Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 348 - JL Holdsworth

Episode Date: March 18, 2020

JL Holdsworth is a world champion powerlifter, author, and former strength & conditioning coach of the University of Kentucky. He is also the owner and founder of The Spot Athletics in Columbus, OH and the creator of Reflexive Performance Reset (RPR). Hit up JL on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_coachJL and on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coach_jl/ Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Visit our sponsors: ➢Icon Meals: http://iconmeals.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off ➢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! ➢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 ➢ https://www.facebook.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 ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

Power Project crew, what's going down? Hope you're having an amazing day. Today we have an awesome, awesome podcast with JL Holdsworth. If you were a fan of the Caldeets episode, then you will absolutely adore this conversation. JL is an old school Westside guy, Westside barbell. And I mean, when you look at him now, you would have no idea or any, I mean, it's so hard to even grasp the concept today that he was actually such a hothead that, I mean, he'll explain it in the episode. He talks about a $30,000 hot dog that he had. You have to listen to it to really understand what the heck that even means. But anyways, JL works with Cal Dietz and no disrespect to Cal, but when he's explaining the RPR system, he's so dang smart that it's kind

of hard for a normie like myself to even understand exactly what he's saying. The way JL put it, it simplified things. So we get into heavy RPR stuff. Um, I promise you, after you listen to this, you're going to really want to look into it. Um, he did a couple of different, um, like examples on us before the podcast. And so like this episode really just solidifies all our beliefs in like, uh, how much trust we have in the RPR system. Um, I really think you guys are going to dig it. Uh, we talked about a little bit about the, uh, the West side days and you know, it, like I said, he's so unassuming. You would never think that he would be such a hotheaded person. Um, RPR system has

helped him calm down significantly, almost like pretty much to the point where he's a different person now, but back in the West side barbell days, like he explains how he, he had to fight his training partner in order to continue training with him. And when his training partner didn't, he basically said, I can no longer train with you. Uh, he says, there's two things that will happen. Either I will get my way or you'll get punched in the face. And it's so crazy because when you, when you, when you hear him him speak or if you're watching the video on YouTube, it would be impossible to ever even assume that he was such a hot-headed guy. But Mark confirmed everything and he was just like, yeah, he was one of the most savage dudes in the gym back in the day. savage dudes in the gym back in the day.

So like I said, this episode had the biggest impact on the Power Project crew because we now implement the RPR system every single day in our day-to-day. And yeah, it was all because of the way JL was able to explain the RPR system to us. This episode is brought to you by Piedmontese Beef. It's the best beef in the universe. Humans and aliens both agree. It's second to none. You guys really need to try it. It's at piedmontese.com.

That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com at checkout. Enter promo code POWERPROJECT for 25% off your order. And if your order is $99 or more, you get free two-day shipping. Check out the Jacked and Tanned box, the Power Project Deluxe bundle. Both of those are available through their other

gift box sets and our promo code works on both of those anyways let's go ahead and get into this episode uh if you're picking up what jl's putting down please hit him up on social media his uh he's brand new on twitter so links for that and his instagram will be down in the youtube description or the it iTunes show notes. Hit them up, tell them what you think and please, please, please enjoy the show. So you were digging through some piles of some old documents? Yeah, actually one of our interns was digging through our library of resources and he just pulled out his paper, right? And so on the inside he goes, what is this? And it was Mel Siff,

Louie Simmons, that 2001 seminar where we met. In like the boiler room of like the Bellagio or paper right and so on the inside he goes what what is this and it was mel siff louis simmons that you know 2001 seminar where we met in like the boiler room of like the bellagio or i think it was a broom closet yeah why we were why were because no one because it was 2001 no one even knew it didn't like was it not supposed to happen there or something like did they just make up a seminar there i'm pretty sure well i i found about it. I remember like walking to it. I'm like, where am I going? Like there can't be a seminar. Yeah.

Lights were out. It's like, there's a clown. What? Yeah. We didn't know what we were walking into. It's funny. Cause you know, I learned about that and that was probably six months after I really learned about conjugate and super training and all this.

And you know, it's just my personality. Once, once, once I'm in, man, it's, it's 110% going in. Yep. And so I learned about that seminar and I was in college. I didn't have money to, to go to Vegas and to do all this. So, uh, I ended up working an after hours club from three in the morning until eight in the morning to make enough money oh my god so uh my job uh at this place was to uh be in charge of the nitrous tank and so i was wayne state so it's downtown detroit so you just i drive to this i get this address from this guy who says i can make a lot of money working this after i was because all right you know i need money so this perfect AB gets me to the Malsif Clinic. I show up to this warehouse

in just a sketchy part of Detroit. When you say a sketchy part of Detroit, take any other city and it's the sketchiest, sketchiest, sketchiest part of that city. Things are boarded. There's nobody around. There's no way there's something here.

I go around to this door with this little red X on it open it up and just all of a sudden and i mean it's just like 2 000 people just going insane and so i find the dude i walk upstairs it's on the third floor except the next thing's like you know i'm playing college football and stuff and i just got done right so i'm 245 pretty pretty athletic guy right she's like all right you're in shows a nicer thing if the you've got to pick it up and run. And I'm like, okay. Right? Like, I mean, how much did I get paid?

And he's like, you're going to get $100 an hour. This is 2001, man. $100 an hour? I was like, I'll kill a cop, right? I was like, and so. I'll kill a cop. Right. And so, uh, so good money, especially off the books.

Right. No, it was insane. Right. And then like there was, there was another thing was, uh, the people who wanted to get to it then would tip you to get to it quick.

I literally made my time. I'm worked one night at that thing. Done. Never worked again. Cause obviously there was the chance of getting shot. And so, uh, and then made it to the clinic worked one night at that thing. Done. Never worked again because obviously there was the chance of getting shot. And so, and then made it to the clinic. But that's the thing. People are like, I can't go.

I can't afford it. I'm like, let's not talk about the things that I've done to afford to go to learn more. But here's the thing. I don't work that after hours club. I don't go to that. We're not sitting here today. Right. Right.

Like how, that's where where people they can't understand the universe these things happen and we don't have perspective on time and space to say whether they're good or bad right we just 20 years later we're sitting here and doing a podcast because i made a choice to act and to do whatever i had to do to get to a place i wanted to be then we meet and it's great the intern brings it And so he opens it up and, you know, he follows your, you know, all your stuff. And he opens it up on the inside. It's everyone's phone numbers written down because there was no cell phone. Oh, yeah.

And so everyone's. So it's like Mark Bell phone number, right? Buddy Morris phone number. Joe Ken phone number. Tom Islinski. Mark Uyama. Right. And for the listeners who don't know, I named you and four nfl head strength coaches and

james smith was there yeah james smith right and so it's i mean and it was in a broom closet right in 2001 and all in all of us were there right and it was some weird last minute thrown together thing i think like because louis simmons never traveled at that time and once i saw that like i heard about the super training seminars but i was like I don't know if I'll be able to even digest that and then as soon as I heard that Louie Simmons was traveling to the west coast I was like he never travels for anything I'm like I gotta figure out a way to go to that well especially I mean people don't know Louie only drives right he won't he won't fly so I mean that's that's a drive to Vegas from Columbus which I wouldn't do it, but you know, but that, that's just Louis, right? I mean, you know, it's, it's, he's different that he is definitely different. Yeah. That seminar is

what sparked the name super training, you know, because I, I was, I checked out Mel Sif's book, like on the break. And I was like yourself at the time, I just didn't have any money. He's like, Oh, you think you're going to buy the book? The book's like 80 or 90 bucks or something. And I was like, yeah, I think so. I was like, I think I gotta go buy the book the book's like 80 or 90 bucks or something and i was like yeah i think so i was like i think i gotta go you know hit up an atm but i didn't know i was just trying to be nice i was like i can't you know can't afford it and uh he was like hey you know what he's like why don't you just keep it he's like it's just as long as you promise you'll put it to good use and i was like all right i was like sounds good and then he died yeah no he died like a month or two later or something right yeah that was i mean that was

the last if you didn't go to that you did before before that you didn't you didn't even see him for people who don't know who melsef is why was he so well known at the time well the book super training i mean he basically took the soviet methods and everything and then lumped it all into one book that you could digest and that was the first time i mean the super super trainings right so people you know i know i talked to a younger kid you know i'm 41 right we've been doing this you know obviously 2001 we didn't know anything right and that was a little while ago and uh so it's funny because people read all these other books and there's great books by people that are coming out today but the way i look at it is there's the bible and then there's a bunch of books on

religion and super trainings the bible and all these's a bunch of books on religion and super training to the bible and all these books on you know programs everything that are coming today they just take all the lessons from the bible which is super training for for people in strength conditioning right yeah so we've been talking a lot today about rpr and you've been kind of blowing our minds with it can you first kind of give us a good description of what it is? We had Cal Dietz on recently. And so I would love for people to hear from different people on what this method is and how they can apply it into their own life. Because at first glance, you're like, I don't know what just happened. It's hard to process. Yeah, I mean, it's really, you know, it's something we talked about this that is so complicated but it really it's simple and and

that's what i love about it most right so for me the real simple easy to digest for people it really is just a system of daily self-care techniques that allow you to reduce pain build resilience to the stress in your life improve performance reduce injury it does so many things but but the bottom line is it's just a system of daily self care. And so it involves some breathing and wake up drills, which is basically rubbing different areas. And, you know, the simple for people to think about it like this is, you know, you walk home and the electricity in your house controls how everything there works. Well, the electricity in your body is your nervous system that controls how everything in your body works. So all we're doing is really just showing people where the light switches are in their body. And that's really it. And so people are blown away. And the analogy,

when I go into, you know, pro teams and college teams, and we've done, you know, I mean, joint special operations, I mean, a lot of special forces and at super high level of performance, almost everybody's using it, right? As far as just the everyday lifter and just person walking down the street, have never seen it, have no clue what it is, right? And so for me, when I go into these teams, people are blown away. And I literally just go, look, guys, 200 years ago, if we're in a dark room and I say, hey, I'm going to flip a switch and it's going to be light as day, you guys would have burned me at the stake as a magician, right?

Because no one understood electricity. But we've had that for you know 150 years and so we walk into a lit room like this and it's just no big deal what i'm showing you guys that blows your mind it's just the electricity your body in 150 years three-year-olds will know how to do it and they'll know where their light switches are and they'll just be like yeah whatever and so that's the thing it's just so new but i tell people it's not magic sun food it's literally just showing where the light switches in your body are it's really simple where did it come from so there's a physio out of south africa his name is douglas heel and he has a system called be activated and douglas has been teaching this for a little while it's all practitioner based so uh you know there's there's a lot and

it dives really deep and it's awesome stuff and and the main philosophy though is a neurological paradigm of how people work so it's a different understanding and so what happened was uh in 2010 chris corfas who's another one of the co-founders of rpr who's just i mean he's one of the world's top sprint coaches. He's amazing. And so he had the top 60-meter guy in the country blow out his hamstring. So he went back through all his training. He's like, oh, my God. You know, because someone gets injured, man, as a strength kid. I mean, you drive a hamstring for a sprinter.

Yeah. I mean, and so he's going over it, and he can't figure out what happened. So a great buddy of his, his name is Dan Fichter, who I call the international man of mystery because he's all over the place. And I love Dan. He happened to be in London learning from Douglas when this happens. He calls Corfis from the thing. He goes, dude, I think I know why your kid blew his hamstring.

And so Corfis starts going into, oh, did I not do enough eccentrics, single leg, all the things that we think of in training. And he goes, no, dude, this is a whole new way of understanding how things work. And so Corfis is being learned. we think of in training and he goes no dude this is a whole new way of understanding how things work and so core physicians be learned he brings douglas over from south africa learns implement starts getting amazing results he tells cal about it cal implements are getting amazing results cal tells me we were speaking at a clinic terry starts telling me about this crazy stuff honestly i go online to to look at what would eventually become rpr or some of the basis of it and i literally get 10 seconds of video and go, not real. You're like,

I'm like, there's no way. Who are these clowns? Yeah. I was like, this isn't real. And so, uh, so because Cal told me about it,

I go, I learned from Douglas. I go through a four day course and just, I mean, mind blown. Life's changing. And, uh,

I come home, uh, Dave Tate, who, you know, you know, Dave, absolutely. so I i i call him on my way home and i go dude i think i think i got something that's going to help you and dave's had tons for

people who don't know who dave is but he's powerlifter was very high level with with us west side and just a lot of injuries over the founder of elitefts.com yeah exactly and so uh dave has this thing where he shakes really bad when he squats heavy. And so no one's ever been able to help it. And so once I went to his clinic, I was like, holy cow, that's neurological. And so Dave comes in. I take him through everything. He goes to lift.

And I get a call. Well, first I said, he goes, can I go train? I was like, well, yeah. Why wouldn't you be able to? He's like, I don't know. Like my body just feels different. And I was like, yeah, no, but your, your body's actually working the way it's supposed to now neurologically.

So go, go train. What are you going to do? He's like, ah, I'm just doing some speed work. And I said, oh yeah, just see how it feels. So on Sunday he had squatted a six 10 with a spider bar and a special box and all this. And I saw a video of it. I mean, like he's having a seizure box and all this. And I saw a video. I mean, like he's having a seizure and it's scary.

He goes that night. He calls me. He goes, dude, I, he's literally, he just, he's like,

I just did 700. I go, what? I thought it was speedy. I felt so good. I just want to see what would happen. Literally sends me the video at 700. Boom.

He's like, I stopped. Cause I was just scared. Like I didn't know where it was going to stop. Right. So after that, he said, you know, power listening for 20 years, sets a 90 pound squat PR one, right. And one day after that, so I'm like, man, this stuff is, is it's everything I thought it was. Right. And so, uh, so the thing was in, you know, I live in Columbus here and and I have two 20,000-square-foot private training facilities. We have a ton of people through our facilities every day. It's all private. They're working with coaches, but it might be, you know, a team of, you know, 20 lacrosse players or, you know, 10 wrestlers or whatever.

It might be one-on-one. And so the thing was, I was like, man, this is all practitioner. It's really high-level. Kind of it takes some time to grasp and so this isn't scalable like i can't give this to my people right because you know we have a couple hundred people going through a day like what that there's not time and so i started calling cal and chris and so how how would we do this in a team talk to douglas in south africa and finally uh had douglas come over and basically met and i go look man i we want to make this

simple so people can just do it themselves and douglas was like yes that's amazing because the more people that have this the better and so just started working from there uh reflexive performance reset as as a company was was born out of that and uh then we just started working on it man and how did you guys come to some of these weird conclusions? Because I think part of what makes it a mystery is that you're like rubbing an area, but it's affecting a completely different spot. So like the little bolts above your butt cheeks, like kind of next to your like a little bit above your crack. That's like supposedly kind of frees up your hamstrings or maybe helps activate the hamstrings. So the back of your head to like your glutes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That kind of stuff. Well, I think that's a, that, that seems like some real voodoo right there, you know? Right.

Yeah. And again, it's, it's not voodoo. It's just showing you where the light switches are. Right. So here's the thing, right? So the light bulb, they're all right there. The light switch isn't right next to them. That didn't amaze you, right? You flip light switch. Absolutely. You flip the light switch on the wall. That wasn't didn't amaze you right you flip light switch absolutely you flip the light switch on the wall that wasn't amazing it's because you know because the wiring goes to that switch and you just know that because since little kids we've been flipping light switches so for us i mean douglas really laid out the system and then we just it became simplifying it right and so for me one thing that's really crucial is you know you said activation and one thing i want to make sure people understand, because this summer, Douglas was here for about 10 days in Columbus.

And he was doing a deactivated clinic. And we were working together on a bunch of other stuff. And we went out to breakfast. And I ordered biscuits and gravy because they're amazing. Yeah, because you like that kind of shit. Yeah, who doesn't right and so uh i order it and he literally just is like he's giving me this like like i just i'm like i like i killed a puppy right i don't i don't know what's going on so i look at some of these guys

and so uh my my biscuits and gravy come and he goes oh that's biscuits and gravy and so what are you talking about? He says, well, in South Africa, biscuits are cookies. So he thought I ordered like chocolate chip cookies with gravy for breakfast. Right? And so, of course, I would look at someone's face. There you go. Yeah, interpretation.

And so what I realized, and we started to have this dialogue, that what a word means to one person based on their lens is complete it's the same word it's a completely different meaning and attachment that could be like a derogatory word right anything yeah a racial slang or could mean some one thing to another person could mean something totally different to another person yeah and so what i realized was the world that i came up in strength, conditioning, and powerlifting, all these things, uh, activation was glute bridges and clam shells and hip circle off, right? Like, you know what I mean?

Yeah. And these things are all awesome things. However, when you understand the neurological paradigm, you understand that for me, that's not activation. That's a warmup and you need a warmup, right? I'm not saying you don't need a warm-up. You need that. However, that's the mechanical part of just warming it up.

Activation, to me, with RPR, is the changing of the neurological firing sequence. And so what we do is a lot of times in our clinics when we do demonstrations, is we say, hey, guys, we just want to be on the same page. And so we'll bring someone up. We'll test their hip extension, right? They'll lay flat down. We'll just have them lift their leg up we'll test how strong they are then we'll have them do a bunch of glute bridges clamshells anything they want to do to feel activated and we retest that and you know what happens every single time absolutely nothing right and so we're all doing this stuff saying it's activating right and it's all this but really it it's just a warmup and you need the warmup.

I still do all that stuff, right? Yeah. Cal showed us even with like the hip circle. Yeah, exactly. He's like, it's, it's not really activating. It's, it's warming up the area. Exactly. And so the thing is, is then what we do is we have them do breathing and the wake up

drills, and then we retest hip extension. So we do activation, how mean, changing the neurological sequence, and you can stand on top of them and it doesn't move. And their strength doubles. Like we had the force tester we did with you. Yeah, that was amazing. That was really cool. Yeah, I mean, if that was rotation, you got 70% on one side,

about 120 on the other side. And on hip extension, I tend to find most people, in most tests, it's about 70 to 100, if there's a little deficit, a more but think about 100 that force output is doubling it's not doubling because you warmed up there's nothing you can do to warm up that will change force output the only thing that changes the force output is changing the neurological firing sequence so here's the question why like like why do we not naturally have access to that like why is it why is it uh why do we have to like kind of

trigger these things by by rubbing ourselves like we're putting on uh soap or something yeah well washing ourselves that's what it looks like yeah yeah yeah uh which washing ourselves is an important thing too right so uh and so uh you know basically we do have access to them. And we do. The people who have 100% access to them, unfettered, infants. Because infants have no perceived stress in their life. So they have the perfect parasympathetic or performance state. If a baby was laying here on the table and a lion was over top of it, it would just be cooing, smiling, batting at the lion. But for us as adults, we know it can eat us.

So we'd be out the door. I don't need to be that fast. I seem to be faster than you guys. And so this is the thing is that babies have perfect breathing patterns. Their firing sequences are perfect because they have no perceived stress. However, as soon as we we start growing up right like two three four we start getting the stress and so all these things in our lives some of them are big stressors right some of her just tiny right just an email from

someone that irritates you or something you know what i mean and it could be anything but what happens is that accumulated stress it changes our breathing patterns and it changes our neurological firing sequence because it puts us into survival state so our body wants to conserve energy so it starts firing smaller muscles instead of the big prime movers so for hip extension your glutes are big strong muscles and they are built to extend the hip well when you're in survival mode your body might use your hamstring hamstring so big but it ain't as big as glutes or body might use your hamstring hamstring so big, but it ain't as big as glutes or it might use your lower back. And all of a sudden you show way weaker, but your body's just trying to survive. That's it. It's just trying to survive. And so some people, depending

on the patterns and kind of how they handle the stress in their life will be naturally much better at compensating. It'll be much higher threshold on force when I test them. Some people who are really stressed out, man, their patterns are so shifted. I mean, these are people that, you know, these are people who get injured a lot. You know, Mark asked a question a little bit earlier when you were doing the drill on, I don't know if it was on, yeah, on me. If like, how long will it last? Cause I think you get that question a lot. I'm curious if an individual tends to be more parasympathetic during life than sympathetic,

right? When they do these drills, will they generally like feel the effects longer? Why aren't you flexing your biceps right now? Right. I mean, better questions. Why not?

Oh, nevermind. Well, they feel the effects longer than someone who's like all always anxious etc and also i don't even think we've um defined parasympathetic and sympathetic so can you define that so people can also understand exactly what we're talking about here yeah so this you know and that's why you know when people ask me what rpr is it's it's a system of daily self-care done right it's just that's all you got to know whatever you're trying

to do you hurt it's going to help you brush your teeth floss exactly it's take a shower it's brushing your teeth for your nervous system you do it every day hopefully more than once right depending on your activity and so uh basically though when we talk about autonomic nervous system that's everyone knows fight or flight rest and recover because we everyone i think learned that in middle school and all that's talking about is parasympathetic, sympathetic. And that makes up your autonomic nervous system. And so you always, it's a scale. You're never all parasympathetic, all sympathetic.

It's just there's one that's more dominant than the other. And so for babies like we talked about, they're just super high parasympathetic. They have no stress. They breathe wonderfully and do this. And so this is a thing where once you get that stress you get that sympathetic dominance it shifts so you're talking about someone who's more stressed out and those things they're going to be more sympathetic dominant than someone who's super relaxed going through life however we have these events in our lives and so people ask would it last longer would it do this and that's a wonderful question when i

first learned rpr man we were testing every athlete We do the wake-up drills and then we, it was summertime. So we had 90 minute workout sessions. So we were testing them every 15 minutes. Does it change? When does it change? And, and so that's where my mind went because I learned a neurological paradigm. And so for me, it's just like our, our light bulb analogy. You know, you buy a light bulb that says it's going to burn for 1500 hours. You plug it into light it into light you know fixture and then you flip the light switch off it goes off does that mean the light bulb doesn't work no we've changed the electricity so i never now when someone talks about how long it'll last what i go to is it's a great question it's just in the mechanical paradigm it's the this is a neurological paradigm and so the question isn't how long does it last?

Does it last longer? The question is, do we know where it is and do we know how to get it where we want it to be? Just like the light switch. Do we know the lights are on? Do we know where the light switch is? That's it. And so it's a different question because it's a different way of understanding.

And so what flips that light switch? So the analogy I give is if you had 50 little kid relatives over for Thanksgiving, right? Oh, no. Just crazy, right? The house is this mad house, right? The kids are running everywhere. They're all over. And they're flipping light switches on and off and doing this.

Then the question is like, how long will the lights stay on? Well, who knows? It depends how we can settle the kids down. Your breathing is settling the kids down. how we can settle the kids down. Your breathing is settling the kids down. So our PR is breathing and the wake up drills because the breathing allows you to calm and drive a bigger parasympathetic response. And so it'll last quote unquote longer if we're breathing in a

parasympathetic way. However, this is the one thing with breathing. Everyone, everyone I think right now who listens to this podcast is probably like, yes, I've heard how important breathing is. I think in the world, there's just so much. And if they're not aware, just hold your breath for five minutes and see if you think it's

important. And it's just, it's so important. Everyone in the world, obviously, if you're alive, you're breathing. However, you're not breathing properly. And, and the thing is, is I look at three levels. There's people that are telling people breathing is important and that's good. It builds awareness. Then there's people who are telling people how to breathe and they're spending all this time on it. And that's great. And it's great information.

The thing is, is you have all this stress and that stress is what's making you breathe improperly. So telling you how to breathe isn't going to work because you're not doing anything with the stress. You're not changing the physiology. And the example I gave you guys earlier is if, you know, Mark and I take you and we take you to the spot and we do two days on your squat and we dial it perfect. I mean, it is money, right? That's like spending two days teaching how to breathe. Then we put 10 more pounds on the bar than you can lift and all your form just goes to crap. That's like releasing you back into the real world where all the stress

is. So if we take you out of the stress for two days and just talk and talk and talk, yeah, it'll probably get a lot better. But once we release you into the real world, put 10 more pounds on the bar than you can handle that stress. Now all of a sudden it goes back to crap. So there's two options. Everyone's talking about taking the stress out of your life. And obviously that that's a great strategy as well. So in this analogy, that'd just be taking the 10 pounds off. Well, the thing is, I've got three kids. I've got two businesses.

I travel all the time, right? All these things going on. I'm not going to remove them. Modern day, modern technology, a drive to be better, a drive to make more money, a drive to constantly increase everything. That's most likely not going anywhere. It's there. So then you guys have created a system that's allowing you to manage it a little bit better

each and every time you go into a training session it might be a maybe a little bit similar and correct me if i'm wrong to you know take in just a second to do a little bit of mobility work before a training session just so that when you're hitting the bottom of your squat you're not you're not going through an end range of motion that you know you're you're going you're trying to break parallel but you're not going through an end range of motion that is your limit range you just have set yourself up so you'll move better for the whole day so someone might say well I don't really stretch because it doesn't really do much for me. But then that same person may blow out their back two years later. And that doesn't mean that stretching fixes you from blowing out your back, but it could help with you managing to be in

better positions all the time for your training. If you carry that out into your life and you're prepared for each day and you lay out your clothes i'm now in a better position to start my day because i started it yesterday you know those those type of things so sounds to me like rpr is like just a just a great way to manage and deflect all the stresses that are coming at us constantly yeah i mean that's why i say it really just helps you build resilience to the stress in your life and whether that's physical stress of lifting, whether that's being a better dad, being a better boss, a better coworker,

a better person on a plane or in an airport, right? Whatever it is. Right. And that's what we talked about, right? So when someone looks at you weird, cause you're violently rubbing your chest,

you say, I'm trying to be a better person. Exactly. Well, it's, it's funny, right? Is,

is all this, people are really starting to become aware of all these micro doses of stress and in the strategy that everyone has in this mechanical model it's like take the 10 pounds off the bar well i can't right because i got a guy i'm actually gonna be adding more i want to add more weight right the thing is is the other option would be making stronger and that's what rpr does is it gives you that resilience to the stress right just like making you stronger gives you resilience to holding technique with big weights. And so changing this neurological sequence, the crazy part, I mean, we were talking about this a little bit before is, uh, you know, I was such a sympathetic dominant

person my entire life. And so you want to talk about like, what is the nervous system? What is that balance? Well, for me, uh, so, so I talked about babies having kind of a perfect breathing pattern and stuff i would be the exception and the reason i was the exception was uh i was a c-section and when they actually cut me out the doctor stabbed me in the middle of the forehead what yeah so i had eight stitches right in the middle of my head when i was born so literally it's been this insane thing where this process is going through yeah he's just never seen an ugly baby like that he didn't have i didn't know how to react yes they're like just you know i don't know he's like let's just fucking no sir i like i've

asked my brother like what what how the hell did that happen like i mean i've been around 41 years now i've never heard of this happening ever to anybody yeah and so i've asked doctor friends like you know eric serrano right yeah absolutely so serrano started in obd like he's delivered a ton of band i was like how could this happen he's like yeah that's not a thing right like he's like so literally me coming into the world i got stabbed in the head and what i've realized through a lot of this work is it literally shut down every bit of feeling i had so it was just straight anger sympathetic survival because what's more survival than getting stabbed in the head right when you come out of the womb. And so when I was a kid, two, three years old,

my doc, uh, my parents took me a bunch of different doctors because I would get so angry. I would ram myself into walls. I would throw myself off of couches. I remember my grandma telling a story where I threw myself off the couch, face first in the coffee table, split my eye wide open, had to get a ton of stitches, didn't cry. Right. And so literally just feeling was shut down for,

I remember I was talking the other night of Cedar points, a big amusement park in, in Sandusky. It's a couple hours from here. So I went there as a, Tim Harold's from there, right? Yeah.

Big Tim, big Tim, big Tim. He stuffed me in the bathroom at west side and he just stood next to the door and well he's like 450 pounds at that time so you can't get out yeah six six eight four fifty he's just like leaning on the bathroom door and i'm just in there and just smells like just death in there it was not a good place to be no it was not a good place to be sandusky go back to it no so so the the amusement park they had the biggest

tallest roller coaster so i you get three hours to ride this thing i rode it and i was just yeah that that wasn't cool so then i get in line another three hours and i'm like i'm gonna enjoy this ride so what i do is i basically take and when when they do and i kind of stand up like this and i put my hands here so the bar won't come down because i'm like well if i can fall out that's gonna make it fun and so literally go to the first hill and i just start flying out and i grabbed the bar and i was like yeah now we're having fun right like i mean and i have a million sorry like in high school i was literally like a grand marquee four-door so the roof's probably as long as this table right so i'm surfing on top of the grand marquee we're doing 60 down a dirt road and we

hit two deer right like i Like, I have a million. But for me, riding in the car, like, that, that was bored. Right? So I'm like, I'm going to spice this up.

So for me, right, riding, I'm going to get on the hood. It's going to be great. Well, I did get on the hood, and that wasn't fun enough, so then I stood on the roof. And so it's,

and that's just how I lived my entire life. And so for me, it was just such survival all the time, that even to feel something, I had to go to super, right? I go to Westside, let's put me, it was just such survival all the time that even to feel something, I had to go to super, right. I go to Westside, let's put a thousand pounds on her back, right. Like put 800 pounds over my face. Right. It had to be extreme, extreme, extreme. And so when I got into, you know, I learned be activated and then we, we co-founded RPR and I'm now, cause the way I talk about it is RPR is it's like brushing your teeth. You do it every day to take

care of your nervous system. Uh, be activated is like going to the dentistRs. It's like brushing your teeth. You do it every day to take care of your nervous system. Deactivated is like going to the dentist, right? It's stuff you can't do yourself. You kind of go to just see if you've been doing everything right and then to get some stuff done that you can't do yourself. And so for me, it's been going through deactivated, doing RPR every day to keep myself in a great place. And I just got into this because I wanted my body not to hurt. I've had 12 surgeries, like, you know, 2004, I was doing 1100 pounds squat, her

needle five S one. That's, that's what took me out of, you know, professional. I had the fourth highest total in the world all time. I was, uh, at that time, you know, I had the biggest total at West side. I had the biggest bench, like West side versus the world, that movie, there's that old clip of me writing my, uh, record for a 775 bench on the board when they talk about putting your name on the record board. I mean, I was on top of the world, right? I was going to be going into that meet. I was going to be the first non-super heavyweight.

Gary Frank had totaled 26. I was going to be the second guy to total over 2,600. And this is, you know, 2004. 275 weight class? 275, yeah. And so at that time, I mean, I was on top of the world. And so basically a guy came to the gym. I was only supposed to squat 900.

And I just, he basically, well, you know this. He tried to jump in and squat with the morning crew. Yeah. That's a no-no. Yeah. Right? That's a no-no. And the reason I got to, this goes to the point, the reason I was training the morning crew was I,

when I first moved to Columbus, I lived on a guy's couch in the night crew. And we were training and something, who knows what happened, and I called him outside of the gym to fight. So I'm standing outside the gym,

shirt off, just screaming, calling him out, and he refused to come out and fight me. And so I basically was just like, you know, cussing,

and I was like, I won't train with someone who won't fight. And I literally go, and I literally went to the morning crew because he wouldn't fight me. so i was like i was like get out here you kick my ass we go back to training i kick your ass we go back to training but if you don't fight me i'm done and so and so he wouldn't fight me and so i went it sounds very rational to me yeah i mean

but that in my mind right that made sense like i went to the morning crew i was like yeah he wouldn't fight me so we're gonna train here right like and so but then you have guys like chuck vogelpool guarantee i call chuck outside the gym we're fighting right like chucking back down from a fight and so but that's that's how i live my life and so this kid tried to to squat with us and i was only supposed to go 900 and i just kept tying weight on because i said you're gonna have to do everything i do and so my goal that day was to put, he had to leave in an ambulance. And instead, I herniated L5S1. And then I'm

done with competitive powerlifting for 10 years. And it was awful, man. I went from being one of the strongest guys in the world ever. I woke up the next day and I couldn't put my underwear on myself. Right? So I'm talking, you know, and this is, people ask me, you know, with RPR and the stuff we teach

it's uh you know why don't you guys just do this and don't teach other people and just why why give this information you know why why teach other people this stuff and for me I think what it really comes down to is that after I heard any of that disc it was six years of just it was hard to shower getting out of bed I mean think about it right up to that point we were talking all the time yeah we were talking all the time that's six years you didn't hear one thing from me right I mean I'm like literally might as well have been in prison because I didn't do anything for that six years and so for me I started the spot athletics in 2010 and that pulled me out. It gave me purpose again.

It gave me purpose. And, you know, finding this stuff, I didn't get into be activated in RPR and all this because I thought it was going to do anything mentally or stress. I didn't understand resiliency distress. I didn't even understand. I had an issue punching people in the face all the time. Right. I thought that was just a thing. Like, I don't know.

I just do it more than others. Right. And so for me, it was than others right uh and so for me it was crazy because i got into it for all these physical things reduce injuries feel better performance and it does all those things but for me that's one hour of my day for the other 23 i have to be a professional human being and it's it's made me a better dad it's made me a better boss i mean my business has exponentially grown because the way i can communicate with people and talk to people.

And I just couldn't do that before. Before, either you were going to give me what I want or I was going to punch you in the face. Right? Like, there was two options. So I avoided conversations because I didn't want to go to jail again. How much did you weigh when we met in 2001, do you think? That was about the start. Like 230 or something?

Or 240? I was probably the start. 230 or something? 240? I was probably 240. Oh, because I got done with football. I started running a lot. Yeah. So I was probably 225 or so when we met. Yeah, I was probably about the same weight, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think you might even be 205 or something. Yeah, you were about 205 at that time because you were doing wrestling and you were really doing all that. And then for me, I mean, at Westside. Yeah, it's weird that we met at this seminar and then we ended up both going to Westside and training there. And, like, you know, he was just crushing it while he was there. I wasn't hitting big weights until I started figuring out my own shit later on. But, yeah, it's an interesting kind of turn of events you know i i show up to west side years later and you're 280 or whatever and i'm 240 or whatever it was yeah i mean am i i mean you know right now i'm about 260 i've been doing

you know jiu-jitsu and stuff again and my goal is really just keep coming down there's no but you know my biggest at west i mean i was 310 pounds. I mean, I was 15% body fat, 310 pounds. Like, I was a very large individual. How long did you train at Westside for? So I was there 2000. So we did that thing in 2001. I moved there in 2002. And so from 2002 to 2004, that was my competitive.

And so it was short, right? Like, this is burning star, man. Like, two years, set the world on fire, and then hurt myself. And that's really what being sympathetic is short, right? Like, this is a burning star, man. Like, two years, set the world on fire, and then hurt myself. And that's really what being sympathetic's about, right? That's survival. I talk to a lot of NFL guys. Like, they say, right, there's two types of guys in the NFL. There's guys that make it a day, and there's guys that make it 10 years.

And the vets know in the first week which guy you're going to be. And it's all based on are you just highs, highs, lows, all over the place, or are you just nice and – are you parasympathetic or are you synthetic? Guys that are in survival mode aren't going to make it. And that's – in life, that's whether it's NFL, that's whether it's business, that's – I mean, that's just the way it is. So what you're talking about with RPR, it made you way more calm.

Yeah. What I saw you do with steven bell earlier for someone like me believe it or not i know i've been speaking a lot on this podcast right now but i'm actually an introvert um so for what you did for him because he uh for obviously people listening he was sitting in the corner and he just like i just wanted to be out of the way but you broke it down and explained like no no, like you're comfortable over there, despite what you think in your head. Uh, you said psychologically you sat over there because you're more comfortable being away from people. When I saw that, I instantly started thinking about introverts because if you can kind of get rid of that block of not being like worried about

being close to people that would do so much for somebody like me. Well, the thing is, and so I'll say this phrase and I said it to you guys and trust me, it took me all of, you know, three years to really wrap my head around this. Uh, your physiology drives all your behavior and whether you like someone where you sit, what you do, how you talk to people, it's driven by physiology being so your your body essentially so so think of physiology as your body your nervous system and so essentially you know we're survival creatures the one thing we're hardwired to do is to survive so this might uh kind of lead into a little a little bit of uh when someone says someone's fat and lazy they're not necessarily right because they're driven by their physique they're like they're

stuck on their couch because they're stuck on the couch and they they don't they don't they're not going to be able to all of a sudden be hit with a spell of motivation that gets them out running well so that's interesting there's there's a you know everyone's heard of fight or flight there's actually another mode and pardon me it's uh there's a, you know, everyone's heard of fight or flight. There's actually another mode and pardon me. It's a, it's a very lesser known, but it's freeze. So this comes from something called polyvagal theory. And so it's in reptiles. They have it and we still have it as a character.

And I truly believe that a lot of depression. So, so in 2004, man, I was on top of the world. You know what I mean? Can you say what that's called again? Polyvagal theory. Polyvagal theory. And so essentially it's just freeze right so the simple is and this is one of my things i hate using big words like to me i just i love making things simple so you think about

a lizard it sees a hawk overhead it basically defecates itself and drops its heart rate almost like it's dead that's freeze and we still have that and so that's what i believe happened to me in 2004 was i was so stressed by being hurt i was in so much pain i had so many issues i had absolutely no stability physically physiologically and so i went into freeze mode and then people call it depression but it's really a physiological state so that person's sitting on the couch it's not that they want to be there, that they want to be fat. And that's what people use as psychology. Oh,

you just gotta be more, but literally their physiology won't allow them. And for me, it wasn't that, uh, I'm not a different person. Like I'm a very caring person. I really do.

I love people. I mean, I'm probably actually very sensitive. Like a lot of times people that want to punch someone in the face, you're having some issues explaining your emotions and stuff, and you probably would internalize stuff by overreacting to something because you're sensitive. It would set you off.

You'd be like, why did this person piss me off? Yeah, I look at it... So people use the sensitive, and I think that's a wonderful psychological way to rationalize it. I look at it. So, so people use a sensitive and that I think that's a wonderful psychological way to rationalize it. I look at it much different now. I don't look at it as sensitive. What I look at is it's about physiological safety.

And so if I don't have safety within myself, then I have to actually destroy your safety so that I feel safe. And so now when people approach me or get mad or want to anger me, I'm like, that's cool because I actually have safety within myself. Whereas before I would tear them down, make them cry, punch them in the face, all these things. And so the crazy part about it is, you know, now my philosophy is how people treat others is just a reflection of their physiology, not a reflection of your behaviors. And so this is the thing. And now, because I feel this way, when someone treats me a certain way, instead of getting pissed off, I'm like, I think, holy cow, man, this person's really hurting. Because when I was punching people in the face, the bottom line is hurt people,

hurt people. And that was the thing. Like I literally, like I look at it as this trifecta. So I'm born stabbed in the head. Right. So that now all of a sudden that shuts down all my feelings. I grow up, uh, you know, when I was young,

you know, we talked to my mom was a camera. So we moved around. Right. So, I mean, I moved 11 times from second grade to ninth grade, sixth,

seventh, eighth, ninth grade, different schools. Then on top of that, when I was a little kid, uh, some stuff that I've recently dealt with, there was, you know, a lot of moving, there's a lot of moving parts. There was some sexual abuse stuff that happened. Right. And so I buried that,

right. I don't want it. So you have all these things and all this turmoil. And so for me, I had absolutely no safety in life. So how did I display that? How did I gain my safety? absolutely no safety in life so how did i display that how did i gain my safety i got big and strong and i beat everyone up and so when i walked into a room everyone was scared of me because they didn't know right like even my good friends were like on a bad day might punch me right like it just is that's what it was like they talked about you came into west side and everyone's like that dude's just crazy and it was because i had absolutely no safety. So I had to dominate everything around me. And it was my physio. It wasn't because I hated people. It wasn't because I was this mean a-hole, even though that's what it displayed as. It was literally because my physiology was driving me to gain some kind of stability.

And so you talk about being an introvert. I know because you've mentioned it. That's probably something you've worked on a lot. And I'm sure it's gotten better because you drew awareness to it until you change your physiology. It truly won't shift. And the cool part is, is changing your physiology, that introvertedness. It changes automatically. It changes subconsciously without actually working on it. And because that's what it that's what happens with physiology so you say i was sensitive it wasn't that i was i think that's a great so a lot of psychologists counselors that's where they would go because they look at that to me when you look at the physiology direction i understand now it's because i had no stability within myself so

i had to dominate out and gain that by dominating everyone else. And so that's, it's just a different lens of, of understanding this stuff. And, you know, it's, it's crazy because, you know, we have in sleep is such an issue for so many people. So we have CEOs, they come in. I bet when you were that angry, you probably weren't sleeping well. Yeah. Just, yeah. Not just looking back.

You're like, man man even if i just got because again if you if you have your rest you'll physically feel better i mean feeling better is where it's at right yeah and so we it's funny you know we have ceos that wear blue you know bands or different tracking you know auras all the things you know apple you have an aura ring he's got an apple watch him so you go through rpr before you go to bed every single time hrv gets better resting heart rate gets better you actually start to get deep sleep all these things start to shift your sleep patterns and so it's not because you're thinking i want better sleep right everyone wants great sleep but we have all these sympathetics these survival these

micro doses of stress that are hitting us all day long. And then we, if we can't let that go, right. If we don't have good strategies, just inherently, which I definitely didn't. And then all of a sudden that stays with us. And now we're taking Ambien to go to sleep and we're doing the scenes. So we have a lot of CEOs that we work with. They'll walk in heart rate will be, you know, 73, 74, go through our PR, you know, four minutes, boom, 52 heart rate. Now we start training, right. They do it before they go to bed, boom, stop taking Ambien. You just have all these crazy things. And so to your point, 100%. Your physiology is driving that introvertedness,

and it's because of certain patterns. And so the psychology of working on it is important. It's good. It builds awareness. But the physiology is context, and awareness without context becomes guessing. I just see it's so beneficial for this. Even this, I don't, I don't know if anybody will be able to make this connection, but like as a photographer, getting pictures up close with people is like real stressful because it's like, okay, here's JL. Okay.

I'm going to take a picture, but I know he, he knocks people out. Like, is he going to turn on me? But if, you know, I did RPR and also I'm now, I don't feel so uncomfortable being close to somebody that will benefit, you know, photographers everywhere just by doing that one simple thing. No. And that's, it's so crazy.

I mean, even the guy, the guy, there's a guy, Matt Bernowski. So he's worked with me at the spot since day one. He's been, I mean,

it'd be nine years this fall. I mean, and how he's made it that long with the way I used to be. I don't even know. Like we were doing board presses one day and he was just, wasn't paying attention to the board as well. He's been, I mean, it'll be nine years this fall. I mean, and how he's made it that long with the way I used to be. I don't even know. Like we were doing board presses one day and he was just, wasn't paying attention to the board as well. I got up, I front kicked him in the chest.

Right. And I was just like, if you don't care about me, I don't care about you. And like, and that, that's just how I was, right?

Like how he made it through, like the dude's the same. And, uh, it's just, and it's so funny. Like, there is a certain way to hold the board.

So in your defense, And it's just, and it's so funny. There is a certain way to hold the board, though. In your defense. Only a power lifter, right? They were like, you know, I kind of get it, right? And so that's, but just now, I mean, I went to an NFL team. There was a kid who interned with us and has made his way up, and he's a strength coach with an NFL team. And I was doing some stuff, and made his way up and he's, he's a strength coach with NFL team. And, uh, I was doing some stuff and we had, we had dinner and he's like, dude, you are a different

human being. Right. He was like, man, they're so lucky. Cause I got yelled at a lot. Right. Like, and that's how it was. And the thing was, I think the people who got to know me, uh, they got through all that and they learned, Hey, is a really good dude however like you had to put up with with quite a bit of stuff to get through those right because because i didn't have safety so it took me a long time to trust and to do these things whereas now it's like okay like this is who i am and you know so for me that like i said the injury prevention i said we have you know college teams nfl teams high school teams that that literally, my son's wrestling team. He's a middle school wrestling team.

There's 80 kids on the team. Huge middle school wrestling team. So the head coach is a personal trainer. Did our level one online for RPR. Implements it with the team. What was cool is I was not involved in the process, right? So first wrestling season in 13 years, I didn't have one concussion, right? And so that's amazing because it's my son and his friends what's even cooler is at the high school the basketball team

does it the football team all these people and they don't even know that i co-founded it right and my son's in the school right and finally the dude basically made he was like hey uh you guys are implementing all this stuff to do to co-found it like his son goes to our school so let's just talk to him but uh it's amazing because i mean like i said you know we have you know strength coach been a strength coach for football for four years four-time nfl strength coach year implements rpr first season in 40 years not one soft tissue injury and those things are amazing right because that saves millions of dollars that i mean yeah it's people's livelihood i mean setting big every powerlifter i've ever shown they set prs right those things are amazing but that's this much of your life right that other 23 hours that's to me that that's where i like it's changed rprs changed me the

most than those in that time are you aware of any studies that show you know i know that you mentioned the better resting heart rate and things like that hrv improvements are you aware of any testing that's been done in terms of like uh i don't know like say blood glucose levels or like anything from uh because it must be doing something to your hormones and stuff i wonder yeah i mean i wonder if you'd be more resilient to like unhealthy food or something like i don't know well so it's interesting we've it's some uh we're getting a decent amount of people who are now starting to do some research um you know one of the interesting things is that you can't measure a neurological firing sequence as it's happening there's just not we i mean i'm sure in 10 years someone way

smarter than me will come up with something what we can measure is outcomes so so that thing that i had to show up my ass earlier that was never mind i'm glad you believe that was RPR. Yeah. And so, uh, I, you're the one who told me we had to do it. I thought that was something you knew. We all did it, right?

We all still left it in. Right. And so, you know, it's, I mean, the thing with it, right.

Is, is that these, the people that are doing research like FMS, uh, a lot of people like that, right. So, so, so kid is master's thesis, right. It's statistically research, like FMS, a lot of people like that, right? So a kid did his master's thesis, right?

Statistically significant change in FMS score instantly, right? What's FMS? Functional Movement Screen. Got it. So it's a way that some people really assess how people move. And so, you know, we have clients at Spot Athletics who have come off blood pressure medication, right? I mean, so there's a lot of anecdotal stuff and there's a lot of results based, right? I mean, this team implements it.

They drop, you know, soft tissue injury by 50%. This team implemented it. They drop concussions by 75%. We had a pro hockey team implement it. They dropped their man games loss from 360 to 180, right? 50% drop in man games loss. And so we have all this amazing uh and yeah it makes me wonder like what's possible maybe you can help someone's digestion oh dude no it changes so for

me so that it's funny so okay no one likes to talk about poop but we all do it oh we talk about poop all the time yeah so here's the thing rpr if there's one area that literally I never expect, is pooping. I had a big shit right after he touched me, by the way. I don't know if you guys remember I went to the bathroom, but let's keep going. But here's what it does. So when you have these firing patterns that aren't the proper patterns, it locks everything up. You go into implosion, and then everything can't move as well. So when I used to sit down and go, it was a 1,000-pound squat, right?

It was just, ah! That was a real power behind that right yeah it's really bared down on that but and that was it like i'd be like oh that's not too much blood and oh but that was like every day for me right and so to me it was just this is how life is well then all of a sudden i started doing this and i'm just like wait it's just it just happens yeah and because with doing the breathing wake-up drills you set those patterns in the right sequence and then again when we talk people talk parasympathetic synthetic don't even forget about those terms we don't even use them with our athletes we talk about two states performance and survival so if you want to go to the bathroom and poop nice easy

flow out that's performance. Survival is there's a bunch of blood. Right? And so no matter what you want to do, digestion, poop, sleep, lifting heavy ass weights, whatever you want to do and perform at your best, RPR will help you do it much better. And that's the thing is the cool part is it doesn't change, right? You don't change what you eat. You don't change how you train. You still use hip circle, right? We still use all that stuff. You still use everything, right? We still use your slingshot. You do all that stuff that you already know because this is something you do before all the stuff i love my training method i love this you literally don't change anything it's literally whatever you do now

put in rpr before it this gets better i mean and that's it's that's what's so cool about it what's uh like the weirdest thing that you've seen you know with rpr because like we were rubbing our cheeks and shit like that and like uh you know some of it gets to be a little uh a little strange you know for people that have never seen some of it before what's kind of the strangest or most remarkable thing that you've seen where you're like okay even though i've been doing it for years that still doesn't make any sense i'll be honest man even when we just did the rotation test and you got you know 70 and 100 that still blows my mind i mean even just the stuff that like intellectually i know most likely there's gonna to be this kind of result.

Because I've been doing it for so long. It just happens, right? And the cool part is, it's not me. I'm not the Google magic. This is tens of thousands of people. It's already in your body. You just have to wake it up. Exactly, right?

It's just allowing your body. So this is what I say. RPR doesn't fix anything. It allows your body to optimally function. That's it. You have everything, right? It's like these lights. If these were 5-watt light bulbs, we'd turn the electricity on and be super dim in here.

However, because they're higher wattage, it's brighter. So you have to do all your training to get more wattage. This just allows the electricity to run the right way so you can optimize and show what you have kind of unlocking another level exactly and so whether it's flexibility whether it's strength whether it's conditioning when you do rpr it instantly gets better and because all of those things flexibility strength uh and conditioning or endurance are all dictated by your nervous system that's what controls all three of those things. And so what's crazy to me, and this was the light bulb was, I learned about the neuromuscular system in school.

He got everything I did before I learned this. We skipped the neuro part and went right to the muscular. So how is it that the first part of the word is neuro, but everything we're doing in our training skips it? It's crazy, right? Like when I was like, I couldn't believe it believe it seems like there's still not that much known i mean there's a lot known just because of all the experimentation but no it's the central nervous system is like oh it's it's a fucking guessing game yeah it's it's a baby field that's what's

so crazy about our prs it's like this goguile tendon or whatever the you know like there's weird things you can tap into that people still don't know how to even really truly access. Well, that's the cool thing about RPR is it's such a simple system. And you do it all yourself and anybody can follow it. That's what's so amazing about this is that there's this great... So you talk about the most amazing thing I saw. So I can't explain why this happens. I have some ideas.

I have some thoughts. Do I have a study that definitively proves it 100 no so i had a guy on my staff uh cow was in we were doing a clinic and uh we're doing some vision stuff and so this gets to our level two stuff but he had a neurological issue and we literally with a red a red shakeraker. We basically were like, boom. And he's like, I can't see that. So he had a complete blind spot in his entire world. He literally, I'm talking,

it's red, right? I mean, you, and he literally could not see it. So he could see the shaker, couldn't see the shaker. It was literally that whole,

his whole body shut off that part. And so he, we went through a sequence. And that's something that like he lived his life with. Yeah. So, so everything he did, right.

So it's funny because he played baseball and he was like, Oh my God. He was like, every time I would, I missed like when he would turn this way, he would screw up. Like, so he ended up learning how to change his body.

So he never had to turn this way. He would always, right. So you learn how to move around these things. You're not, you don't know they're there, but you just, that's why i say physiology drives behavior and so he went through and reset it and literally dude all of a sudden he could see it his eyes changed his whole body

language changed because it was shut down it was literally just shutting his whole body down he dude he changed as a person and so this is the crazy. I've seen this happen. And you talk about what's the craziest. Several times. And so there's kind of two things, right? There's RPR, all of it you do yourself. We go over vision. Be activated goes even deeper. So the craziest stuff I've seen is going through be activated because we dive into emotion.

And I mean. Yeah, it's a weird stuff where people end up crying and all kinds of stuff happening right i mean tell us more about that yeah so i mean i've i've had that experience i mean i've had huge emotional releases i'm talking just like uncontrollable crying and just just crazy like i didn't talk to my mom for eight years and through this work literally i'm talking i went through some some some crazy just and so whatever's in your brain is in your body. So what you do with B-Octane is you start to get all these things set up and in the right line, and then you start to unlock things out of your body. And so the best way I can describe it for people is, you know, psychedelics are very popular right now, I think.

I don't know, very, but in a lot of people I talk to. Yeah, it's growing in popularity for sure. So basically, the way I try to describe people who've done psychedelics is like, going through Be Activated is like doing a psychedelic without a drug. And so you're on a journey, right? And so it's, and I had this, right? I like a lot of this because I think that there are ways to access stuff. It doesn't always have to be with a drug.

You can activate euphoria just by listening to a certain song. I mean, you could be overwhelmed with emotion driving down the street. A certain song comes on and you start crying and it reminds you of something. You can kind of gain some access to these things but having ways to be able to do it on cue and have a system for it that's that's some real stuff right there i mean that's amazing i mean i've seen just just with that i mean just really crazy you know people do you know what a neurogenic tremor is i do not okay so again i hate using big words but i just don't know another way to do it but i'll give you the simple you ever watch the discovery channel and it just uh gazelle's getting chased not just out that would be a different channel uh but uh so a gazelle

gets chased it gets away from the lion it goes behind a tree and it just shakes uncontrollably that's a neurogenic tremor what it is is it's nature's way of ridding trauma from our bodies so animals do this naturally that's really socially unacceptable to do for us and so what happens is all this trauma gets lodged in our bodies lodged in our bodies lodged in our bodies and we don't have a natural way anymore because of social convention to rid our bodies of it and then you then you're introverted all of a sudden right and and who knows it might be something from when you were a kid right there's yeah and so my stuff a lot of it was like so so you go to kind of the sexual abuse thing like i never even knew that happened until i started going through this process and then it started like because

there's huge chunks by the way there's a lot of people that are like that where they they know they know something happened but they don't know what it is there's a lot of people that are like that where they know something happened, but they don't know what it is. There's a lot of people in that. Well, that is the thing, right? There's just large chunks of my childhood where even now I still don't remember. I mean, we're talking like I remember. I know stuff because I've heard stories, right? So you hear stories from siblings and things.

However, there's just these huge chunks that i didn't even remember and so but going through this process you talk about the creative stuff i've seen it's definitely working with the active assault it's all hands-on it's practitioner based and and so what happens is it's with rpr that's why i say rpr is is just amazing like i said like we're talking you know 50 reductions in soft tissue injuries people not having one soft tissue injury the entire we were talking about crazy crazy changes and it's amazing it's brushing your teeth it's your it's what you do every day to care for yourself because your nervous system right it changes incidents like a light switch so it's what you do to keep it where

you need it be activated man it's going to the dentist right and we start to do a little drilling and uh and that's one of the things with rpr when we first started doing it we were kind of we were doing back they we really didn't have it figured out right because we were just learning so we would do stuff with people and we'd be like this is rpr and then we'd be doing drilling and they'd be like whoa whoa i'm not ready for drilling so now over time you see like now it's just something that's like oh this is it's nothing it's like showering or you know what i mean like you don't you're like i don't know is this gonna do anything and boom you're twice as strong right you're like this is and so i've seen so many crazy things where people literally they they get up off the table and they get rid of

some trauma and it's i'm talking like just shaking on control like i had this dude like i'm talking shaking uncontrollably foaming at the mouth like just insane stuff right and i know what is this from like what's the practice look like it's literally uh so you know it's it's it's literally uh it's going through this neurological philosophy and gaining stability for your body to allow these things to come out basically and it's still like a physical practice exercises no no no no it's all it so be activated is all hands-on so i, so if you and I were going to do a session, I would lay you down and go through an entire sequence of things where I would be working on you. So it's, it's practitioner based. It's not something you can do yourself.

Active release type of type of thing or something along those lines. Yeah. It's, it's, it's different than that. Cause it's all based on your nervous system and a philosophy. So here's the thing, what what i'll say it gets really complicated the real simple of it is you would lay down and i would be rubbing on you in certain sequences in certain areas that's the simple of it right and that may not make sense people and people like jail is crazy that's cool i know what i've seen i know what i felt so you know what i mean right the thing with rpr was the actually it's just not scalable like like i would have to lay you down and we would do work for like two and i wouldn't remember what the hell you did right yeah even if

i tried to show someone else or whatever you can't take time yeah take a long time and so that's what's cool is with rpr it's just we've it's just simplified you can do it all yourself it makes you instantly stronger it makes you less stress i sleep better all these things so it gives you huge changes but but there's more right it's just like brushing your teeth and going to the dentist. There's more. And that's, you know, for me that I've seen so many crazy changes from, you know, people literally, I'll tell you one that's really crazy. And this was, it's a hundred percent all RPR based. So I was at a, at an event in Nashville and there was a person who was

administrating this event and it was a business thing and a very nice lady. She was limping crazy. And I mean lady she was limping crazy and i mean she was in a lot of pain and she said and you know i can relate to people in a lot of pain because i've been in a place where i couldn't get out of bed to go pee and had to pee myself in bed because i couldn't move right like and so uh when you've been there you get a lot more empathy and compassion for people who are hurting and so i see her limp and i'm like what's going on she said oh my god my knee and blah blah blah and i have to have it replaced but i just don't have time and she goes into this whole thing so i said you know what i know the system it's a system of daily self-care things you can do every day that will help reduce some of that pain and

help you feel better and she's like show me so literally we're at this thing we go out in the hall i lay her down i start showing her right and so she's doing the breathing she's doing the wake-up drills i'm showing her how to do everything and we spend you know 30 minutes right and i'm just kind of showing her how to do everything and go through and uh she gets up and starts walking and now while she's doing it she's pouring sweat because her whole nervous system the firing pattern's shifting and so her body is on two since. She just started. And I'm talking mascaras running, right?

Like she's pouring sweat. And I've never seen someone have a reaction. Like I've seen people sweat a little bit because everything changes and it shifts the way their nervous system is working. But this is like, I'm talking mascara running. And so she gets up, she takes four steps and faces.

She's just, Oh my God, that pain's gone. And she literally just starts bawling because she's been in so much pain. And I'm just like, awesome. Just do that every day. Right.

Because it's your nervous system. So you get stressed out. It can shift right back. Right. Like you, those patterns can shift right back, but it doesn't matter because you know how to shift them where you need them. And that's the thing for me.

Like a couple months ago, I have a five-year-old. He just turned five, so he was four. We're going through Target. I've had seven knee surgeries. My knee locks up. My kid, he loves transformers. He's heading to the transformer aisle, right?

He's gone. He's heading to the transformer aisle. I'm stuck because I can't move. So I got my breathing, my wake-up drills, boom, I'm right back walking. Right? Like it's just, and that's the thing to me. Like when I tell people it's changed my life i i can't it's like i don't have the words to really describe how much you talk about being introverted i've seen people go from shy introverted to just

being like hey what's going on just a dude who like could never hug another person now every time i see him he gives me a hug right like just crazy things like that what about like migraines or something like that so it's interesting i've seen uh with rpr i've seen people who have migraines i've seen that get better um i've also there's there's some more deactivated stuff that i've really seen work some some big wonders but it's not stuff you can do yourself i've definitely seen some some good changes from rpr with migraines and a lot of what it is is it's these patterns and it creates implosion in the head. So we talk about basically your body needs to be an explosion and it's putting force out into the world.

And that's basically your head starts to get imploding and it hurts, right? Like it hurts. You know, this gets me really, really curious because we just had Eddie Hall on, right? And Eddie Hall was talking about, you know, pulling 1102 and the lengths he had to go psychologically to get there. He went to a psychiatrist who told him like these things that he could do to be able to activate all these different muscle groups that typically aren't activated. He said something like, typically, you're activating 60, 70%. This will allow you to activate more, right? He went to a really dark

place to do that. He said he was going blind and all these things were happening. And I guarantee that some people, especially high level individuals, they're going to go try and find a psychiatrist to access some dark shit to be able to pull some heavier weight. I'm curious when you were talking about activation here differently, as far as RPR is concerned. And when you were doing those drills on me, like there's no fucking joke. When you were pushing me, I was pushing as hard as I could and I couldn't resist. Let's say high level athletes are able to get access to this. Would it have that same effect without the detrimental, I guess, what happened to Eddie when he was going in and out in terms of consciousness and all of that? Could this have a similar effect in your opinion? What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, to me, I've seen it have the same effect and so the way yeah you would you would rage out under weights too i mean you lifted big weights so yeah what's the comparison there you think so the way i look at it is i look at it the difference and and maybe this makes but so if you you know you talk about going to these crazy crazy crazy dark places and and what happens is we get these huge bumps of adrenaline and we get all these things and and it's good but i look at that as is hate fueled and so you got a choice right it seems to pass so when i i look at west side my time at west side and everything at west side i did it was hate fueled it was i want to destroy everything and i did i destroyed my body? Like I destroyed everything and relationships, right? I don't care. It's your birthday, honey. I got, I got bench day, right? Like, I mean, just destroy everything. And so it was all hate

fueled. And what, what the thing about hate is it can be a great motivator. Like, you know, you own businesses. So like, he can be a great motivator. You do this or you're fired. Well, he is rocket fuel and rocket fuel gets you a great place, but rocket fuel also explodes. And it burns out really quickly. And this is what we're talking about in the NFL. You're one day or you're 10 years. So guys come in on rocket fuel, they make it one day, and they burn out. So the way I look at RPR, it's allowing your body to fuel from a place of love.

And so even the way I look at training, I used to train to destroy my body. Now I train because training is an expression of what my body can do. And it's because I train because I love my body and I want to be able to display all the amazing things I can do versus I want to destroy my body. And that place of feeling from love, the thing about love is it's never ending. And so that's when i look at these things i look at right we can get to the we can get to the same point right but if i get there by exploding and destroying myself or i right it's survival and it's performance and so i can survive right i survived right i had her need i have all this time at west i survived but did i truly perform right

steve gogggins gave me, you know, for people who don't know Steve Goggins, he's a legendary power lifter. And, uh, you know, we were doing an event a couple of years ago,

five years ago, something first guy to squat 1100 pounds. He did it right here at the WPO finals here in Columbus, Ohio. Yeah. I mean, Steve, Steve's Arnold.

Yeah. He's a legend. He's one of the greatest power lifters of all time. And, uh, you know, Steve, I don't know, five years ago or something, he'd be probably one of the greatest powerlifters of all time. And, you know, Steve, I don't know, five years ago or something, he was probably one of the greatest compliments I've ever been given in my life.

And he said, you know, all the numbers that everyone's doing now, he said, I've never seen anyone that was stronger than you. If you would have just stayed healthy, you'd be destroying all these numbers. And I was like, man, coming from that guy, dude, I was like, geez. And the thing about it was I couldn't because everything i did was survival and so if i could have came from that place of performance and then like hey i'm gonna take care of myself i'm gonna do good things i'm gonna display what i can do so a hundred percent you can access it and you can access it in a better more healthy way and you could probably

have a combination you know I think that just because... There's a yin and yang. Yeah. You can't be all... And that's a great point, Mark. I mean, you can't... So the way I look at it... You could still, you know,

put the locker room posts, I kind of call them, you know, the New England Patriots do this every... Well, they didn't win this year, but like they do it almost every year. Like, oh, now they're saying Brady's too old and Belichick, you know, won't be able to figure it out because they're the same players.

And they take these newspaper clippings and put them in the locker room, and they use that to fuel them. You could still have that. I think you could still have a chip on your shoulder. I agree with you, though. You might want to be a little careful with it. And also, it's not a great thing to rely on. What you're teaching and talking about is much more reliable. and the way i look at it like i've done a

lot of work with different football teams and and i was doing some research for a book and and the the thing about this is when when you're in the locker room uh a lot of people in lockers when you think about parts meets and this and that guys who are really successful never focus on another lifter they just focus on themselves i'm going to do what i do because what you lift is what you lift and where it lands is where it lands the guys or gals who focus on someone else they always end up getting hurt going crazy attempts bombing out that's because like what we teach is basically we call it a a one, two, three philosophy, right? So one is yourself. So if you don't have all the strengths and abilities within yourself, then you try to get it from zone two, which is friends and family,

or zone three, which is everybody else in the world. So if you're lifting for the approval of everyone in the world, you're going to get hurt because you can't get everyone's approval, right? And so with this, in the locker room, there's two ways to be. And we've seen people like this in power athletes or sporting teams. But it's like, we hate those guys. We're going to destroy those guys. That's hate field.

Or I love everyone in this room so much that I don't want to lose. And I'm going to do my job to the utmost because I love and respect everyone in this room so much. That right there, that's what wins in athletics. It's what wins in life. It's the long-term play. The short-term play is I hate, I hate, I hate. What about using that strategy in war? Like, I hate the opponent so much, and you go running out,

and you go trying to shoot the enemy, and it's like you're going to die. You're going to die fast. Maybe you'll kill a couple people, but you're going to die quick. Yeah, right. I mean, I've never served, but speaking of friends that have right like in in war you don't you know the people that i've spoke to obviously on a personal experience they talk about like they don't shoot the enemy because they hate the enemy they shoot the enemy because they love the guy next to them so much they don't want anything to happen to them and and that's the thing right

like the guys that go in and i've talked to some some high-level operators about this like the guys who go in who are like i just want to kill this but they're gonna burn out and they're gonna get hurt they're gonna i mean they're just gonna wash out and so it's it's that it's that concept but i do think there's that yin and yang right like so all that stuff that was in me it's still in. The way I look at it now is that that hate, that rage, that anger, it's a part of me. And so for me, I look at it like before, it's what controlled me. It's what controlled all my behaviors, how I acted, how I talked. And now it's inside me, but I have control of it.

And that's a fuck ton more dangerous because someone messes with my daughter, right? Someone messes with my family. Right now, it's not out of control, right? Like, I've been stomping on people's faces, and if someone didn't pull me off of them, like, I would have killed them and literally would not have cared

at certain points in my life. Now, all that stuff, it's still inside me, but now I have control of it instead of it having control of me. And having control of that, that's the yin and yang. That's the power. This reminds me of a Hulk from the Avengers,

the new Avengers movie. Oh, yeah. Where Banner's in control of the Hulk. Here's the deal, right? Oh. No way. Oh, snap. If he can't see this, this is the fucking Hulk on his arm. He has a tattoo of it. So, swear to deal, right? Oh. No way. Oh, snap. If you guys can't see this, this is the fucking Hulk on his arm.

He has a tattoo of it. So, swear to God, right? We do these things inherently naturally. Ever since I was a little kid, I identified with the Incredible Hulk. So, I got that tattoo when I was 18 years old. Because I identified my entire life with the Hulk. And it's so funny as I've gone through this. I didn't know why.

Right? But in college like i have a helmet at my house with it's cracked because i used i i was starting fullback but if we scored quickly i had a deal with the special team coach where i could run down and basically wedge bust and just crush people and i would just spear people and so i cracked my helmet spearing a dude put him like he was out like hospital ambulance, the whole deal. And so I was so like, I was just always that.

So, and I, I just resonated with the whole, and it's funny as I go through this, it's exactly, you know what I mean? It's so funny that you made that reference. That is so funny. Yeah.

And I know that you have that tattoo. So when he said it, I was like, Oh shit. But it also seems like going the positive route can compound better than going negative right yeah i mean a hundred percent right and so when these patterns are working in the right way right so what so what you put out into the world is what you get back i truly truly believe that and so did you used to i didn't even know that was a thing right if someone told you that you'd

be like fuck you you'd probably punch them in the face. Right? Guess what you just got? Hey, JL, did you know that what you put out is what you're going to get back? You shouldn't be mean like that. You just got two less teeth. I don't know who you gave teeth to, but you just lost two. No, and that's really how it would have been.

All this stuff I'm saying, five years ago, if literally, and so it's funny, right? People are going to listen to this podcast because this is at the end, right? But if people are listening to me, me five years ago, if I heard a couple of trailers of some of the stuff we're talking about,

I'd be like, this dude's full of shit. I wouldn't even listen to me, right? Like, that's how crazy this stuff is. I wouldn't even listen. And so it's so funny to me because I actually actually in my organization there's there's some physiological things you know how people cut on each other rip on each other it's this thing that was you know i grew up it was a i'm good at it right because

i grew up in an environment where sarcasm was the preferred method of communication i've gotten to a point now where i believe sarcasm is just thinly veiled negativity and so ripping on people is actually you trying to gain physiological stability and support no and that's it it's because you don't have safety within yourself so think about an organization and just think about this right i'm not saying people have to change or do whatever i i have really worked to avoid doing that i still do i fall back about old patterns right i still do i've really worked to not do that because if I see someone, right? So think about, um, you're in a, you're in a group of friends and everyone's always cutting each other and everyone's laughing. It's funny cause it's

good nature. We all love each other. It's great. But really what it is is it's just, everyone's trying to cut down each other's physiological safety so that they can feel safe. And so what if in that organization or in that group of friends all of a sudden you walk in and instead of saying why are you flexing your biceps it's like man you know what you're looking pretty jacked dude man you've been training hard yeah he is flexing his biceps but how different is that feeling for me now it's funny right like it is funny no doubt but how different is that space that gets created from just now all of a sudden you're like,

dude, you know, like Mark, man, you're looking really lean and jacked. Right. Versus like I, my old route would be like,

Oh God, being so queer, you're not powerlifting. You can't squat it. Right. Like I would just be cutting. I would be cutting on sandwich dude. Yeah.

Like, God, I mean, geez, you want another piece of lettuce next week? Right. Like, you know, squat it right like i would just be cutting i'd be cutting a sandwich dude yeah the god i mean geez you want another piece of lettuce next week right like you know so it's like uh and so that's how i lived right i would cut people down non-stop and so i just want to live in a place i'll walk through airports now and so i'm the most relaxed traveling people are so stressed out i walk through the airport and it's like if i see a girl with nice nails or like excuse me i was like those are really nice nails where'd you get those done those are great they're like huh what's this guy yeah and so like if i see someone with like a nice shirt or something like i'll be like hey that's a great shirt right just why not because i'm just gonna give like i'm just gonna give them a nice dose of like they put time right like they

wear like whatever you put time into working out right so it's like i don't want to cut on that because that that's part of that person's identity. It's something they care about. It's something they do. And so, because here's what I know now. And this is what you put out comes back. So if I'm just putting out just good stuff to people, then hopefully some good stuff. Because quite honestly, I got a lot of years of putting out bad stuff to make up for.

Like, there's a balance in the universe that's definitely tipped not in a good way for a lot of people's interactions with me. And I've had to apologize to a lot of people. Like, people that just, you know, maybe they were young in the field. And, like, I was at the top of the game. And I was a complete a-hole, right? And I've just been like, you know what, man? I was a dick, dude. And I'm sorry.

Like, that was totally uncalled for. There was no reason for that. And, you know, some people are like, no, man, I respect that. That's cool. And other people are like, I don't want to talk to you and it's like okay i've said my piece and what you do if that's on you and i can only do what i do so 100 man what you put out it's what you get back and if you're putting out great things i feel like that's what comes back to you and you know there's just a lot of environments where that that constant cutting and that hate and this this and some of those environments like west side barbobeau, people look at them and they look up and they think that's the best way to be.

But you know what they don't see? They don't see the closed doors. They don't see me going somewhere with Ludi and having someone inject a needle this long into my spine and I still don't know what they put in my spine. They don't see that stuff. They just see the Westside versus the world. Right. Right. They see jail writing his name on the board and like, Oh, I would like to be like that. No, no, man, there's a much better way to get to even better level of performance. And so that's why I think is, is we model these things because some of these top performers, right. We take exceptions or we take things we

don't fully understand or haven't gotten really to see what it really is and then people model that and they think that's what it looks like and for me i just you know i have a certain lens that i look at things now obviously i've talked a lot about it today and and it's it's vastly like i used to be the guy in the locker room that was just like oh right like banging my head into the locker and so i mean that was just like, Oh, Raleigh banging my head into the locker. And so, I mean, that was me, you know, would you say that like, maybe when you lift now that you, you're going to rely on your new knowledge, right. But you also still might rely on a chip on your shoulder, um, kind of mentality, but it's just for yourself. It's not like, it's not like you're grumpy, like fuck everybody else. Like I grew up this certain way, you know, and, and it's not like it's not like you're grumpy like fuck everybody else like i grew up this

certain way you know and and it's not you being angry it's just you wanting to prove more to yourself so it's coming maybe more from like a positive way or are you just like super like just calm and relaxed and there's like no hype or or no signs of anger or aggression at all when you lift no so i would say like and this is one of the reasons i got back into jiu-jitsu because i wanted to do something that you know i wrestled in high school so i mean i was pretty good i took second in the state i mean i was a solid wrestler and i like jiu-jitsu i love combat in michigan yeah yep that's really good wrestling right there and so uh the the thing about it was I got back into it because I wanted to do something that I didn't have to be the best in the world at,

that I just enjoyed, that was great movement. And it's like chess. I mean, it's just wonderful. It's thinking. It's moving. It's doing all these things that I enjoy. And I'm going to compete. However, it's a challenge for me personally.

So I don't know if you ever do different personality assessment things. No, I haven't. Like Myers-Briggs and stuff? There's Myers-Briggs. There's this. There's a bunch of them. There's one I really like. It's called Cultural Index.

I'm going to send it to you. It's awesome. I'll send it. It's great. I actually use it when I hire staff at the spot. I do a Cultural Index, and they have to fit within a certain thing and then I know basically what their strengths and weaknesses are.

And so it's awesome. And so I got mine and the guy who's doing the results, he gets on the phone and he's just laughing. I said, what are you laughing about, man? He goes, look, for everyone, there's different personality. There's these things we'd like,

the philosopher, right? The this, the that. And he goes, your profile is so extreme personality you know we kind of we there's these things we'd like the philosopher right the this the that and he goes your your profile is so extreme that there isn't a profile type that your three standard deviations off the chart one way and your three standard deviations off the chart the other way and so those two areas are aggressiveness and you can guess which way that one is and the other one is patience and you can guess which way that one is and the other one is patience and you can guess which way that one is and so so literally he's just laughing he's like dude he's like basically what this test tells me is you would kill your own mother to win at something

and and that but that's like for me it's like always being the best so for me like a personal practice and thing because when i lift i do still fall into those old patterns right i still do right i'm lifting i'm good i'm relaxed and then something switch right it's a light switch something flips and all of a sudden I'm just I go back to old jail because it's like bar on my back bar in my hand right and so for me that was one of the things where I wanted to really get back to something that was just about enjoyment and something where I didn't have to be the best in the world and I didn't have this preconceived right right? Like I know, right. I've benched 775. I've deadlifted 804. You know, I've put a thousand pounds in my back, right. I've never gotten in a

meet, right. 954 is my best. But so, uh, it's, it's like when I put a bar on my back, if I'm bench pressing, right. And I know that I've held 800 pounds over my face right so so it is so that's still something i'm working through that's still something i'm working through because it's hard to stay relaxed when i have all these old ways of doing things and as a strength coach which i think is uh more of your beginning background for sure um you know that all that's happening when we're lifting weights you know like all that's happening when we're lifting weights, you know, like all that's happening when you're benching 775, which looks crazy to somebody because it's like eight or nine plates on each side

or whatever it ends up being, it will baffle people. They'll be like, oh, my God, I can't believe, you know, someone was able to do that. But really it's just an adaptation. It's just your body is adapted to a training stimulus over a period of time you have adapted you have kind of earned the right to be able to lift that weight that way it wouldn't be any different if you went underwater and held your breath for three minutes like you just somehow at some point you made yourself used to that and then you might be able to do five minutes i think people can do like 10 like people can do crazy stuff but it's really just an adaptation to it if you're on the assault bike and you're going as hard as you possibly can

you said give me a sprint 100 for a minute right that's just like there's no way it's just like death right i think you can only sprint for just a few seconds no matter what shape you're in you start to kind of fall apart but again if you're just telling yourself well like this isn't really necessarily hard this isn't really necessarily hard. This isn't necessarily going to be anything that's going to kill me. Just my heart rate has increased. Oh, wow. Like I'm breathing a lot heavier.

Like, oh, man, my legs are dead. But you can even switch your mindset and you can start to concentrate on something else. If you think about specific things, J.P. Price yesterday he's uh one of the few guys to walk out a thousand pound squat and squat it um there's more been people more recently but he he was one of the first he was saying before he would do his big squats rather than like being raged out and fired up and crazy i'm sure he his his senses were heightened i'm sure he looked like he was into it and i'm sure that he kind of went up there with some vigor and some, some sort of aggression.

Well, this is, he was potentiated. Right. Right. So that like potentiated a little bit of excitement, but still super calm. Right.

And then, so when he on rack, the weight, all he thought was step, step, because he was thinking about his two steps. Like if he could walk it out, he knew he could squat it.

So he went to something specific and there's a lot of science a lot of research that talks about this if you have something that you're really stressed out about or you have a lot of anxiety i don't know if you ever heard this before but they say to do math or do something very specific you know think of something very specific so in this case for him it was step step uh when i was benching at one point you know i would think when the weights were coming down you remember how long my benches used to take yeah well the way i was able to hang in there is is i was able to think of something specific while i was doing it i would uh think push my knees out push my knees out because if i knew if i pushed my knees out i would be in a better

position i'd be more up on my traps and i would be kind of holding a position uh better and i just once i focused on that, I'm like, as long as I maintain my position, once I get the weight to touch, eventually after 20 seconds or so, I'll be able to end up pressing it back up. It doesn't matter what the weight is. Well, I think, and this is one of the things when we started teaching RPR, that people who we were teaching it to got confused because they just went like, oh, this is it.

This is the only thing. No, no, no, no. Everything you just talked about, use all of that right that's a secret rpr it's subconscious change and then you still got to use all the greats like so this is a thing it's not you can't just do the body and forget about the mind right but you just can't do the mind and forget about the body it works as one unit and that you know it gets down basically you know if you guys, for listeners, basically there's, I think, therefore I am.

Most people have heard of that, right? So Descartes. Oh, great. Here we go. Another two hours. No, no. So it's simple. Descartes, he says that. And from that point, we'll call it 300 years ago,

essentially what happened was Cartesian method of modern medicine started, which was psychology gets the brain and medicine gets a body. And literally for, for thousands, it literally recorded history. Everybody treated everything as one unit, right? So there's great Latin saying,

men sound like porosano, sound money and sound body. And everyone treated as one unit. So think about this is literally our health care. All these things are broke, all this stuff, all these things are, are these issues.

But yet the way we're dealing with it is we've only done it this way for about 300 years and for for the past you know 10 000 they did it together and that's what we teach with our pr is you have to do all of that stuff but you have to do the stuff for your body you have to do the nervous system the subconscious because again what did i say i said psychology is awareness physiology is context well context without awareness isn't any good either right these things have to be together all right well now i have to ask this question because this sounds quite obvious you you are a believer in in the multiverse theory probably uh i mean i watch spider-man um no i I, is the earth flat?

Well, I mean, some people think it is, uh, and I'm not going to argue with them because I don't want to be confused in that conversation. Uh, and, and so, but no, I mean, here's like, I believe that, uh, one I'm good with what anybody believes. Right. I just think awesome. Right. Because what someone else believes doesn't impact what I believe right now. I'll listen. Right. I just think awesome. Right. Because what someone else believes doesn't impact what I believe. Right. Now I'll listen. Right. I actually I've listened to some stuff on the flat earth stuff and I'm like, not for me. Right. And that's cool. I didn't think it would be. But how how can I really make so when you look at the universe, I mean, essentially, I think most people would agree that all energy can't be created nor destroyed. Right?

I think most people would agree with that. So if that's the case, then all energy that has ever existed exists today, which means it's just switched and changed. the day which means it's just switched and changed and so i think there's a lot of that that if you look through back through thousands of years they really channeled a lot of that type of work and people now kind of poo-poo it and say this but now if you look at what they're doing with quantum computing and some of these things where they're actually going wait we can do some things with this stuff and when you look at like quantum mechanics and all this stuff they're starting to actually be able to prove now the people who are doing it are way smarter than me right i can show you guys some crazy stuff that'll blow your mind that uses the

theory of it and some other things and i can show you cool results i can't like explain why it all like but so i don't know if i believe in the multiverse. I definitely believe there's, here's what I believe. Five years ago, before I learned any of this, I thought I understood 90, 95% of what was going on in the body in the world. As I sit here today, I understand probably two to 3%. That's what I believe. I just believe that I can't know what I don't know. So if you say you believe in the multiverse and you got a good reason for it,

look, tell me what your reason is. I don't know. So if you say you believe in the multiverse and you've got a good reason for it, tell me what your reason is. I don't know if that's what I'll believe. Right. But I just know at this point, there's so much, I know that I don't know that I just have a hard time arguing with people about stuff. That's a great way of looking at it.

Two or 3% and it's only two or 3% of what you're able to know. Yeah. Because no one will ever know everything. I mean, right. No, that hopefully, right. We podcast in a year from now, I'm at a solid one to 2% because it means I've learned more.

Right. Like it's exposed stuff that I didn't know. Right. So, uh, yeah, that's, I think with people, you know, and this is kind of what I'll finish with. And this wraps up essentially kind of my whole, like the philosophy thing. And this is, this isn't RPR. This is just where I've got like this is just

where jl's got right the reason i've gotten there is because i do rpr every day and i'm able to sit in a space where i can think about things and not just be like so really i never so this is crazy i never drank coffee my entire life i didn't i was just like and it's like i was like who needs coffee this is ridiculous right mike tyson said that too he's like you don was like, who needs coffee? This is ridiculous, right? Mike Tyson said that too. He's like, you don't want me to drink coffee. Right? Like, I don't know,

like what? Like, and so, uh, so, so this is kind of the last thing that I'll leave on. This is, we've gone over,

which is, it's been awesome stuff. Uh, so the way that I work to, to really go about everything, including, you know, coming here to do this podcast or anything I do in life at this point, I really, really focus on not having any expectations. And my reasoning for that is that

expectations and in two outcomes, one, the thing I wanted happens or two failure, disappointment, disappointment. And so when I thought about this a lot i thought well wait a minute so i'm obviously super high when i'll push so the thing i want to happen i'll make happen i'll make that happen regardless if i have to break my back i'll make it happen but the thing is i can only think of a finite amount of possibilities if i go on with no expectations there's an infinite amount of possibilities that can happen and I can never be disappointed with what happens. And so for me, that's how I live.

Like I was in Austin, I got my car towed a couple weeks ago. I was having dinner with a friend and I got towed and I walked out and my car got towed. Now old me, someone would have gotten knocked out. But I just walked out and went, all right, I guess the universe wants my car to get towed. And then I just literally went and I was like, okay, where do I get it? Just went on and just got it and went on with my day.

And to me, I don't have an expectation that my car is going to be there. Or I'll say I work to not have that because obviously, right, I fall into old patterns. And when I do, when I saw that, I instantly felt, right? I instantly, when I saw my car was gone i instantly started to go and i went well and then when i started doing my breathing my wake-up self-awareness yeah i just started doing my breathing my way right it thinks it's psychology and then the physiology right and i bring the rpr in boom and then i'm just walking could also be like huh this is gonna be fun right like you're saying yourself you know i'm kind of screwed you know i need to figure out how to get

my car back and well but i don't not like not worrying about it not you know i don't even look at it like that i didn't even see uh and this comes to zero expectations i don't look at my car being taught as a good or a bad thing it's just a thing and because i believe that the universe has such a bigger plan and i can't imagine the planet has so it's a thing and not even like an inconvenience necessarily no because it's just your interpretation of it what about this right and i'm not but what if i would have gotten my car and i would have turned and got t-boned and killed and that was just the universe's way of changing my route right i don't know right i don't know i can't know no one can know but but that's a possibility and if that's a possibility how can i get mad at that what if

it's just the world being against you, though, like it used to be? Well, that was right. It was everyone was against me. And now I'm just like, it just is what it is, man. So I appreciate you having me on, brother. This is so good to keep up, man. Yeah, this is this is it's been too long, man. It's been too long.

So and it was great. Great. Obviously, getting to know you guys as well. So thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank you. And it was great, obviously, getting to know you guys as well. So thanks for having me.

I really appreciate it. Thank you. So where did you – your language on this is really, really clean. There's probably not one spot where you learned a lot of stuff. But if you could point and reference people to maybe a few guides, books, podcasts, videos, mentors. Mark Bell's podcast. That's where I learned everything. There you go.

Yeah, if you have any suggestions on, you know, some stuff that you maybe picked up over the last two, three years that you think has been really, because, again, like the way that you're wording everything is very digestible, very understandable. So it would be great to know if you have some resources that you could share out. Yeah, I mean, honestly,

so all this stuff is just tons of rabbit holes that I've spent a lot of time with. And the cool part is I'm, honestly, so all this stuff is just tons of rabbit holes that I've spent a lot of time with. And the cool part is I'm actually now in a space where I can just sit and think about things, which is really cool. And so for me, one great, obviously, you know, our online course, reflexiveperformance.com, if they go there and do our online course,

I'm updating. So a lot of this stuff I've been spending a lot of time with. So what's great about the online is it updates. It's evergreen. So there's language on the online is it updates. It's evergreen. So there's language on there that's, you know, a year old. And now next month we're reshooting and I'm updating all the language because I find better ways. The other thing I would say is on Instagram, it's coach underscore JL. I post a lot of just this is how I think about this stuff.

So this, I work through a lot of stuff on there, right? I hope that everyone picks up from you that you have really worked for a long time on mastering being a better coach. And I think that maybe some trainers and sometimes some coaches maybe are kind of missing that. They continue to search for what they're interested in, which is great. And you're obviously going to do that all the time. But being able to provide people with more information that they would be interested in, that's going to help them to, you know, kind of get to the next level is really critical. And when I saw and Seema sent me some links, when he sent me some of the links to what you guys have,

you have like these 30 second, 90 second, second 60 second videos there's like hundreds of them and i thought man this is great because it was so clean and so smooth and you you mentioned in the video you said hey i want to just speak in as little as words as possible and you were showing the guy that you were showing your client basically how to even coach it back to you and he coached it back to you you made a small correction you said well you know we still want to say it in like a shorter shorter pattern but the video is still only 30 seconds or so well i think you know one of my favorite saying is if you can't explain it simply you simply don't understand it and uh you know the thing with that is simple is not easy right the simplest The simplest thing in the world, squat a thousand pounds. You put a thousand pounds bar, you go down, you come up simple, ain't easy. And so I've spent just

thousands of hours thinking on this stuff and sitting and, and, and it's been, it's, it's been a process. And so, you know, as far as resources, I think, you know, reflexperformance.com, they can do our online course, uh, coach underscore jail on Instagram. I just, I post a lot of just walking through a lot of this stuff because for me it's like I said man the amount of messed up stuff that I've gone through in my life that's it's whole own deal right the bottom line is because I've gone through that

I don't want other people to have to struggle as much as I did right if I can provide a couple answers for someone like the 25 year old JL right if I can help the 25 year old J jail maybe get arrested a few last times for assault, right? Like that's some good in the world. And as far as books, you know, I really, there's some great, The Oxygen Advantage is just a wonderful book that I really like. There, there's, there's so many great books. I think that, um, one of the things that,

uh, is in, this is going to come from a totally different place. So there's actually a book that I've read recently that is, it's one of my favorite books I've ever read and it's called love does. Uh, and so it's, it's not on training.

It's not on, uh, I think it's clear though that your language comes from somewhere else. That's why I was asking. Yeah, it's not on, uh, it's clear though that your language comes from somewhere else that's why i was asking yeah it's not on uh it's not a parasympathetic nervous system which i've read lots on that right i've read lots on vision i've read lots on light therapy i've let i mean dove down all those rabbit holes right and so uh you know i can tell you that certain teeth correlate to different organs right like i've read that, but what love does to me, and then that's a book I recommend it's by a guy named Bob Goff and he just lives his life and just

an amazing way. And for me, I read that book and I just went, I didn't know this was possible. And you know, one of the other one, this, this is another thing, crucial conversations. I read crucial conversations when I didn't know that a human being could communicate this way, right? Like it was flat out, tell someone what you want and how you want it to be done. And I read crucial conversations when I didn't know that a human being could, could communicate this way. Right. Like it was flat out, tell someone what you want and how you want it to be done. And they'll do it. I didn't even know that that was like, right.

I think it was silence or violence, right? Like that was, those were my modes. And in the book they say in, in Christian, they say silence and violence. And I went,

yeah, that's how I do it. Right. Is there, there's a different way. There's, there's a different way. And so those would be, I mean,

those would be just three off the top of my head, you know, kind of oxygen advantage is more of the science based love does is just a general life based and then crucial conversations is more tactical. Right. So I think that's three, you know, nice kind of rounded for people and, uh, you know, they're ones I enjoy to get over some of the stuff that you did go through. Did you ever get any consulting or did you ever see a therapist or anything like that? Nope. And the thing is,

is, uh, I've done different counseling and therapy at different points in my life and been married twice. And so, so some different things and, uh, none of it ever helped because part of it was,

is, you know, people may look at me and I know this, but I, I, I'm a very intelligent person and so I, I can feel what people want to hear and I know how to give them what they want. And so when I did that stuff, I just knew how to guide the conversation. And then we walked out of the room and I was like, peace. And they're like, I'm so good. I'm a great therapist. I was like, yep.

And so it just never worked for me part of it was because i never really thought i needed a change and at that time you were probably ever is it not you weren't open to it no and and this is the thing is i i i think therapy's great whatever works for anybody do it right when people talk like oh i did you know i jumped out of a window and it changed my life awesome Awesome. Right? Like I, it doesn't, whatever works for people I'm good with because that's part of his people. Like what's the science was, did it work for that person? Great. Then who cares? Right? And so for me, I, I just, that's the most amazing part to me in this is I didn't want to change. I didn't try to change. I didn't

talk to anybody about changing the person that's sitting here today with all the different thoughts and the way I think about thinking the philosophy I have today literally came because my physiology changed, and it just changed the way I thought. And that's literally it. And sometimes I tell people that, and they kind of don't. You know what I mean? Which is cool because they don't have to get it.

Your relationships with everybody must have changed drastically, dude it's it's so much better man like you're seeing everything through a totally different lens right i mean just my kids i mean that's probably the biggest i got three kids man and and you know i got a 14 year old who now he saw me yelling right and i got a nine-year-old who saw me yelling right because this change has been the last four years so she's five years old old, you know, and I mean, we talked about this. She deleted two days of my work and I'm talking broke the dining room tear, kicked a hole in the front door. I mean, she's seen me just lose my stuff.

And it's my, my five-year-old has never seen it. The way he talks and does stuff is different. And so it's literally, I have to have conversations with my nine-year-old and my 14-year-old where they'll yell at him and I'll say, guys, it's not how we communicate. That's not kind words. Let's do this. And, you know, and, and, and as I'm doing this, I'm thinking to myself, there's no way I can ever be angry at these guys because they learned to do that from me. That's how I used to communicate. And so now I'm actually trying to change the way they do it. And it's funny because we do, you know, my daughter, we were riding in a car.

She was fighting with a friend there in backseat and whatever, eight-year-old's fight over, it was last year. And it was great because we're driving down the road and blah, blah, blah. And I go to say something and my daughter goes, wait, we got to do our belly breaths. And so, and literally she starts walking the girl. They do five, five belly breasts. And she's like, okay, now rub here. Like literally she starts, she knows, like she's around it all the time.

And she sees me doing it and we do, you know, and like literally, and then they're not fighting. Right. Like it was just, I was like, this is the greatest day ever. Right. And so for me, like my relationships with my staff and look, a hundred percent sitting here, it's very easy for me to sit in this new pattern and think and do this. When I go into a gym, right? When I go into work, when I do these things, it's a constant, it's a constant working,

right? And sometimes I have to apologize to my staff. Hey guys, sorry, that was some old patterns, right? But, but I know, right? I'll, I'll, I'll say something that's, that's not good and I'll do something, but then I'll come back, right? And I'll say, Hey guys, sorry, that was some old patterns right but but i know right i'll i'll say something that's that's not good and i'll do something but then i'll come back right and say hey guys sorry that was wrong because i had to walk into my staff and go hey guys look my entire life i've been a dick and i wasn't a dick because i wanted to be a dick like i love you guys i think you guys are amazing like the spot look the staff we have at the spot effects are just amazing people we've

always had amazing people there um because we always pushed it. Right. We want to be world class and everything. I'm always pushing education and doing all this. So the people like we have two interns that, you know, move from unpaid internships, one from Missouri and one from North Carolina. Right. Like we get people that want to come and learn all the time and we're always pushing that envelope. But they had a lot to get that knowledge. And the thing is, like, why, right? Why? And so, you know, here's what I'll say, right? I'm not saying any of this stuff to say that I've completely changed and I'm better and I'm this.

No, I'm a work in progress, right? My hope is that in five years from now or in a year from now, six months from now, I have even less return to those old patterns, but I still do. Right. It's what I talked about with our parents. How long does it last? It's do I know where it is? Do I know how to get it where I want it to be? And because I have that tool to do it, when I do go back, I can just switch it right away. And, and that's, to me, that's where the magic is is I just can do that myself right away. Awesome. Take us on out of here, Andrew.

JL. Well, thank you so much for everything, man. I'm blown away by a bunch of the stuff that you were talking about. Real quick, though, when I seen Cal work on some of our guys, and you guys are doing the arm tests and stuff, I instantly started thinking about those hologram bands or whatever. I was like, dude, if those guys had RPR in their arsenal, they would still be in business. Because some of the stuff that you guys were doing, that's what they would try to do, but they have their circus tricks or whatever.

But is there anything that can amplify RPR? Can a Hypervolt, like the percussion massager, can that be used instead of your hands? Well, so it's interesting you say that. So we worked with a lot of that and there's a frequency that that has to resonate at to really get the most effect so so the things that are out there right now again you could i could i'm coming to california in a month uh i could walk to california that would be effective right it would it just wouldn't be the most efficient way and so with the guns way the frequency there's some effect if you do rpr with it but it's it's

it's just it's way better so ironic that you say that uh in the next probably two months and i can't say a lot now because of some stuff but uh we're working with a company on something on a gun that has the correct frequencies and has everything so in the next three months, like this is not something I can't get into specifics, but in the next three months, there will be something that you can put in your hands that operates, that will be an optimal frequency to be able to do all this stuff that we're doing. So we're really excited about, we're super, super excited about, we've been working on this for a while and we're getting really, really close. you know having a guy like cal who's a mad scientist and chris corfis who who probably none of the listeners have ever heard of because he's

a sprint guy but i mean this dude like he goes to to new zealand he's with england rugby like they england rugby uh started using rpr and they beat the all blacks in the world cup and they sent us him like dude we love rpr like we you know not that that's why they won but they're like it was a big part yeah and so now this summer they want chris to just travel just so they get more knowledge on rpr right and uh he's just he's amazing man he's a savant and with those two guys like bumping through on the research and all this and then you know you know the three of us work so so well as co-founders because for me like i love the business side. I love the messaging side.

I love basically how do we make this something that we can get out to people. I love helping people. At the end of the day, right, like, I have three values in life, right? And so for me, it's always searching, which obviously with this, help people, and details create excellence. And those three things for me is what, you know, put together with Cal and Chris and their create excellence. And those three things for me is, is what, you know, put together with Cal and Chris and their amazing minds. Like me,

like I said, I'm really excited about what we're going to be coming out with because it is going to be something that we can put in someone's hands. It's something that is just going to make everything so much easier. So when that comes out, I'll be, I'll be super excited. I'll we'll,

we'll definitely talk some more. Yeah. If you need some test dummies. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, for sure. Cool.

Well, thank you. Um, make sure you guys are following some test dummies. Yeah. I love it. Yeah, for sure. Cool. Well, thank you. Um, make sure you guys are following the podcast at Mark Bales power project on Instagram. Uh, my Instagram is at I am Andrew Z at MB power project on Tik TOK and Twitter.

Thank you everybody. That's been rating and reviewing on iTunes. Make sure you're subscribed to YouTube. We've got a Facebook and all that, uh, and SEMA, your biceps look great. Thank you,

Andrew. Where can people find you? And SEMA in Yang on Instagram and you and see my inyang on instagram and youtube and see my inyang on tiktok and twitter mark at mark's belly bell strength is never weakness weakness never strength catch y'all later poop cast what up uh see i told you now i bet you you're trying to figure out this rpr system right now uh anyways like i said just find jl on social media hit them uh, yeah, figure out where you can find more information about that. Uh, but real quick, we wanted to give a huge shout out and

thank you to everybody that's been rating and reviewing the podcast. Uh, specifically Eric four Oh five Oh eight. Eric says best source of info for people who are into fitness quote. If someone is doing good things in the diet slash fitness community, you're going to see them come through this podcast sooner or later. I've gotten so much good info from Mark and his guests over the years, I can't even begin to catalog it here. Although strength training is a focus, there are a lot of diversity and interests of opinion here and the open-minded approach to every topic discussed. I look forward to each episode, whether it's a big name guest or just the guy shooting the shit on some topic of interest. Definitely the go-to fitness podcast available today.

Eric, thank you so much, man. I sincerely appreciate that. You just hooked us up with a huge thank you and you helped us out a ton. So thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to leave that review. If you're listening right now, if you would like to hear your name read on air, please head over to iTunes right now, drop us a rating, a review, and you could hear your name on air just like Eric40508. We'll catch you guys on the next one. Peace.