Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 481 - How To Do MORE With LESS

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

Today we're talking about getting more from doing less in the gym. Instead of adding more weight, maybe add more reps? More range of motion? There are tons of different routes to take that don't require you to add more weight. Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter: https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢FREE LMNT Recharge Sample Pack: http://bit.ly/3bxyMND ➢Freeze Sleeve: https://freezesleeve.com/ Use Code "POWER25" for 25% off plus FREE Shipping on all domestic orders! ➢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 ➢Sling Shot: 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 #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

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Check out, enter promo code POWERPROJECT for 25% off your order. And if your order is $99 or, you get free two day shipping. We are live now. Live and direct. Okay. So yeah, what I was going to mention there was because, um, Sally was asking me when it comes to like jujitsu, like, you know, when it comes to like, you know, people I train with down here,

how far do I really think I can take it? And there, there's two guys that really were very inspiring as far as jiu-jitsu progression for me to one hodger gracie who's like renowned as the absolute top champ and the top competitor in terms of jiu-jitsu and the gi and then marcus buchesha who's like again he's like a rung down from roger gracie i'm pretty sure he's run like 10 world championships or whatever but the big thing about these guys is that they didn't always have training partners that were even close to their level for a majority of their training um and like roger definitely roger he

couldn't like most of the time he wasn't training with people better than him far like and they usually weren't even close to the people he was competing with but within his training he did things to make things a little bit more difficult for himself within training like he'll put himself in disadvantaged positions he'll put himself in compromising positions and drill bad places to work himself out of so that he can make progression right rather than just like i'm just going to find a harder opponent and a harder opponent, a harder opponent to try to progress. He did things within his training to simulate that and to make it harder for himself so that he could progress. I think that's a big part of, like, if you're not at the greatest school all the time, you can do that. But also when it comes to the gym, exactly what we were talking about, you can add things into your training that you can

progress with other than just increasing load. Yeah. And in the case of jujitsu, somebody wouldn't have to be better than you for you just to start out on your back. Nope. You know, you can start out in whatever position you can say, hey, look, I'm pretty sure the guy that I'm going against is pretty damn strong. He's probably going to be able to do A, B and C to me and get me in these compromising positions. I already know that I'm going to end up there. So I'll just start there.

And the other people that you're, that are, that you're training with, they're not, uh, they're not such slouches that they can't be productive in, in having you be able to get through some of that process. So that's exactly what I did when I was getting ready to train with Chad. I had all of my training partners start on side control every single round, start on side control, start on top of me. We're going to start every single round start on side control start on top of me we're going to start from here and i'm going to work on escaping then if i escape i'll start i'll try to submit you but you're all going to start here because if he gets on top of me

i need to be able to escape his 300 pound ass right yeah so there's a lot of different ways of doing it and today we're talking about you know applying this into the gym and and getting the most or getting more out of less. A lot of times it's not always about the progression of using more weight, although ultimately I think that's usually the goal. But there's other ways that you can stimulate. There's other ways that you can end up with a great result. I think it's always a decent idea to work your way backwards. think it's always a decent idea to work your way backwards you know don't forget don't forget the reason on like what's the what's the reason why you're doing this exercise and i think we get

lost really quickly because we get excited it's easy to put on more weight and it's easy to forget but what's the what's the purpose of the exercise what's the purpose of of of working out you know we have a, um, coming up, we have Brian McKenzie on the show. We'll be able to talk to him a lot about breathing and breathing is one of those things that it could add, it could add another element to your training that maybe, uh, maybe you otherwise weren't thinking of because you can do a lot of your training with nasal breathing. You've been doing that for a while. Uh, I've been doing it a lot with, uh, warmups and stuff like that. But for me, I haven't been patient enough to progress through

the rest of the workout, being able to do that. I've done it through some cardio sessions and things like that, but I haven't done it for a full lifting session. And so it would be interesting to see what kind of impact that would have on my training. And then there's so many different ways, even within that model of increasing my intensity and getting better at that without even using any more weight. And since you mentioned the Brian McKenzie episode, that's going to come out, guys. I'm excited for that one because we go into so many things that you guys are literally going to be able to listen to that episode and take into your training to make progress

immediately. And it'll permeate not just throughout, you know, your progression in terms of straight training and all that good stuff, but sleep, uh, mood, uh, feel like all of that stuff.

There's so much in that episode that you'll probably want to listen to it twice and take some notes. Just saying right now, it'll be out president's day. Oh, president's day. There you go. So you guys got something to do on your day off.

Breaking off some, but yeah, absolutely. Like, um, as far as, you know, progressing as, as lifters, when we look at what we're trying to do, most of us are just like more weight, more weight, more weight, more weight, more weight. But that kind of, I guess, idea leads most people to getting injured because within the goal of moving more weight, you start trying to move weight that you shouldn't be moving.

Then you move that weight badly. And then that turns into you being injured so you know it's that the guys that are able to spend their lives lifting You know they're not always working with heavier weights I mean I see Stan efforting squatting like you know he like really good weight still But he does it for a lot of reps you know he's not just squatting 800 pounds because in the past how much what was his? Squatting a squat at the end like 900 pounds. Yeah, okay He doesn't need to do that to hold on to his muscle or to continue to progress He does different things. I think that that's super important if you want to do this for a long time

Yeah, just again. What's the goal? You know what are you what are you trying to do? You know there's there's a lot of great Lifters out there that we can look to. I always like to point to someone like a Jay Cutler. I don't think Jay Cutler really ever used over five plates in a squat, but he would do like sets of 12, and it was after he did like 100 reps of leg extensions. You know, he would do like four sets of 25 leg extensions to warm up,

get a lot of blood in the legs, and then he would, you know, go 315, 405 and 500 pounds. And his, his squats were amazing. He's got his butt on the ground, but the point is, is like, that's not very hard for him. I mean, I don't know what he could have handled at that time, but I'm just imagining he could have threw on seven or eight plates and been able to do a couple of reps with that as well. Yeah. But that wouldn't have led into what he was,, his end goal of what he was trying to do.

And so, you know, those, that's an extreme case of somebody that, you know, was a four time Mr. Olympia and someone who's over 300 pounds. But for a lot of other people that, that same thing just looks like this. Let's say that your best squad is 405. Well, you know, a training weight might be normally 315, might be 365 on the higher end, right? Well, if we did leg extensions beforehand, we did some sort of pre-exhaust. What if you did leg extensions? And then, you know, again, let's back it up to what the goal is. Let's hypothetically say the goal is to have bigger legs. There's really nowhere,

there's really not, you're not gonna find information that says that you absolutely have to train heavy all the time in order to have large legs. So that would lead me to believe that we got some freedom and we can do things differently every once in a while. Training heavy, yes, we understand the value of that because when you're able to handle more weight, you're able to have more intensity,

more volume through going heavier. But you can also have more volume by just doing more exercises, or more sets, or more intensity, more volume through going heavier, but you can also have more volume by just doing more exercises or more sets or more reps, or you can condense your training down into having some training density, which brings about a whole nother intensity and can hit hypertrophy in a slightly different way. Started out a workout with four sets of 25 leg extensions, none of them really to failure, but getting a good pump in the legs. Then you went to a leg press, you pushed them really to failure, but getting a good pump in the legs. Yep.

Then you went to a leg press. You pushed a weight on there a little bit and you do, I don't know, four sets of 10 or something like that. You're pre-exhausted from the leg extension. So you'll most likely use a little bit less weight on those sets of 10. Allow the amount of reps that you selected to dictate the amount of weight that you use. You also want to have your form dictate the amount of reps that you selected to dictate the amount of weight that you use. You also want to have your form dictate the amount of reps that you use. You also want to have your rest period dictate the amount of weight that you're using. Because if you go to use a certain amount of weight and you break down on rep number

eight and rep number nine and 10 are really shady and it's set number one, that's not great representation of what we're trying to do. It's probably break yourself down a little bit too much. It's probably excessive. Not that it won't be beneficial, but it's probably just not necessary. You progress through that. You get your sets done. You do all 40 reps, four sets of 10.

You do them all very clean. Then you move over into your squats. And now all of a sudden, the 315 to 365 weight that you're used to using for training, because you normally would squat around 405 for max. Now you're probably reducing that by a hundred pounds. Now we're probably talking, you would probably have a great training day for sets of eight or sets of 10 or 12 with anywhere between 225 to 275.

On top of that, you're going to get a lot out of that. Yeah. So it's, it's a great route to go. Most likely you're going to get a lot out of that. Yeah. So it's a great route to go. Most likely, you're going to be a lot more safe. Like your back's not going to be all tired and sore. You'll be sore. I mean, your legs will get crushed from a workout like that. But you're not going to have that same.

When you lift really heavy, that shit stays in your body for a while. A couple of days a lot of times until you start to really accumulate some awareness of it, but it takes a long time. So that's the kind of stuff that we're talking about here today. There's so many different ways of, of even manipulating that workout in and of itself that you can make more beneficial without adding more weight. And, and how many times have we heard people say that, you know, maybe they don't get sore on a regular basis, but then they try a workout like that where they maybe go like a full range of motion versus like doing, you know, the half reps or whatever, maybe even if they're accidental pause or half reps.

But yeah, like all of a sudden now it's like, wait, you squatted less and somehow you're, you're feeling it way more this time around. Like, what's that all about yeah it's crazy right no it makes total sense i mean you activate more muscle tissues but the the big thing that i think we should focus on on from that statement is like your form on all these movements okay because again in the whole pursuit of trying to get bigger stronger and faster right um we want to do it fast so we want to just increase weight, increase weight, increase weight, but we start to develop bad habits with squats or bad habits when benching or deadlifting just to try to move more weight, and then we end up getting injured.

But if you're focused on form initially, you know, we had Mike Izzardell. He's a big advocate of you know um full range of motion right if you start focusing on going through full rom with everything and it's going to take longer to progress but i guarantee you're going to be able to progress for a much longer amount of time the outcomes are going to be much better for you and then on top of that what i like to do um is not only focus on form, but then slow aspects of your lift down. An example of this is your deadlift. A lot of us, when we're deadlifting and we're trying to progress the deadlift, whether it be sumo or conventional, we'll do the lift and we'll just let the weight fall on the ground. I think it was when I started training here, you mentioned control your eccentric.

You told me, hey, just take a little bit more time when you're bringing the bar back to the ground after a few months my deadlift started to increase right right and that's something that i do up till now i i never really no matter what weight i use i always control that weight back down and it's easy i can control that whole aspect of that movement but initially it wasn't initially i did not have the muscle control to slowly it's really hard bring my body down but ed cone i think also talks about that yeah absolutely difference absolutely i think you know you want to have enough control over most of the lifts that you do uh where you can reverse them at any time as well i like to look at it that kind of stan efferning uh type of model where he says you're loading up a spring you know as you go down

in the squat you're kind of loading up a spring. As you go down in the squat, you're kind of loading up a spring. And if you had a spring, it would be able to reverse at any time. And also, even better with the analogy of a spring is that the lower that it goes, the more it's going to spring up. And if you learn how to really do the lift properly, you'll feel that. There's a lot of great squatters who say say i can full squat my ass to the ground more than i can do a half squat with and you're like that doesn't make any sense but they're used to rebounding off their own hamstrings and used to hitting the hitting the hole in that way

and reverse it reversing up out of there and they have such impeccable form them going full range of motion doesn't negatively impact them in any way where most people who don't have the mobility to do full range of motion, they end up having to correct an error on the way up with a big weight. And that's, and that's where you end up in a, in a very compromised position, but your form and technique matters so much because you're not even training the right muscles. A lot of times, you know, while you're doing a squat, you are working on a lot of different muscle groups, but a lot of times people are trying to target the quads. I think I would say a large percentage of the time, maybe with the exception of some power lifters, people are almost always trying to train their quads. And if they get some butt and hamstrings

out of it, I don't think they're mad about it. But I think what they would be mad about is that if they're not attacking the quads much in the squat, and we see that a lot because a lot of people will sit way back in their squats or they really won't get on a good angle to where they're really getting into the quads. And so that's something that you need to, you'll have to learn. Or you might just learn that squats don't work that great for your quads because of your body type and when we talk about full range of motion and we had mike israel on the show what i would

like to say something that we didn't really talk about a lot on the show but he did mention it briefly and i think it may have gotten overlooked it's your full range of motion you know that's the key factor right there it's if you go down in a bench press and you bring the weight down and you get three quarters of the way down and something's weird in the shoulder and you can't, you don't like that, that bottom range and you need to train it differently, train it differently. Don't worry about what everybody else is doing. Same thing with your squat. If you can feel your squat in your quads from doing a quarter squat, from doing a partial range

of motion squat, don't sweat what other people are telling you. And don't worry about not having this perfect, epic Olympic lifting squat where your ass is on the ground. Those are things that you can progress towards and those are things you can work on, you know, at some other time. But really, if you're trying to, you're trying to get hypertrophy and you're trying to get into the muscle, whatever range of motion that is for you. We were doing some lateral raises the other day.

And usually with lateral raises, I like to bring them to the front slash side, not like totally the front, but kind of like, I guess, more towards the front of my thighs. And then I like to try to push up with my elbows as much as I can and have my elbows be higher than where my wrists are, where the weight is, which is hard for me because my shoulders freaking just, they just kill when I do that. So I started doing a range of motion where I was already about quarter of the way out away from my body. And I was just going really just a tiny range of motion because anything higher than that,

I just started doing a lift the wrong way and I wasn't getting enough out of my shoulder. So it's your range of motion. It's whatever is going to work best for you and go by how it feels. Yeah. You know, when you were mentioning right there, first off, your personal range of motion, that's a super important thing because not everybody is going to be comfortable squatting ass to grass with load. But number two, when you were mentioning, you know, my shoulders killed or whatever,

some people hear that and they're like, oh yeah, the pain, right? This is one thing I think is a skill that we all need to be able to develop. We need to be able to tell the difference between unsafe joint pain that is not good and you shouldn't try to work through and muscular pain where your muscles are getting, you know, your, your quads are getting fried, right? And you're, you're working, your quads are burning. That's okay. Because I think a lot of people, I was having a call with a guy yesterday and he was saying, Oh yeah, whenever I squat to this point, my knees hurt, but I've, you know, I've just been trying to progress. I'm like, have you been squatting the same way the whole time? And your knees have been feeling the same way. It's like,

yeah. Like when you lower the load, do you still feel that in your knees that way? He's like, yeah. I'm like, Hmm, maybe we should take a look at like the way you're actually squatting because you shouldn't be feeling that pain in your actual knee. You're feeling a burn in your quads. Understandable pain in your knee. Let's not work through that. Right. That's let's not. So I think that's one.

Find another exercise. Find another exercise or find a different way of doing that exercise that doesn't cause you pain in that joint there. Because, you know, there's there's there's this idea that people have that like, oh, yeah, if I'm feeling something, I just got to I got to work through it a little bit. Yeah. You don't you don't work through joint pain that way, you know, muscle soreness or like your muscles getting pumped, your quads are getting pumped on a leg extension and it's burns a little bit.

That's a good pain to work through, but not if your knees are starting to feel like they're going to fricking shatter under a leg extension. Don't work through that. You know, I think it's a good idea to, to, to know that it's not going to get any better you know like when something when something starts to hurt really

bad you're not going to add more weight and it's not going to all of a sudden feel better the only opportunity for it to feel better is for you to change uh something in the other direction you don't want to increase intensity at that point if you're doing some squats and you're like man the knee feels really weird. Sometimes you got to double check. Sometimes you got to like do the same weight twice and be like, yep. Okay. That sucks.

That hurts. And that's okay. And then you just, you, you know, you, you take it on the chin and you, you move on to another exercise, which is not easy to do, but you could also change the range of motion of the exercise, change the exercise up a little bit. too. But you could also change the range of motion of the exercise, change the exercise up a little bit. I know when I was competing that I might go and do a squat with a straight bar, do a few warm ups and be like, man, that's just not great today. You know, my back is really sore. And I was like, well, I think I could probably still get a good training stimulus for my lower body.

I am a little sore. I am a little beat up, but let me just try a different bar. Then I would slide a different bar in there and grab a safety squat bar or a cambered bar or something like that. Or maybe I would totally switch and say, you know what? I'm not going to even like I'm supposed to, I'm scheduled to max effort for that day. I'm just going to actually do a bunch of practice squats or a bunch of speed squats. There's nothing wrong with practicing your craft. There's nothing wrong with saying, okay, I was supposed to squat 315 for set to six today, but it looks like I'm just going to use like maybe 135, 185 and work on my timing. There's always stuff to work on.

We all have stuff to work on. So that could be an opportunity that you take, reduce some of the weight if you're feeling banged up and feeling a little beat up and just switch the focus, switch that focus a little bit. Like that episode that we did with Jesse Burdick when he was really able, you and him, you guys went deep on the ideas of conjugate. I think that's where conjugate really, really shines. It's not just the idea. And you hear people saying like, oh, if you're not increasing volume, you're not progressing. You're not increasing volume over time.

You're not progressing. But conjugate, you have days that you're just working on your speed and you lower that load. Right. And that, in a way, is going to allow you to progress at some aspect of that lift without going to your max or 90 percent or whatever and feeling yourself fatigued that way. Because a lot of people, they're touching 90 percent type loads every single week. Right. And they don't need to be doing that to be able to make progress. Real quick,

Mark, how was that beef stick? That beef stick was amazing. Yeah. Jalapeno, Piedmontese beef stick. Did you eat it on air? No,

but I just, I, I just noticed, I didn't see you eat it. Yeah, I know. Sneaky bastard. I ate it fast.

He didn't want us to see him with that motion. Hey, yo. Hey, yo. Yeah, that was, that was amazing. Yeah, well, I just wanted to real quick mention that, yeah, Piedmontese does have these beef

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That's my favorite one there. You guys know we talk about the other stuff, the steaks and whatnot. Did you guys know that Joe Rogan and I both had tomahawk Piedmontese steaks on the Super Bowl? Nice. Joe Rogan got his hands on some Piedmontese. Yeah. Yeah. I looked over.

I'm like, hey hey me and rogan on the same level he used a smoker so did i we use different smokers but hey they still came out amazing you're eating the same steak same steak yeah it was just really cool to see that yeah so for more information on piedmontese beef please head over to 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. Highly recommend you guys check out the Power Project Deluxe Bundle so that we get a whole array of everything that we like from Piedmontese Beef. Another thing I want to point out is that the more that you know, the more options you have to audible and to change what you're doing.

So sometimes people will be very stuck. They'll get very stuck in their programming. They'll get a program from a coach and they got their 85% on there and they maybe just haven't learned or haven't recognized that it's, it's going to be really beneficial for them to scrap an exercise for the day and move on to something else. And as we're pointing out today, you can get a lot out of a little. And I think people kind of ask like, oh, if you knew what you know now, would you change

certain things about your lifting? Yeah. And I mean, I would have tried to. I don't know if I would have even listened to myself, right? I just I like doing it the way I was doing it. But the conjugate system is amazing. But how beneficial and how much longer could I have lasted and how much stronger could I have been if I really

took the conjugate to like a different level and, and not even just a different level, but really listened to Louie Simmons, who no one ever really actually truly listens to. But if you, any book that he's ever written or any seminar that you've ever, anybody's ever gone to, you'll have heard Louie say every about fourth week, you should pull back and do something completely different. So you might do a good morning one week. You might do a squat the next, you might do a deadlift variation the next week,

week four, do something completely different, which might just be like some leg pressing or some hack squats. And they're not done in a max effort fashion. They're done. You skip the max effort work for that week and you do something, you utilize a repetition effort method, which is what we're talking about more today, which is bodybuilding. You do some type of bodybuilding for that day.

Then you get back to it. I wish I had the patience to do that. I did it a little bit on the bench. Um, but I always felt like my squat or good examples. I felt like my deadlift was too far behind to take that time to go and do that. But I knew it was the best thing for me to do. You know what I mean? Like it's, it's hard. Cause you know that these things are important. Kind of like sleep. I mean, that's the first thing that people give up when they want to get in better shape. They want to burn fat. They want to look better. Like I'm going to wake up first thing that people give up when they want to get in better shape. They want to burn fat.

They want to look better. Like, I'm going to wake up first thing tomorrow and I'm going to do cardio. And we've heard before, we've heard people say, I don't know if it's true, but I can understand where the logic comes from. You're better off with eight hours of sleep and no cardio than you are with six hours of sleep and some cardio. I can buy that. I can buy that to a certain degree.

You probably are burning more calories, but having that consistent six hours of sleep and the potential after effects of messing up your sleep forever, probably not great. Yeah. You know, I mean, when you just mentioned you should have listened to Louis more or better, I guess, what he said there just makes so much sense because it's like when when we're in it and you're trying to progress hard you think that you need to just continue going hard hard hard beat yourself and scare on beat yourself and then sooner or later somehow you're just going to magically get better without taking a back off period you know what i mean it's like

you're trying to train seven days a week forever you You can't do that. So, you know, if you think about it again, this is another way of being able to progress for the long term. If you're training hard for three good weeks, that week where you backed off a little bit is going to allow pretty much all of that to kind of set in. It's going to allow you to be able to recover well. And that might sometimes like, I think I do this this for like I do this is that if you have like, let's say, two hard months of training and let's say you were backing off every fourth week, maybe after 12 weeks, take a good two weeks and back down. Take a two week period. If you've had a pretty long stretch of hard training, take a two week period and back off a little bit.

That's going to allow you to have another good 12 weeks of training along with deloads in between. That's so important because that's going to allow you to train for the long term. Because what happens if you don't do these deloads that you're talking about is you're going to get a natural deload and that's called injury. And then you're forced to back off. You have no choice there. Yeah, then you're screwed. but if you know about things like tempo training and you know about pauses and different things uh let's say you're let's say you've been squatting the last three weeks you're getting into it you're feeling good you're getting stronger when you're getting stronger i don't want people to uh to feel that the future is always bleak and that there's always something you know know, coming up in the near future that's going to fuck you over.

But that's been my experience, especially when things are going really well. Like, you know, I'm not saying to hope for or to think about it too much, but it's probably coming. You know, there's probably something around that corner. So when and when you start getting stronger, like, is your whole body on board with you getting like really strong? Like, sometimes it's not. And so when you do a lift week in and week out and you start really making progress,

I mean, we've had people here hit like a 30 pound deadlift PR and I've kind of been a little nervous or scared for them on the next one. Cause I'm like, we already, you know, we already got what we needed, you know, like that, that today's a good day. Like let's not, you know, if we, if we, if we get the 50 pound PR, that'd be cool. But only, we'll only get the 50 pound PR.

If I think you're ready for like a 70 pound PR, we're still staying like still staying under, uh, the amount, but it's been my experience. Like I'm getting really strong. A bunch of stuff's going really, really well.

And then just tear something slightly or some sort of slight tweak. And the wheels start to kind of, the wheels start to kind of fall off. So rather than have it be determined for yourself or rather, rather than have it be predetermined based off of an injury, make the decision yourself to, a lot of times the champions are, the champions are avoiding certain things. They're not necessarily always doing certain things. It's not always about doing. Sometimes it's about the choice to not do it.

Like, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to go skiing in Tahoe when I have world championships coming. You know what I mean? Like, those little sounds weird, you know, but like, you got to be careful with some of the shit that you're doing. Pick up game of basketball might not be your best choice. Might not be your best option. You're six weeks out from a competition. You're really

excited about it. You put so much time and effort. You already put like six weeks in. You're going to blow it by shooting some hoops. Shoot some hoops after the competition is over. Yeah. What about staying motivated though? Because a lot of people they want I'm going for PR this week.

And whether they get it or not but then the next thing they want to do is like, well, shit, I did that. Let's see what else I can do. As opposed to, like, all right, we're going to get close to it, and then we're going to back off. You know, I can sense that a lot of people would just be like, I don't know, man. No, just like, it's not as pumped, you know? Yeah, exactly. Blue balls. Oh, I had no pump.

It's not as pumped, you know. Exactly. Blue balls. I had no pump. Yeah, you get kind of like the no challenge blues, you know. You don't have a challenge in front of you, and so therefore you're like, it doesn't really matter. You might not even want to go to the gym at that point because you're like, I'm just supposed to do some lat pulldowns. How lame is that?

What you can do is you can shift your focus, and let's say that you've been on a tear with your deadlifts. Things have been going really well. You're getting a little stronger. Well, that fourth week, you could do as many reps as possible on something like a pull-up. So you can amp yourself up with something. Yeah, it's not as exciting. It's not as, uh, as amazing, but there's others. There's so many other options. You can, uh, maybe increase the amount of reps or increase, um, the amount of weight that you used on like a stiff leg deadlift, like just something different, some variation.

I would just be careful with, you know, the amount of weight that you use. Cause your body is not going to really know the difference too much between a deadlift and a good morning and a squat. It's just going to know that it hurt and that it was heavy. And it's going to remember that. That's still going to sit in your system for a while. So, you know, like a great example would be to do something. So you could do something beltless, which is going to force you to use less weight. Let's say normally you train with a belt.

I love that. You can go beltless. You can utilize some tempo training and you could just have a different challenge. Say I'm going to do four sets of 10 reps, stiff leg deadlifts with dumbbells. How much weight are you going to use on stiff leg deadlifts with dumbbells? Like a hundred pounds. I guess if you're really strong, maybe you're grabbing like the 130s or 150s, but that's not good.

That's 200 pounds total as opposed to what were you deadlifting? You know what I mean? You're probably deadlifting five, hundred pounds something like that make a great example number one of keeping yourself motivated is um kelly stratt who was just here because when you heard him talking about himself when he was dead lifting right he hit four different prs on the day that we were dead lifting and the first pr started with I believe 465 new knee So that's the first time he hit that deadlift on the new knee 465 new PR his goal was hit 500 hit 500 Tell another PR I like where you going with this and then we were like, you know, it looked really good

All of us were like Kelly that was fast So I think you know we smash him we put on 525 or something right that I think we went all the way up to 550 He touched 550 none of like he went up to 550. He touched 550. Not like he went up to 550, but he touched something else before 550. 515. 515. 515. PR.

Even though he's deadlifted like six something in the past. And then we're like, fuck, that was fast. Hit 550. PR. He definitely had more in the tank, though. And you could tell. But again, you remember you mentioned that's where you could back off. Yeah, that's a good time to cut it right there.

Everybody felt good about it. He felt good. He was still safe. It's like that. That's where that's where we shut her down Exactly, but he could have this is the thing though If you see that deadlift cuz I think it's either on his IG or your IG in one of them He could have done like 30 more pounds. Yeah, but it was a great place to back off and be like I achieved this I got this this was the goal. Let's save all of that for another day. Let's go home safe. I think a lot of times we're, the main thing that we're lifting towards is, is a technical limit. You know, that's really what you want to lift towards is a, is a technical limit, some sort of an almost breakdown or a slight breakdown. Um, last set, you know, last rep, you did five to five on rep number 24 and rep number 25.

There was some breakdown there. Not a huge deal. We're probably going to be totally fine. And the more reps that you do, the more breakdowns that you could potentially have and still be safe, they're still not great. But if you did a set of 25, you could have the last five reps be a little bit shitty. You know, you don't want to get in the habit of it, but I could see a set of 25, you could have the last five reps be a little bit shitty. You know, you don't want to get in a habit of it, but I could see where, you know, you're just,

you're going for it. You're feeling it. You want something to be real intense, but just shifting your focus and having different PRS for different times is great. Kelly coming off of having an, you know, having a new knee,

having a knee replacement. Also, some people will do it in accordance to like their age, their, their birthday or their like, this is my first time doing this at 50. This is my first time doing, this is my first time in, in 2021. This is a 2021 PR, you know, I haven't, you say like, I haven't lifted that heavy in a while. So that'll get you excited too.

Cause you're like, oh yeah, I haven't really lifted that heavy since like around Thanksgiving. So this is kind of cool. Then you also can have PRS with your body weight, depending on what you weigh. You know, you can say I'm at a lower body weight than I was six months ago. Let's see what I can lift at this. And that'll get you hyped up and excited. Yeah. Walking into the gym uh this morning and it's just one of the things like i'm so grateful for everything

i've learned on this podcast uh a previous me would have definitely been like all right like it's it's go time we haven't been in here in a hot minute like let's destroy everything but like yeah no i want to be able to come back tomorrow you know like i want to be able to hang in there but yeah today it was like i had everything was a pr because it was post son's birth pr you know like that's kind of how i looked at it actually it was just like i didn't think about it but that's just what happened this morning absolutely like that that's the thing i think that's that's the big idea it's for for being able to do this for a really long time because like let's just say let's just say it's a dumbbell incline chest press and you've been trying to increase the load for a while okay so now on every single set three

seconds down three seconds up let's see where you go you start with there well your first you know workout of that is going to be a pr because you've never done that before the second workout maybe you add a little bit of weight to that because it's much lighter than what you've done before you do it successfully and you're able to actually start doing this well now you're you're progressing at being able to control the tempo of this, but you're also probably getting a little bit stronger because of the tempo training that you're currently doing. Right. So you had to back off that load, you slow things down. And in doing that, you're going to overall be getting stronger over time. Yeah. And like, is it, can you brush it with just with one stroke about like uh you know

how many weeks you should be progressing like like you always talk about progressive overload to that deload just trying to give people something to like kind of give them an idea of how long maybe they should be yeah i think the general rule is week four usually back off a little bit. That's just a three, one, three, one. Yeah. There's that's, that's normal, normal protocol. And I, I think it's based on some central nervous system type stuff and it's based on like this 21 day cycle, but, uh, it just works. It just seems to be effective.

I think you're better off. Um, I never really liked the term deload just because like when you're in athlete mode, like I don't, I don't, I didn't like such words because I felt like that a lot of people were taking that as like, let's,

let's fuck off, you know, let's not really do anything, but let's, let's make something perfectly clear. You could still be really intense on those days. You could still have a really good training session, but it just might be in your best interest to have it look differently.

Let's say that you like hitting a heavy bag or something like, well, go knock the fuck out of the heavy bag. Upper body day. You know what I mean? It's supposed to have a max effort upper body workout, but you strung together three really good workouts in a row. And you're like, oh, yeah, I should probably do something different. Be careful with it because it might again again it might be like that pickup game of basketball you know if it's something you haven't practiced in a while but also what's what's wrong with um grabbing the 80 pound dumbbells and just seeing like how many reps you can get with it

on a flat bench like last time i tried this i got 40 and you'd be sick to get 45, you know, or bang out as many pushups as you can. They won't have the same intensity, but you could still push there and your brain actually will get something different for me. Anyway, there's a huge difference between reps versus going heavy.

I get way more out of doing reps from a mental capacity standpoint, because you're not going to really give up on one. I mean, your body might give up on one rep, but your mind won't. Your mind's like, yeah, we can, yeah, you can do it. Like every once in a while, especially if you're newer and you're just getting started, you might not understand how much push it takes to do a lift. But once you're experienced, like that's gone, you're not going to ever like, uh, you're not going to really mess up just because of the weight you're going to mess up because

your, your body's like shutting down and not able to really do it. It's not really, it's not really your mind at play, but when you can't do 25 reps on a set of squats, sometimes it's your muscles, but a lot of times it's your mind. Your mind's like, yo, like, wait, what are you? You already fucking had your mind. Are you crazy? Like, what are you doing? Yeah.

And so you're, you're going to push yourself into those mindsets that I talk about where your, your brain and your mind is going to grow and expand, which is going to be a little different than what you're going to get from your singles, which you still might get a little bit of that. Because there is a big difference between seeing 315 on there and 365 versus seeing 405 on there. You get those four plates on there. And so that is something that your mind has to kind of overcome. But being able to defeat anything.

Doing supersets of like leg extensions, leg curls back and forth. And just having it feel like your legs are like internally bleeding and you somehow fucking get, you somehow muster up enough to get through it. And you're like, fuck you, you know, and you get through it all. It feels, you feel so accomplished. That's way different than just doing a single. I don't know about you. I feel way better doing, I love doing the heavy stuff. It's cool.

It's fun. But man, I feel way better after doing the higher rep stuff so use that as a challenge and use that to get you fired yeah i always feel like you can just go all out more i know that's it almost sounds backwards i think so yeah like okay like this 135 is not going to kill me therefore i'm going to keep going until i literally have nothing left and you know usually got a good spotter you You risk, uh, some muscle soreness, but you don't risk like really being fucked up. When you go heavy,

you risk being really fucked up for a while. Like where you're walking around, like you're 70 years old. What I, what I love about what you're saying. And it sounds silly, but like you're, you're giving people permission to not be like,

uh, hashtag team. No days off, you know, like you can like that shit on instagram's not real like that person like i mean we all look at michael hearn right and we every he puts he doesn't put it out there but like we know him that he's not literally going for pr every day even though what he's putting out there looks like he's like oh my gosh like i wish i could do that on a daily basis but you know i think, I think it's important because I know before I got here, I would just look at people on Instagram or YouTube and be like, oh my gosh, like I got to go hard every single

day. Like there's no way I'm going to get bigger and faster, stronger with unless I do put in like the crazy amount of work where, you know, pre-workout and all that good stuff. What's up, Power Project fam? This episode is brought to you by element electrolytes speaking of element electrolytes i actually wanted to ask you in sema you being all jacked and tan and all strong and pretty uh do you take your element electrolytes pre or post workout i actually take it uh pre during and post and sometimes i'll do more than one pack.

So if I finish the pack of Element that I had during my workout or my jujitsu session, I'll pop out another one, sometimes post. And that hydration really helps my recovery. Because sometimes after you get done with a really hard workout, when you are sweating a lot, you feel sore, you feel kind of tired, and you feel drained. There is absolutely no problem with taking more than one pack of element. Yeah. I'm really interested in trying it like a intro workout, right?

I've always, I've always been one of those guys that's like, Oh, you got to have your, your pre-workout and then your post-workout and in the middle, it's like usually water or something. Right. But now with element electrolytes from what Rob Wolf told us about how it like maintains strength and all this other, this is amazing benefits. I'm just, I'm really stoked about it. And, uh, if you guys want to be like us,

we actually like getting the value bundle because you essentially get a box for free. But if you're not ready to fully commit, Element is still offering you guys a free Element Recharge Pack. So that's an eight sample pack. All you have to do is cover the shipping. You can do so by heading over

to drinklmnt.com slash power project again it's absolutely free you just have to cover shipping make sure you guys go there and check it out right now i don't know how we got on the topic before but you were mentioning something about emoms right oh uh on the minute yeah yeah yeah yeah on the previous episode slash future episode oh yeah so yeah you you were talking a little bit about it but just think about how beneficial it would be for like a power lifter to grab a good size kettlebell and do a you know first off your your typical workouts are typically maybe you know 60 to 90 minutes some people two hours but think about doing a 15 minute emom we're trying to do every minute on the

minute do 20 to 25 kettlebell swings for 15 minutes all right it's great because it's loaded it's great because it's now getting your hips going in explosive fashion but now you're you're working out of the side of things as far as cardio is concerned yeah thinking about how good you're actually going to feel after that and how actually beneficial okay it doesn't cause as much fatigue as your normal training sessions do but that is something different that's going to allow you to progress within that deload week. Like those are things you can be doing. Well, and you also look at,

um, you know, some of what we're talking about here, you're trying to get, uh, the most out of the least in some regard. And I know that CrossFit really took a lot of things to the extreme, but let's just talk about the strength of some of these athletes.

Some of these men and some of these women are very, very strong. I know that power lifters try to dismiss it, but it's like, these are, these are drug tested athletes that I believe they're drug free. Who knows? You know, there's always people doing whatever, but the majority of the ones I've run into, I believe are, are clean. And even regardless of that, they're, they're not really huge people. You know,

you got like a 200 pound guy and you got a girl that weighs 140 or something like that these people are moving tremendous amounts of weight and i want you to think about this for a minute how are they able to move tremendous amounts of weight when they don't power lift how often do they do singles probably if you see them at a powerlifting meet maybe they get thrown that bone you know uh twice a year from their coach. Cause the coach is like, all right, time to switch it up. Single rep max deadlift. But you know, the previous week they had a single reps max clean. And the week before that they had a nine mile run or the, you know,

they just, they have a lot of different things that they're held responsible for. And then look at how strong bodybuilders are. It's a total myth. It's total bullshit that bodybuilders aren't strong. Bodybuilders are insanely strong. There might be a couple of them out there that aren't strong. And there might be some recreational bodybuilders that aren't strong. But the bodybuilders that I've run into and the ones I've known are really, really strong.

Especially just on some of your average like just assistance exercises something like a lat pull down you know there they are using the stack or full rom leg press yeah yeah yeah mike o'hearn yeah doing doing leg press um or o'hearn doing those full range of motion uh you know lateral raises that he does like all the way up over his head. Um, I mean, you know, a lot of these guys and a lot of these girls that participate in aesthetics

are, um, Jeremy Buendia guys really, guys really, like you don't get big and jacked like that. Um, I think sometimes maybe you see like in contest stuff and you see them doing the cable crossovers.

Like these guys are a bunch of pussies. Like, what are they doing? Like all they care about Like these guys are a bunch of pussies. Like, what are they doing? Like all they care about is their looks. They're not like lifting some crazy weight, but those people can, I think Jeremy actually against, uh,

against what he was supposed to do. I think ended up tearing his pack pretty bad, but it was with a 405 pound bench. I mean, what does that guy weigh? He's not that heavy. No, he's not that big.

Right. I mean, these people, they can, they can push big weight. And a lot of times it's because they utilize tempo training. They utilize a bodybuilding type method. Or in the case of CrossFit, they just built up such a capacity that they can handle some of these big weights. And, you know, one thing that I want to mention about the bodybuilders, because I know a lot of bodybuilders too. It's like if you own, if you only really focus on powerlifting and you see those athletes,

you don't realize like a lot of these bodybuilders, I know they're not consistently trying to squat 500, 600 pounds, but if they were to like a lot of them could, and they could do it really slowly with a lot of control because that's how they do almost everything. Almost all of their movements in the gym, good bodybuilders are done with great form and great control. Not, not everything's done with the three second down, three second up or anything, but they always make sure that form is key because their goal isn't to move the most weight. Their goal is to feel the specific movement in the muscle group I'm trying to work. And if I want to be able to do that successfully i cannot work with the heaviest load possible if i was trying to push the heaviest dumbbell bench i could i wouldn't only feel that in my

pec i'd feel that a little bit in my shoulder i'd feel a bit of my triceps as i'm pushing right but if i wanted to feel that on my pec maybe i'm working with 50 of my max for 12 to 15 reps and that's what these guys do all the time. And if you didn't feel it that much, you can either a, you can grab a little bit more weight. You don't need a lot more weight, excuse me,

or you can shorten your rest interval. You could change the tempo up slightly. Maybe as you're doing it, sometimes like the tempo stuff, you're just not feeling, doesn't feel great. And maybe you have to figure out something slightly different. i remember working out with honey and he just didn't care like he didn't care how we got there he just wanted you to get a crazy pump yeah um and there

was no he didn't really count reps until you were really jacked up you know he started then he started counting reps i think just to give you a goal but i remember the first exercise that i did with him at that gym up in san francisco he had me doing like I was on a machine and I was doing some some pressing he just wanted me to press to where his hands were and so I was just doing the shortened range of motion press and then he was like all right well that's not doing anything to mark because he's pretty strong with pressing motions and then so he had me do like an isometric hold where I was pushing against his hands and he was counting you know for seconds at a time you know 10 seconds and then he had me do like an isometric hold where I was pushing against his hands and he was counting, you know, for seconds at a time, you know, 10 seconds. And then he had me do the partials again.

Then I did it again. And then he was like, okay, full range of motion set at 12, you know, he was just trying to figure out like whatever way he could get me there. Yeah. And eventually it freaking crushed me. Yeah. That was some of it right there at this. And, um, so JC actually had asked on the live chat um what was the hardest part of the final month before your bodybuilding competition this workout yeah this workout killed you yeah this yeah this workout actually this day was uh there you go yeah i'm trying not to cramp up i'm like how am i going to get up this is so embarrassing i'm like how am i going to get up without cramping you had some element at that point huh you're right i know i didn't have it

at that time um actually yeah that that's actually a great thing to bring up without cramping. She had some element at that point. You're right. I know. I didn't have it at that time. Actually, yeah, that's actually a great thing to bring up. This day was really, really hard because we went up to San Francisco and Hany had something going on. It was just hard to coordinate meeting him at the exact right time. At the time, he wanted me doing 90 minutes of cardio. And we were waiting for him. So I was like, I did 45 minutes of cardio. He still wasn't around. So him so i was like i did 45 minutes of cardio

he still wasn't around so i'm like i'm just gonna keep going i guess i ended up doing all 90 minutes you know right then and there by the time he got there this is middle of summer wow i i brought change of clothes but like i went right through everything i had to buy clothes from from this gym that's right you know and it's like getting weird like i'm working out with like no undies and no socks my socks were yeah my socks were totally and completely drenched like it was just gross damn i was like my feet are gonna get like fucked up like this is strange and my shoes are getting all jacked up because this is gross but yeah i'm like squishing around in my shoes and stuff it's like why does why does Mark smell so bad? Oh, man.

Yeah. It's like my balls are right here. I don't have anything in between to block it out. Oh, God. That machine's pretty cool, whatever that thing is. Good DJ in the back looking all jacked. Yeah, he got in on this workout. Honey fucked him up, too.

Yeah, Honey's killer. Yeah, there he goes with all that shit. Like, great great but it's just like you said like the thing is is like you were just mentioning these type of workouts help you actually feel like honey was looking for you to chase the pump a lot of people dis chasing the pump but learning what will allow you to get blood to that area to feel that muscle and to control that muscle will allow you to become a better, a better lifter. Cause like,

yeah, there's a chest press, but now when you're doing back movements, like a single arm hammer strength row, a lot of people can't feel their lats doing that cause they're just loading up too heavy. Right. But if you slow down and you try to feel, where is it that I can feel my lat work?

Boom. Well now you know what you're actually trying to do there. Makes a very big difference. Yeah. And like, what's the science behind some of this? It's like, I don't know, or care, you know what you're actually trying to do there makes a very big difference. And like, what's the science behind some of this? It's like, I don't know or care, you know, it's you're trying just to have the best feel for it. I've seen like actual fistfights over this stuff in gyms because people are arguing about how your triceps aren't working the best or whatever.

Like at Westside, people like losing their mind about like how you're supposed to do an exercise. And Louie was always like, it doesn't really matter what you think of how the guy is doing it. If he's feeling it where he thinks he needs to feel it, then we're good. It's all, you know, it's all that matters. You just try and what's your intent? Do you think you're getting there? I can't really judge whether you're getting there or not because we all move a lot differently.

And so it's up to you to decide, you know? Yeah, it's up to you to decide you know yeah it's huge now again this is going to be another preface for the episode that we're going to have with brian that's going to be coming up but um a lot of us lifters whether we're power lifters or bodybuilders we definitely need to get better at breathing during our workouts because absolutely and i felt this i like i i couldn't prove it but like my recovery after all my jujitsu and my lifting sessions throughout these past few years has gotten better and better and better where at this point i can do jujitsu five times a week or six times a week i can lift three times a week i can go on and do that shit the next week again right

right whereas before i would feel like crap now I'm recovering better because I've been able to control my nasal breathing and research has come out to show that there, there are functions that happen when you're actually controlling your breathing that help with muscle repair post-workout. And if we're able to do that, think about how much better you're going to be able to recover after a hard bodybuilding session, after a hard powerlifting session. Cause we see a lot of bodybuilders lifting, like you'll see it in the gym, like you see all of this uncontrolled breathing, which leads to all this unnecessary fatigue. And you're probably getting less out of that session than you could have if you were to

control your breathing during that training session. No, I think it's, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, you're, you know, you're breathing all day, you know? And so if you're optimizing your breathing, if you're working on it, if it's something that you're developing and in the process of working, I think it's worth it. It's worth spending the time there because you have to take so many breaths in a day. And if you're inefficient with that, everything else might be off.

And it could be the same with like, you know, you hear people throw around the term like metabolic syndrome. You know, people have like metabolic syndrome, just, just basically, in my opinion, it just means that you're not healthy enough to even really get started in the right direction towards like losing weight, which might take a while. And yes, you can reduce your calories, but if you reduce your calories, sometimes for, for some people that are like that, that are in that realm, they'll just have a hard time being consistent with it. And so you have to kind of think of some different things. But going to the basics is always going to be the thing that will get you there.

And if you can get a lot out of just slowing the weight down a little bit, doing a pause, if you can get a lot from learning how to breathe better, if you can get some good results for your body, mind, spirit, just from walking, like, you know, why not? Why not do a couple of walks every day? Yeah. As we talked about in, in the upcoming podcast, we talked about just slowing yourself down for a minute and getting, getting a couple of breaths, you know,

just doing a little bit like box breathing three or four second or three or four second, inhale three or four second breathing, three or four second or three or four second inhale, three or four second pause, three or four second exhale, three or four second pause. Do that five times five and you're good. You know, how long does that doesn't really take long and it's worth it. It's worth, it's worth putting that, that practice in. And I think the heart, the hardest thing is to try to figure out for yourself,

what's something that's so simple that it's almost impossible for me to say no to? Like, that's the key. Like, what can be so simple that I know that I'll do it? Like, if you were to do the amount of jiu-jitsu you do now on day one, you would no longer be participating in jiu-jitsu. I would not. No, you would have came be participating in jujitsu. I would not. No, you would, you would, you would have came in and you'd be like, they hurt me. You would have had a different feeling about it.

You would have had a bad experience. Like you would have been really banged up and your coach would have been like, dude, I told you, you know, you should only come in like once a week or twice a week. And you know, you didn't listen to him and you just went all in on it. Same thing with coming into the gym. You go and start your workout first time ever in the gym and you you're like i've seen people do three plates before i think i can do that and that's the first thing that you try you're probably not going to be you're out of commission for months you're gonna be fucked up yeah um and and i remember this now okay there are two things that will kind of perk a lot of your ears up.

When we had Andy Galpin on with, oh, God, what was her name? She was. Oh, yeah, the one with one lung. Yeah. Kara something. Kara. Killer KO. Yeah, her last name was something special.

Oh, so close. Rem job. Almost. Uh-oh. Oh. There's. Everywhere. All right. Zevia everywhere. Now there's going to right zevia everywhere now there's gonna be monster everywhere it's not gonna be everywhere because i got oh god there is monster everywhere

wow hold you why do we mess up this studio it's cool that you guys don't clean but i know i just want to keep throwing stuff over there until you make it uh okay i was gonna mention next time you guys shoot i'm gonna have to film it from like my phone so we can post it on instagram no i remember when andy was here and we were talking about breathing and then he was like oh yeah man there's something special i have about that i'll tell you about it later because he was alluding to the fact that when people are majority breathe through their mouth which is a lot of people do during the day and they're over breathing that they burn more glucose, more carbohydrates. But when people breathe through their nose,

focusing on nasal breathing, that they burn more fat. That was in essence what he was trying to say, but he was like, I just can't prove it yet, but that's what we're thinking. And on our podcast with Brian McKenzie, he's like over breathers tend to burn more glucose,

which leads them to want to eat more carbohydrates to replenish. Right. Think about how big of an implication that has on your diet. So if in essence, you kind of may maybe focus on breathing through your nose and not over breathing, you might not have even more of a, I guess, craving or need to eat as many carbohydrates as you do currently. Think about how big of an implication that has on getting leaner. If you naturally burn more fat because you are breathing through your nose, think about

the implications of that. What if it's just a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a little bit? That's still a lot. It's still a lot. It's still a difference.

Still adds up. Cause he talked about, you know, you might be breathing, you know, nearly 30,000 times a day if you're not an efficient breather. And if you are efficient, you're breathing about maybe two thirds of that.

Right. Yeah. Right. So it's crazy. Any improvements, a hundred percent better. Right. Yeah. Right. So it's crazy. Any improvements, a hundred percent better. Right. Like if you're regressing all of a sudden, you just stop that. You're good.

That's why I'm so hype about that. That's so good. As far as progressions, like when we're talking about breathing, like he on, like he talked about like progressions as far as like just a sled focusing on pulling a sled when nasal breathing as a lifter. First off, sleds have great parry over to strength. far as like just a sled focusing on pulling a sled when nasal breathing as a lifter first off sleds have great parry over to strength but now instead of like using that sled and loading as loading up as much weight on it as possible like you were mentioning mark put on a comfortable

weight and pull the sled focusing mainly on nasal breathing i'll give you guys a real simple example of like some of the stuff that we're talking about. Um, I think it was last week, last week I did some deadlifts and I pulled a sled in between and I did a set of leg curls in between. Like I knew eventually after I did a couple of sets, I knew I would get a little, a little bit fatigued.

The amount of weight I used on the deadlift was like two 65. Like I didn't need, I didn't need any weight on there. I was kind of hoping that I would need more weight as I was warming up. I was like, Oh yeah, I'm sure I'll progress to like three plays. But after I did the full round and did the,

uh, the sled and the leg curl, I was like, if I'm really being honest with myself here, there's absolutely no reason for me to add any weight. Like this is plenty tough, you know? Yeah.

And I did six sets of it and I tried to stay on course and, um, and not, not take too long with any of it and have kind of a short rest interval. And it was also working on like a nasal breathing. And it's like, you're going to be at different points in your life with different goals. You know, my goal right now is to not necessarily, I don't care that much about like what weight is on the bar.

I care more about this being fit and feeling good. I want the workouts to allow me to feel better. Another goal is just to maintain and maybe even build up, maybe gain some hypertrophy. You know, over the last year and a half or so, I feel like my legs have gotten a lot better. I feel like I can build those up. I got some other goals with my arms and my shoulders.

And so you just, you have these goals, but then you work your way backwards from like, what's the actual goal? Because I think a lot of people are doing stuff. There's a lot of self-defeating stuff going on, which happens often. People sabotage themselves, but there's less obvious stuff that's just sitting there that would be very easy to correct. If you just put a little bit more thought into it, you're trying to have let's say you're trying to have bigger shoulders. Right. And you go to in the gym and you go to do a certain movement and it hurts and you're like, I'm going to work through the pain on this.

Stop yourself for a second. And what you know, what kind of pain are we talking about here? what you know what kind of pain are we talking about here like do you have like rotator cuff pain or something you got something really crazy going on because correct me if i'm wrong that doesn't sound like it makes a lot of sense that you want to be bigger but you're doing more damage you're doing more harm than good you know in the medical field they say do no harm like sometimes that's that's their only goal sometimes is like all right persons are already fucked up i don't fuck them up anymore do no harm sometimes that should their only goal sometimes is like, all right, person's already fucked up. I don't fuck them up anymore. Do no harm. Sometimes that should be your goal in the gym.

You go in there and you're like, oh, man, I wasn't expecting any of this to be hurting so bad. Well, maybe that's where you switch over to using cables. Maybe that's where you switch over to only using bands. We haven't really even talked about bands yet. Bands and chains. You know, maybe that's where you have an option to switch into something slightly different for the day absolutely and then exactly like bands you messer chains much more than i have i have messer chains but like i love using bands for movements because like for example the ghr like you you don't necessarily have to add a load to that

movement but if you add a band to that movement if you're trying to progress it over time let's say you've added some reps you add bands to that movement. If you're trying to progress it over time, let's say you've added some reps, you add bands to that movement, the progression, you have, you literally restart that progression and it gets harder and harder, but it's something that you can use on a lot of different movements to help out. Reverse band is great. I don't know how many people listening have ever even messed around with

reverse band techniques or a slingshot, but reverse band on a squat. I was just talking with Sully a couple of days ago about some, we were talking about some different movements and he mentioned a reverse band squat. And I was like, Holy shit, I need to start recommending that to people again. I totally forgot about that movement. I run into so many people that have hurt knees and hurt backs. And yeah,

I understand like the lift looks different and it, you might feel like you're cheating or whatever. But fuck it, man. It's squat. Like it's still a it's still a great lift. Just some of the dynamics of it are changed a little bit. You think that's going to somehow make you weaker or somehow not allow you to get any better or not allow you to have some growth in your legs? Like, why wouldn't it?

So what? The band's taken off 60 pounds out of the bottom. It's still a great resistance. Still getting all the eccentric. Yeah. It's still going to, yeah, it's still going to be challenging. Maybe it's not the most ideal way to prep for a power lifting meet. But again, aside from that, I don't know.

I don't know why you wouldn't do some of that. Actually, when I was at a say in strength a few weeks ago, I saw a guy doing hack squats. And he was doing it with a reverse band setup. And I was like, because it has an attachment for some bands. And I was like, damn, that was really smart. And so I stopped and I asked him why he was doing that. And he's like, my knees are just, he's like, my knees are kind of garbage. He's like, I love the movement.

And he had pretty big legs. He had some wheels on them. And He's like, I love the movement. And he had pretty big legs. He had some wheels on him and he was like, I love the movement. It's always worked. My legs really good, but I'm just getting older and my knees hurt. He's like, so I use the band. And he's like, the only downside is I got to pile on a ton of weight. So it just takes him, takes him a little longer to do the exercise. They put like four or five plates on each side where maybe normally he would only use

like two or three, but yeah, there's so many different ways to do this stuff, and it doesn't have to hurt, and it really shouldn't hurt. You know, when I did a seminar in Ohio, in Columbus, Ohio, this past, or just two days ago, and when I was talking, I was telling people that, you know, when they're going through their training, on a scale of one to ten, their pain level should never exceed three. And really, you shouldn't have hardly any pain when you're training. I mean, ideally, you should have none.

Every once in a while, if you're training for something, there's going to be something that's like just a little bit off and you might have to work your way through it. How much you work your way through that level two or level three of pain, though, you got to really pay attention to because you don't want that thing to turn into a four or five or be something that lingers around what if that stupid thing comes around when you prep for your next meet after that and your next meet after that like that gets so frustrating gets old really fast so you might even have to make a decision on, on, on what you want to do with that. But when I said that, the, a couple of people, you know, later asked some questions and they were like, I was really shocked when you said that. Cause I thought, I thought this is powerlifting. I thought you need to kind of, you know, lift through it. And I'm like, you do need to lift through it from a mental perspective. Yeah. You can't be, you know, you can't be a wimp about it,

through it from a mental perspective yeah you can't be you know you can't be a wimp about it but at the same time if you're if you have an actual injury you need to be really cautious you know taking even a step back from reverse bands or a regression from it isn't something that like you do all the time but it's something that like jen thompson she does uh uh the when she underacts holds yeah so to to adapt to being able to hold that type of weight above you so think about doing that with the you're not squatting but think about let's say your max is 500 and you just want to unrack 530 just to rack it like you're not going to do that all the time right but it's going to allow you to kind of get used to that feeling of that and tightening under that load on your back. Right.

Put that shit back. You know, Jen Thompson's a fucking savage. She's like 5'15 or something. I think she was doing holds with. Yeah. I remember I couldn't even comprehend what I was looking at when she was at ST doing that. It was so crazy.

Yeah. She's actually going to be on a markbell.com super friend interview coming up soon. I don't know exact date. She is so nice and she's so freaking funny. She is so funny and it was great meeting her and her husband and her husband is like she's got a

dynamic personality. She's pretty fun and she likes to talk trash and she says a lot of stuff that you're not you're not thinking that she would say, and then you kind of do a double take. You're like, huh? Uh,

but her, her husband is just very like stoic and you're like, is he okay? Is he good? But he's like a paramedic or something. He works in like an emergency room or something. So he's seen it all. So he's not,

he's not, uh, worried about amount much, but yeah, what a great, uh, what a great uh what a great couple and what an unbelievable lifter i think she's pressed uh 314 or so i think is one of her world records she has multiple world records 314 pound bench press at like 132 or maybe even 123 maybe i forget what the body weight makes no sense i mean it makes sense but like when you look at it it just doesn't

make sense I just remember her shoulders were crazy like the rest of her she looked built she looks very fit she looks great but I was like damn like okay now I can see where some of that power generated from generated from those front delts holy crap and this is where

by the way guys like with all these different types of progression that we're talking about, if you aren't taking the time to maybe just kind of record some of the things that you've done in the weight room, like write it down, put it in a notebook or something, it could be kind of hard for you to actually see that you're progressing. trying to lose, like, I guess they're trying to get in better shape. Right. And they're only using the scale, but the scale isn't moving and they're not taking measurements. So after a few weeks, they don't think they're making progress, even though their waist has gone down by six inches, right? Cause they're just not, it's not taking the time to measure things that could really make you feel that you're not progressing. But if you just take the time to write some of these things down in a notebook, you could see that, wow, two weeks ago, I did this for only three sets. This week I did it for four sets and I added five pounds.

Like, wow, that's a big deal. Right. Right. So just take the time to do this so that you can make sure and see where you're progressing. Yeah. You also don't have to perpetually chase after doing lifting more. Like you can, you know, if you had, if you had a young kid that was like 15, you just started lifting and you're like, all I want you to do is squat, you know,

uh, one 85 or something. And they use one 85 for sets of five. And then you progress them to a little bit more reps and then ultimately have them doing sets of 10. And then you have them shorten the rest period. They could use the same weight for probably a really long time and make a crazy crazy amount of progress i've noticed that for myself i noticed that with other lifters they're doing a similar weight on a lat pull down than they've been because it just it's not necessarily uh just about the weight it's also about how you do it and how you do

these lifts you start to get better at how you execute them over a period of time. You can put more into them. I was watching our boy Kenny, Kenny Kratom, do some lifts the other day. And he's 19 and he's an absolute beast. Really, really strong. Really well built kid. But he's doing these squats and he's trying to like get a feel for it. And he's trying to like do it with different stances and different in different way. And he's doing speed work for the day. And I watched him do the lift a couple of times and he's getting

some critiques. One of those days it gets to be frustrating. He's getting critique from every different person in there. Then you think everything you're doing is wrong and you're kind of hearing conflicting information and stuff. And he asked me kind of what i thought and i said well the only i said i just think i just think you're going a little bit too light you know which which i don't usually ever say normally i think people are going too heavy um but in his case he's still a novice lifter he's still fairly new so he doesn't know how i know he's oh he's he's no he's an absolute he's an absolute mutant he's a total freak and he like doesn't even he has no i he has no acknowledgement that he's a mutant that is so funny but it's true he yeah he he's like a uh i don't want to go

that far and say he's like a young john cena but but like, he kind of is like a young John Cena. He kind of is right. He's just like, Oh, like, fuck dude, come on. Yeah. Yeah.

He probably, I mean, yeah, John was a mutant from forever, but you know, uh, Kenny is, uh,

is jacked and he's got some good size on him. He's got a lot of strength. And I think he's, so part of my point here is that he's trying to do what everybody else is scheduled to do but he's fucking different than all of them i mean he just he is right like he's just different and so i'm like you know he's using like 320 pounds for his squats i'm like i think he'd need like 365 he's like really but the whole reason was is that the weight that he was using wasn't challenging him enough and if if you're an advanced lifter,

if you're a really advanced lifter, you could take 185 pounds and make it feel like a million pounds. And you could put tons of force into it and you can get down on the bench and you can explode into the lift. Like, like somebody has never seen before. And then somebody else can go, what the hell was that? Like,

that was crazy. When you're new, you don't know how to do that. You don't know how to. So you you don't know how to so what i was seeing with him is like it wasn't like he was really getting lazy he's not even on the right turn but the weight just wasn't challenging enough for him it wasn't challenging him him to get tight uh he's not able i guess my main point here is that he wasn't able to recruit the motor units the motor fibers that he needs in order to be able to flex as hard as he

wanted to in order to do the lift the right way and the quickest thing that would help him the best is just to add more weight to it yeah no absolutely that that that makes a lot of sense but what i what you said that i was like um that's super true is that like yeah no when a lifter does become more advanced they they know how to get more out of less weight like yeah absolutely person you think about mike but like um it's almost like you know i was mentioning that okay you want to have a notebook so you can make sure you're progressing there also needs to be a sense that you need to you need to chase the feeling too like you need to focus on okay this session

did if this was another back session did i feel this as much in my my mid back my upper back my rear delts that the way the you know what i was trying to aim for did i feel all those movements there or do do my rear delts not feel activated today for some reason okay why is that maybe i was actually going too heavy so okay let me lighten that load and focus on the rear delts instead and get that feeling because at the end of the day you're trying to work on certain muscle groups there's not just the volume you're doing feeling. Because at the end of the day, you're trying to work on certain muscle groups. There's not just the volume you're doing, but there's also the feeling of fatigue in the muscle group.

And you got to pay attention to that. And if you're not feeling it there, you're doing something wrong. Right. And there's ways of getting, you know, more and more from your training through range of motion. As we were talking about in the beginning of the show,

don't forget that the more that you move the weight, the more that more volume that adds to your workout as well um i think we all love to work hard we all love to like you know get into these workouts and have a really uh brutal workout i was mentioning to somebody a couple days ago i'm like oh yeah i did like you know a few sets of like 60 reps or something i just said it in passing you know i just i there's just something i I just kind of threw out there. Cause we were talking about different rep schemes. And then they, they told me like a couple of days later, they're like, man, I couldn't walk. And I was like, how many, I was like, Oh, well,

how many sets do you do? Cause we didn't really talk about it. I just mentioned it. Like, I don't know. I did like eight sets. And I was like, Oh, I was like, I only did one. Yeah. I was like, I did. I was like i only did one eight sets to 60 yeah i was like i did i was like i did i did i did one hard set i did it on uh i did one hard set on a um a leg press and one hard set on like a hack squat or something like that sounds like doug foucher yeah it was yeah it was just yeah right just yeah get just yeah that's that's right it sounds like uh doug foucher's workout from charles glass right 60 uh yeah freaking eight sets 60 so i was like damn but you know when you're increasing range of motion on some of these movements you're going to be increasing the volume if you're adding

repetitions to it that's when you got to bring the sets down it's all you know it's it's all fairly simple to understand and to grasp but the main main thing on a lot of this is it's pretty easy to get a lot out of a little. And you can think up your own ways on how you can screw yourself over to make the lift harder. Throwing on some fat grips is a great example. 135-pound deadlifts are really easy. All right. Well, what if we, uh, what if we did a deficit deadlift? What if we did a snatch grip deadlift? And what if we use the fat bar now, 135 pounds, even though it's light, what if we did sit, what if we did three sets of 30? Now we might be in trouble. It's like, can I hold onto that for

that long? You're like, I don't know. I might need to use 95 pounds instead of 130. So quickly the dialogue becomes way different where you're like, Ooh, I don't know if I could hold on to that double overhand for how many reps. Like I never tried it before. I don't know. And it's a safer way to make a progression because you're just not working with the astronomical load that you shouldn't be handling. That's what I've been trying to tell Andrew this entire time, but he's not listening.

Nope. Sitting over there thinking about his baby yeah selfish yeah no no again like i just i just sometimes think back i know you mentioned like is there anything you change and you mentioned like the the backing off that or yeah those back off louis was talking about i think it wouldn't hurt me it wouldn't hurt you no i think that like i was pretty okay at not attacking heavy loads when i shouldn't but i would back off even more those that's the thing i would change i would have a little bit more reserve on when i worked with those loads um because there were points where

i definitely shouldn't have done that i can like i can remember the days where i was just like oh shit i shouldn't have touched that load i know it's probably hard to imagine with jiu-jitsu because you're in it you know but would it be a good idea just every once in a while like pull up to jiu-jitsu get everybody hop in your car and just go do something completely different just hey look we're all gonna go for a walk today instead like everyone be pissed because they want to train or i know a lot of the guys there don't lift you know so hey i'm going to teach everyone how to lift or something, just something totally different than what they're used to.

No, that, that wouldn't be a bad idea. You know, like, like I, I've told you guys about this and I spawn a lot of creativity. I bet, I bet you guys would get talking about like, if you went on a hike, it sounds ridiculous, but you take the whole, the whole squat on like a hike, you guys would probably just start yapping away at some point about some new hold or whatever. And that would have been something that you probably wouldn't have talked about if you were in class because you were like the people have anxiety over the drills oh shit i gotta face and

sema again like you're thinking about all these different things yeah you're focusing on the same things all the time and no what you said there like makes total sense because it's like when i i've mentioned this to both you guys outside but when i notice like when i'm training training training and then when I have to take some time off because like, I just can't go to the session. The next time I come back, new things are thought up. But I even remember, like I had that thought yesterday because I trained on Monday, Tuesday, today's Thursday. No. Yep. Yeah.

I trained Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. That's great that you got that. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. But no, I monday through wednesday and yesterday on wednesday i was thinking i'm like this would have been a bad day just not to train just because i was i was a little bit stale with what i was doing like a lot of the things that i was doing on the mat i was just like feeling there's no there's no nothing really different going on here okay i'm gonna take a day off not train tomorrow and just

like you know get my mind off of it and then like like i noticed when i do that when i come back maybe i have a fresh perspective on maybe to do new things right and i think that that's exactly what you're mentioning there it's like you can't just keep attacking something over and over and over again you gotta do some different things so that that thing can have a chance to progress yeah sometimes you don't feel like it. Don't go. Don't go. Yeah.

If you're somebody that's trying to develop a habit, you have a different set of rules, a different set of circumstances. And if you're getting out of the gym a lot and you're trying to get a rhythm, you might need to go for like 90 days straight. Like you might need to, you know, you might need to go a lot. You might need to go six days a week for a long for a little bit until you kind of get over that hump but in general if you're just like man i don't know i just don't go don't go i was talking to somebody at the seminar too about uh

their diet and i was like what's your main? Because this woman is probably like 55 years old, looks great. She does some power lifting, trains with Matt Winning. And I was like, you already look like you're in pretty good shape, but she wanted to be in better shape. You know, just like the rest of us trying to always get better. And I was like, well, where's the weakness? Like, what's your poison, you know? And she's like, I just have a sweet tooth. I just love.

Okay. Okay. What's the sweet tooth? Like? And she's like, I just have a sweet tooth. I just love, okay, what's the sweet tooth? Like, what food are we talking about? She's like, I like chocolate. I like ice cream. I was like, I love all that stuff, too. It's amazing. And I said, well, what about, I said, what's, like, where do you get this from?

Like, is this just sitting in your house or something? She's like, yeah, I buy it here and there. I said, okay, well, you can avoid buying it, right? And maybe you can just buy it here and there and make it part of your diet rather than it's like this wrong thing to do when you desire it and it's sitting in your fridge and sitting in your pantry. And she's like, I think I can do that. And I said, well, let's just do it right now. Let's just pick a couple days. When do you feel like eating this stuff? She's like, it think I can do that. I said, well, let's just do it right now. Let's just pick a couple days.

When do you feel like eating this stuff? She's like, it's usually on the weekend. I said, all right, well, two days in a row, probably not great. Let's see if we can spread it out. How about, which day is better, Saturday or Sunday? She's like, Saturday would be great. I said, all right, Saturday, have a piece of chocolate and or some type of ice cream. I was like, be reasonable with it. I'm not going know, like just I was like, be reasonable with it.

I'm not going to tell you the amount, but just be reasonable with it. And then, you know, the next or and then another day, like pick like a Wednesday or something, something in the middle of the week. So you're not feeling like an urge for it and see how that works out. A lot of times you got to just you have to placate to what your body is trying to tell you that you want rather than, rather than smacking yourself on the wrist and being like, dude,

I can't believe you fucked that up again. Like, why are you acting like this? Why did you, why'd you eat? Why'd you eat all that food from the pantry? Like, what are you doing?

It were, we tend to be like really mean to ourselves when we're in situations like that. But imagine if you can, cause not everyone's the same. Like for some people, this is a slippery slope. Imagine just opening up the playbook a little bit and saying like,

this is an option. You can do this here and there. And I think over a period of time, if you're practicing a lot of the stuff that we talk about on this show, there'll be a lot of times where you're making such good progress where you're not going to want to. You're going to be like, ah, I ate my protein for today. I got my walks in.

I got some training in. I feel pretty good. I have a little bit of an opportunity to cheat on Saturday. I'm just going to wait until Saturday rather than do it on Wednesday or whatever. You know, just incorporate it. Yeah, it's important to not look at food as good or bad, right? Yeah, I think it can be, yeah. Just incorporate it. Yeah. It's important to not look at food as good or bad. Right. Yeah. I think,

I think it can be. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I mean, like right now, like I can have whatever, cause I don't have anything scheduled. Like it's not bad,

but if I had a photo shoot next month and you see me eating pizza and be like, dude, that's not going, that's, it's not helping you. You're hurting yourself right now. Like then.

Yeah. That's, that's bad. Like I get to slap on the wrist. Well, you could even just attach a rule to it though like just not that having pizza would be productive towards getting it towards a photo shoot but having a slice you know totally can you do it though like that's the hard part is you have to know yourself you know know thyself you have to know yourself. Can you, can you do that? It's a, it's a recommendation, but it's not a one size fits all. It might not work for, it might not, might not work for everybody, but there are a lot

of people that can do that. And if you had another day scheduled where it was like two, three days later, you got to do something again. It might be a little easier for you to be like, I had the one that was good. And if you only know that you have like a portion like we talked about the half of the ben and jerry's if and i got a technique for you guys it's great okay if you if you know about a portion size that you that you have and you understand that it's still it's still available in your future you might be pretty pumped about it you know so okay let's hear this

technique yeah let's hear this i swear to god i think females have the funniest perspective when it comes to foods and when it comes to food this one girl at the seminar uh i was i was i told i talked about how you said that you uh put your ben and jerry's back and i and i thought to myself like man that's really weak like he's falling he's going poor guy's going downhill and then i found myself doing the same thing like not even necessarily because i wanted to but i i felt like i i felt like i should you know i was like i don't really need the rest of it it tasted good enough you know man i'm a pussy so i you know put the other half back in the uh freezer so i talked about that during the seminar and a girl

came up to me afterwards and she goes you know what i do she's like with uh with ben and jerry's or anything that tastes really good she goes i just destroy it i was like that's what i used to do i used to destroy the whole thing she's like no no i eat like half of it she's like and then i just pour soap all over it and i and i wash it out and i throw in the garbage no she's like i have to destroy it so that i won't touch it again she's like i know that i'm gonna eat it later on that is actually a really good idea if you know yourself like you were just mentioning destroy it i know you're destroying some yummy food that's delicious and uh but look man you know that it's gonna cause some harm to you so you might as well just fucking destroy it

light it on fire yeah that's brilliant not Not very cost effective, but. Great job. Whoever you are, I think we figured out something for a lot of people. Yeah. Was that amazing? Yes. It's like. You're just like. Just spit in your foot. Then you move the spit to the side.

I could work around that. I know these people, the Kenrise, Eric and his wife. Family food dude. They like to go and eat different types of donuts. But they will buy dozens. They will take a bite and they will throw it out. They will take one bite to taste the donut and they'll throw out everything else. You got to throw it out next to rotten meat or something.

Across the cold track. Because if it's still in the box here you can easily die when they the garbage ain't that bad oh my god it's next to a diaper i don't know it's my garbage though you know if it was someone else's it'd be weird yeah when i heard that i was like how could you but you know after a while i was like that's actually really self-aware dude we need to go we need to go like eat donuts and like take a bite of one and then put them on a table and then punch them. But you'll just eat the... Get your germs all over it or something, you know?

Rub your hands all over it. It's my germs. No, I know, but we got to do it to each other's. Well, it's just each other's germs. So like I said, it's my germs. Yeah, we are... We have kind of morphed into one giant Mexican white black person. Yeah.

Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty much what this is now. That's what this is. No one's listening though, right? It's gotten better. No one's listening.

No. Oh, there's a good amount of people on the live stream. I mean, I think there. Is Bill on there? No, Bill said he had to leave. Oh. Talking about Bill. Bill Belichick's about to be super useless.

What's he doing? What happened? What? What happened? I mean, okay. So think about this. talking about bill bill belichick's about to be super useless what's he doing what happened what i mean okay so think about this tom brady just and i've done some research since because football is not my greatest subject mad i think he's pissed i think he's absolutely pissed because dude all right all this time everyone's like oh my god he's just been great because he's had this great coach then he goes to this fucking random team brings a few of his teammates it's like oh my god he's just been great because he's had this great coach then he goes to this fucking random team brings a few of his teammates is like let's win another one guys and he does yeah now bill better win a super bowl next year or else everyone's gonna be like he was the most overrated coach of all time yeah the uh the patriots kind of sucked yeah for a big part

of the year they pulled it together a little bit towards the end but they kind of sucked he's gonna cheat probably a lot more coming up oh didn didn't they do something for the balls or something and stuff yeah yeah every time they yeah a couple things they did a lot dude south park had the funniest skit on them they were like let's let's not try to cheat this year let's you know let's do it like let's be legit he's like and then what happened he's like they lost he's like so shit yeah nobody cared about them anymore but dude I'm like again I don't know crazy amount of football but like I did a lot of like

looking up and stuff on Tom Brady recently and I'm just like god damn this man like pick 199 can you go to his Instagram Instagram's fun so I mean Tom Brady's done a lot of cool shit in his life uh-huh but he has a he has a picture where i'm like i'm like that's fucking awesome

i'm curious what is this um i don't know if we'll see it right here if we don't i'll just describe it but i think we'll find it keep scrolling scrolling scrolling you're such a good scroller i just don't want to go too fast anybody ever told you that before no i don't want to be remembered for uh well i mean yeah yeah we got the motion down you know think about what you're doing when you're scrolling andrew just think about your finger real quick okay that's all we need to talk about there let's look for this picture oh no that finger's tired I gotta switch over and I'm still good with it. He's got a pretty good

Instagram going here. Yeah. I'm not seeing it. Anyway, he just had this sick picture of him and his family on the beach and it's just like, it's just this. Oh, I did see that. It's like, it's like of their, it's like from behind, right? And you see the

kids and like everybody looks perfect. And then there's his wife is just smoking and I'm like, I'm like of their, it's like, uh, from behind. Right. And you see the kids and like, everybody looks perfect. And then there's his wife is just smoking. And I'm like, I'm like, this is better than any Superbowl trophies. Got like, this is fucking sick. He's got this picturesque family with this, uh, supermodel wife. I'm like, yeah, I'm like, this is, this is some victory right here. Yeah. And the dog in the shot and everything.

Oh, it's awesome. That's wonderful. Mm. Man, that guy has it all. He's got it's awesome. That's wonderful. Mm hmm. And that guy has it all. He's got all those rings. He's getting all hammered. Hey, what's up with Facebook? You hear about Facebook?

No, I don't know. They don't like us. That's not to say fat anymore on there. Are you kidding? I swear. I think I don't know what happens to you. Is that hate speech now? I think so.

I think so. She I don't know what happens to you. Is that hate speech now? I think so. I think so. She ain't fat, bro. Wow. No, that's, that's, that's really stupid. And you're not even allowed to say it about yourself. Which I think was already kind of happening on Instagram. What if you go to Fat Burger or you have one of those, those ice cream sandwiches? Oh, yeah. i think those are just

called fat boys right or am i maybe imagining things fat burger why you should stop using these facebook okay no where do you know fat well i'm not honestly not even surprised by by that just because all these companies are trying to uh they're trying to control the things you say and if you say something it might not be something that they think is right. So they'll censor you. Yeah. So it's not very productive to call somebody else fat. You know, it's not very productive to call, not really productive to call anybody names

necessarily. However, every once in a while we hear about people that were called names and they end up being successful because they like were like, fuck that. I'm going to go the opposite direction. Or they, you know, later discovered that wasn't true or something like that. But I think that I think that the effort or what these companies are trying to do, I don't think is bad necessarily. What's really tough, though, is when you're a consumer and then someone pulls something away from you, you're like, wait, what? Like, why can't i do that anymore um and i i don't know what i don't know what the main

thing is that they see about fat but uh maybe it's in a different context than what we're thinking because like if you're trying to share with people on how they can be less fat or you're trying to even talk about yourself and say hey i used to be really fat i didn't love that and or you're trying to even talk about yourself and say, Hey, I used to be really fat. I didn't love that. And I, I'm trying to move in another direction. Um, but I guess maybe, you know, it, it, maybe it falls into a category that we don't understand quite yet.

Cause some, like, uh, when I was a kid, it was very common to say gay, like, Oh, that's gay. And you don't say it anymore because you're like, well, that upsets a subset of people. And there's really no reason for me to use that. I didn't really even mean or know exactly what I was saying. Exactly. Just but but it was derogatory, like make no mistake about it. It's derogatory and it could be offensive to some people.

So I choose now just to not use it. I just don't I just don't say it. Um, and it's up to each individual to, to make that decision. But I think when a company pulls a word away from you, then you're like, Oh, I don't know about that. I can't say gay anymore, or I can't make a joke with a friend. Like if it's amongst two friends and you talk like that here and there, whatever words it is that you say amongst your family, amongst your friends, those are words that everyone's in agreement with that these are okay. Yeah. Normally, right? Yeah.

And so on Facebook, we could have a message back and forth. I could say something. You could be totally fine with it, but now somebody else is censoring it. And that's where it gets to be really weird. This is the thing. And this is why the stuff so often, I'm going to use your example of, oh, that's gay because you know, I'm, I'm, I'm going to say I was guilty of that in, you know, high school, middle school, people would say that everyone would say that, but over time, like you, like you learn, Hey, that's actually not the best thing to say. Like, and why do you learn that? Because somebody reprimands you publicly for saying it.

Not because a company takes away your ability to say that word. And you're like, what? Oh, OK. I'll do it over here in a shadowy corner. Well, and furthermore, somebody educates you on why. Like, hold on a second. Let's talk about why. Yeah.

Let's talk about why it's bad to say it that way. You know? And then you're like, fuck i'm sorry like i didn't i didn't know i didn't mean and like i maybe you kind of halfway knew but now you really understand you're like all right well i'm gonna change the way that i'm gonna work on it you know it's not a work in progress yeah it's not a good idea to take away people's agency to say things because what happens happens is now these people who are taking away their speech are going to go and they're going to find their own place where they can say all the shit that they want to say. But now no one else knows what's going on and they won't be reprimanded for it. Just like all these people with unpolitically correct ideals.

Hey, if they put something out there, the court of public opinion is going to come in and say, hey, and have a conversation about it. That's not OK. That is a great example of it all is like, has racism gotten a lot worse in the last two years or has it just been shown a little bit more? Has it been exposed a little bit more, which is what really fucking positive so that we can talk about it more? It's great. You know, there's a lot of things that suck about it, but it's great that it's did all

of a sudden, like a bunch of Americans become more racist. You know, maybe some people believe that because because of Trump or whatever they want to whatever the QAnon weird stuff going on. I don't believe that to be true. I think all that happened was there was a lot of situations that got exposed. People started talking about it more. And now we're overcorrecting, you know, in another direction, which happens quite a bit and probably long overdue.

And by another year or two from now, we'll probably be in a better spot for it. There's a lot of public education going on because things were allowed to be said and shown. But now if it's taken away, who knows what, who knows what's going to be wrong. They're just going to, you're going to have people doing their things somewhere else, and they're going to think they're okay. This company fucked them, but they won't be able to be shown why they're wrong or maybe why it's okay. It's stupid to me. Stop censoring speech. Just don't.

They'll all go to parlor, and then that will get shut down. Parlor will get shut down, too. I went to listen to something one day. A guy was talking about slavery and he was talking about it's his belief that it's that it that it wasn't a form of racism. And I don't know what I don't know in what context. I don't know what he was talking about exactly. I don't know if he's talking about slavery here in the United States or somewhere else.

I went to go look at it. It was taken down. And I'm like, I would like to learn more. Like, what was this guy's point? What was he trying to say? Like I was interested to kind of hear it like like it to me. It's this to me It doesn't it didn't really make any sense But I wanted to learn more about it because maybe he's got a point there. I I don't have any I don't have any idea Now I'll never know That's the thing like you you got to give people the ability to agree or to disagree with it.

Because if his point was like, um, it wasn't a form of racism because every single culture had slavery. Well, one thing to think about is like other cultures that had slavery enslaved their own people, right? There is a difference between bringing a boat of people, a specific colored people from one country and enslaving them only versus being in Greece and enslaving a boat of people, a specific colored people from one country and enslaving them only versus being in Greece and enslaving a bunch of other Greeks. There is a difference.

Right. And you go back to, you know, what we've we've talked about on the show before about like, what is racism? Like, what what does it mean? And that would be the very definition, because these other people, for some reason, think that they have agency and control over these other people that they don't think can do similar types of work and they're not allowing them to be free. They're enslaving them. They think they're intellectually inferior because of what they

look like. That is racism. And I think that part doesn't get talked about enough. I think everything is always brought up as being racist. And you're like, I don't really know if that's necessarily falls into the definition. I know what people are talking about. You know, sometimes it's, um, sometimes people are being selective with who they hang out with.

And there's a lot of other things, uh, that are awful that aren't necessarily a hundred percent racist all the time. They don't always fit the exact bill. Um, but I think talking about all this shit's great. Yeah. I love formats like this where we get to talk about it. You I think talking about all this shit is great. Yeah. I love formats like this where you get to talk about it.

You get to hear Joe Rogan talk about it. You get to hear other podcasts talk about these things. And hopefully people can let it rip and not. Please. Yes. Not get over censored. You know, I think we're still in jail of some sort. Yeah.

Yeah. Which I don't even really know why. Like, we're not that controversial. I don't think. We had some guests that said some things that the algorithm didn't like. Yeah. Yeah. Which I don't even really know why. Like, we're not that controversial, I don't think. We had some guests that said some things that the algorithm didn't like. Yeah. The old COVID-19 thing, huh? Yeah.

Now we're back. No, just kidding. We got a bleep mark saying that. I know, right? No, I think, I don't know. It's weird getting in and out of jail, YouTube jail. But doing everything we can to get back out everyone watching the live stream you guys are helping us out right now so we appreciate

that appreciate y'all hell yeah take us on out of here andrew i will and actually since we're we did we did two a days we're gonna read off another comment and this one is pretty interesting this one's from so hey now on the community tab we just said last comment on this post gets a shout out on air and we said maybe we'll read what you post and this one's just funny this one's from dj not our dj another dj oh wow says winner is the first person to not jump or flinch when the other person touches their leg i love stuff like that i was gonna say it too i think this is some some college days in sima type stuff we ain't going into that experimental phase i mean We ain't going into that. Experimental phase. I mean.

Let's not talk about fireworks. So many DMs from dudes. Who's the guy with the shampoo bottle in his pants? We gotta have him on the show. He might be in sec. I don't know. Just have a podcast

about his giant dick. It was like this, right? Yeah. It was about that length. Little, not as thick, but about that length. Yeah, it was disgusting. Oh my God. Yeah, dude.

You serious? I'm not even joking. Oh, whoever he's with now. Poor man. Suffering. Yeah. He's coming back to the wiener. Yep. On that note uh thank you

everyone for checking out today's episode uh please make sure you're following the podcast at mark miles power project on instagram at mb power project on twitter and shout out to pete montes response this episode code power project at checkout for 25 off your order links down in the description and podcast show notes my instagram is at i am am Andrew Z. So is my Twitter and SEMA. Where are you at? And SEMA and Instagram and YouTube. I didn't see my union on Mark at Mark's Millie Bell. Strength is never weakness.

Weakness, never strength. Catch you guys later.