Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 308 - Chris Duffin

Episode Date: January 9, 2020

Chris “The Mad Scientist” Duffin world record-holding powerlifter and coach. He is the founder and owner of Kabuki Strength, a manufacturing company that produces some of the best powerlifting bars in the industry. Chris is currently training to become the first man in history to successfully deadlift and squat over 1,000lbs for reps. Chris Duffin's website: https://christopherduffin.com/ Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Visit our sponsors: ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Perfect Keto: http://perfectketo.com/powerproject               Use Code "POWERPROJECT10” at checkout for $10 off $40 or more! Use code "POWERPROJECTBUNDLE" for $25 off $100!! ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject  ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject   ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

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Which gym was that at, by the way? That was my garage. Oh. In Portland. Okay. Yeah, I went up to his place in Portland. Chris and I actually were tinkering around with some projects. We were going to make something called a Superlift, which is going to be like a monolift that you can do other stuff off of because a monolift unfortunately it's like

one giant thing that's squatting yeah you can only squat off of and chris had a lot of great concepts and ideas and we thought we could kind of come together on something and we did we messed around with it for a little while and then then i disappeared yeah and you were working a lot yeah i was running the aerospace company at the time time and realized that it was about to go under, and we were going to work on this project. I'm like, Mark, I can't do this, or 150 people are going to lose their jobs. I've got to buckle down and focus. So I got three of them, though, still in my facility that were the prototypes.

Yeah, and they work great. You've been tinkering around with stuff for a long time. I mean, when I went to your garage gym, I mean, first of all, it was like a used car lot a little bit. I remember seeing a lot of used car parts, and I've seen a lot of… Not much has changed. Yeah, a lot of cars and a lot of like machines and stuff and i'm pretty unfamiliar with a lot of it so it's a lot of stuff i've never seen before but then even in your gym you had a lot of innovative stuff you had the bench where you had and you had just oh yeah i still have that yeah you had stuff like set up in just you know whatever weird way you could figure

out at the time you just press a button and the bench goes up and down it doesn't matter you put 2 000 pounds on the bar it doesn't matter it'll just go up down so instead of like lifting the end and putting pens like it still runs today so that's the chris duffin story is like he never adjusts or makes anything like just a little bit better you go above and beyond and make it some crazy uh weird contraption right kind of a mad scientist when did all that start like were you always interested were you doing that kind of stuff as a kid or something i was doing that yeah as a kid so very early i remember i'd yeah i'd take apart like the my little electronic toys and build other things out of them so like i don't know occasionally i'd

like burn myself with wires that were hot or you know whatever but uh and did you go to school for that uh well yeah i got yes i did i want engineering so i've got uh one engineering degree and then i was nine second nine credits short of my second engineering degree wow so nine second nine credits short of my second engineering degree wow so when i decided i wasn't gonna sit at a computer all day yeah yeah so yeah how about then you're good how about that aerospace thing you mentioned the aerospace company like you had 150 employees yeah i so i spent about 20 years so 18 years in the industrial sector i I developed on the leadership side of things. And so I ended up running manufacturing for some automotive manufacturing companies, high tech aerospace. That one was my biggest project. I came in to a failing aerospace company and turned it around.

They were failing for quality delivery and they were losing money every year and in four years time i got it uh profitable and at uh world-class level uh for boeing we're the number one supplier in the world for quality and delivery and then prepped it for sale got it turned around and sold and uh and then went on to uh another company from there what the fuck is i was kind of what's aerospace we made parts on plane for planes so uh yeah so um the ones we made there well we made a lot for mostly boeing although we did some for bombardier and a few other programs some military uh work but primarily it was a lot of 737 uh parts so uh components that went on the what's called the main landing gear so there's a big beam that comes down and we were

responsible for making a lot of the components on that and then probably a lot of regulations i would imagine right a few yeah yeah a few a few. A lot of paperwork. A lot of paperwork. More paperwork goes with every single part than you could believe. So the joke is that you could – a Boeing plane couldn't take off if you actually stuffed all the paperwork inside that comes along with it. And then I did – I was on the critical path for the launch of the 787 Dreamliner. So if you ever watch one, there's a bunch of components on the jet defusal launch that move in and out, made all those components that basically mount to that composite hull

and hold both the engine in place as well as open the doors and things on there. Was that maybe a little bit of like a dream job? Because it sounded like you could kind of make and do anything. Well, everything's highly engineered. So you can't just do whatever you want. What I really enjoyed about the work that i did was working with people so being able to like like i said when i went into the aerospace company the entire culture had to change so there was a lot of cultural change like building people they were used to running around

with their hair on fire always losing the battles like and so it's really inspiring people and getting connected with a vision and helping them understand how they fit into that and then being able to really drive change through people. And so that's what I loved, basically the coaching. Right. Right. And that's why I eventually ended up leaving the career because I wanted to do more of that.

I was doing that at a high level, but the things that I was making and doing and how they are impacting the world wasn't didn't fit my personal vision. So I wanted to go out and this was actually happened basically while I was down here. Might have been last time or the time before. I can't remember. So I'll be like maybe like four or five years ago, right? Yeah. That we're talking about? Yeah. Chris was down here, and I think at the time you were already a world record holder

or maybe you broke the world record in a squat in a 220. Yeah, I had the all-time world record at the time. He used to weigh 220 pounds. That's a while. According to the internet, I'm 220 forever. A couple sandwiches ago maybe. I think that's why everybody thinks I'm like 5'4", because they're like, he must be. He's 220.

That's awesome. And while you were down here, I remember you were, I think you already knew the answer. Yeah, I did. You already knew the answer. You just kind of like, you know, just needed somebody to kind of like nudge you and say, hey, man, fuck that job. Go do something else. But I remember, you know, I remember it actually really vividly. And I remember where we were,

we were in Davis and I remember we were driving down the street and you had a call and you just kind of got talked to in a way where I was like, when you hung up, I was like, man, I just, I don't know. Like I would just, that doesn't work for me. Like I would never be, I would never be able to have a job like that. I'd never be able to have a job like you had where, you know, you have kind of higher ups breathing down your neck like that. And I just said, you know, you've set world records. You've done all these crazy things. You can go off and do anything.

And then plus you're already, I mean, it's not like you had a job at Burger King. You know, you're an engineer. I was paid. That was one of the big problems. You know, I've got a family and I've got a, you know, a lifestyle that I provided for that family. And I was rewarded pretty well for what I did. I mean, I was sought out for coming in and basically doing turnarounds for companies. And so, you know, I never went and applied for jobs. I was recruited

and yeah, it's so that was kind of the big step, right. Is like walking away from that security, that comfort, right. Knowing my, my background, as you do, you understand that that's a pretty important thing for me. Like I had complete opposite of security growing up and I didn't want to have that for my. And so that was for me, that was the big the big hold up. Right. And but at the same time, I wasn't doing with my life what I knew I could. Like I knew the way that I could impact the world the best. Right. And I knew what it was.

And yeah, I remember distinctly sitting on that in that car ride with you and uh taking the call which was on speaker because i can't bring a damn phone to my face uh and uh getting uh uh berated by the ceo of the company uh and it's just like yeah i'm i'm kind of done with this right i'm kind of done with this yeah and that's it's just like um you know i can't really think of i mean people in here have been uh like we've had to talk to people for certain uh reasons we've had to take like disciplinary actions on people but like i can't i've never i would never imagine ever talking to anybody like that. You know what I mean?

I can't see a reason for it. It's not the way I operate. If somebody's listening and they work at a job like that, that's not normal. That's not the way a business should be run. It doesn't make any sense. Now, to get into it a little bit here and there over a project or something because everyone's passionate about it and excited about it,

that's kind of one thing. But to kind of talk down to somebody, I just don't think there's a place for it i don't think it works it doesn't work that's the main problem it doesn't it doesn't help well it's a crazy thing so like over the course of my career um i've had this happen multiple times where you end up in those situations where you end up having to part ways with somebody, do disciplinary action. And I have had many times, twice, that two people that I have let go have come back at another employer and begged me to hire them again. Because they're like, hey, you were straight up, you were honest. And what you told me, like I needed to hear and it changed my life. and you were right. And I want to prove it to you.

Right. And same thing. I've had other people come back and just thank me like repeatedly, because you don't have to handle it without class. Like you can still, this person's a human and you're not like trying to make them feel bad or less of themselves. It's like, here's what you need to accomplish. And you know, you're, you've chosen not to do that. And this is where we're at. Um, but this is, there's nothing personal about this. I want you to be successful. Okay. We're doing this, but I still want you to be successful, you know? And if, if you're not going to do it here, I'm hoping that you can do it somewhere else. And there's nothing like negative about that. It's like, here's, here's, here's the behaviors, here's the actions, here's what needs to change. Um, and if they can't get there, you know, they're making

that choice themselves, but it doesn't mean it doesn't, like you said it when, when, when you talk to somebody on a personal level and say, you suck, like why, why would you say such a, say such a, you know, like, because you don't have to handle it that way. Even if you're unhappy, you know, when would you not want somebody to better themselves and improve their situation? You try to make it black and white and you say, hey, remember, like, this is the job we hired you for. I'm not sure what's happening. And maybe you don't have all the resources or tools to get the job done. Is there something I can do on my behalf to assist you further? Can we buy a new computer for you?

Is there something that we can do to step in to assist what you're doing? Do you need to learn more programs? Do you need to go to a seminar? Is there anything that we can do because it's not really looking good? It's not heading in the right direction. How do we get it heading in the right direction? And it's, you know, the person might be insulted because they might be very attached to what they're doing. They might think everything's okay.

So, you know, one thing I got to commend you on, Mark. Like I walked in this morning before you were here and Smokey's showing me around and introducing me to people. And I just love the consistency in like like, the faces that I see here. And that speaks well. So I just – Thank you. Appreciate that. It's on that same topic.

It's because I scream at Smokey every day. Tell him what a piece of shit he is. But, you know, like, I've never held a job for more than five years. And I've had people work for me for 20 years like that you know people should be like at my company Kabuki you know some of the people used to work for me in automotive or some of those other other companies in you know engineering roles or whatever and it's like hey I want to I need your help call them up and they're like yeah hell yeah you always treated me with respect you know I'm down I want to come be need your help. Call them up. And they're like, yeah, hell yeah.

You always treated me with respect. I'm down. I want to come be part of what you're doing. And that speaks well. That makes you feel good that you're treating people in the way that they want to continue working with you in that manner. When there's a lot of different places they can go. The economy is going good. Unemployment hear. When there's a lot of different places they can go. Yeah. The economy is going good.

Unemployment's low. Like, you know, people have a lot of choices. Go Trump. Oh, sorry. Didn't know we were still on air. You know, we hear a lot of people say like, you know, kind of F your job and like move on and go, you know, go do your own thing. And people want to get all excited about it and stuff. But like, how do you really actually do it

when you're making six figures and you're doing really well and you don't know where else to go? How were you able to do it? Well, the thing is, I'd actually started working on building the platform to do that many years before I ever made the move. We were just reflecting on this picture of me looking young there back in 2008,

and we were working on a project together. But I'd started my YouTube channel a couple years before that, started producing free educational content whenever I could. I was busy, but I'd be in the gym, and I'd be like, hey, I'm going to talk to everybody about a coaching concept at the gym. Let's record this and throw it up. And this is before mobile phones were like super, like it was really easy to do that sort of stuff. And some of that you had momentum with without even ever knowing that it was going to become anything.

Exactly. Did podcasts, things like that. Started building a brand, right? And so when the switch made, I had my first product design. And I just reached out to my audience and said, hey, here's it. And this is the concept. This is where it's going to go. Ah, yes.

Look at those charming... Oh my God. We've changed roles. So I'm the fat one now and you're the skinny one. Maybe next time you come back, we'll switch again. Dude, your cheeks, man. That's wild.

I am pushing my belly out on the prank. But that is hilarious. Just to clear. Was that product you were talking about, which one was it? It was the shoulder rock. Shoulder rock. So I put the shoulder rock. I made 10 prototypes, and I went and i worked with like eric

spoto and a few other people and uh stand efforting and got some a little bit of momentum and hype going about it and then did basically my own kickstarter because i don't think kickstarter was around then maybe it was i wasn't familiar with it and And put it out for sale, listing what the lead time was going to be. Got enough orders to launch that. What do you mean you put it on sale? Was it like on the internet, like a Kickstarter? Not a Kickstarter. It was just I created my own website.

Oh, okay. And put it up for sale with what the lead time was, that it was development and people ordering. I was able to fund the startup of that and got that going. Started selling those, launched the Whiskey and Deadlift shirt, and a couple months later I was able to walk away from my job. Let's back up just a little bit. When you took money, were people investing in the the business or was it just to support you or – No, it was to buy.

So I listed it's going to be 12 weeks to make this because I knew that. Right. It would take me like eight or ten. And so they basically ordered a product. I see. Mainly like a pre-sale. Yeah, pre-sale. Gotcha.

So we don't do that anymore, but that did the same thing. That's a little scary too, right? Like you have people's money and then, you know. You got to deliver. Yeah. So I did the same thing with the Duffalo bar. You get one shot at that. That March.

So I did that at the beginning of there with the shoulder rock, and then in May or June launched the Duffalo bar with a pre-sale as well. Had all the development done on it. What about machinery and stuff like that? How did you work that? Did you already have some of these pieces? I already had some of the base machinery. The Duffalo bar bar i had the machining

outsourced uh and did the assembly uh in-house and then since that as things uh progressed that year we continued to to buy more equipment and continue to bring that in-house uh now we've got a full manufacturing facility and we manufacture everything i went to. I went to the New York Jets, and there's the Duffalo bar, and there's your new trap bar deadlift. That thing's great. And I know a lot of other teams have a lot of your products and stuff too. That's awesome. That is so cool. The Yankees there in New York, they got all our stuff.

What is that, a baseball team? I think so. Andrew, see if you can pull up a picture of some shots of Chris's trucks that he has. Got it. They're separate Instagram, Duffin War Rig. Oh, there we go. Oh, wow. Yeah, things are a monster.

Yeah, the MLB championships weren't too long ago, and nine of the ten teams competing are all Kabuki customers. I remember Louie Simmons back in the day he said if you want to lose don't get a reverse hyper if you want to win buy a reverse hyper pretty straightforward and i was going to say so like whether or not uh kickstarter was even available back then it wasn't as accepted as it is today like anybody can start a kickstarter and people will throw well they won't just throw money, but like it's a, it's a normal thing now. Back then I'd imagine it was not. So like, was there no, and I wanted to have my name behind it. Like I'm, I I'm putting this out there. I'm guaranteeing that this is going to get done. So was there like a huge

resistance early on or just, you had trust already built because of everything? I had trust built because I'd been out there for a while, demonstrating who I was, producing. So for years, I spent building a platform, writing for a number of different online. Breaking Muscle, Elite FTS. So I was doing a lot of work for years building that position. So I get people message me a lot of work for years building that position so you know one of the i get people message me a lot they're like hey i just got out of school you know i want to know how i get into online coaching how do i start and i'm like you need to go like get a job at 24-hour fitness like

what what no no i want i'm like you got to cut your teeth somewhere and like learn the basics like so but i want to retire by the time i'm 30 i want to start uh i want to start your teeth somewhere and like learn the basics like so but i want to time on 30 i want to start uh i want to start you know writing and coaching and doing this stuff online like you realize i've been training for 15 years maybe 20 years before i ever published my first article where i felt confident enough that i've got something to a value add. And then I did that for another 10 years. Maybe not quite 10 years. Yeah, seven years. So let's say 15 years and then like seven years.

Seven years of doing that before even saying, hey, I'm ready now to go launch my own business. And so that's – you got to take your time, like learning as well. You can't just go, Hey, I want to be a motivational speaker. Well, you got to have some experiences to speak from, you know? I know you just got out of college or high school or something, but like, and that's a grand ambition, but you need, you need to have some content, some, you know, you've got to have some content. You've got to have some material, some experiences in your life.

The same thing goes with anything. You've got to cut your teeth. And there's nothing wrong with working for somebody if you want to be an entrepreneur. You know what they're doing when you're working for them? If you find the right job, you're getting paid to learn. You're getting paid for your degree in life all the time. And that's one of the reasons I did the work that I did for as long as I did. I didn't know that I would be going into this industry, but I knew that I wanted to launch my own company down the road. choosing roles and advancing my career because man you know there's so much to learn that i don't

want to do it on my dime like is that a bad thing to say i don't think it is right like you know and i and i do the same thing for for my employees i try to advance them and get the as much uh for them and if they end up going and doing their own thing, that's great for them. I'll support them in doing that. But, you know, I also don't want to not develop, you know, who we've got. That's just ensuring your own loss. And then even in the confines of any business, if a business is run properly, in most cases, everyone should be able to be like a mini entrepreneur within the business. Absolutely. I think that's and that's what I said, choosing the right they're choosing the right job because not everybody works in that fashion. And that's something I always try to do because people always contact me about like, Hey, can you do

something for this within my company? I'm like, Hey, I need you to put you in charge of this. They're like, Oh no, I want to talk to you. And I'm like, well, I don't head up marketing. I don't make the decisions. Like you need to talk to our marketing people. You need to talk to our sales people. You need to talk to operation and people. You need to talk to our salespeople. You need to talk to operation. And people always want, they want to go through me. And I'm like,

I actually don't make the decisions in those areas, but you're the owner. I don't make the decisions in those areas. Like, because that takes all the fun out of it for, for them. Like if you've got a job and all your, all you're doing is executing exactly

what you're told every day yeah there's no creativity there's no there's no i mean that's that's not what you want so you need to find the right of a job description here when people come like people will ask for one they're like can i get like we're like yeah we don't really do that yeah well and i found too is like some people need that. And unfortunately that doesn't work for us either. So it's like you probably need to find somewhere else because that's not the type of environment. And if that's what you need, like it's going to end up being painful for both of us. But yeah, I mean, that's exactly the point is like everybody, you know, every leader in our business is basically managing their own business, making those decisions and they'll run it by me or run it by our team

for getting input and making sure we're all aligned. And that's why we have like a very specific, like defined who we are as a company and what we're trying to accomplish. So to help that process. But it's me providing input, not telling people what to do. I think something that separates you out from a lot of people is, I mean, you've got a lot of different facets to your game. You know, you're a coach and you're able to instruct and then you're also making these badass products. One thing that I've always liked about you is your ability to communicate.

When you talk about, you know, rooting your feet into the ground and when you talk about these certain things how did how were you able to pick up a lot of that information because once you started kind of going down that path down the path of uh kind of like body mechanics and how the body works and all that stuff i really felt that that was a real separation between you and a lot of other strength coaches. Yeah. And that it's interesting because we, we consider like Kabuki and education company first as well. And our products are an output of what we believe as far as human loading and movement. Right. So we don't just like make things because we can make something and sell it. It's does it fit? Is it adding value in a way that isn't there before? But that all

came from basically what you're talking about there. And how that happened is I had a string of injuries like in the early, early 2000s, a little over 10 years ago. And I kept going to doctors and they're like, oh, we can fix that shoulder. We can fix that back. We can, and they're just focused. I'm like, I've been lifting for 20 years and I've never had an injury. And now I've got these things popping up all over my body. And I'm like, I got to dive deeper. This is what I do. I dive deeper. So I, I started going through a bunch of docs and just like not getting, you know, the answers, they all had answers, but that wasn't really what I was looking for. I was looking for, I don't know how to define it.

But anyway, I met someone and he had a lot of questions. I'm like, oh, let's spend a little more time. And we started diving deeper. And then it was from a school around developmental kinesiology. So basically, you know basically movement of the body. And he started introducing me to a lot of other people. And so I started attending these lectures, a lot of more clinical based. So it was continuing ed for chiros and physical therapists, things of that nature.

I'm like, I don't care. I'm going to jump in. And I started participating and I'd end up talking to whoever the instructor was and they're like, interesting. I like your thought process. And next time they'd be teaching, they'd ask me to come and like lecture with them for part of it. And then it just kept going. And next thing you know, I'm like, oh, my good friends, the people I, you know, text and message about, you know, stuff are like the leaders in the world on you know human movement yeah when you shoot the shit with like donnie thompson and me and other powerlifters

and stuff right and stirrette and stuff like that right stirrette stew mcgill uh craig liebenson who brought dns which is a big foundational thing for us for dynamic neurascular stabilization to the u.s a bunch of other um dr triley Weingroff out of New York, just a whole lot of very key people in the industry that are thought leaders around it. And what I brought to the table in those discussions is I lift really heavy things. And we find out when and where it actually breaks, because a lot of the research and stuff was more based around dealing with sedentary or older populations and so i said well this this takes

let's take some thought so i spent a few years like kind of digesting all this and then i started finally getting a grasp of like how does this actually play a role in pure strength training how do we teach this effectively and get the output of this? And then it started having a phenomenal impact on my strength, my power output. People are like, how did you put 100 pounds on your squat this year? How did you get that much stronger? I'm like, I didn't get stronger. I was actually there the whole time.

Well, maybe I got like 15 pounds stronger or 20 pounds stronger. But I didn't get 100. But they're like, but your max went from 720 to 820. You're 100 pounds stronger. I'm like, no, I'm just able to use all the strength that I had. Also maybe stayed healthier, right? Stayed healthier too. Yep. And so that's where a lot of that started coming from.

And then I saw big gaps like this is, you know, in the clinical area, this is top because, you know, low back pain is the number one health care cost in America. Above cancer, diabetes, heart disease, all these things. Nice video there. What's done for back pain? What's uh done what's done for back pain what's that what's done for back pain right like when you go to the doctor they just give you meds usually meds and say take time off right and uh so in the docs i work with uh have people dead lifting with a kettlebell before they leave you know and because they're teaching these principles and now we can do the same thing and it's going to elicit one, it's going to improve your longevity, healthier, you're going to lift better, but you can also increase your power output. Like immediately,

if we start shutting off the systems that are basically down-regulating us. So your power output will go up. So it's just, I use an analogy quite a bit, because I like cars, around the traction control on a vehicle. So vehicles that have them, a lot of people think that when you have the traction control on, it's taking the power from the wheel that's slipping and sends it to the ones that are gripping, which is not the case. from the wheel that's slipping and sends it to the ones that are gripping, which is not the case.

You're going around a corner on some ice or snow or water or whatever. Tire goes loose, and the car senses it. And what it does is it detunes the engine and detunes the shift patterns on the transmission. It reduces the power output. And when it does that, your traction improves and you're able to not slide off the road and die a fiery death. It's trying to protect you from injury. So the same thing happens when we're training. If we're in poor positions, we don't have the right muscles that are supposed to be stabilizing us firing and working the way that you are your traction controls on it's trying to save you and same thing like you know people are

constantly trying to got to do our soft tissue work is a is a fix i i sell soft tissue equipment i honestly don't want people to ever have to use it or buy it there's going to be times where you need to but if you're if everything is working the way that it is, why are those muscles getting tight? Hips don't get tight from squatting. They get tight from squatting like shit. If you're not moving well, the body is going to tighten the muscles around that joint

to try to preserve it and reduce the power output and be able to – oh, yes. Yeah, I mean good movement is going to be good for you. Exactly. Poor movement is not going to be so great. So a lot of the issues that people are chasing is because they're not moving well to begin with in their lifts. Okay? If you're lacking ankle mobility, okay, that's a common one in powerlifting. Like, I don't have the ankle mobility to hit depth, so I've got to wear my squat shoes.

If squat shoes help you lift more, no problem, whatever, go ahead and use them. But if you're using them because you've got lack of ankle mobility, it means that you're not using the foot correctly. The foot is weak. And so what's the body going to do if you've got a weak base it's going to tighten the muscles and limit the mobility around the ankle it's a sign and signal for you that you're doing something wrong and you actually need to develop an area and the traction control you're inhibited there you might be inhibited throughout the body depending on and most people are so you start putting this stuff to play and all of a sudden and i make sure i go on this rant too

because i i talk to uh you know there's a whole audience that are 30 40 50 plus and they're like oh yeah pain-free i want that you try telling the 22 year old that's on his way up you go it's gonna gonna help you like whatever i'm just gonna go to the gym and lift some weights yeah i don't know i don't know what you're talking about i'm like it's gonna help you lift more what do you have to say again so i have to make sure i hit that side of it too so um because that's uh and so fundamentally that's so that's that's where it came from is just really developing a network uh where i'm dealing with the best of the best in that regards and learning with them and from them. And so that's, that's a unique position that I'm in and our company is in because we play on both ends of those spectrums where a lot of people don't. You know, I've had a membership

with Kabuki MS for like years now. And first off, if anyone hasn't gotten at the resources, they're really awesome. But for you, when you were learning about all this stuff and fixing yourself as a lifter, if you can remember what were some of like, I guess the main things that caused the biggest change in adjustment for you as you fix yourself? Absolutely. So, and this goes straight to our coaching methodology, our assessment, how we look at things. We want to look at things because a lot of people will jump. I love certain things and they just jump right to it.

We want to look at what has the largest global impact first. So we organize our priorities based on global impact. So spinal position, breathing, embracing are going to have the biggest global impact. So spinal position, breathing, embracing are going to have the biggest global impact. Okay? So I could, you know, if I'm extended and try to reach overhead, my shoulder mechanics are going to be shit.

Okay? But if I change my position, all of a sudden my shoulder mechanics change. Okay? Same thing with the hip, the foot, like where, where the bars loaded, where the balance is like this has the biggest impact through the entire body. So it doesn't make sense to chase nuance of what's happening here and here. If I've got an issue here. Okay. So we want to make sure that we've got those areas. So that's

why we hit on that so much first is because one, you can always be better. So there's always opportunity, but it has the biggest entire global impact on the body. Yeah. So next we want to go to this, the second one behind that, which is the foot and the ankle complex I was just talking about, especially since we're based off of their basically in powerlifting in every movement even even the bench press a little less so but in almost nearly any sport you know take out swimming or other stuff but athletics same thing nearly most everything is a ground-based sport in some

fashion or another by the end at the end of the day So the foot and the ankle complex is the most next important. So the rooting, okay? Then we start getting into the big power generators, the shoulder complex and the hip complex. There's no priority one over the other, but we're developing power from a base and throwing it out to some distal end. Could be your shoulder if you're tackling in football, but it might be throwing a baseball all the way out to the hand. So there's no priority there. And then if we get past that, which usually rarely ever do we actually get into knees, elbows, things like that, right? Because at the end of the day, these are output joints. They're what we call a fixed joint, um, and where these other ones are mobile joints. And so your issues, if you've got knee

problems, it's not your knee usually, unless you like fell down and cracked your knee, like, or got hit by like physical trauma will cause a knee problem, but just life in general, will cause a knee problem, but just life in general, your knee problem is from something else. Okay. So if we organize it based on that, and that's where we want to start, it doesn't mean we always have to, every single problem that we get, we got to jump back to the spine. If we know that it's good, we do a quick look and assessment, go, ah, good posture, race. Well, okay. Everything looks good. We can start, look and assessment and go, ah, good posture, raced well. Okay, everything looks good. We can start. That can accelerate a little bit.

But what I'm saying is don't overlook it if there's an issue there. You need to make sure it's addressed because it's going to affect everything. Yeah, I think a lot of times when people have a messed up elbow or something like that, they'll look to just their shoulder. But I think what you're mentioning makes a lot of sense, and that's what Kelly Sturette helped me with quite a bit. He was like, well, you're tearing your pec because you can't move your thoracic spine at all.

And he's like, you're kind of forward. You kind of are hunched forward a little bit. And he's like, if you can get yourself to open up a little bit, you'll be able to press a lot easier. You won't have to rely on flexing your chest so hard, especially flexing your chest with your kind of shoulders forward as you go to press is a recipe for disaster. Absolutely. We've got that shoulder decentrated. You're lacking that internal rotation,

right? That's going to load up that elbow huge. But yeah, it's going to start in here. So we see that. And a lot of that is based on the scapula. I hate this word, scapular humoral rhythm. But the rhythm that that scapula is working in relation to the shoulder movement in relation to the spine. And so a lot of people want to lock that up while they're lifting. But go look at Kirill Bench. He's got beautiful. That scapula is moving. When it locks up, now we can't move, we can't internally rotate,

and we see this dump. It rolls into the thoracic spine as well. And all this stuff happens because we've actually locked it down and not allowing it to move the way that we should. So anyway. Even with all this knowledge, though, you still run into some problems here and there, right? Because heavy-ass weight is heavy-ass weight that's a that that's what it is that's why i loved like

one of the things i love about chasing crazy feats is i learned so much in the process like it accelerates my knowledge by years sometimes in a matter of weeks right trying to squat 800 pounds every day for 30 days or trying to do. Did you make it through that? I did. Like you got killed somewhere in the middle there, right? But I made it. No, no, I finished. It was the 400 kilo, 880 pound deadlift every day that I didn't make it through that one.

How far did you get? Made it through day 16. That's insane still. So, which is, that was was tough we'll just put it that way yeah so um but you learn so much because there's no there's no out like a little bit of soreness is gonna cascade if you're not if you got a little bit of an issue and you've got 800 pounds on your back again tomorrow and again the day after that again the day after that like you're gonna get hit by a train.

It's going to come right over the freaking top of you and destroy you. And so you have no opportunity for error. So learning in that process. Is there any way to prepare for lifting like that? Like is there any way to prepare to lift 800 pounds every day or is it just a lifelong of training? So yes, there is a way to prepare for that. Yes, it is a lifelong of training. So it's a matter of understanding that it's an axial load, right? We're loading the spine from

top to bottom. I'm going to deter on a side discussion for just a minute because a lot of people think about work capacity and they want to jump to, I got a sled. I got to sprint with the sled. I got to do my prowler. I got to do the battling ropes. It's going to increase my work capacity. Well, for powerlifting, it's not. Your work capacity is your ability to do the movement more frequently with more volume and more weight or intensity, right? So it's about increasing your axial load tolerancing

because the two main lifts are axial loaded, the deadlift and the squat. Okay. So this has been, this was part of the process of what I've been working on for the last four to five years, which is increasing my axial loading tolerance, my work capacity. That's something that's kind of lifelong, but understanding that that is a loading vector. Weights this way, straight up and down. If I'm a rower, it's a front to back movement. And so I would want to build my tolerance within that vector. Does that make sense? Yes. So you can't just like say, Hey, I'm going to jump on this Bulgarian routine and go to squatting every day. I mean, you can, but you're going to get run over by that train again. Right?

So you've got to understand that it's, it's small changes. If you're going to get run over by that train again. Right. So you've got to understand that it's, it's small changes. If you're squatting once a week, don't just add a second day. Okay. Take your volume in those one session and split it into two, run that for a month, then add a set. Okay. And slowly build up until now you've got two full squat sessions. Now take those two sessions and split it, same volume, into three sessions. And then slowly start building that up. That's how you increase your tolerance for that. So we did that in the deadlift. The whole training cycle was working towards increasing that frequency

so that I would be able to load 880 pounds, 881 or 2 or whatever it is for the kilo conversion every single day. How long was that cycle, by the way, that training cycle? That was – I started it in the spring and we did the event in November. Okay. Okay. Yeah. But it's the larger piece of a bigger cycle around axial loading. So I get a lot of people like, oh, you haven't deadlifted for a year and a half.

Like how can you do that? How can you not squat for a year? Like, well, I was deadlifting. Yeah. I was squatting because it's all axial loading yeah right so that my movement but given my movement patterns are pretty refined so a lot of the regular training that people are doing is around uh managing those uh basically greasing the groove learning learning the movement, doing this sort of stuff.

Wow. So maybe it's a little bit different than what I often run into and what I often see is people lifting too heavy too often. But it's probably more so, like that may be true, but it's probably more so the fact that they're just not prepared for that because you can lift heavy often. You can, but you've got to build to that you've got to develop it like i've been training for over 30 years and i've also been training specifically only around like increasing my axial loading frequency for four to five years as i chase this grand goals campaign that's that's

what that's been all about and so these are just sidesteps as feats in the process, doing some fundraisers for some causes that I believe in. A 1,000-pound squat and a 1,000-pound deadlift, but not for one rep, for three reps. Is that the goal? That is the goal. I did miss the deadlift. I mean, I didn't lock out the third rep, but regardless, I still did reps. And so that is the goal. third rep but regardless i still did reps right and so that is the goal uh so when i announced the ground goals campaign like four years i think it was four years ago i just said hey i'm going

for a thousand pound squat but the plan all along was to do reps with both on the squat and deadlift and be the first and only person to to have done that how much time will be split between the two or is it in the same day if that's even possible? Oh, no. I'm not doing the deadlifting. I'm not doing it. So I'm training one lift. So a lot of people don't understand. I see. I see.

That's part of the trick, right, is all of my recovery efforts, if I was squatting and deadlifting or like doing a full meet, people are like, hey, you should go do a meet. You'll total 2,500 pounds. I'm like, no, not even close. Like I can't train with the weights that I'm training with if I was doing those other things. All I'm doing right now is squatting. When I did the deadlift in those final phases, I mean, there's other stuff we did in the other developmental blocks leading into it. Same with the squat. But it's – I only deadlifted.

excuse me spreading fatigue seems to be like probably the biggest uh change in powerlifting that i've seen where people are doing exactly what you're saying where they're they're uh you know maybe squatting more often or dead lifting or benching more often because it's um you know something that they're trying to increase something they're trying to bring up um when we were doing when years ago when i was doing like a lot of West Side type stuff, you were doing, I think you were doing a lot of West Side type stuff, right? Yeah, yep. What have you kind of learned since that time period? Not that like the West Side stuff is wrong by any means. It's just that there's a lot of different things out there,

and modern-day powerlifting has, the weights have changed. It's insane what the women are lifting, and there's a lot of guys breaking records. I know. I was thinking about that the other day. I'm sitting there. I'm warming up, right? And I'm like like i'm not even at my last warm-up i'm like shit when i was competing like seven years ago that was the all-time world record well not at the weight i'm sitting at right now but you know but i'm like that was that was the

number we're all shooting for you know and then like sam bird took it then i took it but i'm like, that was the number we're all shooting for. And then Sam Bird took it. Then I took it. But I'm like – and then Sam took it again. Anyway, and then – no, we went back and forth a few times. Anyway, I'm like, that's just nuts where it's gone from. What like these – like just an 800-pound squat used to be – raw squat was like phenomenal. And now it's like you've got to have that just to you know be competitive like you know you're not even anybody yet you know like like that the 800 815 pounds was the all-time

world record of the 220 clump class now it's 917 pounds so like it's just crazy yeah so back to your question um yeah i did a conjugate uh followed a lot of Westside stuff for about 10 years. And when I switched to raw lifting, I was still doing the same thing. But I think the big thing for me has been just getting more specific with the periodization. So really understanding what we're loading, why we're trying to load it, and then developing very specific plans with each block that are building on each other. But at the same time, not neglecting the qualities that you developed in the last block. So you can still do that with periodization. So Westside is all about maintaining and developing a number of qualities at the same time all the time. Yeah. And so it's more about like focusing on one quality that we're going to develop right now. So accelerating that further, but still doing some of the other work that's maintaining like the hypertrophy or the strength that you did in the last block.

Right. And I found that is able to accomplish a lot more. The other is I found that speed work for me and a lot of people that I work with wasn't adding a significant amount of value. I get the same results if I just did like high rep benching or there was a whole lot of ways. So it was so nonspecific and misused by a lot of people too. So I think that's the other thing of why I saw a lot of it not being very useful is people are just in poor position because the weight's so light that they would bench or squat in a manner that wasn't their bench or squat, you know? And so managing those heavier thresholds, not necessarily always going to a max effort triple,

leaving a little in the tank, backing it down just a little bit, hitting more sets in volume in those upper ranges, and then end up having a better result on the strength because I'd be able to build more intensity, more volume work in those ranges. They're going to net me a bigger squat where doing some speed work with 150 pounds and some bands wasn't, wasn't doing a lot for me. So let me ask you this. So it was a lot of waste. It was wasted effort in my mind. So getting more specific work better. Yeah. So when it comes to,

let's say lifters that right now speed work is they, they do a lot of work with speed work. What should they be thinking about with when applying it like why should they apply it if they do and how should they apply it correctly so the focus needs to be on quality of movement first so it needs to be executed exactly like it would in a competition so you see people do three reps or two reps really fast on the bench. They'll go up so high, like I said, you want to have good scapula, but they're actually protracting so far with their shoulders and pushing it up there so it could look fast and then come back down. And it's just sloppy.

The joint is not working in the same manner that it normally would. So it's really getting down to having clean, crisp movement executed exactly like your maximal effort. Okay. That needs to be priority. And then it's about putting the maximal effort into it, not making the bar go as fast as possible. So mentally putting everything, okay, I want to execute this perfectly and then put as much effort behind it, but not focus on how fast is it if I've got a VBT device or how fast does it look on camera? Yeah. See this all the time with people pulling super fast deadlifts and they just look like crap. Like, look at that. I'm going to be so good. I'm like, no, you're never going to be

able to lock it out. Like you're just, you're teaching yourself bad patterns. You're not engaging. It's like, it's, it's not what you're going to and how you're going to move when you've got that grinder deadlift that you're trying to finish at a meet. Think about it like in a new sport. Whenever you're playing a new sport, you're trying jiu-jitsu. It's skill acquisition. You're completely missing the skill acquisition part. Your coach will say, hey, do this at like 50%. And then you go to do it at 50%.

Then you go to do it at 100% and you mess it up. I'm like, okay, let me slow it back down again. And you kind of learn it. And what I've noticed with speed work for a lot of people too, a real simple fix is just to add a little bit of weight to the bar. People are really strict on percentages and following what came out of this book. But you've got to realize a lot of the louis simmons stuff um applied a little bit more to like shirted and geared power lifting and things like that and uh he had a specific recipe for a specific reason it was a specific

group of lifters yep and for yourself i think for other people they should just you know add some weight on there that'll slow down the bar which I understand like you're trying to move the weight as fast as possible. But if we go back to Dr. Squat, one of the first guys to squat a thousand pounds talking about compensatory acceleration, you're just trying to move the bar as fast as you can. So you're trying to be violent against the weight, but it doesn't necessarily have to always look super fast. Exactly. That's what I said. It's about the effort that you're putting into it, not how necessarily how fast it's going. Cause if you focus on that other piece, the other things are going to go out the window. You hook up a lot of stuff to your, uh, uh, lifts and stuff and you're always tracking the speed. And, um, there's probably nobody else

that I know that, that has tracked, uh, so many lifts. What have you learned from that? And what are you doing? What's it, what's it for? Yeah. So? What's it for? Yeah, so I use it as a form of auto-regulation. And so I started this not too long after, maybe around 2010 or 2012. So I first got into the speed work from Louis, and so I ordered a VBT device. And I discovered that I could actually use the tool in a completely different manner. I would actually use the tool for my heavy stuff, not for my speed work. And so what we do is actually create, I can use fancy words, linear regression line.

We just track all your lifts as you work towards the maximum, right? And the speed's going to go down and it's just a line with a slope like such. That's it. So we find the slope of that line. So now we know it anywhere on that weight spectrum. So you hit 315 and you hit 405. Well, I know what 385 is going to be. I know what 360 is going to be. I know what everything is going to be. Okay. So now we're able to replace percentages because we know 405 is 80% of your squat or if you're just over 500 pounds, right?

if you're just over 500 pounds, right? So now if we're looking at periodization, we know that we're going to schedule X number of reps in an 80% to 85% zone. That's going to be my hypertrophy zone, let's say. And I want to get this many lifts in that area. Well, if you're using percentages, it's based off of some max that you did six months ago, right? And it doesn't know that you've gone up, you've gone down.

You're basing it on a plan that you're going to have this meat bench at this mount on some day. You don't know if you're ahead of plan, behind plan. Your body doesn't know what plan you made it doesn't know that the kids were up late last night uh with a cold and you didn't get you got two hours of sleep and you may still be ready to go or you may not okay so what we do is instead of saying i want 12 reps in the 80 85 range which could be three sets of four or four sets of three or six sets of two. I don't give a fuck. Just whatever you want to come up with there, okay? But that's the intensity zone.

That's the volume that we want. So now if I replace the speed that would be 80% to 85%, I'm going to walk in and I'm going to work up and hit those 12 reps within that speed zone, which is actually what my max is that day. So for example, um, when I was doing, uh, deadlifting, okay. I speed zone may have had me basically somewhere. I know that I'm supposed to be around like eight 25 for those number of reps. Okay. And I go in and I do my training. Maybe eight 25 was light.

Maybe I should have bumped it and it could have been eight 35. I don't know. I'm not that good to know. Cause guess what? Eight 25 is freaking heavy. Okay. I don't know that I could have had 10, five, 15 pounds more on the bar that day. So now I'm able to take advantage of every little bump in my strength as I'm going and actually train to the max. Cause a lot of people think about auto-regulation is doing less. It's time to back off, not train today, do less sets.

It's also about doing more. And if you manage that over an entire training cycle, you can find that you'll be able to take the opportunity way more often. Or it could be, hey, this is a little heavy. Those kids being up all night with the kids had a little bit with me, but I was still able to get the appropriate amount of training to get the fatigue that I wanted from my training. So I had to back off 15 pounds. The first question is, am I putting in the effort? Cause it might just be in my head and I just got to, this is our first,

Hey, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not moving as fast as I should. Well, are you trying? Sometimes you just need to freaking fix it in your head. So the V velocity helps you with that so it's the day you're like dragging and it's just like oh man i'm supposed to do three sets of four i'm gonna be smart i'm only gonna do two and you get to that second set and you're like god damn fuck you device they're still fast i got that extra set it's just in my head yeah so so it it's really precisely managing the auto regulation and allowing you to make minute adjustments so one that you don't over train on those times but you can still get training in instead of just bagging it and then the other is taking opportunity of every chance you get because your max isn't 500 pounds. Like one day it's 510. Another day it's 490, 505. You know, it bounces around a little bit and then you've, you're creating this plan going into a

meet based on what you hope. You don't know what gains you're going to make during that time. You definitely can't like pick some program off the internet and go, I'm going to do exactly this because that program says I'm going to get 7%. That's a descriptive program, not a prescriptive. Like it it's that program was based on some coach coaching, some lifter and how they progressed and all their many peaks and valleys along the line. Are you going to have all the same little, because all those peaks and valley are also based on everything else that's going on in your life. Traveling down here, you know, that's going to have an effect. Like, in fact, I'm getting over the tail end of a cold, okay? My daughter's sick.

Hopefully she sleeps good tonight, you know, when I get home. Like, there's a whole lot of other things in life. A boss yelling at you when you're on the car you know driving down the road with mark bell you know there's those little stresses all add up and at the end of the day we could try to measure uh there's a lot of other ways hrv is another uh tool there's a lot of other ways to uh to measure it but at the end of the day nobody tells you what the weight should be on the bar today. And this is a way to tell you what you can take an opportunity of. So it's really cool. Is it the be all end all?

No. It's really useful for people like me that aren't very good subjective. Cause I could be like, you know, nose bleed, pouring out my face, pot passed out, falling over the bar.

And you know, my coach, one, one my coach, I'm coached by my staff. I have been for four or five years. Be like, can you subjectively rate that routine on a one to five, five being like the end? I'm like, I was a four. I had more left. That'll be me every time. I'm like, I'm not very good at that.

So a lot of lifters probably heard that. They're like, VBT devices sound dope, but I don't have access to one. What can they, because I mean, you know, there's RP, there's all these other ways, but what are some ways that they can look at that subjectively? Yep. So RP is really good. So that was developed off the, I think the Boggs-Warner scale, which was used in the medical community, which was a 1 through 20 scale.

Mike Touchere really brought that to light in the lifting community and based it down to a 1 to 10 scale. And it takes a little bit of skill. Like I said, so someone like me, I'm not very good at RPE. I can be if I really, really give some thought to it. New lifters really struggle at RPE because guess what? Everything feels heavy. You're like, oh, that was way too much. No, that's like a seven, dude.

Like, that was really heavy. Yeah, weights are heavy. Get used to it. Remember the first time you did a deadlift? You're like, holy shit. Yeah. It's going to feel like that every time. That feels terrible.

So RPE is a skill that you've got to have, uh, or that you can develop. Uh, we keep ours just the simple one through five, but it's the same concept. Um, you know,

for subjectively rating your routines and where your fatigue's at and how hard the session was. Yeah. Uh, a lot of like hypertrophy work, uh, we'll manage on a reps in reserve the same thing again it's like an rpe but it's just a little bit different it makes it easier so leave one or two in the tank leave three to four in the tank um so really good for doing hey

i want you to do four sets of ten of some lat pull downs and i want you to leave three reps in the tank so it doesn't take as much like practice. But those are some good ways to kind of manage that without having a technological device. So it's definitely not a requirement. hopefully well not hopefully i know that there's actually going to be some more companies releasing more economical based good quality products in that field so we end up have end up consulting with most every company that brings vbt to market because they know who we are what we do so we know a lot of what the manufacturer, what those different companies are up to. Um, so this next year I expect a couple, uh, uh, pretty good units to be hitting, hitting the market. So how do you recover from these workouts? So you got any special strategies,

you use a hot or cold baths or anything like that, or what are you doing? Yeah. Well, right now, so my training right now is, it is freaking nuts. I, I can't describe how bad it is and you know what i only train one day a week maybe two uh i just dropped the second day out this training block though so i squat once a week that's it of course i'm end up doing six reps around a 940 to 950 pound load and then i'll do a drop set you know four or five reps around 900 pounds after doing three or four sets in the upper range that shit is freaking nuts i don't know how to tell you like when i squatted less like working out to a squat you know leave your your legs sore maybe your back sore my lats my biceps my triceps my delts my traps like

everything is just fried to hell it's freaking crazy so yeah let's talk recovery because that is what i'm doing the other six days of the week actually that day too so one thing i like to do immediately post training, if I can time permits doesn't like, Hey, I'm running late. I got to get home and have dinner with the kids and the wife that that's a higher priority. So if my squat routine runs late and I don't have time to do a little bit of a soft tissue work cleanup or whatever, immediately post session, it's got to wait, even though it's the priority for training, there's other higher priorities in life. So, um, but the best thing for me is like, if you have anything that's starting to tighten up, uh, or as an issue is not to wait till the

next squat session and then roll it out right before you get there. Guess what? That's too late. That's too late. You actually want to be like tight and ready come that session. You not, not like sore tight, but you know, you don't want to like get everything super loose before you go get under a bar. I think, you know, this Mark, I've heard you talk on this before. You don't want to roll around on a mat and get ready to fall asleep before you train. So, so, um, but the longer I can spend not in a compensatory pattern. So, and by that, I mean like if my quads tighten up really bad and they start pulling on the front of my pelvis and it pulls my pelvis position forward and now I'm walking around

and big ATP, low back starts getting sore. This starts hanging out because it's not engaged my abs. If I spend a day or two like that, it's going to create problems. If I'm walking on one leg more than the other, cause this hip sore. So the most amount of time, and this is what I really learned in like the 800 squat to everyday challenge. I did my soft tissue work immediately post-training. day challenge. I did my soft tissue work immediately post-training. And then that would give me 24 hours of walking around, good position, good posture, feeling well, because the biggest recovery tool there's, I'm going to go through a few here. Um, and some of them cost a lot of money. Some are free, whatever. This is the most impactful one is movement, movement, your daily walks, things like that.

But if I'm walking around hobbled, I'm not going to get the recovery from it. So you want to spend less time moving poorly. So doing that immediately post. Right now, I do a little bit of static blood flow restriction immediately post-training. So this is a performance-based routine I got from Dr. Mario Novo, who's a leader in the BFR community. And so to do BFR effectively, you actually need the right tools, though. You can't just slap a band on your leg. You actually need to know what the venous flow is right and uh is it like

almost like a blood pressure cuff type it's a blood pressure cuff yeah so but you what you have to do is somebody has to measure um when uh when the different you release it and then find the pressure that the flow is at that the flow returns and then that's then you base it off of percentages you found a lot of benefit from that. Yeah. So I do BFR five minutes on one minute off for three rounds. And then I use the Mark pro E-STEM unit, which Kelly Starrett turned me on to, uh, on the top of that, stimulating that. So that really enhances recovery for me. Uh, it's minor, um, but Epson salt baths, just relaxing.

There's a lot of – I don't know that it's a big game changer by any means, but you know what? It can be useful at times. It gives you 10, 20 minutes to yourself where you're just chilling. Yeah, exactly. There's a mental aspect to it as well as there is some physical stuff that it does, but it's not like – A game changer.

It's not a game changer, but I enjoy that. I do it almost daily right now because of, uh, where I'm at. Um, anything that enhances. So I talked about the BFR, but anything that really enhances blood flow to the tissue is going to be huge, right? So your daily walks, that's a great one. Um, one of the products, so one of my companies is Build Fast Formula. We make a vasoblitz, which really enhances blood flow. You sent me some, and it tastes really good. It does taste fantastic.

A lot of people think of those as a pump product because it does. It makes you fuller, makes you vascular, which actually enhances your performance if you walk in that way. Makes you vascular even if you're fat. Yeah. To a point. What's in it, by the way? What's that? What's in it? So a lot of nitrates and then a form of lactate.

So basically just four ingredients, research-based. Research-based, so there was studies done that showed enhanced hypertrophy, endurance, and anabolism over 18 days. So using the product at specific dosages daily. Wow. This is what everybody misses with the NO type products. And so what we've come to the market is here's a daily use product because it builds in your system. And then if you allow it to build in your system, it's going to really enhance recovery. And that's where I want to get to because that's where the big benefit for me is. It's like that enhanced recovery from like that nourishment and replenishment and clearing everything is huge.

So absolutely phenomenal approach is using those type products on a daily basis. And we have that laid out with ours. And so it's – yeah, and having the right dosage. A lot of them skimp on some of the materials that are in there. But I don't want to have this be a pitch or anything. So we'll just talk about daily use of nitrates is absolutely fantastic. So let's see. Sleep, of course.

Yeah, sleep. I actually just picked up. I saw your video with a chili pad yeah yeah tell people about the chili pad what is this thing so it's freaking cool that's what it is well literally freaking cool um so it is a uh basically like an air conditioner that goes in your bed so it's got these micro tubes that every fat guy's like leaning forward right now like what what's this or anybody on teren like transimo i'm telling you those guys gotta love something like that because

the anyway but i have the trend sweats i don't have those. Worse than the meat sweats. But it's a bunch of tubes. It's a mattress cover, and it's hooked to an AC unit. And you can actually set your desired temperature. And it can change through the night. You can have schedules that will automatically turn on, adjust. And so you're basically controlling the environment in your bed, which is huge. Most people, we need to sleep around 67 degrees.

I heat up a lot at night, so I ended up being way above that. And that's one of the biggest reasons for waking up is getting too hot. And so people, this really helps you find, once you find like your optimal temperature, you can just set it. And it might be, here's a temperature that helps me fall asleep. And then it drops later to something else. and then it'll actually wake you up so you set it hey at 7 10 i want to wake up and it'll heat up to whatever temp it'll just naturally wake you up no alarm clock like because you're like i'm sweating so bad i need to get up actually i just have my wife's turns up and heats up. It goes up to like 115.

And that wakes her up. Mine, I just shut off. I just had the cooler shut off on mine. And then your body just. And then I just wake up because I'm like, this is hot. I'm sweating. And you've noticed like a considerable like, I guess, improvement in your sleep. Yeah.

So and I don't have like one of those those aura rings or any of the other stuff. But when I was reading up on it, I found that a lot of people have those and actually measure their deep sleep. When they've put that, when they've started using it, it's had a substantial impact on their deep sleep. But I don't have any of those metrics myself to speak to. But really cool. I have no affiliation with them or endorsement you know nothing like there's no i don't are you able to sleep well in general for the most part i sleep a lot i need a lot of sleep i always have my whole life

try to lay down for what nine hours ten hours something like that nine ten hours and then usually i'll take a 20 to 40 minute nap in the middle of the day too. So a lot of times before training. My pre-training nap. I've got my – the back of our podcast room, there's a couch, and that's Duffin's sleeping couch. So, yeah. I noticed for myself that it helps if I can just lay down for a long period of time because I don't think my quality sleep is awesome. So I try to just lay down for eight hours plus, you know, best I can. I fall asleep instantly.

Yeah. Yeah, I always fall asleep easy, but then I kind of wake up here and there. Yeah. So those are some of the big ones. I use some other stuff, the eSTEM. I still use it other particular times. I used a pulsed electromagnetic frequency device as well, PEMF. So it does the same thing. It basically, the tiny capillaries in the body, the pulsing of the PEMF like expands and contracts those. And so it enhances your blood

flow through the body without relying on the heart as much and really get some of those harder to reach tissues. So I use that, but those devices are pretty expensive and I wouldn't recommend for an individual use unless you're rolling in the dough for some reason. They're usually like something that needs shared. Unfortunately, to have it effective though, you need to use it daily. The window that it's active is about 72 hours. So daily use keeps that enhanced blood flow into those kind of microtissue areas. So that's pretty cool.

But I don't think it's really viable for most people. But the e-STEM is, right? The e-STEM is, yep. Um, but I don't think it's really viable for most people, but the East stem is right. Like the East is. Yep. Yep. Um, I know there's a, I use the Mark pro because it's the, uh, it's FDA approved. Um, it's, uh, it's a little spendier than, cause you can find really cheap ones on eBay. I don't know how effective they are. So, uh, I've used some of those before.

So the Mark pro is actually one, the frequency on it is specifically for recovery, where a lot of the devices out there are actually a higher frequency, and it's about blocking pain. So you don't want that. I do believe there are some other FDA-approved devices in the recovery area now, but I don't know who or any details on that, but if you shop around, you might be able to get something, but you want that, you, that recovery frequency, not the, I've got, I've got back pain and I want to shut it off.

Same as popping a pill, you know, like there's times you need that. Yeah. So but but yeah, that's my only words on that one. So are you doing any assistance work during this style of training or you mainly just getting that squat in and taking off? So in this where I'm at in this block, so there's several so there's several blocks that have led into this. So in those, there was a lot of development of the specific qualities that I needed. So like there was a lot of assistance work on upper back move, you know, just to be able to be able to hold that weight. Right. Um, there was a lot of like good mornings, transformer bar squats, things of that nature back, just direct lat work. Uh, and then as it's gotten, it's gotten more specific. So right now I'm supposed to, this block is just squatting and then belt squat another

day of the week. Uh, but I missed the last couple of belt squat sessions. So it was only a four week block. So probably, and there wasn't going to be any in the next section. I do daily work, uh, on movement. So, so there's stuff that I do to make sure that everything's working together that kind of breaks down a little bit on me. And so there's a lot of movement work that I do. And it's really around this area, the torso, and making sure that everything is operating the way that it should be and getting the connection between all that working. So I don't know how to explain it other than that. How long does that work usually take you? It could be five minutes. It could be 40 to 45 minutes. So it depends on how much time I've got, what kind of, if I'm in pain, trying to deal with specific issues. If I'm feeling good, I just

what kind of, if I'm in pain, trying to deal with specific issues, if I'm feeling good, I just roll around. It's a lot of like rolling type work, movement drills that I do. And if I'm feeling good, I keep it pretty minimal. Yeah. Uh, pre-training I do a little bit, very, very minimal because I want to turn it on, but I don't want to fatigue myself. Yeah. And then when it's, as far as assistance work, like, no, it's just, I work up and I squat like that's it. And then I'm done. So, uh,

Oh, another. So one thing that we do, um, so do rolling work every day. And I mentioned getting soft tissue work done immediately post session. There's a couple of times through the week where I'll have more soft tissue work done.

Uh, it's all in house. I've got a Cairo in-house, an LMT in-house. And we measure, we take a laser and look at pelvis rotation, torso, shoulders, basically the alignment of everything. And that's actually what drives a lot of the soft tissue work. So if we see that I'm kind of twisted and rotated or pulled or different ways, that'll go, oh, hey, we really need to address this. We'll clean up that tissue, recheck on the laser and make sure that I'm aligned as best or within the parameters that I am. You know, I've got a fair bit of rotation of the pelvis, but what we don't want to see is more or one side more than the other. We're looking for balance, uh, of a lot of these and we're getting it in the norm for me,

but that drives a lot of that. So, and that makes a huge, huge difference. Like I said, if we can get that cleaned up, then just living life and moving well. And you know, all that stuff, walking, carrying the kids around, like that's, that's all additive. If I'm not jacked up. So you said you have that in house, actually, when you're thinking about like athletes, right? Uh, ART Cairo, that type of work, uh, if they can find a good one, how often, I mean, I know it's dependent on the prompts that an athlete has, but in general, like how would you, how often do you think you should say that they would want to take advantage of something like that? That's tough because optimally you really

shouldn't need it. Right. Okay. So if we've got a well-designed training program because an athlete is using strength training to be additive to uh their athletic performance so they shouldn't be pushing the the the envelope of what the human is capable of in the gym or they're setting themselves up for potential failure. It's not to win the gym. It's to win on the field. I'm talking about strength athletes. Strength athletes, okay. So strength athletes, again, it just depends on what your needs are.

I think if you come to rely on it and the body expects it or needs it, that is not what you want. So I go a big portion of the year with not getting regular work done. But in these phases, in certain phases of training, I'll put that in because you're starting to build and accumulate fatigue beyond what the body's recovering from. That's part of the peaking process, right? So if we can do that or we can use it to enhance. I mean, you can still use it to enhance performance, though, too. So if I so again, it all depends. Yeah. But if I can do more work in a shorter period of time, I will get stronger. OK, so if my recovery without it is eight days. If my recovery without it is eight days, I can only do so much work every eighth day.

But now if I use it, feel better, maybe I can get it down to six. Well, add that up over a training cycle. I want to get stronger. If I can get it to four, I'm going to be even – I mean, it's simple math. The more work I can do in a smaller amount of time. So you can use it. It's not needed. More work I can do in a smaller amount of time. So you can use it.

It's not needed, but you can still use it to, like I said, rolling yourself out in a nice, slow roll post-workout. Like it's going to help the recovery process, right? So if you can do that and now you can get more work in next session. This same thing goes to like the argument of like form doesn't matter or position doesn't matter. There's a lot of people like to say that. And I think there's validity to that. Cause like it's all about building tolerance to different loads. And if I can develop tolerance to handling a load at deadlifting with a rounded back,

I'm going to be stronger at handling that and right around it back. Having a round back doesn't mean that you're going to injure your back. Yeah. Sure. The risk is slightly higher, but what people miss is how much load can you tolerate in a window of time, intensity and volume in those positions. So I want you to, uh, round it back. Does it matter? So you familiar with a Jefferson curl? No. So not like

the Jefferson deadlift, the best deadlift of all time. The Jefferson curl is a segmental deadlift. Each segment of the spine, you go like this, okay? Okay. So if it doesn't – so this is my argument for the people that say it doesn't matter. It's like, okay, I'd like every one of your training sessions to be max effort Jefferson curls. Heck, actually just do one max effort Jefferson curl. Yep. And you're not going to be able to tolerate much.

So if you can't tolerate as much load, much frequency, I can't train as much. I can't get as strong. That's where form matters. Mark, you know this with your shoulder. Like when it's bugging you and you're not moving well, you can't get as much work in every week. Yeah. Right. You're not going to get as strong't get as much work in every week. You're not going to get as strong if I don't take care of it. So there's something to the argument.

It doesn't mean if you're in a poor position that you are going to get injured. I agree with this. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad. But the problem is people are arguing this in the training world. And the goal of training is to get as strong as possible. And it won't allow you to do that. So, so that's a huge thing. If I move better, I will be able to tolerate more loads with more frequency, with more volume. What's that going to equal? I don't need a study. That means you're going to be stronger. Yeah.

So anyway, that's my rant on, uh, on that. Cause there's validity, what people are saying, but they're, they're using this stuff completely out of context for like the environment that we live in. Well, if you lift in shitty positions and you, you'll just build up a tolerance for it. As you're saying, like you think about a lot of the people that come into powerlifting that are super strong, what's their background? A lot of times they have manual labor jobs. And when you're baling hay or picking up sheetrock and doing all these weird things, climbing a ladder and using a hammer and all these different things, you're in weird positions.

You're not like, okay, let me have my belt on. Let me make sure I brace. You're not able to really do that in those circumstances. That builds up tons of strength. Yeah. Yeah, it does. That's what they call the farm boy strong, right? What's your food like nowadays? I mean, I remember when we first met, you were in the 200-pound range or so. And I think it's been kind of a little difficult for you to gain weight. Is that right? I've always struggled with gaining I think it's been kind of a little difficult for you to gain weight. I've always struggled with gaining weight.

It's been a challenge for me. It looks like you figured it out. No, I'm stuck right now. I'm trying to get fatter. What are you at, by the way? 280. I'm trying to get fat, and it's just like I can't get over it because if I can get to 300 pounds, that's more belly to bounce off of. It's going to make my goal a lot easier. It doesn't matter that it's muscle or fat.

You know it. That belly's going to run into my legs. I'm going to bounce off of it, and I'm going to like that. It's going to help a lot. Exactly. It's a fat suit. People are like, are you wearing a suit? Yeah, fat suit.

How about some Doritos? You're eating any Doritos? I have. I like the Doritos. They're a key factor in this whole thing. I've been recently I've resorted to, you know, I have a protein shake, which I normally don't. I like whole foods, but like I'm just trying to get more liquid. So I have a protein shake like the morning and then before bed.

So now it's two scoops of protein, a scoop of collagen, and a full one-third cup scoop of olive oil. And I'm down about a liter and a half of olive oil in the last week or two weeks. Oh, my God. Down the old hatch. Have you gained? No. I'm still the same. Damn.

It's like killing me. Oh, my God. What about food? What are you doing food-wise, like regular food? Regular food? Well, I have some big help there. So if you go check out my Instagram, if you see some food posts, click the person tagged, which is my wife.

And she is incredible. So the stuff you can just go click on her page and see what, what I eat. J V Q U E L I N E. So it's Jacqueline with a V instead of an a. Oh yeah. I was like, it took me a little while to, I'll have to admit.

But I'm not the smartest sometimes either. And sometimes you can just call me Smelly, too. Makes it easy, right? But it's like having a chef in the house. She just makes phenomenal food every day, and it's healthy. So, yeah, that top one there, sourdough. I think it was, I can't remember, 20. Was that like a pizza?

Yep. Awesome. And just keep scrolling down there. Fresh brioche, a little salmon. Oh, some ice cream cookies. Oh, she made the ice cream from scratch. The cookies from everything's all made 100 percent from scratch. Keep scrolling down.

Oh, yeah. This looks incredible. There's a holy. Is she like a chef? Basically, yes. Yeah, I can't. She's got some big projects underway. i can't really speak to right now so um what about that restaurant that we went to when mark and i were down there that was help that was really good that's a good place yeah her food's better

but wow that's good scroll down oh yeah oh do you feel like you're able to eat enough that's that's my that's my schedule that that's my problem is just tough it's more just like being able to tolerate like eating that much do you eat anything in the morning do you eat when you first wake up and stuff i do i do i just uh when i'm just living life oh scroll scroll back, that middle one, that mac and cheese right above that. Pork belly mac and cheese. Oh, nice. Oh, yes.

Lovely. That has to be good. Oh, that is fatty gains right there. Pork belly mac and cheese. I love pork belly. Sorry to everyone that's fasting. But I like fasting just as a quality of life i'm not like oh it's gonna make your growth hormone and other nonsense like whatever it just helps me like quality of life i feel i like that feeling during the first part of the day but i if i'm

trying to gain weight like you ain't gonna go from 280 to 300 intermittent fasting right so um yeah there's her uh trying to uh work working on pilot's license oh no wait that's a different one i think the heart the hardest thing for me when i was gaining weight was uh just that faux go up uh one above that frequency of the food oh that's just some yeah that looked good yep you got some thai food authentic faux broth just like spend a day just making the broth or is that more vietnamese vietnamese yeah yeah better oh just bomb so anyway that is literally like what i eat like every day so man you're spoiled bro i am what the hell my sister calls me since i you know she's just like you're a spoiled little shit i'm like yep yep so uh nothing wrong with that so that's uh that's good stuff yeah so anyway that's

i eat pretty good uh so um so the problem is like trying to eat bad and gain weight on top of that. And yeah, even though my belly sticks out, I'm still pretty lean right now. It's a little strange. Just like fills up and all the food in there and like whatever. But it's like I'm at the best composition at this weight I've ever been. So I'm pretty happy about that. It's hard to keep with the frequency when you're trying to eat like that. It is.

That's the challenge. You just get tired of eating. You're like, I can't wait until this. And people don't realize. They're like, oh, it must be fun. I'm like, no. I actually just don't want to eat anymore, but I have to. Snickers bars help a lot.

Just sneaking one in here and there. Yeah, it's just so dense in calories. Oh yeah. A good way is to polish everything off with a little ice cream because there's always some room for ice cream. It fills the cracks, right? Jessica was asking me what I wanted for lunch today

and I'm like, it doesn't matter. Protein, carbs, fats and make sure there's some cookies too. Make sure there's some cookies too make sure there's cookies and some grilled cheese yeah um so if somebody was asking if they can go train at kabuki strength is it like an open gym or it is yeah anybody uh there's a there's a little drop-in fee or sign up thing like when you go in the entrance but uh uh it's open uh to. That's awesome. And then so how come you're training once, maybe even twice a week now? Well, my goal is specifically the squat right now.

That is it. And so I'm maximizing all my recovery resources towards doing that. So I'm pushing the squat as far as I can. And so with this block, we're getting not quite to the realization phase yet, but there was other work obviously in all the prior blocks, but now it's getting where the intensity of the weights that I'm handling, if I do other work, I wouldn't be able to handle it. I wouldn't be able to recover. And so I wouldn't be moving what I am. And that's why I said I have to laugh when people say you should do a meet because they don't understand.

I'm a one-hit wonder. That's part of how I'm able. That's how I did the 1,000-pound deadlift. That's all I did. And there's no squatting. There's no benching. There's no anything. And same thing is going here as well right now. And I think it's, you know, that's, I'm trying to do something that

nobody's done before. And to accomplish that, you know, it's not what I recommend. This is not a good training or development protocol. But for me, I really don't need to add a lot more muscle or do anything like that to accomplish my goals. It's a lot of neurological training. I've got over 30 years of training under my belt. So I don't, you know, I can go without doing that stuff for long periods of time and I'll still be just fine. Yeah. You have any desire to go after that, uh, Eddie Hall, 1100 pound deadlift? Well, uh, so that eight 80 deadlift challenge that I did, uh, for a couple of weeks and I said, I made it through day 16. Um, I tore off a hamstring and they, there was some issues with my insurance and the surgeons and a bunch of stuff and basically i wasn't able to get it repaired in time and uh so i'm missing a hamstring so i probably won't be one this is

i already did what i wanted to do on the deadlift i deadlifted a thousand pounds for reps yeah i deadlifted 400 kilos every day for 16 days straight i I don't have anything I'm done. Right. And so when I'm done with this squat, you know, I'm going to be 43 and you know, I've got a whole lot of other things in life. So a lot of my training is going to, I'm going to drop my weight back down. I'm probably going to get down to around two 40 and, uh, be focused on the lifestyle health and stuff like that and providing content, uh, more time to provide content because you know, my time is very self absorbed right now. So,

um, our content, so all of our content is mostly produced by my coaching staff and that's on our, uh, uh, I got to throw this out. Our,

our Kabuki underscore virtual coaching account. We produce daily content and it's really, really cool. so, um, this is our free resource over the paid KMS. So we have both. There's not quite as much on, on this, but they drop content every single day. It also goes onto the KMS site where it's indexed to make things easy to find on like Instagram and whatnot, but it's a tons of stuff on there, but I'm not able to, like, I don't have the time to do a lot of contribution to stuff like this right now because it's, it's very self-absorbed. So I want to get back to, to this. So this is my,

like, I've been doing this a long time. I'm out at over 30 years. I set this goal four or five years ago. I've done half of it and I've been building up to do the second half and this is it for me like i'm done with the heavy heavy crazy fucking shit i'll still be lifting i'll still be helping people out i'll still be doing all that stuff kind of like what you're doing right now and uh and that's that's the shift and change in my life that's going to happen at that time so the other half of that is even if I had the hamstring, probably not. If I, I say when, when I pull off having done both, nobody else has done that. I think that's to do a squat and a deadlift, four reps with 1,000 pounds for both. What's the mental side of this? Like, like waking

up knowing that you have to deadlift eight 81 or knowing that you have to squat 800 pounds again, or what are you learning? What are you learning from that? I mean, it's gotta be, it it's well, those are, those are two different things, but God, those daily ones that is so tough. Like I look back at that 800 squat every day and that, that is so tough. Like I look back at that 800 squat every day and that 80 deadlift every day and I'm like, that can't be done. I'm like, I did it, but it can't be done. And in the process, it's just such a – like every day you're waking up and you're like, I literally went to bed like the later half of both those cycles every night. I'm like, I'm done tomorrow like i i'm done i can't do this again i i there's just no way i i'm gonna i'm gonna give up this is

you're preparing your speech right and then i wake up the next morning i'm like okay one more day i got this i can do this one more time. I got this. I'm fucking scared, you know, and I go in and I do it. And then afterwards I'd be like, I can't do this anymore. It's fucking crazy. There's no way. This is it. It is it.

I'm fucking done. I can't believe I'm not going to make it. I'm going to, but I just can't do it. Go to bed. Wake up the next day. Okay. One more time, Chris, you can do this one more time, one foot in front of the next, just one more day.

And that's what it was the whole time. Like, so it's just one, one step. Just focus on just what's in front of you instead of the whole thing. Because if you think this could be taken for life. Like if you put everything out there that you've got to do, like if you thought back about everything that you had to do in your life to get to where you're at right now, it would be kind of like overwhelming. Like holy shit, that's some work. That's some – there's some gnarly stuff that I got to get through to get – like it's just overwhelming versus like, you got to have a like, okay, I want to do this for 30 days.

That's my vision. That's my goal. But you got to focus on just right now and not go, I got fucking two more weeks of this. Holy fuck. That would just one more day, one more day. So, but yeah, right now the squats are like, I'll go into a session. I'll read it. So, but yeah, right now the squats are like, I'll go into a session.

I'll read it like my, my session this week. I'm supposed to do, um, something in the low nine hundreds for a double, uh, nine 55 for a double nine 70 for a double and then do a dropdown set with like nine 38 for a double. God, that's a little scary when you wake up and you go that's what i'm supposed to do today that's what i'm supposed to do tomorrow how's that with the hamstring man like like i'm i don't get it um it is one of the smaller ones um it's the semi-tendinosis okay that comes through it's not the two main heads but the smaller one that comes around the inside of the knee and then wraps around to the front of the humerus. Sorry, humerus is wrong, bone.

But it's really active in stabilizing. So the full lockout in stabilization can be a little more challenging for me, particularly on one leg can be really challenging. But it doesn't seem to be affecting my squat right now is definitely why. Well, when I'd be wearing knee wraps regardless, because I'm a cheater. but I love side note. I like posted that video about, uh, uh, how I wrap my knees and I get this like voice message from Mark,

like 30 minutes later. It's like, I knew it all along. You fucking cheater. You're just useless. I can't believe that. But just on and on, I think I deleted it.

I got tired of listening to whatever rant it was. Got to keep you in line. Hey, whatever. But it does help my stabilization. Because just like if I get in a belt squat and do marches, like this standing on that leg, if we'll lock out it wants to they're gonna lock unlock a little bit so wrapping that knee is really big for stabilization for me

right now but other than that that was the problem i had with getting it reattached is it's an industry standard that one when it detaches they don't do it so i was having some back and forth issues with the insurance and the surgeons and then all this stuff. And so finally went outside the timeline of being able to get it fixed. Um, cause there has been some that they have fixed on some athletes and it's been positive, but it's not the standard care. Uh, so, uh, so it's, it's not a super imperative one, but I do feel it does have an impact. Um, and certainly I wouldn't want to deadlift cause I know for a fact, um, cause I felt the shift happen as it let loose that, you know, as you go to lock out that hips going to

just side shift really hard. And I just don't, just don't feel like deadlifting eight, 900 plus pounds with, uh, with that one gone. I think it's going to end up leading to some other issues. Do you still talk to yourself before you do a lift? Yeah, I do. And do you have any control over what's happening, or you're in a weird zone? I have control over what I say, obviously. But, yeah, I definitely have a very meditative state that I get into, very cerebral, I guess you could say, or whatever.

I've never done a lot of the things that people do pre-lift that get people hyped up, like ammonia capsules or other enhancements or whatever. Just some whiskey. Whiskey. Well, whiskey helps me get in that meditative state a little bit. It helps me kind of get in that state and shuts off like some of the secondary self-talk and things like that. So it's one of the most potent things that I've found for like really getting in that space. But my father was a Buddhist. He spent some time, like a year or more in the Tibetan monasteries. And, uh, it's at a very young age, he taught me, uh, you know, meditative practices and it's just gotten to a point that, um, I can kind of cue that weird fight or flight type situation.

It's very strange because I can now consciously cue it through a lot of practice. About six, seven years ago is when I finally became capable of like cuing it on demand. The daily challenge is it's really hard just because it burns every day you're dropping adrenal you're dropping like you can feel it happen like the hairs on the back of your neck stand up your scalp tightens everything's standing on end and like it's just like it's just this intense really intense experience pulling off uh previous emotions or just blocking

everything out how does it work it depends i've used that word way too many times, but sometimes it's clearing. Sometimes it's pulling off of past experiences. And a lot of it is just like imagining who I am, that I you know, that, that I'm powerful, that I'm power, that I am powerful enough to do that. Um, it's just, uh, I'll, it kind of shifts over time. Like if I spend too much with one, I kind of have to shift a little bit to others. Um, reminding myself of what I've been through in my life and that I've pulled through that. And I'm, I'm strong enough, you know, to, to walk through that fire and that this is, you know, just like, this is nothing to me. And I don't know, it just like that trigger switches and then it's, it's on like, uh, once that intensity hits, like it's very, very powerful. And, uh, so that's, that's what the self-talk is. It doesn't really matter what I say because that changes a little bit with time.

But it's just triggering that fight or flight state, you know, that hormonal release, that change in the brain and just shutting everything down. And it's just that instant right now. And it's crazy because I can go from like you know i've been in like barely able to lift 800 pounds and then cue that put nine well not it's a very short period of time so put 900 pounds on cue that and be able to hit 900 pounds for a triple like that's how powerful it is so it So it's crazy. And that's actually what makes my – some of my warm-ups are really hard right now because I can't – if I'm doing three or four sets, so this isn't a top set.

I can't use it on a warm-up. So I hit 800 pounds, 900 pounds. Those are freaking hard. I just hit them for singles. I'm like, oh, that freaking sucks. Today is going to suck. And then I get in the state and it's just like, I'll unrack nine 50 and I'll be like, nothing.

It feels like nothing. I'm going to fucking kill this, you know? And I'll hit it for a double and be like, I could have tripled that. No problem. It's just like, just nuts.

But the, the hardest ones are like that last warmup with 900 pounds. It's just like, ah, I think a lot of what you're talking about, I have to be, I walk up to the bar completely relaxed, chilled. And when I walk up for the heavier weight,

that is not the state I'm in. Yeah. I think a lot of what you're talking about is the fact that like, you know, we have the ability to be reasonable and rational. And so you're like, oh, you know, this, wow, there's a lot of weight on there. Like this could hurt me.

Like those are the weird, stupid things that you think of. Oh, no. And you shouldn't, but then you can combat that with what you're like, oh, you know, this, wow, there's a lot of weight on there. Like this could hurt me. Like those are the weird stupid things that you think of. Oh, no. And you shouldn't, but then you can combat that with what you're talking about. Exactly. Using that as a trigger and just stuffing all that self-doubt to the side for a little bit. Yep. Because you walk up to the bar and you start thinking about, as I go down, you know, is my freaking hamstring going to, like I've had this stuff happen. I know what it's like.

I'm going to get a tear in the adductor. I know your big squat. Like you don't want to be thinking about that when you're going down with a weight because it's going to be it's like. I'm going to get a tear in the adductor. I know your big squat. You don't want to be thinking about that when you're going down with a weight because it's going to be in your head and you're going to suck. You've got to shut all that down and be 100% confident in yourself or just not care. And that's the state that you've got to be in to do that because it's not training anymore.

It's at a very intense high level on those warm-ups do you find yourself thinking a little bit more oh yeah yeah yeah god i hate thinking yeah you look at it you're like there's like nine plates on there that seems like a lot of weight yeah i guess all right fuck it i guess i'll give another shot. To do something like what you're talking about here, I mean, you talked about, you know, your dad was a Buddhist. You learned a lot of that stuff from him. But how can somebody, I guess, get on the path to being able to control themselves in that way

or elicit that type of response? I think it is just, you know, what I... Well, let me walk through it again and maybe use some different verbiage and see if that helps. Okay. And it's just like Mark was saying too, is like, you've got to clear that secondary stuff. And so it comes down to having the confidence in yourself in that moment. having the confidence in yourself in that moment. So this is,

we don't have the Kabuki squat face on my shirt, but like the basis behind the, the Kabuki squat face, which is you got to get your game day face on. Okay. And this is a big struggle I have with people like, particularly on some of the Instagram and Facebook that I'm a warrior. I'm battling the weights. I'm just like, you know, like, you know, in the grind all the time.

Like, like, no, dude, there's, there's actual real warriors out there and, you know, they, they go do battle and there's paramedics and like, there's all sorts of stuff, but you have to take that instant in that micro instant and become that person and become that, that warrior. That's super confident, become another version of yourself, right? In that period of time. But please get back to reality afterwards. Okay. Yeah. You're not changing the world by squatting some weights. Okay. So, you know, that's, that's my, that's my hate is people that like have that mentality all the time, you know, and they're that's my, that's my hate is people that like have that mentality all the time, you know, and they're like, no, no, you're just lifting weights and it's

a choice. You know, nobody forced you to diet. Nobody forced you to do a competition. You're not at some epic battle or whatever, but in that moment you need to be. So that's putting your game day face on. And there's a lot of ways to do that. So, and where the Kabuki squat face kind of comes through. So think about this in history.

This is something that, look back, nearly every culture has some variation of this when it comes to going to battle, defending your tribe, your community, whatever it is, right? So, because everybody that does it is just members of the community. They're fathers. They're brothers.

Whatever it is, you're a good person. But then you go out and kill people to defend your families, your friends, and all this stuff. But look at what happens when they do that. Well, they do it in the protective you know but they put on face paint they put on masks they have a ritual dance they have a they have all these sorts of things because that person is now transforming into somebody else that's going to go do things that they would never normally do that's your game day face is like doing that but just in the instance like you're still got to come back live your life and be a person and you know but it's interesting that

that is a phenomenon basically in every culture and think about it like there's that is a ritualistic thing that has been done for for millennia like that's that's how we get through those times to to do things that we wouldn't normally do to protect you know to protect the the you know our loved ones our communities families and things like that so it's throughout so anyway that's a little bit of gotcha off the side there but that gets back to that same thing. And so we see that even in sports. People kind of do that. Blaine Sumner does that with his –

Yeah. The chalk, right? It's the chalk. Same thing. Whatever is getting him in that state, that game day, and you go talk to Blaine any other time and he's just a great guy, right? Yeah. I don't think you want to mess with him when he's got the chalk on his face

and he's walking up to the squat bar. It's probably a bad time. He might come out missing an arm. I don't know. Tell us about your book, The Eagle and the Dragon. Is this a recipe book? What is this? Yeah.

It's a recipe for a better life. So The Eagle and the Dragon. I think one of the first times you talked about some of your, I know what the book's about, I was just teasing you, but like, the first time,

one of the first times you really opened up about your upbringing and your life was on our Super Training Gym YouTube channel. Yep. And we,

you and I sat and we were sitting and we stood and talked at the reverse hyper for probably like, I don't know, two and a half hours or something like that about your upbringing. I just found it so fascinating. Yeah. And there's a lot that was left out of that conversation yet still.

And so I wrote the book. I spent about a year working on this project because it's – that's my goal is to help people live better through strength. every that's my goal is to help people live better through strength that's the the mission the drive behind uh kabuki and the companies that i that i've been part of but it's all about the physical nature of it and that's just one aspect okay so almost 105 star reviews looking good, looking good. Yeah, great. So more importantly is probably the mental, the emotional, or maybe even spiritual side of strength. And I haven't been able to address that through the medium of my businesses. They're very much the physical side of it. So this has been like something I've wanted to do for a really long time. And when I've shared my story, it's had a really big impact on people in helping them understand, you know, see how far the needle can be moved. And so this book is not really, it's an autobiography, but that's not really, doesn't do

it justice. So I use the stories to articulate the philosophies and approach and actually to get you to dive deeper and really understand like what your values are in life, walk you through the process of goal setting based on actually having those values established and really creating and defining the life that you want. So it's really a self-help book. One of the categories, number one in like five different categories, one of those is self-help and one is philosophy. And so, yeah, it's got some crazy stories that'll draw you in. Uh, you know, there's stuff with, well, lots of, uh, lots of homelessness and, uh, crazy stories around that, drug running, murders, human trafficking, all sorts of shit.

So it's a wild ride, but it's not like, oh, woe is me, look at how much or look at how great I am from what I've done. It's stories that articulate messages, and it's very specific in that regard. that articulate messages. And it's very specific in that regard. And the last quarter of the book is really pulling all that together in a really succinct manner that you can put this stuff to place in life. And actually, if anybody wants to know more,

just click on the reviews and start reading through. And you'll see that it's had a very profound impact on a number of people. And the emails and messages I've got is just just huge because some of the stuff that people have shared has been pretty big but the what it's helped them with in their life and be able to process things and be able to move forward and take action because that's what I wanted I didn't want to like here's a book but something that helps empower people. And, you know, some of the, the central themes is like around, like thinking about the stresses and challenges in life, the way that we do the gym. So we grow stronger through these things. So they're not necessarily

a bad thing. There are opportunities for you to challenge you to express yourself and to be able to develop and build strength off of that. And actually I challenge you that if you found comfort in life and you feel just like incredibly happy with where you are and everything's just easy to get out of that, to actually go find things that scare you and take those on. That's the signal that it's the right thing. Like, you know, think about, you know, for you, like, you know, think about the, when you met Andy, right. And you probably were like, God, I really want to like pursue a relationship with her, but you're probably still like a little scared of, like, it's this, it's a mixture of like fear and excitement and all this, like, cause you know, it's going to

change your life, you know? And that's, that, those are the things that we need to find. You know, you talked earlier about, uh, you know, not telling, you know, the leaders in your business, like what they have to do, but you know, they get to make decisions and create and do this. Like, that's where the and do this like that's where the beauty is and that's where they can try to find those things themselves and more the work that they do to be able to challenge people your employees to like do more be better like and do things that maybe scare them that's okay that's what we want like that that's, that's the path to growth. That's the past to light life. Because what happens when we don't do it? What happens when we don't go to the gym? The process of

atrophy starts happening. The process leading towards death. Okay. Comfort is not something to be, you know, you know, to be, to, to, that, that is our end goal. Okay. If we find this and we just like, you know, hang out and chill, you're going to get soft. Just like you're going to get soft. If you don't go to the gym, you're going to get soft mentally, you're going to get soft emotionally. Shit's going to happen in your life and you're not going to know how to deal with it. You're not going to be prepared to deal with it. So anyway, it goes into a lot of other subjects, but that's, you know, people miss that with, you know, life a lot of times. And they're trying to find like, ah, I got this job that I can just cruise.

And then on the weekend, I can chill with my buddies and have some beers and watch, you know, do that. You know, like that's my life. Yeah, we all want it. We need downtime. You know, you need to have that stuff in your life. Just like if you train seven days a week, five hours a day, guess what? You're going to quit growing. You're going to be a hurting mess.

So it's the same process. You need that stuff in your life, but that shouldn't be the entirety. You need those things that scare you and drive you. It must have been hard to write. It was. Because some of it's kind of gut-w it really got rich or not kind of got it. It was, it really brought up, uh, stirred a lot of emotions and, uh, it was just really challenging, especially like thinking through, you know, my kids are all at all different ages

through, you know, two to seven and 10 right now, or seven and 11 right now. And, you know, thinking about them, like when I was growing up, I didn't think about it. Like it was just, just life, you know, but like thinking about my kids being in those situations, just man, that just like hit something different. Like, just I'm like, wow, okay. That really was messed up. Like those situations that I was in and I didn't really see that. And then, uh, you know, walking through that and really dealing with some of the emotions and then also realizing some of the bigger changes in my life were even more recently, uh, were really all linked together as well when I started, uh, started dealing with that. So, um, you know, when I started, uh, started Kabuki, it was the,

to gain control of a lot of my life and like work towards my vision and involved making some changes in my personal life as well. And, uh, I, which I ended up working through a divorce during that, that time. Um, so it's pretty significant changes, but I didn't realize that was also the time I basically retired from powerlifting and I'm like, oh, well, of course that makes sense. Like I was trying to create my own environment and be able to execute and realize my vision. I didn't want to be controlled by another set of rules. I'm like, it allowed me to express myself more fully and the way that I wanted to in the physical nature.

And I'm like, oh, of course I quit that at the same time. I didn't realize that at the time that that was all tied because I basically was throwing everything that I did up in the air in my life and redefining it. You know, I've heard a bit about like when you were younger from the interview you had with Mark in the past. And you mentioned right now how like people should continue to seek out discomfort. You know, don't get too comfortable. Don't get complacent.

But with what you've gone through, it's surprising that like you, you're not seeking just pure comfort. So what do you think is, what is that thing that's making you continue to seek out those types of challenges? I, I think it's the scope of the life that I've had in realizing the real value in, in some of those experiences and what they taught me. So in the book, I walk through every chapter is, it starts out a little intro story, and then it tells basically kind of lesson in the things that I learned during those periods of time. And the scope of my life is very vast. I've seen a lot. So it's not worse than anybody, you know, like everybody's got their stories. There's bad things that have happened to lots of people. So mine is definitely not to say,

oh, I've had the worst, but I've had a very big scope of going from, you know, homeless, you know, foraging for food, killing animals and whatnot in the woods with no shelter growing up to, you know, being a corporate executive, uh, doing company turnarounds and then walking away from that to become, you know, a serial entrepreneur. And like, there's just a lot that I've seen in the, in the scope of that. And those experiences have really helped solidify what I feel are important qualities in my life. And I think that a number of them can be useful for other people. I'm not saying that necessarily seeking,

like some people, maybe that's what they need. Maybe that's what they want. I'm okay with that. But the people that want to continue to grow personally are the ones that need to seek that challenge because you're not going to do that without it. I found in my work experience that that has been one of the best ways of actually creating engagement with people, not just in their job, but actually seeing it had a profound impact in their entire life. just in their job, but actually seen it had a profound impact in the entire life. When I walk in with somebody that's just like, I've been doing the same thing for 20 years, come in, punch the clock, whatever. They're just rolling through life. And I'm like, Hey, I see a lot in you. And I've got some big project next year. I want you to work on. This is what I want. I can't

do that. You're not prepared for it yet, but I believe you can do it. I'd like you to get out and get some courses in this and this and this. And, you know, like really push them. Like, I believe in you. I can do this. And then this thing scares them. But a couple of years in there, they've changed all parts of their life. They're fully engaged. They're more engaged with their family. They're more, you know, like you have to be like, you have to be engaged in your life. And if you don't have something that's creating some challenge, something that you're trying to drive, something that scares you a little, like you're going to settle into that and you're going to settle into it in all portions of your life. That's what I find. So it's been huge. And I say, you know, they're going back to school to, you know, get their bachelor's degree in business that they'd always wanted and never got. And, you know, like,

they've taken on a fitness goal and they've dropped 20 pounds of weight. And it's like, these aren't the things that I asked them to do. And they're killing it, of course, on this major project that you wanted you know um so i've seen this stuff in place personally in myself and others through the course of my life and uh so and obviously there's a lot more than than that that uh that i cover in there but the the strength aspect is definitely a good topic for the uh for the show so yeah when were a kid, did you ever, because of your upbringing, because of being homeless and squatting at different houses and stuff like that, did you, I don't know, did you think that you weren't capable of certain things and then something happened in your

life somewhere along the lines where you maybe recognized that you are good enough to do certain things or was it like that for you? Yeah. Yeah. So I definitely, you know, I lacked a lot of social confidence growing up because I was continually moving. Like I wore clothes that were falling apart and kids made fun of me. And like I went years here and there with no friends. I had I had my friends die on me. I had you know, it was it was so the social part of it, like going into high school and stuff like that. I was like I never saw myself being a speaker, a leader, anything like that in any regards. I viewed myself as the quiet introvert and – which there's nothing wrong with that. But I realized as I progressed my career that I did possess those qualities once I really realized like what they were and how you

could bring it about in different manners. So like from the leadership aspect, you know, I, I always viewed like that leader as being this like super motivational up in front of everybody, rah, rah, rah type person. Right. And what I found is I end up being in leadership positions quite a bit, and I'm like, why me? I was leadership of the – or the captain of the wrestling team, and then I was whatever, a bunch of different things. And then same thing, I got elected president of the engineering society, and then I went into jobs in management, and I'm like, I'm really good at this. I'm like,

why? I don't understand because I'm just this quiet kid. Right. And then I realized the value of authenticity. Like, and I'm like, oh, that's why people connect. Like I'm real. Like who you see, who you talk to, you know, it's real. I'm not up there. Rah, rah, rah. But we talked about having difficult conversations with people. And when people know it's not like a cursory, hey, you're doing a great job. Thumbs up. That doesn't mean jack shit to somebody. jack shit to somebody. But when you take the time and you're like, Mark, you know, I really appreciate a couple of years ago, we were driving in your car. I got this phone call and you looked at me and you said, man, you need to do something different with your life. It's time. That was huge for me. And I want to thank you. You know, you know that I'm real when I say that. And if I say, Hey, you're not performing the way that you want to, but I believe in you. I want you to be successful. They know that that's real.

And you're probably going to have a good return on that. So authenticity, like being the real, you caring for people can be huge. And so next thing you know, it changed my, my view of what a leader was. And I realized, Oh, this is why I'm good. Like I just need to continue to do this. You know, it's developing visions for a company and then like getting people engaged with it. You know, being able to have that conversation and say, Mark,

this is where we're going and you're a part of this. Like this is what you need to do. This is how you fit in with this. We need your help on doing this. Like people are going to buy into that versus being up in front of a room and going, look at this. It's awesome. Let's all go there. You know, whatever motivational speech I'm still, I still suck at it.

You know, people don't buy into that. And then I started doing more public speaking, though. And I realized, wow, I'm actually pretty decent with a crowd, too. So I just didn't have those experiences when I was younger. Like, I had a lot of anxiety and fear of, like, people making fun of me. Because that's the environment I grew up in. of me people like, cause that's, that's the environment I grew up in. Like I was the poor kid that wasn't, uh, wasn't bathed properly and was wearing, uh, clothes and shoot, you know, shoes with my toes sticking out the side of them, you know, like I was the brunt of jokes and,

you know, sat alone on the playground. And, and now I'm like, Oh, you know, I'm, sat alone on the playground. And, and now I'm like, Oh, you know, I'm, I'm an effective leader in the strength training community in the world. Like, and, you know, I can, I can walk into an environment, stand in front of a room of like, you know, hundreds of professionals, more educated maybe on topics. And I can sit up there and lecture. I can walk into a physical therapy or chiro, chiro school and lecture, you know, and comfortably be there in my own skin and know that I have value to add and not stumble over myself, you know. That's a pretty big shift.

Yeah, it's huge. What gave you the confidence first, maybe some of your education, or was it physical? Was it lifting? Good question. Combination of both probably. I mean, I've always been pretty smart on a number of topics. on a number of topics. And so my comfort level with my ability and knowledge has always been fairly strong on things I'm educated on.

And strength is... I'm sure like wrestling probably gave you quite a bit of confidence too. No, sports as a whole and training was huge for my self-confidence and probably really helped facilitate a lot of that shift as I went through. So I started lifting in junior high and it was the same thing. I'm like, I'm the I'm the nerdy kid. And I'm like, I should be big. Like, that'll make me less nerdy. Right. Like that'll make me less nerdy. Right. And, uh, and then, uh, actually funny. My wife was, uh, joking with me about, uh, uh, high school nicknames last night. We were texting back and forth. I'm like, actually my high school nickname was Duff the buff. I'm like, I guess that's not a bad nickname, honestly, for high school. So, so, you know, by the time I out of

high school, you know, I wasn't like, yeah, definitely nobody was making fun of me. You know, I was like the strongest guy in the school. Like you don't do that. So, um, so, you know, yeah, sports and lifting was a huge foundation overall for my self-esteem early on. Yeah. And, uh, I'm not sure, you know, what role that plays in like my current situation, but that was a very transitional time for me, uh, through high school coming out of, cause I had a, a regular place to live. We had a washing machine, like, you know, um, things like that. So it was, it was more stable. Um, it was more pathetic, less pathetic looking at that time. And then, yeah, the confidence that came through with sports because I was fairly successful in most everything that I did.

I think it's huge just to, like, have an identity. Like, people want to – that's the way people want to view each other. They want to say, oh, like, oh, there's, you know, Chris. And what does he do like if we're talking as friends in school it's like well i don't know i never really i just see him on the playground he's kind of always sitting by himself but as soon as you're the wrestler you know even if you're i mean everybody knows how hard it is just to participate in wrestling like wrestling is difficult so even if you're not the best guy in the team they're still

going to be like oh i know him yeah he's on the wrestling team and then it just uh it brings about a little bit more positivity because you're like oh yeah he he does that with us you know or he kicks our ass like then it gives you even more that makes you more valid it shouldn't change anything really it shouldn't but it does like it that was definitely a transitional time in my life in the coming into confidence. And then the second piece of that was like moving off to college and no one knew me. Nobody like, I always had this feeling in high school, like everybody knew,

Oh, that was the kid that lived down by the river. Honestly, most people had no clue. I found out later, like, you know, but I always had that in the back of my head.

Like, and cause literally I lived in a trailer down by the river. Like Chris Farley. Chris Farley. And you're living in a van down by the river. So I always felt that there was these lasting impressions from me. But I built my confidence that I didn't really care that much anymore. Because I was valedictorian. I was, you know, a state level wrestler. I was,

you know, I was involved in a lot of stuff. Like I, I was pretty confident in myself at that, that point in time, but it really took another level when I moved to go to college and nobody knew who I was and everybody else was kind of in the same environment. They've been pulled out like nothing from your like. And I was like, oh, I'm just like everybody else. Like that was like that was really additive to that to me at that time. I'm guessing more so additive in a positive sense. Yes. Yes. OK. Wow. Wow. All right. And at this point, how do you handle your, I guess, continued education in terms of strength? Because like, yeah, you've you, you know, all these different professionals. So everyone's at, you know, you have access to everybody. But I mean, you're not they're very much seeking out new knowledge themselves all the time, reading new research, passing it along. My team does the same thing. So we actually have each of our personal, our coaching staff specialize in different areas. So, you know, we've got somebody hired that focuses on diet and nutrition. Somebody else focuses on research on, um, um, you know, myofascial release techniques and other stuff. So as a whole, like we're really trying to expand

our company knowledge, but not relying on every person to be an expert and everywhere else. So we have to, we all lean on each other and then share internally with that. And then having the resource to reach out to these other people outside of that, that are kind of doing the same thing a little bit in different environment. So like I'll travel and spend time with, you know, some of these professionals, a lot of them are on our advisory board for our company now. And so that's how I keep them looped in. But, uh, you know, I'll travel and spend time. Like I was just, uh, uh, down in LA last month, learned a whole bunch about, uh, the Vegas nerve and its impact on, uh, throughout the body. And, and, uh, you know, just like continuing to just reach. Cause these, these people, like a lot of it is either reading research or getting

shared research because there's not a lot of books or other stuff that I'm reading anymore. Yeah. So it's really learning through other people, the experts in each of those fields and seeing what applies, how is it useful? How does it interact with these other areas? And okay, is that a useful piece of our model that we're going to extrapolate on or just a bit of knowledge that we're going to just have in the back of our head? So it's really that. One is internally creating those experts in the field that we can rely on to enhance our companies.

And then that way we can deal with a lot more and then using that same resource externally and a lot of it is research-based and then testing application because there's again a lot of it's not really in like truly what we do as lifters right yeah so so that's the uh that's the interesting side there's a lot of research that's done for lifters on impacts on set rep schemes, diet, dietary approaches, frequency, all sorts of variables like that. But a lot of those other areas are not. All right. What you got, Andrew? Let's see.

I do have some questions from people, but I wanted to take a super quick second to thank Perfect Keto for sponsoring this episode. We're trying actually something different with them. We're doing $10 off any order of 40 or more, but if you're ready to go in deep, you can get 25 off of 100. For $25 off, it's Power Project Bundle. And then for the $10 off, it's Power Project 10.

That's at perfectketo.com slash Power Project. You'll see our survival kit. It's pretty awesome as far as like getting through fast and whatnot. But my question was, that damn trap bar is amazing, dude.

Where did the idea come from to make such an incredible trap bar? Because you think a trap bar is like, what the hell can you really do? It's a hexagon's strong enough to hold weight you step in it you lift and then you come out with an incredible bar so a few years back so i was doing uh another tour of uh all the mlb teams that we work with and i'm always asking like, what are your struggle points? You know, and just observing as well. And I'm sitting there in the weight room as they're working with all these players who literally I have no idea who they are. So which is my business partner, Rudy, is an MLB fan as much as you can get.

Our closest relationship was with the Dodgers. And that's been his like who he's loved since. Well who he's loved since the 1920s, we'll say. And so he just loves them. We can just drop in there anytime. But just watching what they're doing, and I'm like, man, all these coaches are sitting there having to bend over and pick up the the bar and you know so that they can load plates for the players in between every in between every advancement right so there's a lot of other things too like one they all use bumper plates the sleeves are too short okay they're stepping over it oh wait how are these being used oh they're trying to use them

because it's actually for athletic populations they're trying to do a lot of bulgarians and stuff like that they're not fitting they're running into the them because it's actually for athletic populations. They're trying to do a lot of Bulgarians and stuff like that. They're not fitting. They're running into the bar. So I'm just like watching the stuff. I'm like, man, okay, there's a big opportunity here. There was some open trap bars I'd go see, but they would want to rotate because they weren't balanced. And I'm like, ah.

And then I'm like, so I start asking. I'm like, hey, what do you want to see for grip? And I'd start getting different answers because different teams want different things. Then I drop into the NFL teams and they're like, God, we can't get our players into these damn things. Can you make like a super wide one that'll fit? Yeah, yeah. So we have a newer version now, which actually has adjustable width as well. So you can go really narrow. So we have a newer version now, which actually has adjustable width as well. Wow.

So you can go really narrow. Talking to Kelly Starrett, he's like, I need something for my teens. So I don't come up with this stuff. You see, I was given the answers by everybody else. Yeah. Right? So our designer, so I've got an engineer that used to work for me in the automotive space. And so I sit down with him.

I'm like, here's the constraints. This is what we need to come up with. And the loading mechanism, the self-loading, that was definitely mine. I had to go back and forth with him several times because I'm trying to draw it. I'm an engineer, but my designs are on napkins or whatever. I'm really horrible at sketching things out, but I'm trying to sketch it out. So I went back and forth for a couple of weeks. I'm like, no, no, it's like this. And finally he got it. And he's like, ah, yeah, that makes sense. I'm like, yes, it's super simple. There's just nothing to it. Just pop it up. Yeah. Um, so yeah, I mean,

that was the design constraints. One, it needs to be for athletic populations. And so we need to have it open. We've got to have it balanced. And there's another thing that came into balance that people don't understand. I've got a great video on our Cadillac bar and it's called Playground Physics. And I talk about what happens when the load is below or above the wrist. So I know you know the normal Swiss bars, right? They always want you to

come out of the rack and immediately wants to break and crush your face and you're always unstable. Okay. That's because it's a teeter totter. It's literally a teeter totter. Okay. And a teeter totter means that you can't ever find balance. You have this infinitely perfect balance point. And by infinitely perfect means you can never actually find it. So that's why you walk into a playground, teeter-totters always sitting on one side. Because the point that it rotates about, the center of mass and center of rotation are on the same point.

So it'll always be unstable. Well, everybody, you notice on trap bars, everybody always ends up using the high handle position because it naturally feels really good. If you grab the low handle position, it always wants to dive forward, move in your wrist. You can't like find center. So we have the only trap bar that our our low handle position is slightly offset so even our low handle position feels more like a high handle position because it's like a swing which is the same thing with the cadillac bar it rotates about one point high up but the center of mass is below it so where does a balance point find

always returns to center and that's why we take so the cadillac bar there's no we take out that induced instability in the wrist well we have the same thing in trap bars nobody's ever just nobody's ever realized it before so ours is offset by like three eighths of an inch, just enough, but you put it in your hands and you can feel the difference. So especially if you're doing single leg work, lunges, Bulgarians, carries, any of this stuff, if you drive, grab that handle that's on center, it's always going to be want to dip forward on you as immediately as you pick it up or you try to walk. So you're always going to be fighting this. So that you immediately as you pick it up or you try to walk so you're always going to be fighting this so that's incredible so there's a lot of little things like that in there and then as far as that and then yeah the rest of it is just we want it

open we wanted it balanced we wanted to eliminate people having to get in bad position you're sitting there you're doing deadlifts you're working up you don't have a deadlift jack that'll work on the damn thing so you're working on maintaining good position good spinal position good bracing doing all this stuff and then in between every set you're fatiguing yourself getting in horrible freaking position to load plates in between every one so you're compromising your your training or you got somebody else doing it for you and they don't want to do it. So, so they're going to be the one I'm going to sell it to because they don't want to do it anymore. Yeah. I love that freaking bar.

So like my back is always kind of bothering me so that like I can deadlift fine, but then loading and unloading, it jacks me up. Exactly. Cause you're, you can't do it in a good position. Yeah.

And then, so I'm lifting with Mark and Chris and they're both lifting three times as much as I do. But with that bar, it's like yeah dude let's go it's so simple and then i wanted to have different size grips because yeah hey a strongman's gonna want to work on grip so they're gonna have a two inch they're gonna have a two inch rotating um just to have it interchangeable to work because people do different things that fat grip's a motherfucker it is so good though and then uh so it was just like opening up the versatility of because what i found is people are using trap bars for a lot

more than just dead lifting and so let's build that in there and make it the right length get the right balance build in these other unique features that people hadn't thought of like the self-unwracking or the self-wracking the the instability in that low handle position, which, again, nobody else has caught on to. Like these bars have been around forever. Nobody can figure this out. Same thing with the Swiss bars. They suck.

I'm sorry. You know it. Like they're not great to bench with. So you do those little minor changes on where the load sits and handle positions and all this stuff, and all of a sudden it feels incredibly different. We get an incredibly different training, uh,

training impact from it. So what I wanted to have was the best deadlift type bar in the world, not a competition deadlift bar. Okay. Neutral grip deadlift bar, the best bench press bar specific in the world. It's the Cadillac bar, the best squat bar in the world, the transformer bar and the best all around training, general purpose training bar, the Duffalo bar. And that's what we have.

That, that Cadillac bar is probably the scariest thing I've ever benched with. I'm like, I'm so weak, I'm shaky. And then, you know, Mark goes, he's like, oh, this is a little squirrely. Yeah, that's incredible. What's the main benefit of the catalog bar? I honestly haven't used it just yet. Okay. You'll love it. It's good for your wrist.

Yeah. Like, so you personally, because I know you've mentioned that in the past, that your wrist. Baby ass wrist. Yeah. The one thing you got to be careful, because everybody's trained with the Swiss bar to choke up on one side because it's gonna try to rotate in your wrist so you actually have to grab you just grab ours in the center yeah um so make sure you grab in the center of the grip um but the others yeah to take out that where it's trying to do this you come out of the rack it's trying to break your

face you come down and touch your chest and it rotates again so it's getting that instability out um and then uh getting the handle position. So every handle position is slightly different, a little bit more internal or external rotational bias based on how far out it is. Because as we go further out, the change in the shoulder is different as well. So everybody always has these fixed ones. Well, it should be slightly different every one. But leaving a little bit left that you can cue some external rotation. So not be completely in line with the shoulder, but just enough that you can still cue that external rotation. So we get the shoulder in just a really great position that you basically can't

get out of position. And so with all that stability movement, like now, if you take that bar down, you'll get that extra range of motion without like feeling the stress in your shoulder so like i took this uh the prototype there's a great thing about mlb is uh every head strength coach has bad shoulders right so i go into i know this already so i walk into every weight room we show the other stuff and they're like what about this one and i'm like who here has bad shoulders head strength coach raises their hand they're the buyer and uh i'm like oh okay do you want to do some benching no i can't bench haven't for five years and uh he's like oh this issue that issue i'm like i'll just try it

like oh that feels good i haven't been able to take a bar to my chest for years you know like wow i can actually get all the way down. Put some plates on. No pain. This feels good. Put two plates on. They're sitting there doing reps. This happens over and over again at every team I go to.

Then they're like, oh, my God. Their staff is sitting there jaws hanging because they're going three inches deeper than normal with two plates for reps. And they haven't been able to bench with a bar for years all because we can we're controlling that shoulder position yeah and uh and then the other is from athletic perspective same thing with the duffalo bar like we need to be developing power behind the shoulder if you're starting out here in front may work for bench press you know for power lifting but this is too late to the game in athletic world you need to be starting power Starting out here in front may work for bench press, you know, for powerlifting. But this is too late to the game in athletic world. You need to be starting power generation back here.

So it develops. And then you're going to get, well, even for powerlifting, you're going to get more development with that extra range of motion as well. So we've had a number of people use that and see over a training cycle, see a huge spike in a bench press that hasn't moved anywhere in a long time. So normally you can't get into that extra range. Now still, if you've got an internal rotational deficit where you can't get in there, that's, it's not going to help you. So like for Mark, it may be a struggle because he struggles a little bit with internal rotation. So he might still have to put a board or something on there because he can go down, but he's going to reach a point where he decentrates that shoulder, driving it forward in the capsule and be in bad position. So it's not going to fix that.

But for most people with shoulder problems or shoulder pain while pressing, it's going to disappear while under the bar. Got any new products you're really fired up about that you can share with us? None that I can share. So I'll just, yeah, sorry. Any plans on making like racks and stuff like that? I don't believe you make anything like that yet, right? We will be, but it's a long ways out.

It's going to be a lot different than anything that's currently on the market. So basically, slowly, we're working on reinventing the gym. So right now we're doing it in the barbells. But everything is built around these concepts. Getting the joints in the right position, being able to accommodate for variability in a lifter's height, length, levers, height, length, levers, and then variability for dealing with a person's mobility restrictions,

things like that. So to be able to rapidly accommodate and basically get people in the right position to train. I love people like some famous NBA player will post up a squat video and everybody's like, ha ha, he squats like shit. Oh, that's only a half rep. I'm like, you realize he's seven foot six. Like, ha, ha, he squats like shit. Oh, that's only a half rep. I'm like, you realize he's 7'6". Like, he can either do a half squat with a back squat bar,

or he can compromise all his position and risk injury and not develop correctly by trying to go break this randomly parallel spot, right? Because he's not built to back with a load in this very specific spot. There's nothing about our bodies that said, we're supposed to have a barbell on our back right here. And people with different torso and femur links and stuff like that, they can't do the same thing that necessarily everybody else can. But with a transformer bar, we can change that.

We can actually get something so that anybody can go in there. What's the video here? LeBron squat. Yeah. That's the video here uh lebron squat yeah it's that's the like most famous one yeah so we can actually fix that with a transformer bar like i wouldn't have to do a thing like this mlb loves this because they uh they get all these players in from the dominican republic and they're very skilled athletes, but they have zero experience in the gym. They have no training age at all. Right. And so now you've got this huge group of athletes that all you need to do is get stronger and more resilient in the weight room and they're going to excel. But they, you're starting from ground zero with squatting. Well, you can put a transformer

bar on their back, get the right adjustment. And all of a sudden they're all squatting perfectly with no coaching. Wow. Like, yeah, that's, that's pretty freaking great thing. So anyway, we haven't got into the racking and the other stuff, but everything is being built around those principles, getting things in the right positions. Um, so it it's, it's all around improving biomechanics and accommodating for variability and mobility, levers, height, all those sorts of things so that we can actually effectively train everybody. And this is where training is going. Not powerlifting training, but general population training, athletic training, even elderly rehabilitation, all this stuff. And it may not be there yet, but it's going to be. And if it's not, I'm going to make it happen.

What else you got coming up? Anything coming up soon? Speaking engagements or anything like that? I'm trying to keep everything a little limited right now. I'm trying to keep everything a little limited right now. The next three months we're prepping for this big squat. And when's the squat? That is March 18th or 19th, whatever the Thursday is that week.

Are you going to stream it live or something? I'm sure it will be. I don't know how to do that stuff, but somebody on my team does. That will be done in San Diego at the URSA show, which is the largest equipment show in the world. We will be unveiling some new products there for anybody that wants to attend, but I can't really speak to them just yet. But obviously everything is in line with what I just spoke about. And so it will be done at that event. In the course of this, we're actually filming a documentary around what's happening from training, rehabilitation, and a mixture of the mental

side of it, the philosophy, all that sort of stuff. But I wouldn't expect that that comes out. It'll be a feature length documentary, but i'm not expecting that until the to be done till the end of this year early next year um so that's that's it my wife has a massive project that i can't talk about um that'll be happening over the same period of time so our plates are very very full um and then the rest of the year i haven't quite thought about yet except uh uh gonna finish the war rig i going to start working on that again. You were talking about the farm boy strong being in those different... When I'm in the middle of this, I can't go work on the rig. I can't get under

there and be up here and doing... Those just don't go together. As much as I want to finish it, that's sitting to the side. I'll be speaking at Swiss again. Society for Weightlifting Injury Prevention and Sports up in Toronto this fall, which is a really big gig that I enjoy going to. And we've got seminars every month all year long. Go to kabuki.education.

You'll find those. We will be doing at least one in the UK and possibly another one overseas this year, but they haven't made it on the schedule yet, but most every other one is there. So we've got stuff going on all year long for education and certification. So, yeah. Cool. Where can people find you? Can find me on, so one, I've got this great program. Well, I don't.

Audible does. So I'm going to talk about that for just a second. And then, cause it's, it's really cool. Where if you sign up for Audible account, you can get my book for free and another book for free. So there's a link to that on my personal website, which is ChristopherDuffin.com, and a link to the companies that I'm involved with, Kabuki Strength, Build Fast Formula, and Barefoot Athletics. That is something that's – oh, I've got my – my shoes are off.

Shoes with you, right? Yeah, they're on the floor. I'll grab them in a second. But there are links to all that on there. So ChristopherDuffin.com. My Instagram and LinkedIn are where I'm most active socially. Facebook, I gave up on a while ago. But mad underscore scientist underscore Duffin on Instagram.

But you can just type in Chris Duffin on anything and I'm sure I'll pop up. So it's not too complicated. You guys can figure that out. Yeah. Link link was just added to the description of this video too. Okay. Um, so yeah, uh, I, I mentioned the, uh, the coaching account on IG. Definitely check that out. I mean, we have massive content that we're dropping daily on there. That's really, really cool stuff. Kabuki underscore virtual coaching. We should have renamed it to education or something, make it make a little bit more sense. But that's that's our free education platform. And yeah, that's I think that covers all of it. So yeah, barefoot athletics. So anybody knows I've been you watch my videos,

I train barefoot. I've been barefoot for like five years. And one, it's just a strength training. It's an opportunity to work the feet and allow them to develop stronger. If you look at my foot, there's massive muscles on there, actually. They're jacked. I got jacked fucking feet. So jacked feet. They make you stable and strong, my friend. So, uh, it's, yeah, it's the point we start off of. So, so big proponent of like, I produce a lot of education around,

uh, uh, proper foot mechanics and the impact that has, um, you can wear shoes. I got nothing against shoes. Uh, shoes are great actually, because they protect you against cuts, cold environment, piss on the floor, things like that like that oh shit i didn't think about that anyway especially in here so so for that uh we've uh um launched a barefoot athletics that's with a b-e-a-r kind of a take on my growing up in the wilderness. I might have been chased by bears a few times, too. But these are prototypes. We're starting to ship in, well, right after Chinese New Year. So we'll probably be in stock and shipping.

Are they supposed to smell that bad? No, that's just my feet. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, it's just a minimalist uh shoe uh wider than normal uh because uh when you're under load the front of the foot has an opportunity to splay more than others so you really need this wide like people like chuck taylor's are great or this or that they're not they're not wide enough to really allow this splay the natural splay of the foot but we also have to control for sheer forces.

So there's some stuff with stitching and stretching the specific way that hide stretches one way or the other so that we can create stability so that the foot doesn't roll outside of the shoe. But for the most part, minimalist shoe that's aesthetically not marketed to runners and hippies, so the rest of us can actually wear it. All the other barefoot style shoes out there are very Portland-esque in look. So trying to create something that you could actually, how shall we say, still get laid when you're wearing. Because there's a bunch of stuff out there like Vibrams and others, and I'm like, yeah,

if you plan on not having sex with your partner, you can wear those. They are functional, but there is some other things. Anyway. Even the shoes on is usually for the ladies, isn't it? Anyway, so. At least in some of the documentaries I've seen.

Documentaries. I haven't heard that in a documentaries uh that's what we call them here yeah documentaries the one with the plumber was great wait what i thought we weren't doing that anymore we got off track really fast no fap january's over yeah so uh ended badly but anyway, pretty excited about that project. I think it's pretty cool and allows the foot to still be used correctly, be able to strengthen, improve our proprioception with the ground, all this sort of stuff. So anyway, anybody that checks it out, there's links on – you can go to Barefoot Athletics or just find the link off my page,

ChristopherDuffin.com. Which is already in the description. Awesome. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you all later.