Mark Bell's Power Project - Don’t Let Lifting Weights Destroy Your Body (Longevity Training) || MBPP Ep. 1096

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

In Episode episode 1096, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about how the fitness industry may have gotten confused over the years. Everyone is focused on muscle mass, but strength may be the key to maintaining longevity.   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below!   🥜 Protect Your Nuts With Organic Underwear 🥜 ➢https://nadsunder.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 15% off your order!   🍆  Natural Sexual Performance Booster 🍆 ➢https://usejoymode.com/discount/POWERPROJECT Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎 ➢https://emr-tek.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶 ➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Become a Stronger Human - https://thestrongerhuman.store ➢ UNTAPPED Program - https://shor.by/JoinUNTAPPED ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Podcast Courses and Free Guides: https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz/ ➢ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Everyone in fitness has it wrong about muscle and everyone in fitness has it wrong about strength. And I think strength is at the core of a lot of research studies, but then they're mixing the message. They just keep talking about muscle. What about endurance? What about mobility? The ability to sprint?

What about just strength? Do you think you would have thought this same thing when you were 31 years old and when you're squatting thousand pounds and benching 500 pounds? My interpretation of what strong was, was only one way. Squat bench deadlift, that's how I got judged and so that's what I did. And long term, if you're not someone who's competing in the sport, do you really think it's going to be that beneficial for you to keep banging your head against this one wall? In my quest for strength, I lost some abilities to do some things that other people would

be like, oh, that's odd. Why can't he do that? Bodybuilding, you're just focused on only gaining a lot of muscle. Powerlifting is gaining as much strength on the barbell as possible. But when you focus in on that, what it does is it makes it difficult for you to try to do anything else. If you guys have been enjoying the concept we've been bringing here on the power project, consider leaving us a review on Spotify and Apple. We've had podcasts with people from Functional Patterns,

to Ben Patrick, to Jack Cruz, who roasted us on air, but we did that for you, to bring you some of the best information in fitness. We're learning along with you, and leaving a review with how you dig the podcast is really gonna be something that helps the podcast move forward. So if you can, leave us a review there,

and enjoy the rest of the show. Everyone in fitness has it wrong. Everyone in fitness has it wrong about muscle and everyone in fitness has it wrong about strength. That is something I wanna dive into today because I've been saying for a really long time, strength is never weakness, weakness is never strength. And I don't just say it because I love to hear myself talk,

which I do enjoy thoroughly. But I say it because I actually believe it and I actually mean it. I think that strength is critical and strength is pivotal. And I think strength is at the core of a lot of research studies that people are sharing out. But then they're mixing the message a lot of times. A lot of times they're, in the next statement,

they're then talking about how important it is to have muscle mass. And I don't disagree. I think having muscle mass is important. I do think that building your body up makes a lot of sense. As we get older, we don't want sarcopenia and these different kinds of things.

But I believe where people are going wrong is you need to send a signal to your body. And you need to send your signal to a body that we are not going to accept being weak, we are not going to accept going backwards, we actually want to advance and we want to go forward. So it's the training of the central nervous system that I think is more critical for longevity

and for you to prosper as you get into your older ages. Let me ask you this, man. Do you think, because you always, that statement, strength is never weakness, weakness is never strength. You said that from day one, right? But the way you look at strength, do you think you would have thought this same thing

when you were 31 years old and when you were squatting 1,000 pounds and benching 500 pounds, would you have thought of it the same way? I think I've thought about it in a similar way for a long time, but in my quest for strength, in my quest for strength, I lost some abilities to do some things that other people would be like, oh, that's odd. Why can't he do that?

Like it doesn't even require hardly any strength, but it requires some strength, requires some mobility. So in my quest for striving for one thing so hard, a lot of other things fell to the wayside. A lot of other things ended up in the rear of your mirror, not getting tended to. But I do think that you can negotiate all this in a healthier way. I think when I was training for strength and I was powerlifting and benching 800 pounds and these different things,

I trained within ranges of motion that were shorter or just barely to the ranges I was required to do in competition. But looking back at it now, it's easier for me to kind of look at it and say, oh, you know what happened there? It was, I probably needed to explore further ranges of motion, thinking of like something like a fly for your chest, like a chest fly, to really open up the pecs and get them to kind of stretch out and to go into a range of motion that was unfamiliar with my body. So for me to really hone in on some of the weaknesses that I might have had at the time. Yeah, no, that that that makes total sense.

And the thing is, is you were a power lifter. So in essence, you're a specialist of moving heavy ass barbells, right? But when building that skill, you lose out on a lot of things, like you're probably not going to be the best at sprinting. You probably might not be the most flexible, although there are some powerlifters that do some flexibility work. But I think one of the goals that we

have with what we're going to be talking about today is, even if you're a specialist in a sport, can you develop other capacities of strength that are going to assure that as you get older, you have access to everything your body can do? Because don't get me wrong, I think it's cool to be the 70 year old that can still squat 225. But I think it might be cooler to be the 70 year old that can get into a deep split squat, squat 225, still sprint on a dime, still do some jump roping, still have the endurance to run a mile. Like, and the thing is, is I don't think

that it takes an excessive amount of work to be able to get to that goal, because you're not going too deep down a single rabbit hole. I think that is the key factor right there. I think, especially when we're talking about strength, it excites me because you can get strong doing so many different things. And if you are taking on many different disciplines

and taking on many different things, then you have access to get better at those things because they're new, they're kind of novel to you. So something like sprinting up a hill. Again, sprinting, somebody going 100% out of nowhere, probably not a great idea, but use your own caution. Maybe go 80% first time out, maybe go 70%. Get yourself used to these things.

But when it comes to strength, and I think about how could somebody gain some pretty good strength? Well, shit, they could try to do some pull-ups every day. They could try to do some push-ups every day. I mean, you could literally just wake up first thing in the morning and just say, yeah, I want to see how many squats I could do. Squat onto this chair. You're an older person and you don't want to squat maybe to the depth of a seven-year-old kid or something like that. Then just squat to a chair. Bang out as many pushups as you can. The requirement though, to build muscle mass

and to hold on to muscle mass, it can be pretty tricky. I mean, I would say like, if you're playing a sport, that might help quite a bit, because sometimes you can kind of play the sport and the sport helps you to burn a lot of calories, helps keep you pretty lean. And in some cases, some sports will actually just the activities of those sports will help you to kind of hold on to some muscle mass.

But some cases even make you lose muscle mass kind of depending on how much you're doing that sport and everything like that. But if you're playing a sport and you're lifting and you're eating some protein and you're young, probably not that crazy of an idea to gain muscle. But again, I wanna kind of bring it back to what I said originally. I think it's more about strength than it is about muscle. Having muscle mass I think is important,

but it's really the training of the central nervous system. And when you talk about what you can achieve in a gym, I know that we can sit here and talk about so many different things that the gym could do for you because it could help your brain. You're chewing up some glucose during the workout. So it could help with insulin sensitivity. The many, many different things that are going on

at one time is unbelievable. And I don't know if we'll ever even know all the benefits of exercise, but you're mainly, you're not there to like lose weight. You're not there to burn fat. Again, yes, you could burn fat. There's exercise you could do, and you can measure it scientifically where you're like,

yeah, you're burning a little bit of fat. But you're there for mainly two reasons. One reason is to add muscle mass and the other reason is to gain strength. And the gaining of strength is looped into central nervous system training. Your nervous system can get trained with just about anything when you're untrained,

when you haven't really done anything quite yet. So you can go in and bodybuild and you'll get stronger and you'll kind of prime your nervous system when you're young and when you're new to some of these things. And even if you're older and it's new to you, it's novel to you, you'll still get some training of the central nervous system. But I believe that coming up this year and the year following, mainly because I'm going to be shouting out a lot, I think that the training of the central nervous system is really pivotal when it comes to cognitive function, and when it comes to your ability to, I guess,

coordinate and organize your body into doing something explosively. And I think that that is really critical for health. And then the last thing I wanna add to that is the strength to weight that is really critical for health. And then the last thing I want to add to that is the strength to weight ratio is super critical. So if you're big like in SEMA, it's important that you're not just big and muscular, that you're also strong.

And in SEMA can do pull-ups and you can hang off the rings and you can do all kinds of different things. And that's really important to have a good strength to weight ratio as you get older. That's, and this is a video I want to pull up because I think it's really cool. This one right here, she is, I don't know if she says she's 60. Yes, she says 60. Dude, okay.

That lifts 60 kilograms every week. Yeah, so 60 at 60. Drawing machine. Doing ropes. This woman also started lifting just a few years ago. And we'll put the video in the description. But I think like she had some sickness that she was dealing with a few years before,

never has lifted before. Then her son, who's a trainer, got her started lifting weights and training, and now she seeks it out. But I can imagine the amount of muscle that she's gained, the amount of bone density that she's gained, the, what she's able to do. And she started this later in life, man.

Look at her fucking dead lifting right there. It's awesome. Pushing a sled. All these things can help develop strength no matter what age anybody is. The other thing is, you know how many sets you need to do with this stuff? Not many.

I mean, again, if you're an advanced, you know, if you've been lifting for a long time, it's not uncommon for a power lifter to do eight sets, 10 sets. I mean, that's fairly common. But if you're somebody that is, you know, trying to get some of the health benefits of some of this stuff, you don't need a lot of sets. We know this from going out and doing sprints. Even if you're fairly fit, but you're not a runner, like good luck with a couple of 200 meter repeats. 100 meter repeats.

I mean, you're gonna be wiped out. By the time you get to maybe say like your fourth one, you can now be trying to run at 100% and that 100% could represent that 100 meters taking 20 seconds or more because you're so gassed. You're like just completely, you're completely smoked from it. But I really think that training the nervous system is super important, but it's also super quick and easy because you don't need that many sets of it.

You don't. One thing I want to add in here too is because again, like we'd mentioned, there's different aspects of strength. There's your body weight strength. So I think you should evaluate if you're a person who you can deadlift and squat a lot, but you can't really do that many pull-ups. Like pull-ups are extremely difficult for you, and a lot of body weight stuff is extremely difficult for you.

Evaluate that because like, if you're so strong in one area, why can't you do these things that just require your body weight without extreme levels of difficulty? Body weight strength is also important. Those people that do calisthenics, when they're older, you see how well they're able to move. So I think developing that body weight strength is extremely functional.

But I also think, again, because many people that listen may be powerlifters or bodybuilders, so when you're focused on those specific sports for bodybuilding, you're just focused on only gaining a lot of muscle. Powerlifting, it's gaining as much strength on the barbell as possible. But when you focus in on that,

what it does is it makes it difficult for you to try to do anything else. You're doing so much training volume. You're probably doing more than you really need to progress. I think you could probably take away a bit of your volume from what you're doing for bodybuilding and maybe take away a few sets of what you're doing in powerlifting.

And if you really want to develop all those skills of being a stronger human being, you could then go and have some energy to do a little bit of running or some hill sprints or any of these other things we're talking about. Cause a lot of people are like, well, I can't do any of that right now. Well, it's cause you're doing too much of this one thing

and long-term, if you're not someone who's competing in the sport, do you really think it's going to be that beneficial for you to keep banging your head against this one wall? And that's where I can kind of look at the error of my own ways, you know, and even saying something like strength is never a weakness, weakness is never strength.

The word never is a really powerful word. And so as I leaned more into getting strong, that was my only focus and my, as you pointed out earlier, my interpretation of what strong was, was only kind of one way. It was squat bench deadlift, that's how I got judged. And so that's what I did. I also recognize that strength and muscle mass

go together a lot of times. There's a cross-sectional situation that happens when you're training for muscle, you're going to gain some strength. And when you're training for strength, you're going to gain some muscle. And when you're training for strength, you're going to gain some muscle. So these things, they do definitely coexist, but I think some of the messages

and some of the information that I see getting clipped or some quick takes that they'll pull from a Peter Itea or even our good friend, Gabriel Lyon, I think if we were communicating with them, they would agree, yes, strength is a huge factor in all of this. And when they're testing these people at these retirement homes,

they're testing their grip strength and they're testing their leg strength. And they're not really testing how much muscle mass they have per se. But I'm also in agreement that muscle wasting can be a really negative part of getting older. But again, I think if you're strength training,

even without like specific, you know, hypertrophy protocols, I think you'll have the muscle mass that you need. I think that's the way the human body is designed. When I start to think about, you know, I think about all these different like bodies that I've been like obsessed with since I was a kid. These different body types, these pro wrestlers

and bodybuilders and powerlifters, and going, man, that is so awesome. Look at how Jack Stan Efforting is, or look at Hapthor Bjornsson, or look at these guys. As I've gotten older, I'm starting to think, and this is, I'm not putting anybody any, I'm not putting anybody's physique down, I'm just trying to more normalize what a male physique actually might look like if there's not performance

enhancing drugs in there. And if somebody's not, it's not 24 seven their job to have this particular body type. And then you start ending up with a physique that probably looks, Sean Baker is an outlier because he's six five and he's, he's a, he's a giant, but, um, I believe that he's drug free. Paul Saladino, same thing. And Peter Itea. Those are physiques that are easier for people to work towards,

but still very difficult. Like they still have low body fat percentages, but those guys are guys that work on their strength as well, especially Sean Baker, who's working on a lot of explosiveness and things like that. And I think that the key factor is for people to continue to work on strength and not just you'll hear ITA or you'll hear Dr. Lyon talk on these podcasts. And I've worked out with Gabrielle before and she does explosive movements.

She's picking up sandbags. I mean, this is a woman that weighs like a hundred pounds and she's like moving around like 60 pound sandbags and stuff like that. I mean, she's almost picking up her own body weight and like running 40 yards within stuff is, it's pretty wild. So these people, go ahead.

I want to, don't forget, you were saying people, but the really cool thing about what you mentioned from Gabby are right there is because that she's working on strength stuff, but the way you pick up a sandbag is different from the way you pick up a barbell. She's also working on her functional strength of picking up an odd object in a different way, the strength of your hands to put it up. There's a bunch of little elements that are added there. So you can clump different aspects of strength because you use to put it up. There's a bunch of little elements that are added there. So you can clump different aspects of strength because you use specific pieces of equipment. Right.

And I think what might get misconstrued from people listening, or again, something getting clipped, is that they might hear Gabriel Lyon talk about muscle-centric medicine, how important it is to have muscle, and how muscle is important for insulin sensitivity and all these things. And again, it is, but I think like when I, maybe it's me too, like maybe it's my own interpretation of what I'm hearing.

I'm like, I think they're a little bit off because it's not about being like super jacked, although I can appreciate that and I want to be jacked and tan, right? That kind of goes more in line with like what I wanna do and what I think makes me feel good. I'm not necessarily advocating it as like a health practice to be as jacked as possible because I do think in those situations, I think to a certain degree,

your luck runs out with just building muscle mass. But anyway, I think Gabrielle and Peter IT and some of these people That you hear the message from about building muscle building muscle be as you know gain as much muscle as you can while you can I You know, I don't want to speak for them But I would imagine if I asked him the question like hey isn't this a little bit more about like strength because your strength deteriorates I mean think about when you walk down the street and you see someone that's in their 20s,

what's the difference between that person and a person that's in like their 80s? Person that's in their 80s might be kind of- Their date going wong-ong-ong-ong, like our other guests talked about. That's true, that's true. It could be, oh, the 80 year old with a boner. Yeah.

You know, the person might be kind of like hunched over. They might be, they might look like their walk is like this laborous activity. Like it's hard. A lot of times you'll see an older person. Andrew sent that clip of the person that was a hundred plus and their mouth was open and they were breathing hard and stuff like that. And totally understandable. You're a hundred plus years old, but their strength is running out. Their body is starting to kind of deteriorate. The body's starting to kind of break down.

And yes, I understand there's like some sarcopenia going on, but I think that, and again, the guy living to be a hundred, anyone living to be a hundred plus, they get to kind of do and say whatever they want. I have no idea what that's like to be able to live that long. But I do think that strength is the real heart of it because I think that our ancestors were able to build strength because strength does not take so many sets and it doesn't take, it just takes some simple stuff of working together, you know, working together as a community and like carrying water

and carrying food and hunting and doing all these activities that you would have done. Those activities don't slap a lot of muscle on you. So you might start to see where I'm coming from with this is that your average person, like how much muscle you're really gonna gain. Like if you're not really super intentional, like we talked about this on a previous podcast.

If you're super intentional about gaining muscle mass, and that's a huge focus for you, and you have pretty good genetics, we might be talking about like 30 or 40 pounds of muscle mass from the time you're young to the time you're kind of adult-ish, and there could be outliers, could be people that are maybe a little bit more than that.

But for most people, just through normal activity that we would have done a couple hundred years ago, maybe working on a farm or something like that, how much muscle would that person gain? And for me, I kind of lock into this thought process, and I know other people do too. Some people don't like this thought process of locking into what our ancestors did,

but to me, all the answers are already here and they have a lot to do with our past and lots to do with our history. So like what would a healthy person, you know, like I guess I'm trying to think of like, you know, how would some of these medicines, even testosterone, how would testosterone help us to like live longer?

I don't know if it does. I don't believe that it does. We haven't seen anybody, we haven't seen somebody live to be 115, 120, 130 and go, oh my goodness, like it's cause they're on testosterone. And some people might say, oh, well, testosterone hasn't been around long enough. I think it's been around long enough to know.

I think that testosterone just gives us a little bit more time to fuck around and extend out a younger-ish body for a longer, prolonged period of time. Before we get too far away from it, I wanted to ask you, Mark, about, you know, you said it's more about like getting a stimulus on the central nervous system.

In the context that we were talking about with something being new to somebody or like kind of like newbie gains for somebody just getting started, how you really just want to kind of get a stimulus on that central nervous system. But when you try something new, sometimes you can get really wrecked.

You're really sore and you're like, man, I don't know if I want to go back tomorrow or the next day or whatever. What do you think is a good, like a proper frequency for kind of stimulating that central nervous system? Yeah, I think somebody that's new is just like, small integration of bringing some of these things into your life.

So if you're going to a gym and you're trying to do like a body part split or something like that, like if you've got a program or something like that, you're just gonna have to take it really easy. You're gonna have to start out very slow, take your time with it. A lot of people that I've advised over the years that are kind of newer to lifting,

I think it's important just to kind of like learn the different exercises, learn the movements, learn some of the machines. and it might take you a while to learn some of these things, but the only reason why I would say it might be a good idea to do multiple sets for somebody that's newer would simply just be kind of more for the coordination. Like, okay, you did a set with that bench press machine,

do another set of it, and usually, a lot of times they'll be stronger like on their second set because the body's like already starting to make adaptations or the next week they'll be quite a bit stronger. So I think you just have to start out really, really slow, almost like I did with running. You gotta really, really take your time with it. And also like we gotta think about,

with all of this stuff, if you're someone who's new to lifting in the gym, understand, or resistance training in general, the coordination aspect of things is a big deal. I remember there's been a time where I was training someone and they're like, wait, how do I put the barbell back? Oh, just put it back. But they're like, wait, but how do I do that? Like, you put it back. Oh, just put it back. But they're like, wait, but how do I do that? Like, you put it back. And that's a coordination thing. These are little things that like you take

for granted after you've been lifting for a while. You're like, yeah, just fucking stack it back. But some people getting up from the bench, how do I get up from this position? Oh yeah, you use your abs. You crunch here, use your abs to get off the bench. I mean, Andrew, you've killed your back a bunch of times getting up off the bench, right? Like I've hurt my back before too. Like it's a weird, uncomfortable thing. It's something you'd have to learn.

Exactly, all these things. Mark had to actually coach me how to get off of the bench. It was pretty cool. He turned it into some like a cool piece of content. But yeah, you're absolutely right. Even just like helping somebody re-rack weights, like for you guys, it's just like, you know, boop. But for me early on, it was like,

how do I get the big plate down on the, you know what I mean? Like, so that you're right, there's absolutely some things that just, you'll gain with experience by just showing up. Yeah. Do you want to play this clip? Yeah, I think it falls in line with what was just mentioned.

Milo Sarkif. Former pro bodybuilder, now professional coach. So for those of you that know me, you know my story, but those of you that never heard of me, I competed in 110 shows, 72 professional. I was one of those that competed all the time. Every organized show I would compete in, I trained six days a week, twice a day, 15 years straight.

And as you can imagine, you know, with this kind of volume and this kind of intensity and training that is required for a pro bodybuilder, I endure just about every kind of injury and pains and aches and had three surgeries on my knees, one on my shoulder. And of course, as I retired, I continued training I had three surgeries on my knees, one on my shoulder. And of course, as I retired, I continued training like we all do, once a bodybuilder, always

a bodybuilder. But that challenge and excitement of going to the gym became punishment. I mean, when you are searching for a pain, and we all do, muscle pain there is, there's that high, and you get the pump and you get the muscle feeling, there's no better feeling than that. But when you go there searching for a muscle pain, and you have nothing but the joint pain, squeaking, damaging, numbing pain, it's no fun.

So let me tell you, any bodybuilder that would. No, I think that was good. Yeah. He goes on to talk about stem cells and how important he thinks they are. And he had a good intervention with stem cells, but I'm just hearing from so many people that are like Milos Serkev

that have been lifting for a long time. And this guy, I mean, Milos has one of the greatest physiques in the history of bodybuilding. He looked absolutely incredible. And I'm just seeing that more and more. And I'm not saying that like every bodybuilder is going to end up in pain because there's ways to navigate this stuff where you don't have to be in pain. But what I'm suggesting and what I'm trying to get people to wrap their minds around and one of the reasons why we had

The people from functional patterns on and another reason why we had a guy like Jack Cruz on I'm trying to get people to not be so married to the ideas and the principles that they have now and to start to Expand their horizon expand their mind a little bit open up their eyes so that they can kind of see I'm very lucky I'm very lucky that I'm very lucky that I was able to, you know, lucky and maybe like, I don't know, studied up enough to know to like move out of the way of powerlifting at like the right time. And to start to get into other things. But I love for other people to be able to enjoy exercise, be able to enjoy their life, to not be in tons of pain.

And I'm just seeing it from more and more people that I'm friends with, lifters and just old friends that just have been into like exercise stuff for a long time. They're not getting the same result from it anymore. And as Milos was pointing out, it's like you're going to the gym because you're looking for this like little pain stimulus that makes you feel good.

You know, pain and pleasure, they come from kind of the same spot, but you try to get into your routine. You're doing like a, just a simple tricep push down and all you feel is the pain in your elbow. Then you're like, all right, well, maybe that's not in the cards for today. Maybe I'll go over and do some like incline dumbbell bench and you go to do that and all you feel is like pain in your wrist.

You're like, shit man, all right, well that's not great. Maybe I'll go and do, you know, the leg press and you go to do leg press and your knees are killing you. So I see this with a lot of people and what I'm trying to help people to do is to like, let's pick all this apart and let's try to figure out a place to where we can do a lot of these lifts and do a lot of these things that we love to do and do them forever.

And you know, this is, if anyone went and listens to the functional podcast, functional patterns podcast that Mark just mentioned, it's worth a listen because they have a lot of great concepts in that episode. But this was the exact thing that I felt like I had a fight with them about. Or let's just say a disagreement. Because what they were mentioning was you don't see many people lifting as they get older. And what we just pulled up with Milos is the prime example of that exact thought process.

Well, I mean, you know, we should that's they'd probably say, Hey, look at Milos Sarkev. Look how great he looked as a young bodybuilder. You never expect this man to feel beat up when he's older. But the thing is, is he mentioned six days a week, two workouts a day, fucking mind numbing workouts probably. Probably when he got out of the gym, he probably felt more beat up than- He's known for like destroying people

when they train with him. Yeah, and that's the way he trained himself. That's the way he trained himself. But this is the thing when it comes to not just lifting weights, but with all forms of training, training your flexibility, training your endurance,

training your speed, resistance training in the gym, or training with calisthenics. You do not have to kill yourself to progress at any of them. The only reason you feel that you need to kill yourself is because maybe you feel that you really want to push yourself and you're really looking for a challenge and you feel kind of good after that.

But too many of those inputs is not, it's not good in the long term. You could do that here and there. You could have a pretty hard sprint session, you know, but not every sprint session should be a hard sprint session because when you talk to track athletes who are beat up in their 30s, and you ask them, why aren't you springing anymore? It's because when they were an athlete, they were beating themselves up with sprinting, absolutely destroying themselves.

They wouldn't be able to sprint for days after their hard session, but that doesn't have to be that way. You could always get these inputs and actually feel better after that workout if you do just the right amount. Meat, meat, it's time to gobble some meat. Good Life Proteins.

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to save 20% off your entire order. Or if you want to save even more, use promo code power project to save an additional 5% off your build the box. Again, goodlifeproteins.com, link is in the description as well as the podcast show notes. You got to figure out a decompression. You know, you're going to do gymnastics,

you're going to do sprinting. Most people that have done these sports to a pretty high level, they'll be the first people to tell you, like, man, I'm wrecked. And so are all my friends. And then you think, oh, man, well, gymnastics is kind of bad for you. Well, yeah, if you're only doing gymnastics, but what if on top of doing gymnastics,

which you explore a lot of mobility, flexibility, there's a lot of strength, you know, doing the rings and some of the shit they do in gymnastics is an amazing example of strength. But maybe those people need to drag a sled. Maybe those people need to work on like specific exercises for the ankle and for the shin. For the wrist.

Yeah, for the wrist, right? Where you're actually doing a wrist extension exercise or grip exercise. I mean, a little bit would go such a long way. And when I start to think about what we've been talking about on this show for a while, we've mentioned this many times with diet. We know that dietary intervention

is probably one of the hardest things someone can go through because there's so many like lifestyle changes and to tell people that their diet is shit, it makes them feel bad because it's like kind of a, you're kind of judging the way that they live. You know, you're saying, man, your shit ain't working, man. Like you need to switch to something else.

Cause you know, this ideology that you're under right now is just making you fat and making you unhealthy. But what we normally do here at the Power Project is we try to fill up people's plate with so much activity and so much stuff. Options. Options, yeah. That they can't stomach anything else

and have room for anything else. And so if we do the same thing with fitness, if we say, hey, it would be great if you went on some 10 minute walks here and there. It would be great if you could, if you can microdose some mobility drills into your day. It'd be great if you microdose some strength into your day. You start to kind of work on all these different things.

Like, hey, you know, because you're strong and because you've built some strength, it also would be cool that you look like you lift. So maybe a little hypertrophy work would be a good idea. And hey, because you look like you lift and because you're pretty strong, maybe you should be able to tie your fucking shoes. Maybe you should be able to wipe your own ass.

Like maybe these things, maybe you should have enough mobility to where you don't look like a trash can kind of moving around all the time. So I think they're just, you want to try to explore a bunch of different stuff. And when you start to have, you know, a practice of running, a practice of mobility,

I understand people have their nine to five and like, man, I ain't got time for all this shit. And we're not even saying that you do it all in one day, every day. Nope. You just kind of spread it out whatever way you need to. But it's gonna occupy, it's gonna occupy a lot of your time.

It's gonna take some effort to do it. But when you do things this way, you're gonna be able to spin a lot of plates at one time with none of them crashing down. And you're gonna be able to lift and do the things that you love for really as long as you want, if you can take the time.

Andrew's been spending a lot of time. Andrew walks in the gym, he goes right to the mats, and you're doing a lot of this mile fashion release stuff. It's like, I know at this point you want to do it, but at first you don't really want to do it. It hurts. You're digging these different objects into your ribs and your back and your butt and your hamstrings and stuff.

And it's kind of miserable, but you're understanding the benefits of it. And then I would say, I would imagine like there's a reason why you're doing it's probably making you feel better, right? Yeah. It's making me feel better and it's also making me perform better There's times when I'm on the mat or somebody like they're in my garden if they're trying to go to like a smash pass I can feel like ooh I better let go because my lower back is probably gonna feel that later Now I can I don't even really have to think about that like it's like it feels so much better that it's like no I can just work my game here. I know we can't like blanket statement a lot of things, especially when

in all of this realm, right? But I know with like nutrition, we can say stuff like, yeah, aim for a gram of protein per pound of body weight. You know, keep your carbs somewhere around 100, keep your fat somewhere around 100. If you're 200 pounds, you could probably end up somewhere around 2000 calories if you follow that. So there are some somewhat like guidelines that we can recommend. When it comes to this stuff, can we, would it be possible to kind of have it

make it fit your fitness macros? Meaning, how much percentage should somebody try to give their strength, their hypertrophy, and then their mobility? Like, is that possible? Let's see if we can break this down even further. Because there are... There's way more than this. But if we were going to put these into different boxes, there's like your barbell, weightlifting, resistance training aspect of things.

Macro nutrients. Right? Okay, so there's that. Then we have our body weight, functional strength, balance, little plyometric, like all those body weight stuff, right? Vitamins. Yeah, OK. And then we have our endurance, our ability

to do certain things for a long period of time. You've got your running, you've got your jiu-jitsu. We have our speed and power work, which can be done in a lot of different ways. And then we have our flexibility, movement work, that type of stuff. So actually, I think we can probably talk about what we do for these different boxes, and then people can pick what they want from there. Sounds great, yeah.

Let's start off with this one that everybody obviously loves. Barbell, gym work, resistance training. How can people structure this so they can do some of it, get some of it in? I really just, and I think it's, you know, people are probably disappointed. They're like, well, he's, you know, he's on the other side of things now. So he thinks differently or whatever. But I truly believe this.

I believe that most of the people that are lifting weights, they only get mainly two good sessions in a week. Even if you're trying to get four and trying to get five, it's just not easy all the time. And if you have a regular nine to five, it can be difficult to just square your life away and have everything precision perfect to the point where think about how many times you go home and tell your significant other you had an awesome workout. Probably doesn't happen like as much as you would like it to. So what I like to see people do is have way better accuracy. So I think just even just having this idea

of lifting way less, I think can really help you achieve more accuracy. So if you lift like two or three days a week, I think you could have more accuracy. You can have more workouts consistently that are going to be better rather than you're trying to go five days a week. Now, having said that, I also understand everyday crowd.

I get it. Like sometimes that discipline is great. And if you're in the everyday crowd and you're doing well and you got good momentum, then the everyday thing is, it's in a different category because the everyday thing is a little bit more of a mindset type thing. But again, I would just say, you know, just try not to overdo it when you're going,

if you're gonna go in every day, just to kind of reduce the overall amount of exercise you're doing. I think you can get away with three to four exercises, you know, per workout, if you're going in nearly every day or five days a week. And if you're going in just like two or three days a week, then maybe you need to double that.

Maybe you're looking at six to eight exercises, but if you work hard at six to eight exercises for three workouts a week, and you do that for a substantial period of time, you're gonna have incredible, incredible gains. It's gonna be, you know, you're gonna be surprised at how much you can get out of really just three hours a week or so.

Honestly, I agree with that, like two to three workouts in like, in terms of resistance training in the gym. And then outside of that, a lot of other things can potentially be microdosed, but I'll get into that on another thing. But if we're talking about the gym, and you want to build a lot of other abilities too, two to three days a week, you can laid it out really well. Anything you have to add to that? Yeah, the only thing I was going to add is just what I do personally,

which is like I will have a, you know, somewhat of a structure, but that structure isn't structured. So what I'm getting at is like, if I was gonna work Monday through Friday or whatever, Monday would be like a push-pull day, but if I don't get through that full workout, that workout goes into Tuesday, and so on and so forth. So what my workout usually is, you know, what it is, is just a bunch of supersets.

Comprised of, I think you're trying to say. Thank you, fucking hell, I couldn't figure it out. Comprised of is a bunch of supersets. And when I say a bunch of supersets. Comprised of, I think you're trying to say. Thank you, fucking hell, I couldn't figure it out. Comprised of is a bunch of supersets. And when I say a bunch, I really mean like three to four max supersets. And if I don't get through all three on Monday, well then Tuesday I might get one more in, and then Wednesday I might get one more in.

And it's like, cool, now I finished my workout. I just don't beat myself up the way I used to. Yeah, and then obviously, like Andrew just said, there's a lot of different ways. A lot of people are like, what's the best split? What's this? You could do full body, full body, full body. Upper, lower, full body. You could do... There's so many ways you can set this up for yourself. I think that some tools that you could try to use

that bundle a lot of capacities into one are great. Like the tank. The tank from Torque is one of those things where you're able to push, pull, get a crazy amount of resistance. You'll feel your whole body working with that type of thing. And that's when, that piece of equipment is something that I think if everyone owned

one of those tank sleds, there'd be so much full body benefit because your whole body's working to push and pull an object through space. Push, pull, row, push, pull, row, just like repeat. And even on the pushing, you can actually like kind of do like a bench press almost. You can do like a dynamic, you know, shove like you're doing like a chest pass with a med ball or something like that.

And I think, you know, the reason why we're saying like, you know, two or three days a week, and we're saying like, it's because the amount of exercise that we do, we basically train every day. Like we're in a gym almost every single day, but we don't do that much. Like at least I don't do that much. Like I don't do that much. Like yesterday I did a handful of sets of bench,

did like five or six sets of bench, and in between bench, I did some jumps. And then when I was done with that, I did a little bit of sandbag stuff. I dragged the sled with my brother and his girlfriend, and that was it. But then I went on a run. So see, like these things, they start to add up,

they start to accumulate. But again, if you're gonna just try to condense it down into just a couple days a week, which I think would help everybody with motivation. I think it would help people with their time management because people, that's what they, we hear the most, right? I don't really have time. Well, have you tried just working out on Saturday and Sunday when you have off from work?

Oh, I never thought of that. I mean, that would be great. Saturday, Sunday, wake up at 7 a.m. before the wife and kids are up and go get a good workout in. And then by the time you get back, maybe everyone's up and they're ready for breakfast. You didn't miss nothing. They didn't miss nothing. And it also gonna help a lot with motivation

because if you're trying to be motivated to train every day and you're taking pre-workouts and we should do a whole show about no pre-workout. But yeah, right? I meanworkout. But yeah, right? I mean, shit. But yeah, people are trying to like, you know, just get so hyped for these workouts because they're tired from other things that are doing. It's all understandable.

I get it. I've been there. I think you guys have been there and you're trying to make something out of nothing. But the best way to do it is just to calm down and probably not have as many scheduled workouts. All right. Next, next up, our other thing. Function, let's, let's, let's look at this as like the functional strength, the body weight functional strength.

The way I go about this is I think that your body weight honestly only takes your body. And I think this is actually one of the easiest ones that you can implement without the need of a gym Because again when people mainly think about training they think about getting a gym membership and everything they do is at the gym But with your body weight This is where maybe some investment into some tools might be pretty helpful for you You can get yourself a pull-up bar that goes on your door, right? So every time you're at your house, maybe you go through that door You do a few pull-ups you could go a little bit deeper and get yourself like some of those base blocks, push-up things

or all these companies that have those type of dip bars or whatever. Because when I'm at home, when I'm watching TV with my girlfriend or something, I have my rice bucket in front of the TV. I hit that up like 30 to 40 minutes a day. And then I have my, I do some pull-ups, I do some push-ups, I do some dips on my dip bars that are literally right in the other room. And it's easy to do. And I'm improving at those skills

without having to go out of my way to go to a gym to do it, right? It's not that expensive. You could have a slapboard at home where you can do some, or at the office, you could sit in a squat and do some of that type of stuff. That gets into some range of motion stuff, but at the same time, that also lets you hit some deep squats with your own body weight while you're at work.

You drop and do some pushups. That doesn't require anything, but you can improve at all these things that improve your body weight strength to weight ratio. You can do these every day. Every day. You know, you could do them every day. And I guess, you know, with running, running is a body weight movement. So I'm doing it every day.

And then I've been working on jumping. And Seema, you mentioned this to me a while back about how your jumps feel like- Springier. Yeah, not just your jump rope, but yeah, you're feeling a lot springier and you're feeling like there's a lot less effort. So I was jumping yesterday

and I was doing some like box jumps and I brought the box height up a little bit, which I'm not really a huge fan of because I don't think it's always necessary for people, but it's fun. It's fun to like kind of see like, oh, am I progressing? And so I was messing around with some of that. But what I noticed was that a couple of weeks ago,

I had to really kind of like throw my arms down and back to sort of generate like a swing motion and then to bring my arms up to explode up to jump onto something. And now I just don't really need that because my legs are just springier. And then I've been messing with jump rope, not a ton, not like super frequent, but a couple of times a week. And same thing, getting like spring year, like it doesn't require, I don't know if people will know what I mean,

but sometimes the first time that you go to jump over the rope for an individual day, your body's a little stiff, and then it takes a moment to kind of get into rhythm. I don't feel like I have that kind of dead zone to start. The juices flow immediately. Yeah, it feels good immediately. It feels like a little bit more rhythmic immediately.

And so I'm noticing some really good benefits from that. But yeah, you can train body weight stuff can be done every single day. Some people like to get really regimented with stuff where they're like, I do 150 squats every day and a hundred pushups every day day and 100 sit-ups. If that's you and you like to be regimented that way, that's cool. But I tend to just like mix stuff up, make stuff up. I mean, I was doing like a almost like a skater lunge today, like off

of that thing that I got from Cal Deets. I was messing around with that on the couch stretch thing and that was feeling pretty good. So like, I'll just kind of mix things up quite a bit, but body weight exercises are amazing. A quick suggestion too, real quick, would be really consider, because I understand when you potentially listen to us talking like, oh, these guys, all they care about is fitness.

The reason why we care about fitness is because it's like long-term, it helps with everything else, right? So it's a good idea to try to set up your space at home, make it conducive to your fitness, right? Rather than just having a couch and a TV and whatever food stuff, like it is a good idea to get things that are just in your space

that make it easy to pick up. Can you have a kettlebell in your space? Can you have a dip bar in your space? Can you put a rice bucket somewhere so you get your hands in there and you're actually working your wrists and your fingers? Like all these things can be incorporated into your living space. And yeah, when some people come over, they'll be like, why is all this stuff everywhere? But who cares, right?

Because it makes it easier to take care of yourself. If only somebody did make a manual for how we should take care of ourselves, there would probably be more stress testing and use of the body, but that manual doesn't exist, so we have to do it on our own. Right? So just think about that. Think about how you can make your space more conducive to your health and fitness. Yeah. I've just been doing a lot more walking lately. A lot more. So like yesterday, I worked really hard.

Like I did a lot of stuff yesterday. And so this morning it's like dude Okay, I need to get in the lift. It's like nope I'm just gonna go for a walk and I just kind of threw my headphones on went out for a walk Two and a half miles later. I'm like, alright, I feel good. You know, I got here I'm gonna get some more steps in because it kind of like almost like with that myofascial release stuff You just start to feel better and better the more you do it And so what I find is like at the end of the week, so, you know, about four jujitsu sessions

right now, I feel pretty tired and I, but like I want to keep moving, but I don't want to overdo it because the main goal is to get better at jujitsu right now. So what I'll do is I'll just go for another walk. And then if I feel good enough, that walk turns into a light jog, but it's typically never like hours of work. You know, I might... I think the like route that I go is either two miles or two and a half miles, depending on, you know, which turn I make.

But if I'm running, I'll take the two-miler and I'll just cut it there and be like, you know, I feel good. And then I'll kind of walk it out a little bit more to kind of calm everything down. But again, something that Josh Settledge actually had mentioned, I feel good and then I'll kind of walk it out a little bit more to kind of calm everything down. But again, something that Josh Settledge actually had mentioned, he was just like, yeah, you just got to lace up your shoes and go. Like, how hard is that? You know, you just lace up your shoes and you start running.

And like, you know, he's absolutely right. So that's just what I've been doing a lot lately is just, you know, one foot in front of the other and just keep keep keep moving because it's when you sit down is when stuff starts to hurt the wrong way. You know, like forgot who said it recently, but it's like, you can either be sore from a good workout or sore from not moving and man sore from a workout is a totally different like feeling. Cause that other feeling is just terrible.

So I'm like, yeah, let's just keep moving. Whatever that, whatever that looks like. It's a walk today. Cool. If it's a run today, even better. Doesn't matter, let's just keep moving whatever that whatever that looks like. It's a walk today. Cool If it's a run today even better doesn't matter. Let's just keep moving. I Think there's a lot of things you can do to feel good you know like we're talking about like lifting and bodyweight exercises and all these different things we're proposing but You should just basically have an ability to sprint like an ability to and then again

I say sprint but I'm not even talking about like, just necessarily going all out. And I'm not even necessarily talking about like, running and sprinting, but I'm talking about the ability just to go from zero to something that represents something pretty dang fast, you know? If you get on an assault bike, you can produce a pretty good amount of watts.

You know, someone that gets on the assault bike and they can only produce like 200 Watts, they're probably fairly compromised. Like their VO2 max probably isn't very good. There's a lot of correlation with VO2 max and how long you live. There's some correlation with strength of your legs and longevity and things of that nature.

And so if you try to do stuff and you're not able to have any explosiveness or any oomph to you It's something that you got a question if you don't possess the ability to like jump hardly at all I can't jump up onto a six or eight inch like curb or something like that then something's off, you know, you're I think people just need to start to Explore some other things and if you're already good at something, if you're like Kenny Williams and you're explosive and you're a bodybuilder and you have good mobility,

then I think you owe it to yourself to keep those things. And the only way you're gonna keep them around is by at least doing them occasionally so that some of that stuff doesn't die off. And this goes into our speed and power aspect of things. Exactly what Mark just said, find ways to go fast on certain things. I do think that like, you know, since I've started sprinting, I can't look back. You know what I mean?

I'm sprinting multiple times a week now. And the cool thing about the sprint is that you shouldn't open up your body all the way when sprinting when you start off. Like you should try to keep your sprint at a safe percentage, whether it's a 40%, 50%. Yeah, technically it's not an all out sprint. And most people wouldn't call it that, but it's a sprint for you right now.

And as you get more comfortable, you can open things up. But when you have the ability to open up your body on a sprint, there's so much mobility that's going on there. There's so much range of motion that's going on there. But if your body isn't ready for it when you start, it's an easy way to hurt yourself. So ease yourself into that skill. Have the goal of unlocking it at some point,

unlocking your ability to sprint. Because when you do, everything feels easier. Because everything is easier, truly. But really do take advantage of that. If you have a rowing machine, if you have the ski erg, if you have a salt bike, whatever you have the ability to go fast on safely, do that. Get the heart rate up for a period of time,

and then slow down. And you can do that type of stuff twice a week, also easily. It's not something that you need to do every single day, but two times, maybe three times a week, you can do it. And the thing about this is if you want to do it frequently each week, then lower the intensity of what you do it at. So like for me, I do like sprinting four times, five times a week.

So what I'll do is at this point, all I'll do is eight hill sprints, six to eight hill sprints, right? I can do that multiple times a week. So what I'll do is at this point, all I'll do is eight hill sprints, six to eight hill sprints, right? I can do that multiple times a week now without it destroying my body instead of doing 15 or 20 hill sprints. And if I did that, I'd probably only do it two or three times a week. So think about it that way. If you want to do this stuff more frequently, because you like the way it feels, decrease

the intensity. That means when you get off the machine, you're like, I could have done five more sets, but you don't. Cause you wanna do it the next day or you wanna do it the day after that. I think you'll be shocked too at what this will do for your body in terms of like leaning you out

and muscularity and stuff like that. And again, it just doesn't take, you know, it doesn't take the same requirement of all the things involved in hypertrophy. Like the hypertrophy game doesn't end in the gym. You know, it just doesn't take the same requirement of all the things involved in hypertrophy. The hypertrophy game doesn't end in the gym. It just doesn't. You have to tend to it all day long. You gotta eat your protein and do everything else right.

But when it comes to gaining strength, it doesn't really work that way. Obviously, you do need the building blocks, so you need some calories for sure. That is critical. But when I was power lifting and I saw, not only myself, but other power lifters, like not really paying much attention to sleep,

not really paying much attention to their food, and people got stronger. It's because that signal is so strong to get stronger that your body tends to want to adapt to it. And I know that you can get big and, you know, people do so without as much sleep and stuff. But again, if you're not paying attention to your food and trying to gain muscle, you're making a huge mistake

and it's usually a lot harder for people. But what I love about some of these aspects of strength or even like sprinting and stuff like that is that you can kind of just do it periodically and you can have your own versions of it. You know, we're talking about like sprinting and we're talking about hill sprints and, but for somebody just kind of starting out, it could just be like, you just jog up a hill. You know, like that's a good start. Like that's a great starting place. Okay, you jogged up this hill that's 50 yards and you did it three times.

Like that's incredible. Like, you know, try that again in three days and see how it feels. Go ahead. Please don't lose your train of thought. See how it feels. When you mentioned jogging up a hill, it made me think about like,

one of the reasons why I love the rope is because it ties spinal rotation into everything you do. You can sprint with the rope, okay? If you go to some of David Weck's stuff and you'll see this light rope that he's using, like, you can literally see how fast can you rotate your spine side to side and do that for 30 seconds. Like, don't do that initially. Like, get familiar with, like, using your spine with the rope and then go fast. Like that an aspect of sprinting is rhythm. A lot of people don't realize that rhythm from the side to side of the

body, right? So you can mimic that with the rope, that spinal rotation, and that's something that will help you feel more comfortable going out and sprinting, right? So you can even sprint with a rope. Sprinting is fun too. Like once you get going fast and produce and force on any of this stuff, it's a lot of fun. And I just think that it's like baked into our DNA. It's baked into your body to want to do some of these things.

One thing when it comes to, you know, implementing some of these things, again, you could do your own version of them. I mentioned jogging a hill. You could go up the stairs and you can go upstairs like two stairs at a time and put a little oomph into that, like explode into it a little bit. If you're somebody that's been susceptible to injuries and you're nervous or worried about something, then just do it whatever way you need to do it to get it done.

But I also noticed something really interesting that I think is a good thing to share with people. There are many different versions of strength. And you can run hills and different things like that. But something that is kind of hard to do and will feel really good to most people that are unexperienced with running is try to run run, you know, you can pick a minute mile that best suits you, like maybe you're a little

on the faster side and that's fine, or maybe you're a little bit on the slower side, but if you try like a six to eight minute mile pace, so it could be six minute mile pace, seven minute mile pace, eight minute mile pace, try that on for size and try that for like a minute or two. A minute or two at a six, seven, or eight minute mile pace is a real bitch and it's actually running.

So the big difference between jogging, kind of shuffling along. Jogging, I would say that jogging is a little bit akin to maybe like jumping rope. There's some rhythm involved, there's some stuff going on with it, but it's not that complicated and it doesn't require that much of you. But when you start to like run, it really, you're going to kind of feel your body twisting and turning and it's almost like you're ringing out like anxiety in some weird

way. Walking kind of does something similar, I think, if you walk far enough and long enough sometimes but I've noticed this with running. So give that a try because there's almost, there's obviously like everyone can like run differently and people have different mobility and different attributes when it comes to these things, but try that out and try doing it for a minute or two minutes or so, and you're gonna feel your body

open up and you're gonna feel this flow. And it's just gonna be way different than anything. If you're not a runner, it's gonna be way different than anything you've ever experienced before. But it does take time to feel that, right? It takes time. Yeah, the first time you do it, or the second time you do it,

or maybe in the fifth time you do it, just gonna be breathing really hard. And you'll be like, wow, this is like kind of crazy. But it's the reason why you see so many runners posting stuff and they're so happy and excited to share it is because they're really hitting that feeling. And I think that's where the runner's high comes from.

I don't think the runner's high comes from like just jogging and being out there for a while. I think the runner's high comes from running and from running pretty hard. I wanna have a serious conversation with you about your balls. And I'm being serious here. On this podcast, we talked about a lot of things

to help men improve the health of their penis, because it's important. And your balls have very thin skin. This is true. You can touch them right now, and you know it's pretty thin. Women do a lot of things to take care of their vaginal health, and men, we don't really think about the things that we put right directly on our balls, like our boxers.

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Yes, that's over at NADSunder.com. That's N-A-D-S-under.com. And at checkout, enter promo code powerproject to save 15% off your entire order. Again, that's at nadsunder.com. Links in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. But then let's think about this too. It's, I think being able to get yourself

to a point where you can run and attain a runner's high is good because I think, I'm sure that you can do that without messing yourself up. You can do that while getting good at a lot of things. But the thing is, just like with people who love training jujitsu and then they train themselves into injury, even after they get proficient, runners who love to run and get the runner's high will run themselves into injuries. And you see this all the time. You see all these runners with foot injuries, back pain, knee

pain, et cetera. And they're just like, I love to run. That's all I do. I'll keep running till the day I die. That doesn't have to be you. You can build this skill. You can build this ability by biting off a little bit of it and slowly improving at it over time before you

and then become a proficient runner. But you don't have to be the person that, if you want to be, you can. But you don't have to be the person that does mar you want to be, you can, but you don't have to be the person that does marathons six times a year. Right? So, yeah, a lot of people overdo it. You get excited about a particular thing and then we do that thing that is supposed to be healthy and we turn it into something that's not healthy at all.

And then this kind of falls into the idea, the strength side of endurance, right? Ways that you can build your endurance. I love jujitsu. I grapple for long periods of time when I do. That's something that's helpful. Mark, you run a lot. But, you know, if you're someone who really does like using weights,

you can implement like training for endurance into your weight training. With a kettlebell, you can do EMOMs, you can do complexes where it's like, okay, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna literally swing a kettlebell for the next five minutes or I'm gonna do something with this for three minutes and move to something else for a few minutes. You can do that type of workout with resistance training and improve your overall endurance by just keeping your heart rate up. See I love this topic because again it doesn't really have anything to do with building muscle.

And again I'm not against building muscle. I think building muscle is great. The cascade of disciplines that surround building muscle makes it a worthy cause for so many different reasons and I will always promote that. And I think it's great. But again, I just think some things got kind of tangled up in some of the messaging that I hear. I'm like, ah, man, I hope other people aren't listening to that and hearing it the messaging that I hear, I'm like, ah, man, I hope other people aren't listening to that and hearing it the way that I'm hearing it because they just keep talking about muscle. And what about endurance?

What about mobility? What about the ability to sprint? What about just strength? I think strength is really important to be able to tap into that at any time. I was mentioning something to someone the other day about David Goggins and people, David Goggins talks about being like the baddest man

on the planet kind of thing, baddest man on earth. And it's such a great moniker, it's such a great thing to cling to, but make no mistake about it, David Goggins has a skill set that is out of this world. He has an exceptional, extraordinary skill set and his mindset might have helped him build that skill set. But if we take somebody that we all admire and we take someone that we're like, yep, that dude's pretty tough. You know, he's fucked that guy's we take Joe Rogan, for example, and Joe Rogan tries to run with David Goggins.

No matter the mindset that Rogan has, he's not gonna be able to run with Goggins if he's going all out. Like it just doesn't make any sense, right? Like we can, you can kind of envision that and you can picture that. So we have a tendency to kind of undersell, we oversell the mindset and we undersell the skillset.

The skillset is pivotal. And Seema can kill me in fighting because he has a skillset. Not because he's more angry, not because he is stronger in this case, but even if I was way stronger and we had a bunch of metrics for me, you know, and we could say, wow, Mark's faster and he's stronger and he can do this and this and this.

I'd still get killed because I don't have that skill set. And you've seen it so many times. And I think Jiu-Jitsu is such a wonderful example of that. I've heard Joe Rogan kind of talk about it before where he's like, it's just, that's just what happens to white belts. Like it just, you know, they just, with somebody that's been there, you know, somebody who's been training for four years, like just, they can't do anything.

And obviously there's outliers to everything. You know, you could have a NCAA, 2A champion, you know, white belt and there's some shit, right? There's some shit that can happen here and there. But for the most part, you get what I'm saying. And I think that when we're doing all these things, keep in mind, you're building a skillset. And over time, your skillset and your mindset,

they'll both expand. They're both gonna grow. You're gonna get tougher and better at all of it. And so I guess my point in bringing it up is when I think about longevity, I'm thinking, man, if you build up all these skill sets going into your older age Where you don't have a problem going on a run. You don't have a problem going to jiu-jitsu You don't have a problem with you know hitting up some heavy deadlifts with your friends. You don't have a problem with boxing a couple rounds and sparring or hitting some bags or

Going on a hike. you don't have a problem doing any of these things, not because you're mentally tough, but because you have a skillset for it. All right, and then I think what comes naturally here is flexibility and range of motion is the last thing that we mentioned. But before we get into that, I do want to mention,

with all of this, use your mind and then think of the person that goes balls deep into one avenue. So when we were talking about barbell and weight lifting and resistance training, think of the people that went all in on that, and that was their form of fitness. And then you could probably think of all the holes they have in their fitness.

Like there are some people that do that that are flexible, but most aren't. There are some people that do that form of fitness, and then you could probably think of all the holes they have in their fitness. Like there are some people that do that that are flexible, but most aren't. There are some people that do that that have some endurance, but most aren't. Most can't really even run or sprint, right? They're really good at this one thing, but they're really bad at other things. And then just take that and move it into the body weight functional people kind of got a lot of benefits, right? But they can't do other things.

When we look at people who are really good at endurance, we then need to think about the guys who are doing 50-milers, 100-milers, look at how they look, look at how sickly they look. We actually had a podcast recently about visceral fat, and I talked to this woman who does Dexa scans for a lot of people. She did my Dexa scan too. And she said, the people that generally have the most visceral fat that I notice

that are generally seen as fit are the runners. Why? Because they always intake all these gels and all these things for their runs. And they end up having a lot of visceral fat, even though they're not very big, right? So, you know, and then speed and power, when you're really good at that, but you go way too far,

then you don't, you can't do that as you get older because you've killed it. Flexibility and range of motion, yogis, they're just really flexible, really have really good range of motion, but they have all this joint laxity and this is why FP kills them all the time, right? Functional patterns goes at them.

But that's still a good capacity to have. And I think range of motion and flexibility is something you could easily do any of that stuff around the house. You could do any of that type of stuff when you're sitting around, you can go sit in a squat. But then you can also use the gym to improve those things. So when you're lifting, can you do certain movements in your training routine that move you

into a longer range of motion, but move yourself out of it. So now it's not you're just passively flexible, but you are actively controlling yourself in and out of those ranges. Conceptually, if you just take that concept and do that, you can work on flexibility and mobility with your training routine. You're bringing up a really good point,

and runners and cyclists, it's easy for us to look at them and to be like, man, what are these guys doing? Or what are these girls doing? Like, this is wild. Like they're kind of skin and bones and people for the Tarte de France, they wanna like weigh less and less.

That's like super important for them to only have to haul around X amount of weight during that activity. But at the same time, those people could look at like a pro bodybuilder and be like, what are these guys doing? Like, they're plenty big, like, why is Nick Walker trying to get bigger? Like, he's absolutely massive. It's absolutely insane. The hypertrophy levels that some of these people have, have

gotten to. And I think, you know, from sport to sport, from one sport to another sport, it's probably easy for someone to look at that. Even just thinking pro football, like an MMA fighter might think that pro football is crazy because of the CTE. And a pro football player would be like, no, you guys are nuts. You're punching each other in the head. That's wild.

And so it's kind of easy from one thing to another to look at it. But when you're doing the sport, it's kind of easy from one thing to another to look at it. But when you're, when you're doing the sport, it's normal, you know, it's like, uh, if, if two runners were talking and somebody was like getting ready to do an ultra marathon, um, the guy would be like, yeah, instead of like lunch this week, I just, uh, went out and I ran 25 miles or something like that. You know, instead of my normal lunch break or instead of going home for a few hours, I just ran 20 miles. And that sounds crazy to most people.

And most people would, most people probably wouldn't be able to run 20 miles. And anybody that could run 20 miles would be sore for three weeks from that. So what's normal in one sport is definitely like abnormal to the normal person. But I guess a lot of what we're trying to communicate here is like, there's probably a lot of good practices in yoga. They meditate a lot. They know a lot about breathing. There's

probably a lot of good practices that are done in Pilates. There's probably strongman. Strongman is like one of the greatest sports. And if you get your average person to do some strongman training and strongman events, that would be amazing. But you know what the problem with strongman is? It's way too heavy. The weights are way, these guys are so strong. These people are so strong that it's just astronomical.

Even some of the implements themselves without any weight on them. Some of those things are, you know, four or 500 pounds before they ever even put any weight on them. So the sandbags that we have in the gym and the med balls that we have in the gym, you know, the heaviest sandbag that we have in the gym is like, you know, 300 pounds, I think, uh, for strong, man, I mean, they pick that stuff up. They'll shoulder it.

They'll walk around with it. They'll wear it like a hat. Like did with the 40 pound sandbag today. Do you guys think it is a good idea to try to prioritize some of these things? You know, like literally like, okay, I got my, if it's a strength athlete, I got my strength work done. Should I then move right into endurance? Or is it like, oh no, maybe I should work on the flexibility. You know what I mean? Like bigger bang for your buck, I guess I'll say.

Yeah, I think that like this is an individual thing. You look at these things as like they're human capacities. That's how I look at them. That's why like, again, when we had the conversation with Functional Patterns, I was just like, well, I totally like what you guys are doing, but I'm not going to let go of these other human capacities because I have the ability to do them,

but I also have the ability to run, sprint, throw, and jump. So obviously, it would be good to maintain them. So if you're someone who's a lifter or a bodybuilder, how can you develop these other capacities so that you're not only a bodybuilder or you're only someone who's just big, but you have these other things that you're able to do. If you're someone who does yoga, how can you then develop these other human capacities

of strength, endurance, speed, functional strength? You can do that, you can absolutely do that, but yoga can still be your main thing. For me personally, Jiu Jitsu is my main sport, but all these other capacities help me to be a better grappler. And I guess, jujitsu is my main sport, but all these other capacities help me to be a better grappler. And I guess I'm just lucky with my sport because all these other things help me grapple better, right? So just figure that out. You could still have your main thing, but just because you have your main thing doesn't mean everything else,

every other capacity has to go to the wayside unless you're a professional that's doing this and making money off of doing this. But the thing is that's not most people. Most people are doing jujitsu for fun. Most people are running for fun. They're not running to make money. So that means let's do the other things that are gonna help us age well rather than doing the only the one thing

and getting good at the one thing, but then we lose out on all these other aspects when we're older. Yeah, I think we're unique in that sense. I think that you're not seeing that many other people that maybe desire to go after a bunch of different things. Because I know for myself, like, I'm not on top of everything all the time. Like it's impossible to, you know, to be on top of all these different things that we

talk about all the time. But like I do practice a mild fashion release. I do eat properly. I do fasting. All the stuff we talk about on the show, I'm always kind of messing around with, always trying to bring these things into my life and seeing how I can bring them into my life.

But there's a lot of people that do jujitsu. There's a lot of people that power lift or do other things and they're just doing that. And during my power lifting career, that is primarily what I did. Luckily, I learned about some other things and some other techniques, but they were still very much kind of boxed in or boxed around power lifting. Like I did learn about diet. So after every power lifting meet I did, I would always lose weight and be in a little bit better shape and sort of try to recomp each time.

I did learn about like dragging the sled and having some sort of conditioning, even though it wasn't great conditioning for really anything else other than being able to handle the training for powerlifting and getting a little bit better shape each time that I did it. And then learning some stuff from like Kelly Sturrett about mobility. So I've always kind of been poking around at these things. I just wasn't as open to them.

And I'm hoping that the people that are listening to this can learn from some of what I did because my body is basically, I don't wanna say forever compromised because that's a long time, but it's pretty compromised from, you know, a lot of things like my hips are super tight. I don't have, you know, like squatting, you know, full range to the ground with my heels down. I know some people are like, Hey, I wouldn't mind that trade off. You're fucking rich and you, you did really well in powerlifting, so shut the fuck up.

I agree and I wouldn't change anything, but it would have been nice to have some of this knowledge because kind of spinning out of and going from powerlifting to some of the other things that I'm doing now, I would have probably been able to turn things around a lot faster and have things be maybe a little bit easier. And that's why with everything that we talked about here,

I think a lot of this then comes back down to the ability to microdose it. Because as you were saying, if you knew a lot of this, you would span out of powerlifting a little bit better. But for any of you that are focused on a specific sport, with all this other stuff, figure out ways to microdose them into your training day or into other days during the week. Like we mentioned, keep some tools at home, right? When you go into the gym, think of other things you could

do. Get some tools that allow you to move your body in different ways. That's like the rope is something that I think is really good because it's low impact. People can do it when they're older, et cetera. But it gives you this spinal movement that you're not getting with most other things that you do. You know what I mean? So it's an easy way without any type of extra resistance to move your body in a different way. We talk about these things all the time,

but just figure out how to do that. Figure out a way to microdose it. It doesn't need to be a huge workout, but if you do these small things over a long period of time, it's gonna add up for your body, right? Because most, like many people, aren't doing any of it right now. So just think of doing five minutes a week,

that new thing for five minutes a week, that goes a long way in the long run. And some of what you're doing is like, obviously doing as much high level jujitsu with the best guys in the world, doing as much as you possibly could handle would be great. But that could be easily overdone. Absolutely. Because you can just get cooked from doing too much of that.

Will get cooked. You'll get cooked. And so you need to have other stuff that, you know, you're posting a lot of stuff on your story on Instagram and people are like, oh, that guy seems pretty like chill. Like he's just like doing this like rope flow stuff. And then he's juggling like a kettlebell. And you're doing a lot of these things that don't look,

they don't look anything like high level jujitsu, but in your mind, it's allowing you to express strength, explosiveness, dexterity, coordination, rhythm, in a similar way, but it doesn't really cost you anything. Doesn't beat you up. It's like a little bit of energy, you're outside, you maybe sweat a little bit, but that's about it. I'll talk about this on another day too,

but I look at like these things as flow activities. So these are activities that allow me to get into a flow state that aren't jiu-jitsu because one of the reasons why people love running and the runners high is because they're able to get into a flow state with running. They're so efficient that their movement takes no level of thought and they can just keep going for miles. That's the same way I feel when I do jiu-jitsu. And you're nasal breathing doing a lot of this stuff. And you're just kind of playing music usually. And you like are, what do you mean by flow state? Give us a little more detail if you can. I'm going to use jujitsu as a description.

When you become proficient enough at any activity where the way that you move your body is now not dictated by you thinking about moving, it's just you doing the thing your body knows how to do with no inhibition. So a flow state, I can get into a flow state with jiu-jitsu because I've trained so much over the nine years that I can roll with somebody and boom I'm just in it. I could close my eyes and roll with them because I know where to grab, I know where to sweep, my body knows what to do and there's no level of

thought. That is like the, that's the best athletic feeling ever which is one of the reasons why people love to train jiu-jitsu so much after a certain amount of time, because when you get good enough, you can flow. But you're not thinking, you're just rolling. And the runner's high, I think an aspect of the runner's high is, you're on it. Your gait's good. Your... Everything, the way that the body's moving is just...

A couple miles go by and you're like, wait, what? Like, that's been amazing. And you're like, what was I doing? And you're like, fuck, I'm not sure. And then you can't get back, it's gone. That's flow state. That right there is flow state. And that's why people dive into running so deep

because you think about it, lifting doesn't give you that. Because you're doing a set, you stop. Set, you stop. You're thinking all the time. But with the flow, that's why they call it rope flow. When you become proficient enough, you're doing these things and then you're not thinking. Your body's just doing these patterns

that it's learned how to do. You're rotating. It's another flow activity, but it's low impact. No impact at all. Kettlebell juggling, same deal. When you get proficient enough, you're now flipping a kettlebell and you're just in it. You don't have to think anymore.

You're grabbing, flipping, grabbing. It's a flow activity without beating you up. So that's why I like these other things because it allows me to get into these flow states that I love to do with Jiu-Jitsu, but Jiu-Jitsu's not the only flow activity I have. Strength is not always a weakness, maybe. Strength is never a weakness,

weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later, bye.