Mark Bell's Power Project - From Gladiators to Ultramarathons: The Ultimate Guide to Building Mental and Physical Strength - James Pieratt || MBPP Ep. 1128

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

In episode 1128 of Mark Bell’s Power Project Podcast, hosts Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza hang out with James Pieratt to dive deep into the art of building mental and physical strength. From the timeless training secrets of gladiators to the extreme endurance required for ultramarathons, this episode is packed with practical insights for anyone looking to improve their health, fitness, and mindset. Get James' new book now: https://amzn.to/4i0LSSHFollow James on IG: https://www.instagram.com/wildhuntconditioning/Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.liveJoin The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qNSubscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUwSpecial perks for our listeners below!🥜 Protect Your Nuts With Organic Underwear 🥜➢https://nadsunder.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 15% off your order!🍆  Natural Sexual Performance Booster 🍆 ➢https://usejoymode.com/discount/POWERPROJECTUse code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎➢https://emr-tek.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained:   ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast➢ https://www.PowerProject.live➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerprojectFOLLOW Mark Bell➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybellFollow Nsima InyangFollow Nsima Inyang ➢ Ropes and equipment : https://thestrongerhuman.store➢ Community & Courses: https://www.skool.com/thestrongerhuman➢ YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=enFollow Andrew Zaragoza➢ Podcast Courses and Free Guides: https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz/➢ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamandrewz#PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

What have you tried or what have you learned from these historical contexts that you've applied to what you do in training? Like everything. The gladiator training was a lot of your typical athletic lifts, like this gladiator deadlift. I've had scoliosis my whole life. This thing completely unlocked my back. Gladiators in general are fascinating because when I reconstructed the training, it kind of resembled modern athlete training. Like there were sprints, tons of plyometrics.

Did any of these cultures talk about rest or recuperation or recovery? Ancient sports nutritionists would talk about how you should eat mildly before you train, but athletes should sleep extra. And I was like, like that's bulletproof information. They also used hot and cold therapy. They used mobility. But it's important to remember we get our scientific institutions from the ancient Greeks. Bad diets too.

So it would have been right around 480 BC. There was this guy who was actually a runner who went completely carnivore and won the Olympics. And after that, the next Olympic games, everyone showed up. Half the runners were carnivore and no one had ever done it before. Does it make it noticeably harder to run if you are a little heavier or is the progression of getting heavier like slow enough to where maybe doesn't matter a ton for you? You get a bit of both. So you can definitely tell that you're heavier when you're running. Um, also if you're slow, like me makes less of a like performance based difference, but

you can definitely, you're definitely heavier. Um, on the other hand, if you are like too light, like, you know, you don't want to be running around like 6% body fat, especially doing like the wilderness ultras that I do, where it's like, okay, I'm, I need enough body fat to get through camp, and then get through, you know, a multi day event a week, the two weeks were longer, at which point, I know I'm going to be losing a lot of weight in the process, like, you know, so I've had to actually do two separate fat bulks, six and eight pounds of body fat just

intentionally, which is actually kind of challenging when you're training and doing all that, just to prepare for events. Maybe a little bit more common than people think, right? Because if someone's gonna do a specific type of swim, someone's gonna do a specific type of run or some sort of venture across the United States, they may gain a little bit of body fat going into that.

Yeah, so my buddy, Zach Bitter, and I were recently talking about this on his podcast, but like one of the, if you're going to be doing these, like, um, cause I'm getting, right now getting ready to start training camp for a 1000 mile run. And so, yeah, yeah. The goal is if everything goes well, I'll be one of the, one of the very few. Bullshit dog. Why do you do this shit? Well, if the goal, I do. I truly love it. I can't like, I truly love it.

I do. You do? I do. I can't like, it's not, I can't take credit for like the hard part of it. Like even, you know, I know it's like a lot of like running influencers and motivational people. It's, they talk about, you know, how it's important

to like cultivate a savage mindset by doing this thing you hate called running. And I can't relate to any of that, because I love what I do. You're beyond all that. No, it's just, I mean, it's hard, but it's enjoyable. We've all tasted that. It's what you chose, what you chose to enjoy to do.

Well, and I think that's also an important thing when you talk about how hard something is or isn't. I mean, if you signed up for it and chose it of all the jobs in the world, you chose that as your job and you show up every day and just kind of talk about how hard it is. What does that make you? You know, so that at least that's my, my perspective on that. And so I just, you know, but the truth is I love it.

So if all goes well, I will be one of a very small number of human beings on planet earth that's run a thousand miles in a single effort. Yeah, four, four digits. For the others. There's some people, Timothy Olson is one I know off the top of my head. He's a guy who did, for a while he held the record

for the Pacific Crest Trail. And the way that he ran that was pretty much continuous all the way through. I mean, not, he was stopping along the way as you have to, you know, just for simple bathroom, food, little bits of sleep when you're talking. He was running for like 50 something days. Um, so it's like stuff like that, but yes, like that would qualify as a single effort. You know, it's, there's also some, you know, the alternative would be like stage races, like,

Hey, you know, it's, um, on day one, we're going to go here. Day two, we're going to go there. And it's like, you know, planned out some of those can get kind of longer because it's a little more measured and the daily outputs are a little less whereas what I do is just basically run, plan to stop at night for some amount of time to switch out supplies and you and I run quite the opposite. I know you you ran like unassisted like 500 miles right? Yeah yeah stay to Oregon. So like in my fanny pack, there's like little things of honey in there. There's electrolytes in my car.

I have like extra water. I got like rations. I got stuff like all over the place. Cause I'm terrified that something weird will happen. I'm like a run. But when you're going out there, I mean, I know you are packing. It's not like you're not packing stuff

to make sure your performance is good, but you are going without like meeting up with anybody and all that kind of thing. So the way I do it is either unassisted or semi-assisted. So unassisted would be like many of the events that I've done where we just bury cachets of food ahead of time or even have them mailed to like small town post offices that I'll be passing near that I can divert and go resupply. Whereas this last one I did when I ran across the hottest desert on earth, the Sonora desert, that one was a little bit of both because there was a certain amount of access point for the film crew, you know, to follow and make their documentary.

And then there was also like my crew to bring water and, you know, drop things off. And then we also buried like we had cach bring water and drop things off. And then we also buried, like we had cachets of steak shake powder, literally just buried throughout the desert along with like glycogen powder and like jerky and peanut butter. Imagine if a bear came across that, he'd get all jacked. He would, super jacked. And so it's like, I would know where these are.

And then I had a phone with me. My customer service people, they were like, this guy needs this much protein powder. I'm like, he's going pretty far. I was like, he probably does. And then, yeah, no, they didn't. They hooked it all up. That was, like I said, I was sipping it

like just the whole way. But. And then how did you come up with some of that? Because I know that you have, I know that you're into like the warrior side of things and the ancient times and how people used to train and stuff but there's also a lot of sophistication that goes into staying hydrated properly during these runs and stuff.

And so who helped you come up with a game plan and how do you game plan for some of these insane adventures that you're doing? I can't take all the credit. Honestly, I have my nutritionist Jordan Sullivan is, he's also the nutritionist, uh, Israel Adesanya, Alexander Wolkonovsky, Leon Edwards, a lot of the big UFC stars. So the reason that I sought him out and brought him on as my nutritionist, not just cause

he's the best in terms of performance, but he's an expert in performance while depleted, particularly dehydrated, um, like fighters have to go through in their weight cuts, prepare for a fight and which inevitably also have, I know, I've lost 20 pounds of water over the course of a run before. And I mean, you're replacing it as you go. So by the time you're done, you're only eight or 10 pounds lighter, but adding it all up. And so we track things like that fluid loss, hydration. And then I also work with a group called Scratch Labs out of Boulder, Colorado, and they're

experts. They're owned by a guy named Alan Lim, and he is actually the one of the cycling coaches for the US men's national team. And so he's again, an expert in endurance outputs. And they produce hydration products, right? They do, like glycogen, primarily glycogen based stuff. So you know, you get your cluster dextrose with a little bit of salt and some, you know, different mixes and stuff like that. So just able to, you know, stuff I'm able to drink while I'm on the move. And then I'm also somewhat known for raw milk

and ginger ale being primary fuel sources while I'm running. Mixed together? No, no, no. Oh, thank God. Separately, separately. I just, I love milk and it has everything you need., no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Yeah, so the bubbles help with your gut in general, sort of a ginger, obviously, very good for the stomach. It helps with the queasiness. It also helps like, keep my appetite going, keeps my stomach balanced, keeps the nausea away, especially if like, again, running across the hottest steps on earth. The biggest thing, like my body was pretty well adapted to like the sensation of heat,

like I wasn't overheating and it felt like I was gonna collapse, but I just lost my appetite repeatedly. Cause it's like, I mean, if anyone who's been in like a super hot situation, you know what I mean? Just all day out in the sun, like it's, you don't really feel like, like sitting down all of a sudden and just putting a bunch of food in your dehydrated gut, you know? So that was definitely an issue. But again, we plan for these things, you know, with Jordan was scratch.

Um, and we, you know, we make a strategy because like you always want to perform well as an athlete, but when it's like, hey, if I mess this up, I could die or end up out here or have some miscalculation, you tend to be a little bit more particular in how things go. Let me ask you this, man. We were just taking a walk, the Fab Four is the other day looking at Christmas lights and we ran into somebody who did some ultra marathons, and she mentioned that on each of her ultra marathons,

her face, her whole face swelled up. Where like she couldn't really see towards the end of it, but she loves it, right? I keep hearing about all these different side effects that happen after ultra marathons. Like things happen to your feet. So my question is, I know you enjoy it, but is there anything good things happen to your feet. So my question is, I know you enjoy it,

but is there anything good that happens to your body? Like I know you probably adapt to that stress, but do you always end up with something towards the end of it? No, no, no. I mean, I'm admittedly like more durable than most just because of all the weight lifting and the fact that I run at a pretty slow, consistent pace,

whereas a lot of the runners run really fast, take a break, run really fast, take a break, and I just kinda keep more consistent, which is a little easier on my body. You're generally at 11, 12 minute, you don't even really care, I don't think, but 11, 12 minute mile pace is probably correct, right? 11 to 14. But that's including stops too.

400 miles. Got it. Yeah. At this last, oh yeah, right here, that was the Fat Ox. So I was actually going, it was a 24 hour race. You just run one mile laps consistently for 24 hours. I was aiming for and on track to get about 110 miles done in that 24 hour period. And then at mile 33, I got a fracture in my foot that got progressively worse. And so I ended up going for the next 18 hours, just like limping at like, you know, literally a limping pace.

And then I'd stop and try to like get it taped and maybe switch a shoe and put on an extra sock and then get going. Nothing, you know, it's just all in vain at the end of the day. But I actually, I did have a good time. It was frustrating, but like, as much as it would have been tempting for me to be like, ah, I didn't get the results I came here for today. Like, might as well pack it up and go home. It's like, I mean, you already came all this way. For one, you might as well do your best to scratch that itch. And then on the other hand, like, you know, like I tell my athletes, it's, you know, your character is defined by who you are on the rough days, not the good ones. And so it's like, if, if I'm out here and I'm just, you know, telling people that they should train and do their best and leave it all on the

line. And then I just go home because things don't go good on the first six hours of a 24 hour race. Like that's not a very, uh, uh, not a very character, character forward moment, you know? And you have your, you have your brother here today with you and he used to work for slingshot and you know, was that super training? I know that you were saying And you have your brother here today with you and he used to work for Slingshot and he was at super training. I know that you were saying you're visiting your mother

as well, she's coming into town. Seems like you have a pretty tight knit family. I've met your fiance. Are you married yet? Yeah, oh yeah. I met your wife before. Seems like you're pretty close to a lot of your family members.

Is any of that ever taken into consideration when you're doing some of this? Do you have any worry or concern that you might do something and that might be it? Oh, like might die? Yeah. Oh, sorry, I thought you were going a different way with that. Yeah.

I mean, just because there's other people. No, no, yeah. It's not like you're a lone wolf out there and no one gives a fuck about you and you're just out there doing your own thing. No, 100%. You got a lot of people, it seems like, that care about you, that rely on you and so on. No, that's a, you're right.

That's a great question. Maybe you're just a selfish motherfucker. Yeah. I'm just kidding. Maybe. But no, I, so some people know that my dad died in the mountains. He fell off a cliff and actually survived the fall. But when he realized that his whole body was broken, he made the decision to shoot himself,

um, which is, you know, understandable in that situation. I didn't hold him against it. Um, but the point being like, that's generally pretty typical for how men in my family go out going back at least the last couple of centuries. Um, so if that were to happen to me, yeah, like you don't want that, but it's all right. You know, like the world will continue to turn and I'll have, you know, died doing something I love.

So like, does it bother me? No, not really. Do I accept that it's more likely even than possible? Yeah, yeah, sure. But, you know, that's why you work hard while you're here. You hopefully leave your family in a good situation and, you know, you live every day in a way that makes it so they feel no shame when you pass.

You know, that's all you can do. I mean, it's like, you know, I mean, all due respect to Brian Johnson, I don't think we can live forever. And I, you know, I just choose personally not to pretend as if, as if so when I'm choosing not to live my life. Now this thousand mile ultra marathon, what's your plans for actually how to make it happen?

Like how are you going to be doing it? I'm going to be starting at the Mexico border and Southern California and running the entire coast of California up to the Oregon border. And it's about 1200 miles total, but I will only be running somewhere right around a thousand because there's like areas that can't be around. There's some cliff areas without runnable surfaces. There's military bases along the way that, you know, they don't allow pedestrians by

and et cetera, et cetera. But I'm just going to really try to chip away at it at a very slow, consistent pace, you know, like nothing crazy 35, you know, somewhere between 30 and 40 miles a day, depending on the terrain and weather. And hopefully we don't have any like flooding issues or having to divert for that or supply issues, but just slowly, calmly chip away one day at a time.

And it's like with the multi-day stuff, it's weird because the hardest days are always the early days. Like once you get yourself in a rhythm and you're flowing, like then you're going, you know, at that point it's more about, oh yeah, that was cute. You know, at that point it's just more about not getting injured and making it to the end because mentally you're like, oh no, you're, you know, I'm in the fight, I'm doing this. What does keep you going? So I frequently obviously get asked why, even by other ultra runners who are like,

well, why do the, like the wilderness part of it where there's the risk is so much higher where you have to carry what, you know, you're doing all this with 30 pounds on your back. Like why not just like run normal ultras? Like, and the truth is I, I mean, I, I like to live my life as the man in the arena. Like I like to experience those things, feel those things and interact with life up close and you know, unfettered. And that is, you know, like I'm not a Spartan warrior, like, you know, just wasn't born in that time or place. So I'm in the here and now. And this is something I do that makes me feel alive and gives me that sensation.

And I get to actually put my money where my mouth is and demonstrate or test if my character adds up to my idea of myself and if not, where I can improve it. I saw somebody, a comedian today talking about how we kind of have come out of the woods and maybe that wasn't a great decision because we're kind of supposed to be savage. And she was just like, think about it. You just sit there all day long, denying all these things that you want to do.

You want to kill somebody, you want to do this, you want to do that. She's like, we used to just do it. She's like, now there's all these rules, can't do it. And she was saying how she's amazed that people have willpower in the first place because we do have a lot of these things going on in the back of our mind of doing these weird kind of crazy things.

Yeah. I mean, it's there. You can only suppress, you know, human nature so much. So I think, you know, it's, if you're going to, you can't deny it. So your only alternative is to channel it and, you know, how you're going to do that. But like in this book I just wrote it, you know, it literally it talks about how I mean the whole foundation of the entire book is that the human like the the warrior's mythos is one of the most enduring in human history. It's part of us even if we aren't actually fighters or warriors because it's more about

our human potential. You know, like what what can we do if we live by a code of honor and train with purpose? You know, even if it's not to be a warrior, like what's possible. And then it just looks at how people for the last couple of thousand years have done that from Africa to the native American warriors to, you know, Spartans and gladiators. And so like that, for me, that's always been, I'll say a source of strength, but really examples, like, you know, some, a place that I can always look for examples. Like if I have a, even like a moral quandary, like, oh, read some Marcus Aurelius, like, and come away from that telling me you didn't learn something about how to just be a decent human being. I mean, the guy talks about how we're all essentially like, we're all on team human, like we're all on the same side, going through the same struggles, fighting the same demons,

trying to move towards the same things and that we should be doing so cooperatively. And like you should look at your fellow man with that in mind and with empathy always. And like, like there's, you know, that's bulletproof. That's a pretty bulletproof philosophy. So for me, you know, and then of course, with the training, it's like, okay, well I wanted to be a guy who could fight, was strong, had endurance, was fast. Like how do we do that? Cause a lot of, quite frankly, a lot of the modern athletic coaches I talked to early on were like, no, you're trying to, too many moving parts was the term I kept hearing over and over again. And I was like, but the Spartans did it. Like they won the Olympic games consistently in

strength sports, endurance sports and pancreas and wrestling. And, oh yeah, and they dominated the entire Mediterranean with their, with their military forces. So obviously it's not impossible. And so that was really what kind of got me on the track with digging into ancient societies and figuring it out. And in truth, it's also, I've come to learn that history is the best science lab there is. Like people look at like ancient history as if it's like mysticism or separate from science.

The thing is like, science is great, but if you study a group of 500 people, how is that gonna compare to 10,000 years of people doing the same thing over and over again? Like we know- 500 people and then get the average of the 500. The average of the 500, okay. And so it's like, we know for sure

that picking stones up off the ground works. It worked 10,000 years ago and it works for the mountain today. You know what I mean? Like if you pick a heavy or a sandbag, you pick a heavy stone or a sandbag. How many sets? How many reps? Exactly.

You know what I mean? And so... Can't do it every day. You're going to get too tired. You're going to lose muscle mass. Yeah. And then the other argument... Exactly.

And the other argument is that studies present the most recent cutting edge evidence, but that by its very nature is untrue. Because the thing is, something happens. We observe it, we wanna study it. It takes 10, at least 10 to 15 years to get any sort of organized data, to organize the studies, to understand what you're studying, know where to aim those studies.

So any latest studies you get, you're getting info on something way past the fact. Also too, I mean, just say we took, you know, a bunch of trained athletes that lift weights and they're predominantly explosive athletes. And then we said, let's put them on this program. Let's get them working towards running 20 miles. Well, if we did a four week study, we can easily show,

oh my God, look, we were right. They were going to lose a lot of muscle mass, but we don't really know or understand the mass, but we don't really know or understand the adaptation afterwards. We don't really know or understand the different things that maybe they possibly could have done to circumvent the weight loss in muscle mass. There's a lot of stuff.

I always think it's interesting how people say, you can't do this, you can't do that. And there's guys like Arnold and many others who have pointed out, like, I love when someone says says that that it's my opportunity to rise the occasion and say hey I guess we'll see. Yeah I mean that was very much I mean the my you know I mean you were the guy that helped me deadlift 500 and plus pounds and run 50 miles in the same day and like that was you know repeatedly you know people that you know that you can't balance those two attributes and I didn't have any

like prior training or anything. So that's just like adaptation that just shows you what simple adherence to a consistent program, or I'm sorry, a consistent plan will do. You know what I mean? And so I think it's really important not to listen too much to other people, especially experts, because it can be limiting.

Like, it can be motivating and that's great, but it can also be limiting. You, you know, it can be motivating and that's great, but it can also be limiting, you know? You need to sometimes not know so much. I agree. And that was honestly my biggest strength and early on, it's like when we first met, it was just my naivete. I was like, I knew what I wanted, and I just didn't know enough not

that I wasn't supposed to have it, you know? You think that applies across the board? Like you do Jiu Jitsu as well. Like, do you think it applies to martial arts and stuff, just to being a little, you know, not, you always want to respect everything, you know, not, you always want to respect everything that you're going into, but being a little dumb and a little numb to it?

It is. I think you also have to have naivete in the sense of like, I'm almost too naive to be embarrassed about trying a bunch of new stuff. Like I got offered my jujitsu purple belt after two and a half years. And that is, you know is generally about half the time that it takes most people. And most of that was because I just relentlessly ran

at the things I was terrible at. I got tapped over and over again for the first six months, like even my other white belts, you know, and then after that, it was just, you know, like because I didn't shy away from the crappy spots and I didn't really know, like I was too naive to know that that like I was supposed to be embarrassed by being tapped or that I would, you know what I mean?

Like to adhere to some of the more nuanced aspects of the culture. So I was like, Oh, cool. I'm just a wrestler. I'm just going to like charge into guillotine, you know, and I'll just, I'll figure it out later. And, and I figured it out. But the same thing. Yeah.

If I had come in like, Oh, okay, I'm supposed to do this and I'm not supposed to be too much here or there. Or the big one was I'm not supposed to go train at other schools or for early on I would just train at any, you know, I would train as far and wide as I could. Oh yeah. People warned me about my elbows hurting really bad and people warned me about my joints and stuff. Yeah.

So I was like, I heard like Joe Rogan mentioned it like twice and I was like, ah, sign me up. I'm cool. Let's go. Let's go see what this is about. What have you tried or what have you learned, you know, from these historical contexts that you've applied to what you do in turn? Oh dude, like everything.

Like, I mean, and that's not, so for one example, I found in my book, I talk about, I outline an actual exact workout plan used by Roman gladiators. This is like super rare. You never get like exact workout programs laid out in all the history, but this guy Galen, the father, he considered the father of modern medicine

by many, spent his early youth when he was training to become a doctor, being in what they called a living anatomist or an exercise physiologist at a gladiator training school. So he lived with them up close, trained them, did all this stuff, and he left detailed writings on how they trained, what they ate, all these things. So I was able to reconstruct a lot of that.

Just, I mean, like most of it was already translated from Latin, or it was already translated from Latin. So just like in terms of translating it from, because he would, they didn't have names. They weren't like deadlift this, that he was like, turn, sit, pick up this, do this. So I, you had to kind of, a little bit kind of deconstruct it, or reconstruct it.

But when I did, he had this exercise that I called the gladiator deadlift, because I didn't have a name. Essentially uses two relatively light dumbbells, and you place them on either side of you with your opposite hand. You reach over, you pick one up in like an art across by like a hockey RDL and then rotating to the outside, you do the same with the opposite hand to the opposite side and then come up and then you hinge and place them both back down. Dude, I've had scoliosis my whole life.

This thing completely unlocked my back and I've done rotational, anti-rotational, all this stuff, but rotational through a changing, like a dynamically changing plane. Show me the double blind, Pizio studies. Show me the studies James. I'm telling you bro. Do you know if there's a video of that exercise? On my... Anywhere?

Instagram maybe? Oh boy. Hmm. Yes, but I'm trying to remember exactly where. It's on your Instagram page? What is it called again? My Instagram or YouTube. I've just been calling it the Gladiator Deadlift because there's no name for it.

Like I literally found this in an ancient text, you know? It kind of sounds like the instructions from Peter Griffin on how to do a deadlift. Badmatch for back. Yeah, things like twist and lift. Yeah, actually he rotates way to the side. And Seema, I just had an idea. I'm going to, I'll text it to you. Okay. I just got an idea. But yeah, so it's like, I mean, stuff like that, like I never, and it's, it's pretty simple variation, but gladiators in general are fascinating because when I reconstructed the training, I really kind of resembled like modern athlete training. Like there were sprints, tons of plyometrics. Like one thing was that they had a lot

of extra shoulder exercises, kind of made sense from hepting spears and shields and all that. But okay. Kind of intuitive, right? Like I want to move fast. So I'm going to do things that look fast. Yeah, I mean, explosive, you know. That's pretty simple thing to follow.

Like jumping, doing pushups fast, you know, basically any exercise you can think, yeah, sprinting. They also actually were big on walking too. Like, you know, just literally just walking. And Romans in general were- Probably walking with some sort of weight. Gladiators, they talk about that.

They also talk about organized weighted carries. So the gladiator training was a lot of your typical athletic lifts, like this gladiator deadlift. Plios, weighted carries were both huge parts of it, extra like sports specific stuff for the shoulders. Additionally, this is different, but the Spartans who are around, you know, some centuries before the gladiators

did a lot of really cool stuff like lunge variations and stuff while holding dumbbells straight out, or they called them halteres, but they were essentially stone kettlebells. Holding them straight out here, good posture, tight core, and then just doing like forward lunges, backward lunges. And like, even if you try it, try it with a pair of 20 pound dumbbells now, super light.

It is insanely difficult, but that's specific training for shoulders first standing and the fey length, you know, I mean, we've all seen 300, how they fight, you know, shield, spear, do that for hours. Like you're going to need some delts on you. You know what I mean? And oh yeah, there we go.

And you said lighter weights? Yeah, super light. Man, this is like, I mean, you could build up to heavier, but like kind of like with the Jeff curl, you wouldn't want to just like load it up super heavy. But this is in its way, like a rotating Jeff curl. And yeah, this is- Seems simple.

It's super simple, but like I said, when do you actually rotate under resistance through the full plane of motion all the way through, unless you're doing like reverse bent presses or some crazy stuff, you know? And so my back is like, again, it feels better than ever right now. Did any of these cultures talk about, or was there any regard to rest or recuperation or recovery?

So actually talking about the ancient Greeks, they had something called the tetrad cycle, which was, I've used it, I actually just used it. I reconstructed an entire, I take pride in this, the world's only historically reconstructed Spartan strength and conditioning program. I did deep dive pottery shards, archeologists, all sorts of stuff rebuilding this. And part of that was, I'm sorry, the original question, sorry, I just spaced.

It's about, what? Rest. Rest, yes, the Tetrad. I was like, The original question, sorry, I just spaced. It's about, uh, what? Rest. Rest. Rest, yes, the Tetrad. I was like, I was like, anyway, the Tetrad cycle. So part of that in that, they talk about how ancient Greeks, a lot of them. So that would be, one exception would be runners. Runners didn't follow this, but pretty much everyone was grapplers, strength athletes. ranked athletes, they followed the tetrad cycle, which was basically one day of what they would call like short preparatory exercise. So that's like a 20 to 30 minute like plyo workout, like a few, you know, ones and triples of like some explosive jumps, some very short sprints,

nothing fatiguing at all, but just activating the nervous system. Then the next day after that would be a longer, more strenuous exercise. Like say you're like full body hypertrophy day, something like that. The day after that would be active recovery. So rucking, swimming, some mobility, right?

And then on the final day after that would be like skill-based training, working on your techniques for lifts, you know, if you're a boxer, you're throwing your punches, wrestling, you know what I mean? And then also some like sports specific training, like say if you're a wrestler doing some Bulgarian bags or whatever, you know, speaking in modern terms. and then they would keep to the cycle and then you could

interrupt it also with just an extra day of rest at the end if you needed. But apparently runners didn't do this because they thought it was a little too much volume by the end of the week. So the early Olympic runners. So runners have always been anti lifters. Yeah, a little bit, a little bit, but. I wonder too, like surrounding their training and stuff, I'm kind of just imagining there's probably like celebrations of sorts.

You know, there's probably like times where they eat and drink a lot, you know, and maybe that went along with training. So maybe they trained really hard for a few weeks. And then maybe there was like almost like a big ass party where they ate a lot and maybe rested a little bit and stuff like that. Oh yeah, after the games.

I mean, you see ancient Greeks, Romans, they're all about the festivities. And also they had one of the best diets I've ever encountered. Like the Mediterranean diet today is awesome. So imagine like the ancient version of that that's gonna be a bit more fat based, a lot more micronutrient dense than you're not.

You're gonna have a lot less pastas and fillers, whereas you're gonna just a lot more micronutrient dense than you're not, you're gonna have a lot less pastas and fillers, you know, whereas you're gonna just a lot more like olives, lamb, cheese, dairy, vegetables, you know, fruits, both dried and fresh, like a pretty broad assortment. It was just overall just an excellent diet. But in terms of feasting, definitely, but beyond that, there was also,

I found writings where ancient sports nutritionists would talk about how like you should eat mildly before you train and eat a ton after you train, like on the daily basis. So it's like, and then you should also, that athletes should sleep extra. And I was like, like that's bulletproof information. They also used hot and cold therapy. They used mobility, but it's important to remember

we get our scientific institutions from the ancient Greeks. So our sports science also, so it's like hot therapy, cold therapy, mobile, like you name something that we're doing today that they weren't doing. And I, you know, I'll wait like outside of some EMDR type, you know, electronic stuff. So it's, you know, they were ahead of the curb. They were even into doping. Like some of it was like probably effective. Some of it was probably like a little crazy.

You know what I mean? Like eating goat testicles. There we go. Yeah. Oh, that's not crazy. No, no, no, no. The crazier stuff was like arsenic and cyan, like bazzo constructors that could kill you if you had like a tiny bit too much or like different, you know, they also, uh, it was common practice by pretty much everyone to also drink wine while

you were training and competing. It was watered wine, about 50, 50% wine, 50% water, little honey and, you know, spice in there. But, and then they thought different spices, like, this is probably where they're onto something like cinnamon and cloves would give you more of a flush and a better, you know, blood, you know, stuff like that. He's got, you know, so, and then obviously milk of the poppy, as they called it in the old days, you know, opium, same thing, you know. So it's, I mean, they, you know, that's, it's been around forever. Fat diets too.

There was one guy, one year, a, I believe it was right. So it would have been right around 480 BC. There was this guy who was actually a runner who went completely carnivore and won the Olympics and a long distance runner. And after that, the next Olympic games, everyone showed up half the runners were carnivore and no one had ever done it before. And then there was another year where I believe he was a strength athlete who said that a secret to his strength

was massive, massive quantities of honey. Like he would drink honey. And the next year you show up and each athlete just full of honey bottles and just, so it's like they, I mean, the, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same, you know? Was there any, uh, do you know if there's any intentional fasting? Definitely. So fasting was traditionally done, you know, more for the spiritual side of things as opposed to performance, maybe more health, more health, sick or something like that.

Physically and mentally, you're definitely, fasting's definitely been seen as healing throughout many societies. But there was also things, something kind of close is that it was actually very common practice through orders throughout history across the world to eat very minimally before battle because they thought two things. First thing is they thought it would slow them down,

like mentally and physically. And then the second thing would be that if they were wounded in the stomach, you had a much greater chance of dying if you had a belly full of food because it would poison your blood. Whereas like a little bit of bread or a little bit of fruit or something, you probably, you know, much better chance. So that way, you know, traditionally, yeah, there wasn't like a huge amount of eating before peak physical performance, at least when your life depended on it, you know? Being able to handle the stresses of your day,

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of nail strips as well as a bedside tin. Again, that's at hostage tape.com slash power project. Links in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. How about weapons type of equipment? Oh man, there's like, I mean, again, in the book, I get into like one group, the Fijians on the island of Fiji, insane warriors, massive humans, super strong, but they were known for their war clubs. They essentially had a different one for every

occasion. It's like fighting in the jungle, fighting in the open, crushing skulls, crushing like their skull crusher was shaped like a pineapple, like a carved wooden pineapple. There were like, man, like the ninja, ninja is an interesting one because they're generally kind of looked up through the lens of like, uh, mysticy, Ninja is an interesting one because they're generally kind of looked up through the lens of like, mysticism, yeah, exactly, mysticism or comic books. But in real life, Ninja exists, they were called the Shinobi and they were actually ultra marathon runners,

or at least that's a theory I put forth in the book. We have essentially three or four different good accounts of them covering like up to 70 miles in a day. And because riding a horse is not incredibly sly, especially back like in peasant times when it was like the equivalent of like a Ferrari, like ripping through the countryside in a Ferrari, it was not subtle or very ninja like. They did almost everything on foot and the shinobi as they were called. And the thing is they first learned how to fight and like use stealth tactics from the

Yamabushi who are essentially mountain aesthetic monks in Japan who are around long before the ninja showed up. And another, there's another interesting group of mountain monks nearby, only 30 miles away from where the ninja first started. And they're called the marathon monks of Mount Hey, they're still there to this day. I've been there for about 900 years. And these guys, they believe the path to enlightenment is running ultras.

Like literally they think running a seven year ultra marathon is the path to peak enlightenment. And it's, they have a crazy running schedule. It's, you know, it starts out in like the first year. It's like 50 miles a week and then it builds up, builds up and eventually like by the time they finish it, you've run a distance equal to the circumference of the entire equator, 25,000 miles. And again, they're doing this on like a diet.

It's almost all milk, soy, vegetables and rice. And just at a very slow pace, they do it in rope sandals. During the challenge, they go through about three pairs of sandals per day because they just wear out so bad. Their only protection from the element is a big wide wooden hat and they're only allowed to put it on if it's actively raining. Like it's this whole crazy thing. So we don't have any concrete evidence, likely never will, but in the book, I bring up the possibility that maybe if ninja were routinely covering 70 miles in a day and they had a habit of learning from mountain monks that, uh,

maybe they learned from the guy, their neighbors who could also just cover mad miles. Um, but in terms of weapons, uh, bro, they had crazy stuff because a lot of their stuff was like farm implements. Like, so, you know, the mod, the ancient equivalent of sawed off hunting shotguns, like farm equipments adapted to war little sickles that they put change with spiky balls on called Surigama and you know, the ninja stars, that was a real thing.

They would also frequently throw spikes. 48 years old. So the magazines that I used to read when I was a kid, like we see like martial arts stuff, like every kid was into all that stuff. Oh yeah. And you know, it was back when like people just thought karate was kind of the only martial art.

You didn't really know what the hell was going on, but you would see like this ninja stuff in the back of the magazine. And they had like Chinese stars and nunchucks and all these things. And me and my brothers and my cousins and stuff would all try to like get this stuff or order this stuff. But it would be very dangerous. It wasn't like you were getting some toy version of you actually bought one of these things. You threw it across the room and just stick right in your wall. Your parents would be like, what is this in your wall? You're like, I don't know what

that is. They cut yourself with it slightly. You're like, whoops. They got a South Park episode about that. I think the boys are playing with a ninja star and one gets hit in the eye and they try to like cover it up. Yeah, that thing does it like, you don't know which way that thing's going to spin.

It's like worse than a frisbee. No, you have an eight year old with like a noodle arm throwing in any, like 360 degrees of possibility. Throw that at me. Let's see what happens. Yeah. No, they were gnarly. They like poison stuff too. But anyway, see, yeah, there's crazy weaponry. The West out, we were talking earlier about the West African tribes, like adapting super quick when Europeans showed up with gunpowder weapons. Like they would

take their war canoes, some of which could hold like more than a hundred people, 20 rowers and 80 warriors. And they would mount like small cannon on the front of these canoes and use them like modern like warships almost. You know, the same thing in Alaska, when actually the Russians tried to invade America once and were driven out by a Native American tribe called the Klinket.

And that might be one of the only reasons if we're not speaking Russian to this day. But it was the same thing, they adapted. They like, you know, you see different like tribes come in contact with guns, react different ways. A couple of them just like, Oh cool. That's how this work. All right.

So that's how we're going to use them. All right, cool. And then they started digging trenches and having rifleman and mountain cannons and fortresses. And so it's, you know, again, it's like human, you know, the human spirit is such like such an innovative and creative thing that it's, it human, you know, the human spirit is such, like such an innovative and creative thing that it's, you know, as rough as warfare is, it provides an excellent medium to demonstrate that.

Most of the stuff you looked at and studied, are these people that are culturally forced to train because it's a cultural thing? Are they slaves? Like what's kind of the deal with most of the stuff that you've researched and looked up? So with most of the stuff that you've researched and looked up? So generally most of the cultures I looked at it varies a little bit, but most of the cultures I look at, if you were to look at it from like a modern anthropological perspective,

you'd say that they created cultures that rewarded training. So it's like if you're a real ex culture, you know, if you create a culture and you're like, all right, if you're really good at wrestling, lifting and running and shooting a bow, like that's really, you know what I mean? Like that's where you get your man points from, uh, generally where your reproductive opportunities would come from, you know, being good at this thing or that. Like for instance, if I was like really, really, really good at jumping on a Pogo stick, probably wouldn't translate as much into like, you know, normal world and my mate, my mate, my ability to attract a mate as per say, some of the things that I do, you know? So it's like, that matters.

For instance, tribe in Africa, almost all the men can just jump way higher than any NBA athletes, the Messiah, they're lion hunters. But the thing is, the reason for that is that the way that you attract a mate is by doing the Adumo, which is a jumping dance that just like repeated plyo pogo's over and over again. And like the highest jumper gets the most broads. And so like that's where the term broad jump came from. Basically, literally clip it, clip it.

But like, so you see you do that for a couple thousand years and like, you know, dudes get good at jumping real quick when that's on the line, you know what I mean? So, you know, it's all- What a great incentive. Bro, I'm saying, bring it back, you know what I mean? I think I'm getting a couple of guys that would like that brought back. But, and then, you know,

there's also just crazy genetics in the book too, like Thor, the mountain. The reason that he is like he is is because of something called the founder effect. Okay. Which means his entire population, the entire population of Iceland was founded by a very small group of people. That very small group of people all happened to be jacked Viking warriors or more specifically

Viking warriors. And therefore way more jacked, way bigger, way stronger than the average person. They started the family. Those family members had family members and they bred with each other for the next thousand years, literally about a thousand years. So you have 1000 years of just a population evolving from all freak athlete giants. And then what do you get? You get Iceland, the country, the strongest country in the world.

And it's not even close, not even close. Not even close. You know, per capita, like I believe in terms of like the strength, like the strongman world, the only country that consistent, like that has more titles than them is America. And we put forth like a thousand more competitors than they have or something like that. But so it's like the same thing with Jamaica. You had just by chance about 600,000 African slaves from West Africa. They just by chance happened to have a very high incidence of a type two, a fast twitch, like muscle genes, and then large hearts and a couple other little things. And then you brought them, they created an entire population. And then of course you get the sprint culture in Jamaica, where they're constantly training, they're developing method, like, you know, and you get the fastest country in the world,

again, not even close. Yeah, I think Thor's dad was pretty much the same height as him when I went and visited him. His dad was like working on, you know, the other part of the building of the gym and they were expanding out and he came over and shook my hand and his hand was bigger than half Thor's and I was like, what the hell is going on with this family?

Yeah, that, I mean, so it's like, you see, when you look at just, I mean, warriors are, you know, and the Vikings were, you know, warriors among warriors. But when you look at it around the world, you see like just some crazy things in terms of physical potential, but also the mental and the spiritual stuff. I mean, being able to run for seven years. I got just, that's amazing. And then, uh, also a lot of it admittedly is just cool. Like, you know, learning that the Apache were one of the forerunners of the

whole nasal breathing movement by going for tempo runs, specifically hill runs, and filling their mouths with water first. They would have to teach their children at a very young age. Hey, run to the top of this mountain and back. I want you to fill your mouth with water first. They would teach their children at a very young age, hey, run to the top of this mountain and back. I want you to fill your mouth with water first. And when you get back, I want you to spit it out on the ground right in front of me. So I know you had it there the whole time. You didn't take any breath through your mouth. And that, you know, the warrior trainers, which are usually like an uncle, not a father, so you could be like a little more harsh, you know, in a lot of these cases, because your dad can

only be go so hard on you, whereas your uncle can whoop your ass a little bit, you know, or whoever the trainer was was would expect them to spit that water back out to show. So it's like a lot of it just, you know, it's like super interesting, but I don't think, um, I've yet found like a modality of fitness or health improvement that I didn't cover in the book in some capacity that wasn't here a thousand years ago, you know, have you done any like, I guess I'll say research on like the downfall of some of these like

empires? All of them. Really? Because you know, like we were joking about like in the beginning, like we lived in the woods and if somebody came to your campsite, they either fall in line or oh shit, we have to kill them. Like we are very far from that. So like how did other empires kind of transition from that to again, maybe

falling? There's only one way it happens. It happens in a thousand different flavors of this one way, but it all starts with inner decay. Same thing like the Spartans were a tiny little group, like a very small proportion of Greece. They weren't even ethnically related to a lot of Greece. They had been there. They descend from earlier population, like essentially native Americans per se would be here. They rose up, they kept like a very ins there, they descend from earlier population, like essentially Native Americans per se would be here. They rose up, they kept like a very insular, they made a culture entirely around training. And because they had indentured servants, they weren't fully, it was kind of like slaves,

but not in a typical way. It was more like a second class citizen population. They did all the farming for him called helots. All they did was train all day long. And they didn't train, hunt, chill. And they developed such a peak level of fighting prowess that it wasn't even close with other Greeks who had the same tactics and armor and weapons as them. Problem is they became victims of their own success because they start conquering everyone,

marching outwards. Soon they control all of Greece, even a little bit of Asia, Turkey and whatnot. The problem is that you can't rule other people without taking on their ways. So the Spartans for the first time start using actual money. Before that, they didn't use money. They used like little iron ingots essentially as currency. They start taking gold.

We see archeological and the archeological record Spartan houses, buried gold caches from this fourth century whereas not so much in the sixth century BC. And they eventually start taking on these ways, get overextended, move away from their, for lack of a better word, concentrated Spartan ways. And then soon enough, and ironically though, the Spartans are interesting because they hung on

for more than a century after they lost power. They lost power, Alexander the Great rose up and filled the vacuum. But his dad, there's a funny story I like, that his dad, when the Spartans were essentially They lost power. They lost power. Alexander the great kind of rose up and filled the vacuum. But his dad, there's a funny story I like that his dad, when the Spartans were essentially just a sideshow, like people would go there to look at what they used to be, you know, but they weren't a military power, nothing really anymore. But they still wouldn't surrender to Alexander's dad when he made all the grease bend the knee. The only people who didn't

were the Spartans. Little Sparta backwards, you know, nothing left, no power. And he sent them a letter that said, if you don't surrender, you know, I will come in and I will raise your land. And if you don't send me this tribute, I will come in and I'll take your women. And if you don't do this. And so the messenger brings us the King of Sparta and his dingy little kingdom, you know, centuries after their heyday has passed. And he reads the letter, you know, if you don't do this, I'll do this. And if you don't do that, I'll do that. And the Spartan King was like, okay, uh, bring that letter here and give me your pen and he just takes it and he turns it over and on the back, he just writes something real quick and hands it back to the messenger.

The messenger takes that all the way back to Macedonia, hands it back to Philip Alexander's dad, and he turns it over and on the back all it says is if. And so to the very end they were like, come get some. You know what I mean? Like it doesn't win. That's not about that. Come get some. You know what I mean?

And so like that is something that like I'm literally I'm like, that's going to make a good tattoo, you know, just if. So it's like, and that sums them up to the end and they beyond that, like the Spartans were known for being sarcastic, like hilarious, dry humor. And like, you know, and 300, they kind of alluded to it a little bit. I thought it was actually kind of cool. Like, you know, we will cover the sky with arrows. He's like, so we'll fight in the shade. You know, like that was actually like, well, that was a real line they took from history. God really said that. But so it's like, you know, anyway, when looking to examples, like it's really, really hard to beat that, you know. What a video kind of popped off the most for you, because I know you've had a lot of videos that have gone viral and why do you think some of these videos have caught on?

Like what's like, I think you're correct in saying like, there's a massive attraction to this innately for some particular reason. I think a lot of it has to do with like, there's a lot more inside of us than we think. And we're talking about like freaky athletes and people that have freaky genetics, but even undersized people, even someone who's a hundred

pounds has so much within them that we can't calculate it. We can't tell what they have. Like they might be able to run, they might not be able to lift the heaviest weight, but they're going to be able to have a capacity somewhere else. Oh no, it's more important for people like that because they got like to give some people,

like my biggest surprise here is that so many people are interested in this. I got on social media, I started posting social media stuff about this two years ago and a million people have followed between the couple of platforms I'm on. And. I started posting social media stuff about this two years ago and a million people have followed, you know Between the couple platforms I'm on and I had no idea I thought I was just a geek with like a super niche like, you know interest and it's so it's super cool for me to See that but in terms of like who you know, like who this stuff is for it's for everyone

But like that person who thinks that they're not that they're not there that they don't have it that they're not Genetically gifted or whatever like that, that's the guy who I would point this material, and it doesn't even have to be through me, but look to the historical examples, look to what's possible, look to guys like Bill Peanuts West, who had a natural body weight of 104 pounds

and ended up squatting more than 600, you know what I mean? And I mean, just made it. The original founder of West Side Barber. The man Louis looked to himself, inspired Louis. Louis was a kid on a German, a military base in Germany who read about Bill West in a magazine and had an idea to found West Side Barbell

and look where that went. So that's another example. And Louis isn't probably what you would call genetically gifted either in that, you know. And I mean, the guy did a mate like superhuman things. So, I mean, it's important to remember. And for myself, like someone out there, mathematically speaking, it's likely that someone

out there listening to this at some point walked by me as a homeless person on the street and stepped over me, you know, on the way to work one day and didn't even know. And I've arguably done some pretty cool stuff in the six years that I've been sober and a participating member of society since then. So if I had looked at that and been like,

oh dude, I'm not this or I'm not that, like I might as well not even try, I'd still be there. Yeah, and maybe your genetics aren't obvious. Some people's genetics maybe are more obvious because they're six foot eight or something like that. Yeah, I mean, the only, I can honestly say the only thing I got that's like a little

different in my recipe is the weird fast twitch thing. Like you're not going to find anyone who can out sprint me outside of an NFL combine or an Olympic meet most likely. Um, you should have seen Graham's face the first time we went out and sprinted barefoot, but, um, that was like the only natural inclination that I had that. And then when I was in prison, they told me that I had, um, a weird thing with my brain. It's not like a spectrum-based disorder, but it's called a low latent inhibition, which means that my brain is technically worse than yours. Is it like filtering out data,

which means that the brain either gets overwhelmed or it adapts to like that extra data input. And- Like I'm already in prison. I don't need bad at more bounding. bound. I know they told me I'm like, so what is- No, like what does this mean? But basically it's like you get more overstimulated

by stimuli easily, but also my brain doesn't have the same novelty response that a normal one does. So when I look at a problem or a set of data, it tends to be from a fresher perspective each time where it's not just like the same old thing again. The way that it was described to me was like, if I look at, if you look at a doorknob, you see a doorknob. If I look at it, I see a knob with screws, I see the components as separate things.

Kind of like a dog smells the components of food, but a human smells the complete dish. So those aren't like being able to run real fast for like a few seconds doesn't exactly translate to like a bunch of real world, you know, like potential. So it really is just like, you don't have to have anything to be something. You just have to start doing something. In terms of your training now, strength training and stuff,

what are you doing to prepare your body? If there's anything you have to do to prepare your body for the next thing, a thousand miles. It's super interesting. Cause like even me, if there's anything you have to do to prepare your body for the next thing, the thousand miles. It's super interesting, cause like, even me, like there's not data or an established path on how to prepare for something like this. There's tons of data on how to prepare for a hundred mile event, something for a few days,

even a week long. But the thing is, when like this event could take, you know, up to a month, you know, somewhere near a month. So if I peak right before the start of it and I get my body right to the brink to be in peak form and I go into this, there's no way I'm going to make it through the next 20 something days of running, you know, 30 to 40 to 50 miles a day. So I've actually kind of been playing with the idea of like building a strong foundation, very

strong joints, a high strength to weight ratio, stripping away the extra body fat from the bulk getting like lean and light. I'll put on a little, a few pounds of body fat right before the event. But, um, and then really just kind of ramping up a lot of low intensity volume building, building, doing like some like back to back 30, 30 mile runs for like three days, take a week off where I'm just like, just doing some rocking and lifting the next week, do like five days of 30 mile runs back to back to back. And then, you know, like some, again, if I just do the typical, like normally when you train for an ultra, you build to a peak, you get to the peak, kind of let yourself chill for a couple of weeks going to the event, you know, just real light, but you still have that peak performance and then you take that

into the event, dump it all out, you know, in a day or two, and then that's it. But it's like, that's not going to work here. Cause my body will, you know, and so, and I'm also going to be running a lot on cement, which is, you know, also very, a lot more challenging than the trails. I'm used to. Um, so, you know, I'm looking at it kind of like that basically just kind of gonna get jacked, shredded, really fit all around and maintain my capacity for like ultra endurance, but I'm also like, see I ran my last ultra four weeks ago,

I start my training camp again in two weeks. Six weeks, I'm not gonna have detrained that much. My body will have rested a bunch, my broken foot will have healed up, you know, but. Still broken, I thought. No, I mean, I broke it four weeks ago and I'm walking around, I'm not running yet, but I walk, lift, assault bike, barefoot, all that now.

The first two weeks were kind of rough, but yeah, no, like normally they say six weeks to heal, like for the bone to rejoin, another two weeks for the calcium to fill in. And so it looks like I'm, oh yeah, you weren't here for this. So apparently I have superhuman bone healing. Nice.

Yeah, the doctors were like- Wolverine. No, no, that's actually what he said. And I was like, wouldn't it be Deadpool more? Cause Wolverine's bones, they're metal, they don't break. He's like, why didn't I know you're so into all this stuff? I don't know what's going on. I actually went home and tweeted about it after.

I was pretty offended. But yeah, no, they're like, the only thing I've heard of that's compared my doctors and MMA doctories, like the only thing I've heard of that's comparable is this guy, Yul Romero, crazy freak of nature, MMA fighter, got his skull fractured in a fight. And then by the time he got to the hospital, there was already calcium buildup around the edges of the fracture, and less than an hour later.

And so that's the only thing, the scale of bone healing we've never seen. So I was like, that's pretty sick. I'll take it. Yeah. You're obviously super resilient with all the shit that you've done over the years. You were mentioning earlier that your coach, he kind of specializes in people being able to do stuff after they're already like messed up, they're already dehydrated. Yeah, you got to talk to him at some point.

Yeah, I'd love to talk to him because some of my understanding is when you get dehydrated, that your body starts to do a lot of really cool things. Obviously you can be in a danger zone. So you always want to be cautious of that, but your body's starting to produce ketones and your body's starting to try to make up, I guess, for the fact that you're dehydrated and you can start to burn body fat pretty quickly. And what are some of the things that you've seen and have you trained specifically? Like when you're doing these 30 mile runs,

are you like, maybe I'm just not gonna drink as much water today, I'm just gonna go out and actually kind of specifically train a little dehydrated? No, I don't. For me, it's the opposite. You do gotta stretch your body and get it accustomed to that,

but I train really, like I train at the higher side of volume and intensity for what is required of me. But no, for me, I would just take that same amount of water and probably just do more work on it, you know, as opposed to taking less out. Strain it out. Yeah. Well, just like also it will help me with the pacing and like, so I do think like,

I, unlike other ultra runners, I have to account for the water. Like I have to weigh water. I have to carry all of it. There's no aid station. So I'm already monitoring it. So it's like, I need to know what is, what's ideal, what's not ideal and what's last resort for covering 20 miles, you know, in terms of how much water to have, because oftentimes there's that between watering holes for me.

And some of it, you're not, you're not a small guy. So if you were, if you were 160 pounds, then maybe wouldn't have the same discussion. You wouldn't have to lug around probably as much water or liquid with you. Well, that too, and muscle mass. I have, I'm 40 to 50 pounds heavier than the average ultra runner, my same height, my equivalent height. I am, I mean, variably between eight and 20% body fat, depending on what I'm doing.

And so like a lot of my weight is muscle. Like I'm a dense person and muscle requires, I mean, it's all water, you know what I mean? You know, like that's the cool thing about like crazy jacked UFC fighters that can cut, like Gil Romero, that can cut a bunch of weights. Cause they're just, it's all muscle. So you can dehydrate muscle.

You can't dehydrate fat, but it kind of plays the opposite hand when you're trying to like, you know what I mean? So when you're trying to minimize how much water you have to carry and drink and plan for. So, but that's why we run the tests. Like, you know, I would go, like go out and equivalent, you know, in a hundred, like I know,

and I'm, if I go out and a hundred, it's 104 degrees on that day at peak temperature and I'll run 40 miles in the heat on that day. I know how much water my body will go through. I know I'll lose about 21 pounds of water throughout the day and that I'll be able to accurately place somewhere between nine and 11 of those pounds. If I'm stay on top of my fluid and you know, proper electrolytes for retention, carbs for retention, all that throughout the day. So I know I'll come home roughly 10 pounds lighter

than I was at the end of the day. And if I'm doing a multi-day event, or I've only had to do a couple where it got that hot, but it's like, then you know exactly how much you have to try to replace by the time you go out for the next morning after your four hour break for food, shit and sleep, excuse me, but you know what I mean? And you know, being someone that's communicated with Zach Vitter,

a bunch of those Zach is, he's a ultra runner as well. He's hold some world records and stuff like that. And I know that he's been a little bit more of a keto, low carb proponent, but obviously he still is consuming some carbohydrates, you kind of need him. Kind of what have you found? I'm sure it matters a lot. Like you're going to get dehydrated.

I'm sure you're going gonna need a lot of carbohydrates, but maybe on some other runs, maybe you don't need as many carbs. So with carbs, especially if you're fat adapted, you really only need them for two specific purposes. The first would be the carb load leading into the event itself, you know. And I've gone from instead of doing a more intense

48 hour, 24 hour carb load with a lot of liquid carbs and stuff to doing 48 to 72 hours, potatoes, lentils. Most of my carbs come from fruit, potatoes, lentils. And then as I was telling Encema, like traditional corn and stuff like that, blue corn, you know, whatever. And so I would do that, but generally for the carb load and then for hills.

You need to have some on hand for hills because that just takes carbs to get up Hills. So- It's gonna jack your heart rate up and make your breathing a little bit higher, right? So- Yeah, yeah. Well, but you just, you know,

there's just more of that muscle involved. You go from zone two to zone three or four. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And even locally, like just the cap, the burn in your calf, you know what I mean? So, but, and it takes some time, but you learn to apply that.

I do the honey packets too. Those honey stinger ones are good. They got a little electrolyte in them too. Um, I tend to take, uh, uh, make my own. There's a drink, the Raro Marie tribe. There's some of the best ultra runner, probably the best ultra runners on planet earth. I'm actually going down the train with them next year, but, um, there's a drink

they make using, uh, the version I make uses raw milk, uh, corn powder that's been roasted and soaked in light and make it easier to break down for the gut, more digestible and bioavailable, uh, was a little bit of cinnamon and honey in it. And oh my God, it's, it's delicious, delicious. And, um, so, you know, stuff like that, you know, it makes a big difference to get it in, but you just got to know where to aim your carves particularly. Cause Zach's a good buddy of mine. He's like, informally speaking, my, my running coach in terms of like, like if I

need to get faster on like a section or something, like Zach's the first guy I go to, um, and he, uh, uh, he's a little bit more low carb than I am. I do a little bit more, but again, more muscle mass and just kind of a bigger dude, um, but yeah, we both pretty partial to looking, you know, I pretty heavily towards fats for fuel. And that's just also like, you know, that slower lower burn. And then the thing I noticed also is it's nice not to have the insulin spikes through the event, you know, just because it's don't have as many peaks and valleys.

What's that corn called, by the way, for people who are interested in that? Massaharina. I just use this stuff from Bob's Red Mill. I love love that company. Um, but there's all sorts around. There's also, my wife gets some from the Navajo tribe, some blue corn. I don't know the brand off the top of my head, but there is a Navajo tribe members offering a blue corn version that we also really love. Okay.

What are people missing when it comes to conditioning? You know, again, you're you're someone that does jujitsu People talk a lot about strength and you see a lot of Strength and conditioning style workouts being done more and more on Instagram But I don't really believe that people are doing maybe as much on the conditioning side of things It seems like that's a huge part of jujitsu huge part of all sports, but it kind of gets pushed to the back. I was watching the football game last night, the Cowboys were on, and their defensive end was one of the best players in the entire league.

He was just gassed. And that was the fourth quarter. He sprinted play after play after play. So sometimes these things happen, but in my view, I'm like, this is a professional athlete. Agreed. He should be ready to rock all the time. Agreed.

And I think that a lot of people are, they kind of push the conditioning off the side, like, you know, I'm usually pretty okay, like in my event or in my thing. And I'm always thinking like, I wonder if they really know, I wonder if they know how much harder they could push. There's that too, but there's also the fact that

as your fatigue increases, your cognitive ability declines. So the better your conditioning, the better you clear your thinking later in the game when the other guys are slowing down, they're getting brain fog. And then also the biggest thing, anyone who's seen an MMA fight, it's confidence. I had the competence to take this fight where like,

when I fought MMA or you're just at wrestling, any of that, I had an incredible engine. And so I was never afraid, I could turn it up and put it at nine and hold it there for the whole match. And I knew the other guy wasn't gonna be able to stick with it, you know what I mean? it up and put it in, not put it at nine and hold it there for the whole match with you know, and I knew the other guy wasn't going to be able to stick with it, Pat, you know what I mean? And then also I had the competence to try things to take risks to know that if it

went bad, I had the energy to scramble out or to defend the takedown. So that's a big part of it. But as far as the actual training goes, it's actually incredibly simple, not easy, but conditioning being like just a massive conditioning machine, cardio beast never gets tired, super easy, got to do three things. Train each of your three energy systems. That's it. Okay. Your phosphorus system, creatine phosphate, whatever you want to call it. That's your short bursts of a few seconds. You know, you got to be doing that. You got to be doing some, you know, some sprint, some jumping, you know, some explosive lifting, whatever

it is. It doesn't have to be heavy. Probably shouldn't be heavy, but should be fast. Okay. Then second system is your, you know, anaerobic slash glycolytic system, primarily carbohydrate fueled. That's your intermediate stuff at 30 seconds to a couple of minutes. Uh, that's an area where people tend to shy away from cause you get a lot of burn. It burns. Yeah. Go around like a 400 or something. Yeah, exactly. Uh, but it's one of the most important because it's not just building direct endurance. It's also teaching your body to clear lactate, you know, or lactic, it's different, but lactic acid, you know, we'll just simplify it. Trying to clear the acid from you, teaches your body to clear the acid from

your muscles quicker, which means you recover and other things. There's also, and then finally, of course, is number three aerobic and that's your low and slow. And again, you don't have to be running. You could be sitting on a bike in the gym watching Game of Thrones. You could be rowing a rowboat in the middle of a lake with your wife, rucking, whatever the thing is, you know what I mean? It's just enough to be a little bit annoying though. I think that's important for people. Just a little bit, yeah. Yeah, it's like, it's not, it's pretty easy, but as you start to do it for 10,

15 minutes, you're kind of like, I just want to stop. Yeah, yeah. And so just get to 30, you know? Right. You know? Right. You know? So you train those three energy systems, train them consistently. You don't have to train them with crazy volume

or intensity, you just have to train them regularly. Again, this is all stuff I outline in the training programs on my website because it's like, I myself, when I was training, just get into basic training, it's like, well, there's so much stuff to do, but I have to move, you're telling me I need to move linearly, laterally. I need, wait, you're telling me my core needs four types of exercises just to have basic

function. You know, I need linear, I need lateral, I need rotation and anti-rotation. Like what do I do? How do I organize this? What's the best? Like, so it's, it just, I simplify it. Many of the programs on my website are free. Also, I never want, like I come from poverty. I never want money to be the reason someone doesn't get good training. I am all due respect to Jeff Cavalier. Like I started out just watching like whatever YouTube videos were there to learn how to exercise and get nothing against him, but probably his training is probably not the best suited for my goals as I've come to find out.

So I never want that to be an obstacle for anyone. If you want to train like a bad ass train like a Spartan, train like a hybrid athlete at a high level, train with a historic kettlebell program, you know, then come get it, son, you know, but fitness is fitness. For years on this podcast, we've been talking about the benefit of barefoot shoes, and these are the shoes I used to use back in like 2017,

2018, my old Metcons. They are flat, but they're not very wide, and they're very stiff and they're not very wide, and they're very stiff and they don't move. That's why we've been partnering with and we've been using Vivo Barefoot shoes. These are the Modest Strength shoe, because not only are they wide,

I have wide ass feet and so do we here on the podcast, especially as our feet have gotten stronger, but they're flexible. So when you're doing certain movements, like let's say you're doing jumping, or you're doing split squats, or you're doing movements where your toes need to flex and move,

your feet are able to do that and perform in the shoe, allowing them to get stronger over time. And obviously they're flexible. So your foot's allowed to be a foot. And when you're doing all types of exercise, your feet will get stronger, improving your ability to move. Andrew, how can they get the hands on these? Yes, head to vivobarefoot.com slash power project

and enter the code that you see on screen to save 20% off your entire order. Again, that's at vivobarefoot.com slash power project. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. So to put it nicely, you've been through some stuff. That's very nicely. Yeah, but thinking about like the modern man, right? Modern father, modern eight to five guy enjoys playing football or enjoys watching football

on the weekends. How can somebody like that develop a resilient mindset or resiliency to do something a little bit harder? And I'm not saying they're, you know, you've ran for 24 hours, you've ran across a state, you're going to run across multiple states, you're gonna run across the country. That's some shit, dude.

How can somebody who's not doing anything near that start to do some harder stuff? I mean, I think you'd be a pretty good example. You seem to be doing pretty good at it. You do things just outside your comfort zone and do them consistently. I remember before you did jujitsu when you were just like, you told me you were considering it,

you know what I mean? And I'll look at you. You know what I mean? That's light years ahead. But beyond that, again, it's a game of inches. So a lot of times, so a lot of people know I'm Japanese, or part Japanese, my mom. I had no clue.

Yeah, no. I know people are like, wait. I love people like you. You just pull it out when it's convenient. Japanese, my mom. I had no clue. Yeah, no clue. I know people are like- I love people like you. You just pulled out when it's convenient. What the fuck? No, I do. I do. But no, people are like, hey, so like, not to be a dick, but like, what are you?

And I'm like, oh, my buddies at Barbell, they're like, until like it came up in conversation, like, oh, we just assumed you were like light skinned, you know? And I was like, no. So Japanese, part Japanese, half Japanese, my mom. And they tend to approach progress a little differently than we do. So in America, we have the home run mindset. And that's cool, swing for the fences.

But it's only cool if you have the grit to do that over and over again and fail over and over again and most people don't. And so they get discouraged when a couple of things don't go their way. I deal with it myself. But it's just, I also had like some, I don't want to say toxic, but let's say some harsh versions of masculinity early on. So I kind of hear those voices sometimes, but not necessarily the best way to go. But in general, everyone deals with it. So completely

understandable. But Japan, they approach it a little bit differently. Instead of trying to swing at home runs every time, they look at what's called Kaizen or the compounding effect of incremental daily gain. So that's, if I gain one inch per day, that's actually eight or nine inches per week, not seven. You know what I mean? And so it just small wins consistently every day. For some people, it'll be getting in that cold plunge

when you don't feel like it For some people it'll be working out for some people. It'll just be passing on the extra doughnut, you know Whatever whatever it may be but look for small wins to incrementally build on and use those to approach goals. So it's like If you've never run before running a 5k is a great goal. That's you know, a little over three miles That's amazing You know if you've done some running run longer lifting do something that puts you out of your comfort zone running a 5K is a great goal. That's a little over three miles. That's amazing. If you've done some running, run longer. Lifting, do something that puts you out of your comfort zone.

I don't mean that in the generic sense, but I mean like actually. Like the first time I, my skinny ass, walked into super training, like with a bunch of monsters that could lift like in a thousand pounds, like that was not within my comfort zone. But I wanted to learn how to lift 500 pounds.

I knew I could run 50 miles in the day probably, but I wanted to learn how to lift 500 pounds. I knew I could run 50 miles in the day, probably, but I wanted to learn how to lift 500 pounds. So I went somewhere where I was going to be, you know, starting at the bottom of an entirely new ladder outside of my comfort zone. And obviously, you know, that developed into doing that and, you know, achieving everything I stood out to and more. To expand a little bit on this idea of like making consistent progress. You have to realize too,

there's gonna be regression as well. There's gonna be regression in the main goal and there's gonna be regression in all these like little side goals that you have. Let's say you're just trying to gain weight. Well, as you gain weight, your pull-ups are probably gonna be worse. Your running might be worse.

Your conditioning might be worse. But hopefully it's temporary. And hopefully it's something that you can not develop a blind spot about. And then same thing if you're trying to be faster, you're trying to be leaner. There's a lot of cool things that come along with that. Could be tons of health benefits,

but you could also be leaving some other things behind, like strength and maybe some of the other things you enjoy. But just remember, it's just temporary. And so when somebody starts jiu-jitsu or somebody starts running and they're lifting and they hear all this stuff about you can't lift and do these other things at the same time, you're going to start to think that they're right, but they're not correct. Just stay in the pocket, hang in there, let the defenders go flying past you. And eventually you'll find the open receiver.

Eventually you'll find kind of your own right way. And when you do, it feels amazing because now you're doing a bunch of different things that you enjoy doing. And I think on this podcast, we share it so much about not just what we love lifting. And if that's all you love, and then I guess that's fine. But I would like for people to then I guess that's fine.

But I would like for people to find other things that they enjoy and I'd love for people to maybe develop some other skillsets in case lifting just isn't there for them the same way it was before, if their goals shift, if they get injured, now they got other tools they can kind of utilize for other aspects of their life. Yeah, I mean, I don't always love lifting.

I lift all the time, but sometimes it's because it's required of me for what I do, and other times it's because I like lifting. Makes it easier to get it done. Yeah, so sometimes you might just get tired with the thing, and you might want to go do calisthenics for your strength stuff while

and just focus on jujitsu or yoga, or whatever your thing is. And so I think also it's also important to realize that the more diverse your training is, the better I think also it's also important to realize that the more diverse your training is, the better it is for your health. Generally speaking, if you put all your eggs in the power lifting basket or all your legs in the ultra marathon basket, you know, it's, it's not going to compare in terms of your health, you want

how long you're going to be here, your quality and ability to interact with the world, your kids, your grandkids. It's not going to be the same than if you're doing a little heavy lifting, a little endurance, some mobility, some, you know what I mean? Some like animal floats, whatever your thing is. Because that diversity like that is, I mean, it keeps, you know, you tickling all the right buttons for longevity. Let me ask you this, man.

I find that for me, finding weaknesses is something that helps me like really get to a new level of strength in terms of everything else I do. So, right? So what are some things that you've been adding in recently that have really moved the needle for you and you maybe wouldn't have expected them to? Honestly, the biggest thing was that gladiator deadlift for sure, just my lower back.

But taking on the whole, I mean, it might be overly specific, but groin training. I've been doing a lot more like Copenhagen stuff and a lot more stuff because I do so much linear, you know, one foot in front of the other running in a straight line. And like, I've always been pretty good at hitting like the outer glutes and stuff, but man, the groins,

like, so I've been doing a lot more, you know, but yeah, in terms of like, just as an overall, I think that's important, an important thing to highlight, aggressively seeking out your own weaknesses at the physical, mental and spiritual level, there's no way to get stronger. Evander Holyfield used to say, "'Find the truth before the truth finds you.'"

And I mean, I've always loved that. He was talking specifically about fighters who would hire like coaches to fluff their confidence, but not be super honest with them like, "'Hey dude, you suck at this. You need a better left hook or Hey dude, like this guy's going to light you up pass on this fight until you're ready. Like, you know, like you need someone, even if it's just yourself to, you know what I mean? So it's like, if you're bad at something, if you have some lingering thing, like be honest about it and go address it. Because that's honestly how I've evolved myself physically

is just by chasing the weakest point repeatedly. It's like, you know, it's very tempting to do the things you're good at, but like I started running ultra marathons because my endurance was terrible. It was terrible. Like I said, I'm like all my genetic fricks got put in the fast Twitch, you know, so it's like two or three good explosions, three or four, and I was just done. And I was like this, I need endurance. I also observed in prison, like the mental and physical level endurance was the key survival trait that like, I remember locked up with the worst,

they literally, they put the Golden State Killer was, he went in my cell right after, like, put him in my old cell right after I got out. Not that he, like, he was a little old man at that point, but point being, like I met terrible human beings, I met dangerous human beings. And the one thing that the most dangerous had in common was just their ability to endure like with indifference, you know, hard, cold, hot, whatever it was. And so like, I realized pretty

quick, I'm like, all right, like being real fast and flashy is nice, but I might want to get like some long-term grit here and some like, you know, mental endurance with this also. And then, you know, so again, same thing, your weak muscles, your weak parts, bind them, you know, and if you just play, play to the bottom repeatedly and bring that bottom up over time, the whole vessel rises. Yeah. Do you think there's something to training your groin more so than like, maybe we understand because you might be tapping into like the psoas and then you might be tapping into I Believe it's Chinese medicine talking about like your chi. Yeah, you're kind of a lot of people talk about these Know these different parts of our body where certain amounts of energy can come from and things like that

Yeah, I mean, I certainly don't I don't know anything about chi but as far as the groin for sure And so the reason I got into chi and it's just like radiates out from this area right here. Yeah, right there. Like right down to about here. Yeah, no, but with like the groin specifically, I was having psoas issues. So you brought that up.

And just really, you're very tight on one side. I have a discrepancy in leg length. I mean, all people do, but my one side is pretty short. So I have a hip tilt and that one hip gets tighter. So I started, you know, kind of the reverse squats, the Copenhagen planks, you know what I mean? Just general growing mobility. There's a guy on Instagram, I just started following,

or I just met him on Instagram, range of strength, I think. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. He has really good stuff. I like that's his approach to mobility kind of aligns with my own in terms of just like weighted stretching and full range of motion lifting, you know. I saw a video the other day of Jesus Oliverus saying, this is the best, you know, secondary

exercise to a squat. Maybe you can kind of bring it up, But I saw him doing a leg press. And you know, you just think like, you just lay down and do a leg press, you know, and you think everyone's going to kind of look the same when they leg press. His leg press doesn't look the same. His leg press looks so different.

Like a zombie press type. He just can move really well. He's a big, big boy. What is he like 400 pounds? Yeah. But as he's doing this movement, just kind of watch to like, he's able to open up his gro move really well. He's a big, big boy. What is he, like 400 pounds? But as he's doing this movement, just kind of watch till he's able to open up his groin really well and see how his back stays flat on the machine.

And it's just all, it's all his legs moving. Yeah, now that's a perfect leg press. And I was like, shit, my body doesn't like doing that because I'm tighter than that. And so what will happen to me is I will fold up and my butt will want to tuck underneath because the groin's not as flexible and so on. Grease that groove.

But yeah, so like, I mean, I guess to an extent like you, my base of strength training knowledge, a big part came from Westside Barbell. The other big part, oh, and from Josh Bryan, JL How Strong for sure. But the primary came from my buddy, Jack Tyler. He is a rugby strength conditioning coach. So some of my like exercises perspective, just some of the nuances associated with training are a little bit different with how I do things because of that. One thing that I learned through him and just through watching European rugby strength conditioning

programs is the leg press is actually a very function. Like I did like ironically, a very functional movement. I mean, it's a completely isolated leg press, like a leg drive rather, you know, like thinking we're deadlifting. It's a bad exercise. You know, no, no, of course not. You know, I mean, there's it's very, I will loosely say there's no such thing as a bad exercise. It's it's how you use it, how you deploy it. I mean, there's bad advertising for exercises. It's how you use it, how you deploy it. I mean, there's bad advertising for exercises. People that say like, watch me do this,

like hyper-specific four band, liver king core workout. And then it's going to make you punch harder. Like, you know, that's bad advertising, incorrect and ethical advertising for an exercise. But it doesn't mean that exercise is bad, you know, per se. But what are you expecting it to do for you? That is where the disconnect for a lot of people lies. And the leg press, act really applied.

I mean, it's literally, it's an isolated leg drive. It's kind of like different variations of squats without the complications or the last part of a deadlift where you finish the hands and it's just all leg drive to lock out. So it's like, when people do that, but specifically, I think it's great, man. I mean, especially if you want to work on, you know,

getting that fluidity of motion, if you want to do a thing, do it. Like, you know, it's martial arts taught me anything. It's that, you know, drillers make killers as the, as you know, Jiu-Jitsu folks say, but do it over and over again. Nothing wrong with that, man. Something good to try out too.

Everybody knows about the horse stance squat. Oh yeah. It's funny how long the horse stance has been part of like martial arts training. Yeah, bro. You know what I mean? Horse stance, wall sit. Mm-hmm. You know, people have been doing that type of stuff forever, right?

So it's one of those things where like these things, the proof has been there for a long ass time. I have an interesting note about the horse stance. Don't know why, no idea. Maybe somewhere a listener out there can help fill us in. The horse stance throughout history was traditionally used as a lower body conditioning exercise for strikers while the wall sit was used more for grapplers.

No idea why, but I have observed this. Okinawan karate, love the horse sit. Dagestani grappling, love the wall sit. List goes on. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, love the wall sit, you know, list goes on. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, it could be a freestanding thing. I mean, if you want to overanalyze it, grappling or connected to another person,

like you're connected to a wall, striking more freestanding, who knows? Horse stance, just a wide stance, right? Like a wide stance squat. Like literally just, and they used to, those of us who did traditional martial arts would just, yeah, they would just have you hold that for like minutes, you know? They would do it for time.

Yeah, for time. Exactly. I use the wall sits a little bit more because I kind of like to drive back into the wall and really, you know what I mean? But, and you can also hold something a little easier with a wall sit if you want to stack some, you know, goblet kettlebell hold or overhead kettlebell hold. Yeah. But, you know.

Gnarly exercise. A lot of them. I mean, I learned a lot of good wall shit in prison, you know, like literally just put your feet square with a wall, put your hands here, and then try to push that wall down for 30 seconds or three seconds. I'd rather learn it from your book. Yeah, you should. I'm just going to read Preparing for War and hopefully I can avoid doing it anytime. Audible is about to drop.

The book's out on Amazon, paperback, hard copy, Kindle, etc. And Audible is dropping. So if you want to just want to listen to it on one of these epic runs, you know, who did the, uh, who did the voice for audible? Uh, a were just hired a British actor. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

I was like, so I have like, I'm a pretty antisocial introverted person. I like a pretty small group of friends and they're all eclectic, you know, Tom Haviland and you know, just like random people who do random, you know, random stuff in different directions. And one of them happens to be a leading man in Hollywood and they're for a second. I was like, hmm, I was like, nah, I'm not gonna, you know, but that would have been funny.

You're friends with Tom Haviland. He actually exists. He does. He's a real guy. He's a real guy. And he's in like New Zealand or something? Australia, yeah. Australia. Yeah.

You know who he's talking about? No, I don't. Sorry. So he was debatably, he deserves a big piece of the credit for my company growing to the extent that it did. We met right when I started Wild Unite and he was like immediately, he's a super hyper-intelligent intellectual guy and loves the history, loves the thinking, philosophy, all that stuff. So he found my stuff early. We linked up online and for like the first,

I don't know, three, six months of my account, he reposted every post I did. And he had a following I did, you know what I mean? So it was like, my first thousand people who learned about my wild hunt probably came from him. Yeah, I was just texting him the other morning too. Yeah, he's nutty, but him and I are like- Let's see if we can get him,

maybe he can be like Dr. Claw. We can have him on the show and just not show his head. I can already tell he's not, he would turn down Rogan if Rogan asked or if anyone- Get a weird voice maybe. So you never see his face? Is that a good deal? No, he's a family guy.

He likes to keep it private. I think years ago, he can find footage of like, yeah, him doing some stuff, but he just trains out in his backyard. He's six six. I think he's 300 something pounds. Six seven between three 20 and 400 was his peak. He had it for, it had been a couple of years, bulk into 400. Um, but his, like, we, we really get along well because his perspective on strength training is kind of how I approach endurance training. And it's like, do it for, do your own stuff for your own reasons.

He has no interest in joining world's strongest man or competing, you know, doing any of that. And while I do compete occasionally, it's usually just for training races, for my own adventures and for fun. It looks like he has shoulder pads on. Oh, he certainly does. He's insane. That's crazy. Yeah. He's a, and just a great human being, like truly a great human being. But

so, yeah, just, you know, and I'm, I like the way I like, like I say, if you talk to me, like every three months, you know, you're one of my friends. And if you talk to me, like every two, every, every 90 days, you know, you're a family member, but like, I just have, and it's not even like, I am introverted, but I also just like, I have bad awareness of time. And so it's like, I thought, you know, I've talked to him, I got a couple other buddies and you know, but other than that, so, and now we're getting ready to, to leave Cali once and for all. Yeah.

And you sometimes like to disappear into the woods for two weeks at a time. I do. I do longer if I can get away with it. I saw a cool clip of cam Hanes. I think this would be cool to kind of get you to comment on this. Maybe you can pull it up. Andrew is on Instagram. He was just basically talking about how he likes to train and what he's training for and how maybe some of the other things he's done in the past maybe haven't been as useful for

some of the stuff he's doing. He's just running, holding the camera. It might be that one that's on the left, the third one down, maybe, probably that one. It probably needs some audio. You know, he was one of my mentors early on, right? Wow, that's cool. Yeah, he's a super good dude. Yeah, he's an animal. I mean, I know he's still putting in the miles.

Yeah, he kinda, he was, yeah, he walked me through some tough stuff. He was a good dude. Hey, so I was, listening to a good podcast, I put it in my stories, and it just reminded me of something. I mean,

it doesn't really matter if I need that hat. You care what I say or not, that's fine. I'll just say what I've learned and that I've run a lot, I've lifted a lot, I've lifted more, run less. It's like I've ran more, lifted less.

And what I've learned is having a big bench or deadlift or whatever the fuck lift with a lot of weight is not going to help you kill s***. What will help you kill s*** is endurance. If you don't go further or longer at a higher level than everyone else. Miles, miles under your feet, miles with weight on your back, mile after mile and being at your best or better than everybody else when that opportunity comes. Endurance is all that fucking matters.

Keep hammering. Agreed. Um, so yeah, I mean, he's, he's not wrong. And that's the thing, like I've been in a wide variety of life threatening situations in my current life in the wilderness, my old life in the streets and behind bars. And like I said, the guys who triumph are the ones with endurance because it's, it's not just about like, Oh, heck and run, or I can do this thing for a long time. It's, Hey, I have the mental capacity to sit here and focus and weather this storm while

everything, you know, everything around me tells me not to. And I mean, Cam is, he's as good of an example, but as anyone that guy's is a beast, you know. Yeah. And I think what he means is like Cam Hanes still lifts weights and he's always all the time. Three days a week. He's a huge proponent of lifting weights. But he was saying was a shift in his focus towards like, Hey, let me go from 315 to 405.

Didn't necessarily have a result for what his goals were. Yeah. I think it's important for people to have perspective on like what is your actual goal and is that thing working towards your particular goal? If it's not, then maybe it's not the right thing for you for that time. No, I totally agree with that. I actually just kind of, I'm guilty.

I just dealt with this myself because I was like never deadlifted 600 pounds before. Pulled 550, but had a little more left in the tank, never pulled 600. And then I'm like, I stopped and think I'm like, okay, so is that gonna make you run a thousand miles better or make you better at fighting or this going from 550 to 600?

Probably not, you know? And so I was like, maybe I'll circle back when I'm, you know, circle back when, you know, I don't have thousand mile runs on the docket, but no dude, it's like, I mean, John Donahurst says the same thing about Jiu-Jitsu, like a Jiu-Jitsu world champion with a 400 pound bench press, if you increase it to 500 pounds,

is he gonna be a better Jiu-Jitsu champion? Of course not, you know? And so it's very much where the rubber meets the road. And- 500 pound bench, that was pretty respectable. We should talk about that for a little bit. Mild, I wanna know who that guy is too, yeah. I wanna know who that guy is.

Where can people find you, man? It's always great to have you here. Wild Hunt conditioning on all things, I want to know who that guy is too. Yeah. I want to know who that guy is. Where can people find you, man? It's always great to have you here. Yeah. Wild Hunt Conditioning on all things, YouTube, Instagram, check out the new book, Preparing for War on Amazon. And if you guys want to see what I do up close and personal, A Good Day to Die is a documentary on YouTube, but you can watch it for free.

That follows me as I run across the hottest desert on earth, drinking a Steak many other many other snacks actually eating a bunch of bison macaroni and cheese too Next time you can tell us about drinking your own urine as well. Strength is never weakness weakness number strength. Catch you guys later