm like, well, maybe you should blame God because this is the human foot. This is the way that it looks. But Paloovas are awesome because it's gonna allow you to train your feet and train your toes and allow for that toe spread

because you got the five finger toe thing going on. It's like putting on a glove for your feet, feels amazing. It's like walking around with toe spacers. You know, we've been working on our feet for a long time now. You always hear the benefit of people talking about like these tribes who have gone without shoes forever and they have this toe space and have these amazing feet. And these shoes will allow you to just passively get that back by walking around.

You don't realize what a disadvantage you're at when your foot is all clumped together from the football cleats or soccer cleats or whatever else you were wearing when you were young and so it's nice to be able to splay your toes. In addition to that though, one thing I love about Paluva is the fact that it's not a regular barefoot shoe. I do love barefoot shoes as well, but it also has appropriate padding. And when you're stepping on some crazy pebbles and rocks

and different things, like when I'm out on a run, some terrain is a little different than others. I don't have to be worried that I'm gonna get some sort of stabbing crazy thing happening to my foot because it has an appropriate amount of cushion underneath the foot. And guys, Paloova has a lot of different styles on their website. I think one of the newest styles they just came out with, which is a little bit more

of a rigorous do is the Strand ATR. It's not these, these are the Strands, but the ATRs have a little bit more. If you want to go hiking with them, you totally can. Those are amazing. If you go out, you know, throw those on and go sprint on a field and your feet feel so strong grabbing the grass and being able to actually grab the ground with your foot feels amazing. I'm more of a chill guy with my Paluva. So I like the Zen slip ons, but that's the thing with Paluva, there's a lot of different options.

So if you had to Paluva.com and use code power project, you'll be able to save 15% off your entire purchase. And they also have toe socks. Their five feet of toe socks are no show. So check those out too. And instead of the way it used to do, which is usually like kind of one max set of reps, it would be more like, maybe the my era max, but I'm doing like five by five with it. So a better way to kind of build up more total reps. And I saw that kind of working, working better for me. So

you mentioned a few, you mentioned that you had a quad bicep neck. I don't know if there were any other injuries, but I think pretty good number. So this is one of the really cool things about being able to talk with you is you have so much experience. And I wonder for a lot of the younger list lifters that are listening better, you know, they want to become super strong or they already are. What are some things that maybe you wish you had

in your training that maybe could have prevented some potential injuries? Or you already just mentioned something right here about the way you work with volume, you know? Like figuring that out. What are some other things that you think could definitely have helped? Yeah, I mean, certainly the two things that I would think

of that come to mind for me would be, like for example, with dead lifting, having a cleaner form where you're not yanking the bar off the ground, but you're kind of pulling the slack out. And that can still look very aggressive and it can look more aggressive for one person than the next. There's a lot of acceptably good form

with idiosyncrasy from person to person. But certainly I'd form where I would just be like trying to, like in my mind, if I yanked the bar hard enough off the floor, I would succeed. And so obviously there's no amount of force at the floor that completes the lift for you right there. You've got to get in position to actually drive it all the way up. So certainly getting good form is a key thing

to kind of preserving yourself. If your bench or your squat is uneven, you're putting undue stress on some joint more than another. Can you maybe describe a little bit of what you're trying to do when you're deadlifting? Because I remember, I remember seeing you do like some deadlifts and meets where you're kind of excited,

you're kind of fired up. I mean, you were always pretty calm, but you were excited, you know, to do the lift. And you'd go out and you'd like tug the bar and you weren't even in position yet. And the bar would like almost come off the ground. I was always like, Holy shit. Like I've never really seen anyone do that before. Um, yeah. What are you, what's kind of going through your head? What are you, what are you working on to be able to get yourself in good position for a big

pull? Yeah. Well, I would say in the earlier days, it was just like being as aggressive as I could, you know, kind of dropping the hips and then pulling up and back as hard as I could. So there were, you know, it probably took me like three or four, you know, hamstring terrorists to like figure out that there was like a better way. But I definitely tore my hamstrings like repeatedly.

Meant more like a paper towel, but you have a paper towel, see if you can find a paper towel. Oh, I don't know. Just try to see if we can find some. Yeah, so a lot of hamstring tears from like kind of poor deadlifting form or just maybe over aggressive ones.

But it's been a while since we had like a real power lifter on the show and sometimes I get a little sweaty. But the, yeah, I think the other thing, like I had done in this video here where I'm doing like 900 and I don't have a belt, what I was thinking for that was like just as important as getting strong is I need to not get hurt leading up to the competition,

to the event. And so in my mind I was like, okay, what are the things that are going to probably be the places I get hurt? And it was like, okay, I don't want to tear my hamstring, I don't want to hurt my lower back, I don't want to tear my lats. And so my training was basically like,

I need to handle these hard sets and hard volume to get stronger, but I also, okay, I need to maintain a certain amount of strength with my sit-ups. If your stomach is strong, then your back is more supported, especially with no belt. So I would do, you know, I had kind of a rotation of like straight leg sit ups with a weight behind my head,

incline sit ups with a weight on my chest. I would do like the ab wheel, just, you know, on my toes for some reps and some like hanging leg raises. So I was like, as long as I can have a certain standard of that, I'm not like overdoing it, but I'm not neglecting it. That'll help to preserve my lower back to tolerate the training.

And then for hamstrings, I was like, I'm not trying to build mass, but I am doing just kind of a minimal amount of GHRs just to make sure the tendons feel like they get some stimulus. So that was the other thing, is sort of like knowing where your body might have sort of vulnerabilities and just addressing them,

not trying to, so I would just want to be where I'm like, I can do the sit-ups with a 60 pound dumbbell, but not then thinking, well, if I can do it with a 100 pound dumbbell, what can I develop now? I was like, no, I know that's not gonna be the weak link if I can do the 60 pound dumbbell, but doing more is not gonna, it's just gonna put me in harm's way,

it's not gonna make me develop more. So that was one of the most successful build-ups for me, and it was because it was like, I just kind of knew where I might derail myself and I was able to just stick to the script and kind of a, you know, sure. Thank you, sir. All right. Here's a little towel. If you didn't want to wipe yourself out, get a little too excited here, leave it right here if you need it. Anyway. Um, you know, those,

those front squats are actually like really brutal. I've never, I've never been like man enough to go through like an, and, and handle some front squats. Did you ever put like squat shoes on or you always flats? I tried to do it. Yeah. I've tried a little bit with, uh, with some squat shoes or with, uh, some, you know, 10 pound plates underneath my heels or whatever. And it's interesting because I sucked at them so bad that it would have probably been the thing to help me get more progress or to allow me to hold myself a little bit more upright.

And it's just interesting how when you're trying to find like weak points, but sometimes you find like a certain weak point where it's like demoralizing. And you're like, I don't know if I should, I don't know if I should really even mess with that one. What are some things that you've done like from a recovery standpoint in your workouts in terms of like, I don't know, you do any like myofascial release stuff?

Do you go to a massage therapist or any of those things, especially coming off of like, you know, torn muscles and torn ligaments and so forth. I've probably gone through like the gauntlet of different things. You know, we used to have like, Jordan was a chiropractor at our gym and he'd do a lot of like ART and some, you know,

different like muscle stuff like PNF stretching and you know, some adjustments and, you know, I've done like electro stem, I feel like that didn't do a whole lot. I've done, at one point when I was younger, I liked doing contrast showers, so that's really good, or bath I think is even better if you have two baths to go in.

But that's basically the idea of getting in the shower and you're getting it hot where you're basically, you're sweating, and then this works better in the winter time, you're getting it hot where you're basically, you're sweating and then this works better in the wintertime but you flip it to the cold water and you just tolerate that for about like a minute, to two minutes and you're like shivering, you're like, I don't wanna do this.

And then you crank back the hot water. And to me, so this is like the approach that I have for all electronics which is like you're just hitting the reset button. So your circulation increases while the water's hot, and then it sort of like retracts away from your limbs and into the core of your body when you go into the cold. And then the moment you put the hot water back on,

it sort of like flushes back out through your circulatory system. And I think it really like, sometimes you get like knotted up muscles the Circulation kind of sucks and then when you hit that like hot cold hot and you reset it it flushes through those kind of like congested You know arteries and veins and stuff. So for things like knots in the hamstrings in the back That felt like it worked really good You know for a while to use the shower and then we had one house that we were renting

that had like a pool and a hot tub, so that would be pretty good as well. You know, I've gotten like massages. There's a place where the women do like, they like walk on your back and you know, that feels pretty good. So definitely I've used that for like, when I was doing my meat or the, you know,

lifting for the, you know, the cage. So, you know, you know just write it something I don't think anything is like a miracle I think you had to kind of start with you know smart training and good high protein diet and that sort of thing so was there any like writing on the wall like when you would get injured were you like oh man there was a couple clues there I should have kind of paid attention to that definitely hindsight is 2020 and you know like I've probably torn my hamstrings like four or five times so you know sometimes you're not smart enough to of paid attention to that. Definitely hindsight is 20-20. And you know, like I've probably torn my hamstrings like four or five times. So, you know, sometimes you're not smart enough

to like pay attention to the message and you do it again. But yeah, I mean, like sometimes you do learn, you're like, okay, these are the things I need to not do. These are the things that will help me to kind of stay healthy. Right. So yeah, I mean, definitely have to evolve and yeah. So I think I've learned a lot of the lessons just because I feel like I'm like

not smart enough to retire when I've gotten hurt, you know, just I'm still here. And then he tried the things and you're like, I'm not going to do that thing again that kind of got me in trouble. So, I'm curious about this man because you know, as you were talking about those Russian lifters, something that you, you all, I mean you see it in competition and I wonder about it in training, but it's almost like they always have a little bit left in the tank.

It's always like even after, like a lot of their third attempts, they could have done more, but that third attempt was heavy and clean. So it makes me think that they're probably very good at selecting good weights in training where they don't push too much. And one thing I noticed with like,

I think it happens to everybody is, you know, you're excited on a certain day and you just like, you probably work with weights. You shouldn't, maybe it works well that day, but you build that habit and then one day it just doesn't. Right. How do you think a lifter should gauge if they know that they want to go heavy on a certain day? how heavy is heavy enough? Okay. Well, if you're, if you're talking about like, let's say for a competition, you know, cause that's where it's like if you're trying to decide,

you've got to be able to, I mean, first of all, from like that sports psychology standpoint, if you're the lifter on one side, you should be thinking like I could lift any weight. And on the other side, you should be like, what's a good, what's a good strategy, you know? What's gonna be a way that I can actually lift? But the problem is a lot of people are like over cautious and a lot of people are not good at judging their limits because they're overly aggressive.

So that's a pretty, you know, I'm not gonna, I think you probably read a book about trying to gauge your own ability. But a lot of people do kind of talk themselves down and you know. So that part, I mean I don't know, you have to kind of, I think having a coach who can objectively like watch you and be like, yeah, you, you think you can lift 30 more pounds, but we're going to do like 10 more pounds, you know?

So sometimes you need the helper to be, you know, the voice of reason while you're just kind of like ready to run through a wall. And then on like the training side of things like training day to day, because one thing is like, you know, somebody gets into power lifting. They want to gain strength fast, but strength does take time. For most people, vast majority of people, strength does take a lot of time.

But when you see people lifting four or five, six, seven, eight, you want to almost try to speed run it, even though that's not a great idea. So what would your advice be on like being patient with training and picking correct numbers in training? I mean, I feel like there's a lot of ways you can go. I mean, a lot of lifters I've seen who are younger though, they'll do meets like four or five times a year. And you know,

so the ability to kind of go heavy, make it or not make it, and then go back to training. And I think, you know, most people respond really well to training when they're younger, assuming they train hard. You know, if you train hard, you might make some mistakes and set yourself back. But, um, and if you're just very cautious, then I think what you're asking is kind of irrelevant cause they're already pacing yourself maybe too much. Yes. So I think, you know,

you have to just kind of have a little trial and error and then you'll, you'll probably find sometimes that, you know, if you do it on your own, maybe you overdo it. I mean, honestly, if you do it on your own and you can't get it right, you should have somebody help you. If you hire a coach, then you should be at that point where you're like, I want to lift more when my coach is holding me back. So when the meat comes, you're hungry. When I did the 900 deadlift in the animal cage,

in that training, the story behind that for me was like a year before that, I had torn my quad and I had the quad reattached surgically. And so when I started training again, usually I would squat twice a week. So I'd do like back squats and front squats or maybe some safety squats. And when I started training back, every time I would do a squat workout

It was like I can't really just get quad dominant and it was like I would lift and then I would be pretty stiff for a Few days so I only squat like once a week and it was really just like a good morning with my knees bent So I was like, well, I can't sumo really so I'll just Conventional pull and so at the time my best sumo was 880 But my best conventionalo was 880, but my best conventional was 780. It's like a huge difference. And so I didn't know,

should I be basing my training on 780 or on 880? So I didn't really know. But eventually I was getting stronger and I made a breakthrough on my form. And so before I did the 900 in the cage, I kind of set out to do it. Like once I made 850 in training, I was like, I feel like that's,

I don't know why, but I feel like I could do that. And so in made 850 in training, I was like, I feel like that's, I don't know why, but I feel like I could do that. And so in the training, the heaviest I did was 865. And in one side, I was like, I know that I just need to do certain weights to kind of be ready to make an attempt, but I also know, and this is where a lot of people run into an issue, if you lack mental strength,

then you will not feel confident to keep your training under wraps and then just wait for the meat to take that adrenaline-fueled attempt. So you will be like, the only way I'll know if I can do 900 in this event is if I do it in training like five times. And then that may not help. It might actually cause you to get hurt and then not do it or may cause you to peak

your training too soon. So being able to kind of know like what do I need to do to stimulate physically and then mentally, how do I know how to be strong enough to like not be tempted to do the weight in training that I just should wait to the meat to do. Yeah. I mean that's a whole nother deal right there.

You have to kind of figure out how to do that or have somebody who can Have had enough competitive experience to kind of like keep you know, keep you in check Yeah, it's really hard to get the strength that you really need with just five sets of five You know five to five is gonna get you a lot stronger I'm sure that someone could do it, but it actually would be very hard to not Take those heavier temps at least here in there you know you have training sessions where maybe you do your five by five or maybe you do what's prescribed and be very hard to not take those heavier attempts, at least here and there.

You know, you have training sessions where maybe you do your five by five, or maybe you do what's prescribed. And you know, you're doing sets of five, and you get to that like fourth set, you're like, I could handle a little bit more weight. You put a quarter on there, that goes pretty smooth, and you're like, ah, might as well.

You know what I mean? The next thing you know, you're kind of like maxing out. I think that happens to a lot of power lifters. Oh, for sure. Yeah, and I mean, I always feel you know, you're kind of like maxing out I think that happens to a lot of powerlifters. Oh for sure Yeah, and I mean I always feel like when I look at my training programs on like so logical It's so you know The one side is like a little bit of sophistication to it because I'm you know Each thing I'm doing has a purpose and then on the other side. I'm like this is really simple, but

I've obviously thought about it so much that it's like it's probably not simple to the person who's like trying to figure out what I'm doing I've obviously thought about it so much that it's like it's probably not simple to the person who's like trying to figure out What I'm doing But yeah I mean I think there there has to be some sophistication in your training program because you know I think the one classic thing that everyone who's in a bodybuilder powers or knows is like, you know Any program can work but no program can work forever So you've got to be able to kind of like, you know introduce new stimuli in your training, you know So if it's like what's's better, training with sets of 10

or training with sets of five? It's like, well, one's gonna work for a while and then it's not gonna work. And then the other, so it's like, you've got to figure out a way to kind of utilize each sort of element of training effectively and then also if you're trying to time it so you have your peak at a certain event,

then you have to sort of order those blocks of training or those sort of, and there's also training where you do like blocks, so you might do one thing for four weeks at a time, and then the next thing, and then there's more of the conjugate, where you're like, I'm gonna do like, Brandon and Lily have the cube thing, where you're like, I'm gonna do a max this week,

and then next week it'll be reps, and then there's gonna be like a speed training. So you're kind of rotating through different stimuli. So there's a lot of ways to do it, but you know. I think we have a bunch of questions for you. So maybe we can start to hammer through a couple of those. Like there's a lot. All right, let's start on the nutrition aspect

because there's a few, one person wants to know like if you still follow the vertical diet and then there's another one about protein. So in essence, like what has your nutrition looked like through the years? Has it changed as he's gotten older? Has it been consistent? Okay. So I would say from about age 15 to 25, my most important staple was like burritos and also like a lot of hot wings. So, you know, always seeking out a lot of protein and calories, calories,

get your pen out kids. I mean the, it is true though, like we used to lift at Gold's gym and Gold's gym would close at 10 but also the burrito place would close at 10. So like, I got to wrap this up by like 9 45 to like get my calories in after the workout. And then if I didn't, then it was like, all right, I got to go to the, get some wings later. So, but, uh, I do now kind of follow more like the vertical diet. I definitely prefer that.

I do a lot of meals where it's like rice and rice and ground beef or ground Turkey. Those are kind of two staples for me. But, um, I also like, I also, and this is kind of like more like the zone diet, I would say, um, where I will sort of organize certain meals around either having high protein high carbs and like really minimal fat So that could be like okay. I'm eating ground turkey and rice. It's a lot of protein and carbs, but very little fat Or I could have a meal that's like high in protein high in fat, but very little carbs I'll be like I'm gonna have like an omelet with a bunch of bacon, or I'm going to have a steak

and maybe some vegetables, or like a salad, but I'm not going to have bread and mashed potatoes. It's such a great way to eat too if you're traveling, because that allows you to kind of like pick and choose according to what restaurant you go to. Yeah, sure. Makes things more simple. Then you can still eat the foods you like,

but also the, if you sort of don't combine the carbs and the fat, like, which is kind of what I'm calling the zone dieting, I'm not making this up. This is just sort of something I've seen before. You're, you're not combining the two different energy systems. So you're able to digest it a lot better. Like I go to breakfast or my wife cooks and I'm like, all right, I just ate like seven scrambled eggs and you know, four strips of bacon and a bunch of you know, whatever Feel pretty good. But if I go and have like a piece of toast after that, I'm like, alright, I'm ready for a nap, you know

So it's just like that one little element of carbs kind of bogs it down the question about that real quick Do you feel like that you wouldn't have felt like that from 15 to 25? Do you feel like you could just eat anything together and you wouldn't feel that? But as you got older, is that why? Or, um, did you feel that way before too? Um, that's a good question. I think a big element for me is like every couple of years I figure out a new trick in the kitchen and it's like my quality of life has improved, you know, and you learn like, oh, I learned how to cook a steak or I know how to scramble eggs or I bought a rice cooker and I don't have to like heat up, you know, and you learn like, oh, I learned how to cook a steak or I know how to scramble eggs or I bought a rice cooker and I don't have to like heat up,

you know, refrigerated rice, which is pretty awful. So pretty much my gym and at home I have like rice cookers. I just always have, you know, that white rice is ready to go. And then, you know, I know how to just make a ton of ground beef or ground, uh, ground turkey or cook, you know like a Costco package of steaks and Yeah, so once I learned how to kind of deal with actually making food is like, okay I'm living better and then probably pretty simple too

Like if you're trying to gain weight you probably just weigh yourself a little bit here and there if you're trying to lose weight Check the scale a little bit here and there just kind of see where you're going My default is always gaining weight Like if I'm not really thinking about my I always gain gain weight cause I eat a lot. That's just there. So when I do a meat, that's when I'm like, all right, I'm going to start dropping the snacks and then I got to start controlling the portions a little bit. So then it's always like, all right, I need to make sure my protein is in check,

but I'm just not like eating superfluous stuff or I'm like monitoring how much, you know, rice I'm eating or whatever. So for me, it's always a matter of like, if I want to lean out, I need to try. If I want to gain weight, I don't do anything, I just eat. So. Yeah, and at 270, like the next time you compete, are you going to try to get down to 242 or what do you think you'll?

I'd say normally my like kind of in between competition weight is probably like mid 250, 257, 258, somewhere in there. So, definitely just bulked up a little more as a result of eating a lot of my kids' snacks in the house. So that is one challenge for me. But when I compete, I'm sure I will, it's hard for me to get motivated to diet unless I have like a meat.

And then I'm like, all right, my training feels good, but training feels a lot better when your protein is like really high Mm-hmm, and so then that sort of becomes more intrinsically motivating and then if you are I don't know if I would do like 220 again, but if I was you know trying to get the 220 I'd have to get my body weight down to like 240 and That would take a lot of I mean take a lot of consistent eating But also having that sort of fear of missing the weight is pretty good motivation to eat on a schedule.

And this actually question ties into something we were talking about in the gym. Somebody asked, how do you balance being a dad with training? Do you have less time to train now? Yep. So I have a lot less time to train for sure. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, I think even from when my wife

was pregnant with our first kid, and she was just pregnant, I didn't want to be like, you know, so that was when I was like, all right, I'm not going to go to the gym for four hours. I'm going to try to keep it to like 75 minutes and just do the important stuff and like, not, you know, bullshit with my friends too much and I'll kind of like figure out which accessories

are like meaningful and which ones are just kind of like unnecessary, you know. So now it's, you know, again, it's always about like kind of pairing down. What do I need and then like what do I kind of not, you know, what do I need to do? So yeah, that's pretty straightforward I think, but it's a reality.

It's not easy. I think the toughest thing for me, because we have three toddlers right now, and so in the last few years, sleeping has been reduced a lot. So that's not really something you can work around. Yeah, so that was right after the middle two were born, then we had one more daughter.

So yeah, there was not a lot of, you know, it's not a lot of sleep that you'd ideally want. You're like eight or nine hours of sleep as a lifter, and it just wasn't. So you have four kids, right? And there's a set of twins in there, right? Yeah, so the oldest is 14, the twin boys who are five, and the daughter's four.

Two kids at the same time, and they're five. That's awesome. And hard. All right, another question. Yeah, that are five. That's awesome. Yeah. And hard. All right, another question. Yeah, essentially, should young lifters try to get stronger while maintaining a weight class or should they try to get bigger and break plateaus? Yeah, so one of the slogans I always put in my hashtags

is no skinny champions. So this is not exclusively for like weight gain, but it's really more the concept of like having sort of self-limiting sort of like mantras, you know, which would be like, I want to get big, but I don't want to lose my abs. And we're like, you're skinny, you need to get big. Nobody cares about your abs right now.

Or, you know, I want to get bigger but not too big. You know, so there are all those things. Yeah, I think if you restrict yourself for some arbitrary reason, that can be like the theme of your whole career. Is like always kind of, you know, not getting as excited as you want because you're not getting the results you want because maybe there's something you're doing that's kind of slowing getting as excited as you want because you're not getting the results you want

because maybe there's something you're doing that's kind of slowing you down. You know, another one for me is like, think with a lot of RPE training, there's like a really good, I mean it's a really great concept, but a lot of people overthink it and they basically outsmart themselves

out of like training hard enough. So that's something, I mean that's again, with the thing with Louis, it's like you have to train hard, you have to introduce a lot of stress. And if you're just measuring it too well, then you never get big. That's actually probably one of the reasons why AMRAPs for you are so good,

because you actually brush up on failure, you know? But what I thought about later, after I'd been doing it for a long time, is I was like, okay, if there was a way of kind of taking Dorian Yates and doing it as like a powerlifter, that's kind of it. Where his training was like, all right, I'm gonna do like my pullovers

for just a warmup set and then a set of max reps, and then I would do my bent over rows for like a warm-up and then like A set of max reps and it's kind of in that six to eight rep range Yeah, that's kind of what I was doing a lot of like sets of five to eight And it would just be like all right one set of max reps and you know, it doesn't necessarily Mean that you'll feel great as far as your body later on in life But it also does it does work. Mm-hmm And you know, certainly it's like that intensity of effort

that's there that kind of makes it work. For me it worked well too because, okay so a lot of people if you're gonna like squat and do like a set of eight for example, your form will deteriorate as you go from like four, five, six, seven, eight to the point where it might not be productive or it might be like dangerous. Same thing for deadlifts or for bench.

But for me, I was always able to execute my technique right up until the end. And a lot of that is like experience, but really what makes it work is that you have an idea of what you need to do for your technique and all the sort of the mental distress that kind of creeps into your mind while you're squatting or you're just like,

just wanna get this over with. Why am I doing this? Like I could just stop now and it'll be fine. Just like, just start the last one. So if you can take the time to always, like let's say you're squatting and your traps are hurting, you're like kind of tired in your lower back,

you're wobbling, you're getting out of breath. But if you can sort of take the time to sort of say, let me stay tight, take a couple like little in-between breaths until I can take a strong breath, you know, brace and still like execute the full squat. If you can do good reps until the end, to me like AMRAP is as many reps as possible, not as many reps as impossible.

You're not trying to fail, you're just doing as many as you know you can do with confidence and then stopping. But certainly pushing through that mental distress of like, that's enough. But yeah, not everybody wants to do that. And for whatever reason, I did. So it worked well for me.

Other people, it doesn't work. And other people, the first rep is the best one. And then, you know, and that might be, that means that your training needs to be kind of like tailored for that certainly, so. You mentioned earlier you have like some neck pain or like a nerve thing and you think it's kind of throwing your bench press off.

Have you ever spoken to any other lifters about that and tried to figure out how to get that to fire better? I know Jill Sullivan, when he had that barbell like kind of wrap around his neck when he was doing that heavy squat, that he ran into a lot of issues and that whole, like he had a whole side that was just like shut off and he really struggled.

Have you ever communicated with anybody like that to try to get those nerves to fire? Yeah, I've definitely talked directly with Joe because I know that he pretty much, he did it in a different way than I did it, but he had pretty much the exact same injury. Now him and I had both competed as like two twenties and two fortys. We both had exactly the same benches of like five Oh one at two twenty,

I think five twenty nine or five twenty three at two forty two. And so he had done the thing where the bar just kind of like folded over his neck and, and then he said said he thought he was okay, but then like about six weeks had gone by and like he couldn't even bench 135 without like problems. And the same thing happened to me, not squatting, but I was doing like, I was doing some like, kind of like a dragon flag,

so I was trying to do some ab training on one of those incline sit-up boards. And I just wound up like putting way too much pressure on my neck. I thought it was okay and then, and then it was obviously not. And so I went six weeks, and it was like, I was doing some bench, and I was like, that bench kinda sucks.

And then one day I was doing 135, and I couldn't even just push it up without flaring, and I was like, that's really, really messed up. So yeah, I mean, we pretty much had the same thing. We both had our bench kinda dip down to where we're like, okay, we're doing like 350 or something like that. You know, so you've lost like 30% of your strength or whatever the number was. And I had had it for about three years and I,

and the same guy that helped him to kind of like regain it, uh, Jake Benson, like I, I wanted to talk to him and we worked together for a little while, but I didn't really go through with the whole program. I think my, my life was not conducive enough for that. So I did not, I mean, it's my fault. I didn't really go through with the whole thing and I was just like, I can't keep up with this. It's like pretty rigorous.

And so I was like, it's gonna have to happen in the future sometime if it does, but it was like, okay, I can't. So my bench is, you know, I've been able to get up to like around 440, but that's still like 80% of former benches. So it's like, you know, not that exciting to try to make a 400 bench and to meet when you've done like

over 500. There's another question about calisthenics now that you just mentioned those dragon flags, uh, you, your opinion on calisthenics and how they help with your powerlifting and if they do, um, yeah, I think the only example that I would say, I guess two, I've always done a lot of pull ups, so pull ups are pretty great.

I think doing high reps with body weight is a really good way to build up your lats. Sometimes I think that's better than weighted pull ups for me, but I've talked to Julius Maddux and he was really big on this whole push up sort of regiment that he was doing. He's pretty good at benching. So.

And he's absolutely massive. Yeah, he's like a 400 pound guy. And the way he explained it to me was, and he had also worked with Josh Bryant, but Josh had him basically do 10 sets of five push-ups. And you're basically just reversing really fast and forcefully at the bottom. So it's to build up your chest strength.

So he said he did 10 sets of five and then eventually he had him work up to 10 sets of 40. So you can think of like 400 pushups for a 400 pound guy. And he said that really blew up his off the chest strength. And so after I had this neck injury which also really affected my tricep, not so much my chest. I was like, well, I can train my chest pretty well. So I started implementing that and I had gotten up to the 400 pushups.

If nothing else, it was fun. My chest was pretty pumped up and it looked good. I think if all things are healthy, that can be a good strategy. I know in Westside, I've talked to Louis, and he would kind of explain certain bench protocols, like wide grip benching, where you would kind of start with a six by six and do that for a little while,

and then you would take a new weight and do eight sets of eight, and then eventually it would be like a 10 by 10. And so I thought it was pretty interesting that Louis was like, the idea here was not doing some exercise and then over the course of time increasing the weight, but it was like using a certain exercise where the focus of the workout

was increasing the sort of the volume. So obviously a push up is your body weight. And so if you're using a weight and the goal is just to increase the workload with that weight, not just to like do a rep Range and then increase the weight as you go such an obvious sort of thing to think about once you've identified it, but So that's something I try to utilize in training with a lot of people is you know bodyweight stuff can be good for some people

But yeah, I think what I learned from that was like, okay There's a lot of ways to really benefit from ramping up rep ranges into these like really high rep ranges. And you see a lot of like CrossFit women who are huge from doing like 300 squats a day or so. I don't know why it doesn't work for the men, but yeah, I mean, there's definitely some benefit to doing a lot of reps of calisthenics.

Those CrossFit dudes are pretty big too in that way. But it's like the women look like they're more jacked. They do. They do. Yeah, exponentially, yeah. They look super jacked. But I think certain calisthenics don't work because you're like, your body weight is a one rep max

for certain things, you know? Yeah, yeah. So you can do like 20 muscle ups, it's like probably not, you know? Fair. All right, and I don't know if this is something you think about, but this is a correct question from Kenton Kramer. All right, and I don't know if this is something you think about but this is a correct question from

Kenton Kramer, what is a way to bulletproof tendons and ligaments? Well, I think it depends on which which ones so like for example I was saying before when I was trying to you know, build up my conventional deadlift I wanted to make sure my hamstring tendons wouldn't you know snap and so I was just doing Some GHRs with bodyweight. It wasn't even that much. It'd probably be like 20 reps in a workout but it was just to address it. I don't know. I think you probably need to figure an exercise out that works for any one of the body parts. There's no one exercise that's going to fix all the tendons obviously. If it's your pecs then I would think probably doing something like flies are gonna kind of help build that up

you know letting letting the stretch kind of sink in or if it's a you know If it's your quads, maybe you need to do like honestly a lot of the knees over toes guys stuff I think is really good for like building up your knee sort sort of like structure. That was a question here too. I've done a lot of like, uh, I, I like to do a lot of, um, the things in his regiment. I mean, I don't, I don't, um, follow what he does exactly, but I'll utilize some of the things that he's kind of put in the videos.

So like all this is not from his, but it's sort of a bastardized version. I'll start my lower body workouts by walking backwards on the treadmill and I'll put it pretty steep, like 13 degrees or 13, and I'll walk slowly, but it's just like a couple minutes of that, my quads are all pumped up, any sort of tendons, sort of stiffness feels like it's improved dramatically. A lot of just body weight split squats

or kind of sissy squats on the toes seems to like you know, most people if you did that you really hurts the knees, but if you did it with a Strategy of like okay I'm gonna start by supporting my weight and then build it up Then you will improve that sort of tendon quality in your knee Figuring out ways to get a lot of blood flow to an area seems to be critical Yeah, I thought he was really really a a genius at is, um, is putting everything into context one.

So you can sort of say like, why are you doing each thing? And then two, teaching how to do regressions of everything, which is like pretty, if you want to be a trainer, like learning how to teach people regressions is like huge. Yeah. You know? So that's where like, I would always, you know, kind of fall into that camp of like,

well, like a Bulgarian split squat is great because it makes you balance, it makes you stretch your back leg, and it makes you put a lot of weight in your front. But if you can't balance and you're not flexible, it's like you're gonna be overwhelmed and you're not gonna really build it up. And if you're not strong,

so if you have more than one variable, it's like, okay, you're probably overwhelmed. But if you can like hold on, and then you can like put your front foot up or you can limit the range of motion and you can just kind of build one of those elements by itself, then you can progress to where you can kind of address the next element. So yeah, I think those are pretty helpful.

A lot of people do stuff for the triceps with like bands and I think high reps certainly for like your tricep tendons is a good thing. I have a question just actually for me but when you're squatting and deadlifting are you thinking of anything with your feet or like giggle like yeah are you just thinking of anything with your feet or not really? No. No? Okay. Maybe when I squat like my foot pressure but not I don't think of like twisting my feet into the ground or like I don't know spreading the floor and too much like that. Okay for me is usually like just bracing the core and You know, yeah

Are you actively trying to drive your knees out or is that just like how you squat? I used to but really what I think about now is not like trying to be you know like I'm like Ninja Warrior or like pressing your feet out in two different walls and like wedging yourself in there. But really more like I just want the inner thighs to kind of just move out of the way so they're more relaxed so my knees open,

but I'm not like trying to force them open. So it's really just more to kind of like create space to move. There's a question here about your numbers in terms of your new goals as far as squat and deadlift. I mean for deadlift I've always wanted to kind of get into the 900s with either sumo or conventional. Sumo I've done 881 so I haven't made it to 900

like in just a straight up deadlift. For squat I've always wanted to get to 826. That was the, Kirk Krawowski's, he had a number that was the 242 record for a long time. And even though it's not the record anymore, that was just a milestone that I envisioned myself getting to and I've done 804. And that's kind of on the horizon.

So that's certainly a target for me me just because of that sort of like, you know, setting the goal once and then like, even though other people have like obliterated it, it's like, well still like to get to that. Was there like any sort of like particular day, you know, you did mention like you came to super training many years ago and competed and you did like a 600 pound deadlift a year later, you were in like the mid sevens. Was there any like particular day where you're like, I think this is like a thing.

I think it's going to turn into something. Well, I'd already been competing in powerlifting, I think at that point. So, um, I was definitely already committed to lifting, but sometimes I would just be like so intense in the training that when I would do a meet, I was like, I'm going to do something else for a little while. So like after my first meet, I think I spent from November through June, so seven months building up for this first meet. And I was like, I'm going to take a break.

I did jujitsu for six weeks and then I was like, all right, I'm tired of this. I'm going to go lift again. And then I kind of dabbled with some Olympic lifting. So I did some competitions for six months, for like six months with that. And then the tactical strength challenge, I did it a couple times. I mean, I had kind of enjoyed doing the kettlebell stuff, but just having like a sort of a specific kind of target

to train for was pretty interesting and satisfying the two times that I did that, so. 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 the show for a really long time of certified Piedmontese beef, and you can get that under the umbrella of Good Life Proteins, which also has chicken breast, chicken thighs, sausage, shrimp, scallops, all kinds of different fish, salmon, tilapia. The website has nearly any kind of meat

that you can think of. Lamb 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, you know? Ha ha, yeah. I can cook up some chicken thighs or something like that, and have some shrimp with it, or I could have some steak.

I would say the steak, it keeps going back and forth for me on my favorites, so it's hard for me to lock one down, but I really love the bavette steaks. And 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 on some really good meat, pause. You can go to goodlifeproteins.com and use code POWER for 20% off any purchases

made on the website, or you can use code POW for 20% off any purchases made on the website. Or you can use code power project to get an extra 5% off if you subscribe and save to any meats that are a recurring purchase. This is the best meat in the world. Yeah. And I mean, it was actually pretty cool as some of the things I did to train for like that five minutes of kettlebell snatching. I mean, definitely pretty grueling,

but it actually made my grip quite a bit stronger and I got so lean that actually my belt at its tightest would have to kind of like go in between my ribs and hips. So I was like, okay, this is getting a little ridiculous. I must burn a ton of calories doing kettlebell for five minutes straight. But certainly the breakthrough for the deadlifting was, you know, I had,

I had tried to switch from conventional sumo like a number of times and just had like really kind of poor success. And eventually when I started using the block pulls where you can like handle heavier weights and you learn how to kind of like wedge your hips into place, that was where my sumo just kind of took off and I was like, Oh, I'm going to be able to pass my, my, uh, conventional. And then, you know, it was like from one year, 650 conventional next year, it was like 740 sumo at the same time. And, um, you know,

I just kept going from there. So that was, uh, that was a huge breakthrough. It was just kind of stumbling across the right, the right exercise. It was pretty amazing when you came up to the gym and you trained with Stan Efforting and Stan hit a PR that day. You hit a big PR that day. I think you squatted a little over 800

and Stan squatted like nine. Like 900. Yeah, that was pretty, both you guys were just huge too. I remember Stan just looking like a refrigerator at that time. Yeah, I have to say I never really liked Stan's squat form but I did appreciate how massive he was

and I always say that he was one of my favorite lifters because he would just go to a meet and always bench press 600 pounds. So that was, you know, squatting and other things is nice but like a big bench is still more important. Yeah, Stan tends to lean forward on his squats, but he, he basically just kind of used, he kind of used his lower back, which kind of gets to make sense cause he didn't have a huge structure of, uh,

yeah, he's very like hip and back dominant where his like knees kind of taper in super, super wide. It was interesting trying to work with him and squat. It was, uh, you know, we had to take his stance out. I thought, you know, we had to take his stance out. I thought we would have to take his stance in. We tried some stuff and it just, yeah, it didn't work well. And then also he would descend so slowly.

And I was like, I think you need to get down there faster. And then he tried to get down there faster and he'd lose his balance. And I was like, I don't think you can have your head down like that. He's like looking at his shoes while he's squatting. And I'm like, I think you need to have your head up more. And of course he'd put his head up more and it would mess him up. So I was like,

we just got to work with what we got here. Yeah. Cause you can see his back is huge. His, uh, he had a lot of hip strength in that wide stance. So, and what, what I was saying is like, I don't think the muscle mass that he has right at his knee insertion is like, as developed as like all the meat in the upper part of the thigh So if you were to try to you know, narrow it up and get more knee flexion I feel like that would just be kind of playing into his maybe not to his strengths. So

It's pretty crazy to have that contest the backyard meat of the century where we had yourself and Stan and Eric Lillibridge and baby slayer What an interesting interesting nickname be rubbish there. So yeah, Pete rubbish there was just a lot of a lot of awesome lifters at that contest and I remember like somebody broke a 45 pound plate like On their head. I was like we need to like keep that plate No, I don't I don't know if someone dropped it or whatever But like I've never seen a broken 40, just completely broken in half. I think it was obviously an accident. I met Pete Rubish for the first time,

and I was just kind of doing my warmups, and he was like, he's like, I lift a lot better when I'm angry. I was like, oh hey, nice to meet you. I was like, he was in his own zone for that. Yeah, I remember when he. He's a pretty awesome dude. Oh, he's amazing.

And now he's doing like marathons and stuff. I remember when he squatted at this meet, he had one of the worst squats I've ever seen. He nearly died on the squat. And I was like, well, he's got to discontinue. There's no way he's going to go. It was on his second attempt. And then he went out there and he went heavier and he made his third attempt and I was like,

oh my God, this guy's an animal. This guy's angry and angrier. Yeah, he got madder and madder. Gotta turn up a little bit. Do you think when you're done powerlifting, when you kind of hit maybe some of the lifts that you're kind of looking for or kind of go out more on your own terms,

do you think you'll get into maybe something else? Maybe you mentioned- Not marathons. You mentioned jiu-jitsu. Is that something that you think you would like to pursue? No. I mean, I like coaching people. So I'll just kind of do my lifting, do my coaching. I think if I'm... I haven't really gotten to that point yet where I'm decidedly retired. So You know, I haven't really gotten to that point yet where I'm like, you know decidedly retired So I don't quite know yet, but Yeah, I don't know. I don't I'm not I'm not foreseeing a lot of running in my future. I

Don't think you did Susan the cards either I don't really see like, you know bodybuilding is sort of a transition So yeah, I don't know I you know if there's something that sort of motivates me to lift then I'll just do that and that's I'm sure I'll probably never be just fully done with the gym. So, it's always something to pursue in there. Yeah. Or, you know, as my kids grow older and they, I mean, they're all playing sports now and, you know, you know, so I would, I'd love to sort of, you know,

kind of support them in all their sports endeavors and whatever else. So, yeah, I think I'll just kind of have to, again, it's kind of more like being a coach again and sort of being like a supporter. Maybe lend my knowledge and expertise on lifting as much as they would need that. So, my older son, when he was eight, he did a deadlifting only meet.

So, it was fun. We trained him for that and it was like. Did he cheat? Did he go sumo? He definitely went sumo. Um, but it was cool cause he did a, most of the training, like I think there's always that sort of fear people have like, Oh, my stunt, my kids growth. If I make, you know, lift. But I also would sort of think like, maybe if you were like just making your kid do like a shit ton of squats,

but I can't imagine like compelling some child to just do like high volume squats. Like you're going to get your eight year old to be like, all right, we're going to do like a small of program. Going to be sore and depressed all the time. We're doing squat every day. Yeah. So that was a couple of years ago. This was like 2022, I think. But when we were training, when he was eight to do his do his meet, like the workout was right on the board. It would be kind of like a crossfit workout.

You're gonna climb the rope, you're gonna do some box jumps, you're gonna push the sled around, then you're gonna do some push-ups and sit-ups. So it was just like- Just hammering those squats, yeah. Yeah, it was like a lot of just obvious stuff to do in the gym that's not just heavy lifting. And then at the end of the workout,

we would deadlift and it was always it was always like sub max we're not like trying to just trying to get his like form good and then at the meet just let him kind of go for it I remember the day after the meet you know he had he had warmed up to like a PR in the warm-up area and then you know he had all PRs on the on this on the platform nice and the next day he was like super cranky you know it's like he didn't know why, but I was like, I know why. Why am I so mad? That's great.

Just kind of like, yeah. I was like, he's just a wreck the next day. Not like, he couldn't physically feel it, but he was just kind of like, you know, just like sometimes kids are just kind of in bad moods and, or they feel like they're a little bit sick or something. Any more questions in there? There's a lot more, but yeah, all right. Let's ask a couple more. Okay. So you squatted with a,

you squatted big weights with a wide stance for a very long time. Um, how did you keep your hips so healthy? Um, that's a good question. Do you stretch? I think I would definitely do some stretching. I mean, not like, I guess I would just sort of think of it as the normal amount that I always did. So I had like a background in gymnastics, so I had some stretches that I would do from

time to time. But I think if your form is good and you always use the full range of motion, like you'd maintain it pretty well. I think the sumo deadlifts kept a lot of strength in there too. Front squatting to a deeper depth than you're gonna like low bar squat to I think kind of bullet proofs you a little bit as well. My front squat will be also very wide with the hips

wide open just because you need flexibility in your ankles and your groin to get a deep squat. And in a lot of my best meets I would train intensely, but I wouldn't miss any squat reps and like training buildup to a meet. So that was, you know, that was definitely an important factor, because there were times when I did miss reps and I was like,

I just crunched, you know, like my hip and then enough of those and it's like eventually my hips start, you know, I have like an impingement in my, you know, kind of that impinges when I internally rotate my right hip. So eventually that just kind of got worse over time. And that actually happened from doing like Olympic lifting where I had done like a power clean and then it turned into like a deep squat,

where I caught it in kind of a wide stance and then just got pushed down a little too far and felt my hip kind of like fold in a little bit and you know, a little pop and it was like, okay, well that didn't feel good. And then, you know, many years later, it kind of got worse and worse and now it's like, so now I just narrowed my stance. I still keep the hips wide open, but the stance is more narrow and that suits me fine.

Just sort of adapting and using more quads and back instead of as much hips. Did you utilize some deloads and stuff like that or did you just kind of progressively train a little heavier going into a competition? Yeah, I don't really ever do any specific deloads. I think my training was just kind of, I was thinking of like, what's the right amount

to tolerate from week to week? Sometimes you'd kind of be forced to take a deload if you had to like travel or something, but no, I didn't really do a lot of deloading. I just kind of had a sense of what's the right amount of training for myself. Do you want to, any tips for getting a strong? I don't think deloading is useful,

but not my sort of strategy most of the time. Gotcha. Tips for getting a stronger sumo deadlift lockout. I struggle with the lockout on my sumo at the top. Yeah, I mean, there's a number of things the stronger sumo deadlift lockout. I struggle with the lockout on my sumo at the top. Yeah, I mean there's a number of things that I would say. The first thing, I mean for me the most important thing for sumo was always just doing the block pulls. It just really strengthens your hips.

If your hips are not engaging, like with that kind of lateral, sort of like abduction or lateral pressure when you're at any point of the lift, you can tend to kind of fall forward. So that could be at the bottom or the top. Certainly for me, the conventional deadlift thing was always meant to kind of give me the strength to kind of extend through at the top. So I would also sort of think for sumo sometimes as the bar passes your knees, your grip and your hands have to be able to kind of like negotiate passing your thighs or, you know, moving into the lockout position. So just the exact position on the bar needs to be kind of like thought through.

Yeah. I would always do my sumos with my underhand, left hand, about one inch wider than my overhand. And the reason for that for me was that I felt like, you know, I'd always build up the calluses under my ring finger the most, so the weight's kind of directly hanging onto the ring finger the most. And so if you kind of rotate your hand

about your ring finger, it sits about one inch wider. So for me that felt right. And then my underhand, you can't really see me at the desk, but the underhand hand would kind of fall past the thigh more easily. So I always kind of like the idea that if you slightly widened your grip, that would allow you to kind of use your lats and extend your thoracic spine more as you locked out, so you kind of utilize your upper body strength. But sometimes the narrower grip gives you a little more

leverage and speed at the start and that can carry you through. I think for me, my grip was always like just strong enough. So if I was narrow, it would be hard to like have that extra pull at the very top. So the wider suited me slightly better. Did you do particular stuff for your grip or your forearms or even like your wrist? Your forearms and wrists are super jacked. Honestly I have

done certain things but I think I grew up playing baseball and if you spend a lot of time swinging a club around you build up your forearms a lot. Most baseball players have a lot of forearm development so I did do a lot of forearm development. So I did do a lot of pull ups where I would kind of like cuff the bar, kind of in that sort of like gymnast grip where you're not like hanging but you're like, you're keeping your wrist flexed. I think doing a lot of dumbbells with thicker dumbbells, that really would like pump up my forearms

or just get this like kind of Popeye thing going at the end or I think cause you'll kind of tuck your elbows a little bit and then there's a little flare so that back and forth against like a lot of inertia that got the forearms pretty good. But I mean I don't think doing like wrist curls or wrist rollers or things like that, that was never like a part of my training.

And I'd certainly heard other people sort of liking those things as really not helpful for your grip. It kind of comes down more to like finger strength as far as having the grip strength you need to deadlift. So what I would try to do for the grip strength would be, I mean the two things would be one, doing some like axle, just holds or deadlifts where you're just gripping like a smooth two inch diameter bar.

That was pretty helpful. And then sometimes I would do, sometimes like just doing sets of like maybe RDLs or sets of reps where you're just not letting go and you're just not re-gripping, you're just trying to make sure you can sort of lock your grip in and keep it there for a long time. But yeah, that's not really like super sophisticated

of a thought. Just having sets that last longer. I think this is a, there's a lot, but this is a very good question. Um, for you, do you, before doing heavy lifts or lifts and meets, are you thinking anything? Is there anything going on with your mindset preparation, uh, before any of these lifts? Um, yeah, well I think the first thing would be like the buildup to the meet.

For me, the strongest motivation was always, if I, in my mind, I'm like, I know I could lift a certain weight, you know, then my training was motivated. Like, I would think of it like, if you watch like, you know, Marvel or Spider-Man, and there's like a, sort of like a multiverse, there's like one world where I have lifted these weights, and then there's the reality where I have not lifted these weights, and that's like a multiverse, there's like one world where I have lifted these weights,

and then there's the reality where I have not lifted these weights, and that's like very stressful, you know, two worlds that are totally at odds with these others, so that was very motivating, but in the meat itself, I think the training had kind of always, like whenever you're training, I think there's this idea, like okay, there's gonna come a point where I'm trying the PR

at the meat, and I need my training to sort of be contextualized with that. So if I'm just kind of dicking around in the gym, but I'm not putting myself in the context of like, am I lifting 80% just because or am I doing it because I'm practicing what I'm going to do against that like PR? Even things like rehearsing my walkout in the mirror with no weights, just,

um, you know, so getting everything dialed in. And then I think the thing that I always thought of, like, I felt like the meat always was either going to kind of go really well or not well based on how I would squat. Uh, I think the thing that I would think of for the squatting is one is the need to not get psyched out when you pick up the weight and by definition, it should feel heavy because it's like a weight you haven't done before.

So if you pick it up and then you get psyched out and you approach the technique differently than you normally would with, you know, you're cautious, you go slower or you go faster, anything like that, then that's like, you've already lost. So that was one thing that just kind of consciously, I was like, all right, I need to get psyched up so that I can execute it and know that even if I descend,

there's a chance I won't come up, or there's a chance I'll get hurt, you know, maybe something pops when I get to the bottom, but I will definitely not lift the weight if I'm not aggressive. So I think a couple things that I would visualize, not visualize, but I kind of thought of like a sniper who was like, you know, you take all these hundreds

of practice shots and then there's a moment where you just have to trust all the training and just go for it. So that was definitely one mindset and then there's, yeah, just like the, I guess this is another sort of war thought, but my grandfather was in the army in World War II and he was on D-Day, so I always imagine you're in this situation

where it's like, okay, the only chance you have is sprinting towards all the gunfire and not sort of just being cautious. So it was just that thought of, all right, you just gotta be able to go for it because you don't know what's gonna happen, but you know that you're prepared and something is, it's only it's only going to be good

if you just go for it. So getting psyched up is definitely pretty important, but there's like a total rationale or like, you know, pragmatic thought to like, all right, you got to be, you have to be aggressive or you're screwed. Aggressive, but maybe a little bit calm too. But yeah, like the sniper thing, it's like you're not just trying something

you haven't practiced like 100 times that all led up to that moment. So you can make subtle adjustments and then at the moment it's like, all right, you've got to trust all the things that you've done. And I want my first two squat attempts to build my confidence into that last lift

so I don't have to sort of like, you know, a lot of people were like, well I want to hit like 500, my best is 480, so I'm gonna do 485 first and then I'll, you know, it's like you didn't decide if you wanted to just make a little PR or if you wanted to make the best PR you could make so you're like hedging against what if I miss the 500, I don't want to have no PRs. And you can only prioritize one strategy. So for me it was always like, let me prioritize a strategy

that sets me up for the best PR I could make for today. And that usually means starting lighter and kind of building the confidence in and not needing to almost lift the weight to know that I can probably make the weight, which sort of says you kind of lack the confidence or just the, the, you know, like you're not relying on all the training you already did then knowing you're

prepared for it. So for a deadlift thing, I would, I would definitely have to kind of go and like kind of give myself a little cursing out, you know, and get pretty, uh, angry and sort of, you know, motivated to be aggressive. Because I think in the deadlift, you don't get to feel the weight before you pick it up, like a bench or a squat. You've got to sort of be on like 100% by the time you actually try to pick the weight up.

And so if you're like, I wonder how this will feel. Be really heavy and you won't make it. So definitely sort of needing to kind of get yourself amped up before that. So. Let's take like one more question and I think we should bring it in for the day. Okay, actually this goes into the BBBC program. How does your body handle the amount of volume

in the BBBC routine? Truly amazing, huge fan from CKM FURS. Okay, so the BBBC, that's Boss Barbell Club. The strength training programs that I've either given people as a coach or just kind of followed for myself, there's definitely a lot of volume, but I think the way that it breaks down for me is it's almost like it could be kind of done with sort of like a template. And kind of like, I think there's an element of conjugated training

where when I do my squats, for example, I'll usually squat on Monday and I'll squat on Wednesday. And as I was saying before, if I do back squats on Monday and then I follow that with pause, high bar squats, then on Wednesday I'm doing front squats. It's a lot of volume, but each thing serves a specific purpose. So the low bar squats, I'm practicing my technique,

I'm handling heavy weights. The high bar squats, I'm building my technique, I'm building my stability at the bottom, but also I'm building my quads. You're basically, if you're really good at leveraging your hips and your back with the low bar, then the question is, are really good at leveraging your hips and your back with the low bar, then the question is are you good at leveraging and are you strong where you just cock strong

in your quads and your glutes and your back? So in a pause high bar squat, I'd be in a more narrow stance. And so it's like you're taking away the leverage of your hips. So usually when you hear somebody talk about a squat, you're like, you sit back or spread your knees, and those are both lateral motions

that create leverage, but the other element is just how forcefully can you push up and down. And so then the pause high bar squat is like, what's your just your pure strength? And then the low bar is sort of like, how much can you multiply that? Can you multiply it by 10% or 15% or 110, 115%. So it's sort of like building leverage

and then there's also building just pure strength. And then the front squatting is for hypertrophy. And also has a direct strength carryover for sumo. So I think knowing each element has a place in what it does that allows it to kind of function well. Also one of the most important lessons that I learned was like, you can train while you're sore. That was like a huge limitation for like a long, long time for me.

And then once I was like, Oh, I can have sore quads and squat and get stronger. Oh, that's like, that's like pretty, pretty powerful. You know, when I was in high school in college, it definitely was like following that like nineties bodybuilding sort of style where you're like, all right, I'll do the quads and I'll wait like five days. And if they're not recovered, I'll wait another day and maybe another day. So once I started like increasing the frequency, it was like, Oh,

that was like a huge game changer for me. Was there a person that's inspired you to get into powerlifting? Uh, and also like, who's your favorite powerlifter? Yeah, I don't know I would just say I Think when I was first getting into powerlifting, I learned who Ed Cohn was I was like, okay That guy's the the greatest and certainly watching his you know kind of seeing his numbers and some of the footage was like very very cool The first time I I saw him in person I remember I was at the Arnold and I was with this this guy Craig Terry he was dead lifting and I was like

backstage by the dead lifting only meet and I see this guy from like at least a hundred feet away who's like very short but like extremely wide I was seeing from kind of his back, and I was like, that looks like the wrong proportions for a person, and then I was like, that has to be at Cone. It's like the back was like much wider than like the height of his spine, and I was like, okay, that, never seen that before.

This is while he was like still really competing, or maybe he was just done. Put together in a different way, that's for sure. I was like, yeah, that dude's got a unique build for sure. And so, yeah, he was definitely one of the inspiring and favorite lifters for a long time. But now I definitely watch, when I was lifting, I think Stan was one of my favorite lifters,

I appreciated just being huge at the same time as you know putting up big totals and Now, you know, I definitely like watching John hack He you know, he's it's like a 200 pound guy benching 600 pounds like that's that's extremely impressive Does the 900 pound deadlifts, you know routinely? And then I've been watching Colton Angle break for like you probably like a year and just like okay This guy's very awesome in terms of his lifts

But also a lot of this sort of the form tendencies I I see that he does are similar to the form that I you know Maybe in my dreams and vision that I was using and he's like, you know 24 He's like already the best in the world and I started lifting when I was 24 and I was pretty trash as like lifters. So, so it's cool to see that like a new, you know, era of lifter where it's like, uh, I'm not saying you learned from me, but the idea that, you know, you're like the knowledge that's kind of gone through the different generations.

So like the talent is as good, if not better than ever, but the knowledge is like that they're starting off with is like way better for sure. Um, yeah. And I know, I know his coach, I'd, you know, I'd competed or kind of gone down to Australia and you know, done stuff down there. And so, you know, like that was when his coach was like just a lifter. And so, you know, I can see kind of the generations kind of evolving. So it's very cool to see young lifters that are Very impressive. Where's your gym located at?

So boss barbell club is in Mountain View, California. That's like kind of around San Jose Where can people find you and where can they find out more information about boss barbell and stuff like that? You can go online. It's just bossbarbellclub.com I'm sorry bossbarbell.com. You can if you want to you know Do some coaching or come in and do some sessions you can email me dan at bossbarbell.com And you know, I'll do some coaching with people either online or in person so Thanks a lot for coming to Davis today and meeting up with us, I really appreciate it.

Yeah, for sure, my pleasure. I think people are gonna be fired up listening to this. Strength is never weak, this week is never strength. Catch you guys later, bye.