Mark Bell's Power Project - How a Gold Medal Strength Coach Builds Faster, More Explosive Athletes | Cal Dietz

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

Ever wondered how 21 Olympic and world champions reach the pinnacle of human performance? Renowned strength coach Cal Dietz joins the show to break down the revolutionary training methods that prioritize athleticism over raw strength. In this massive episode, we explore the intersection of neurology and biomechanics to help you move better, recover faster, and stay injury-free.Follow Cal Dietz: @CalvinDietz  0:00 Intro and Winning Gold in Milan5:10 Energy Systems in Hockey vs Soccer10:30 Common Injuries and Hip Impingement15:45 Banded Training for Muscle Speed21:15 The Brain as a Survival Mechanism27:00 Hidden Compensation Patterns33:20 Triphasic Training: Eccentrics and Isometrics39:45 The Spring Ankle and Big Toe Reflex46:15 Bench Press Mechanics and Glute Stability52:30 Performance Pattern Cycling59:00 Why Heavy Lifting Can Ruin Movement1:05:45 Tissue Remodeling and Immune Response1:12:15 Plyometrics and the Dennis Rodman Example1:19:30 The Truth About Knees Over Toes1:26:00 Box Squatting for Athletes1:33:15 Assisted Lifts for World Records1:40:00 Razor Curls and Hamstring Health1:47:30 Teaching the Brain to Relax Faster1:54:15 Heart Rate Recovery and Performance2:01:00 The 20 Minute Walk Recovery Secret2:08:30 Interpreting HRV and Omega Wave Data2:15:45 Carbohydrates and High Intensity Training2:22:15 Safety Bar Single Leg Squat Deep Dive2:29:00 Supermaximal Overloading and Bone Density2:36:30 Solving Movement Glitches2:43:45 The Goat Drill for Brain Coordination2:51:15 Youth Sports and Early Specialization2:58:00 Finesse and Elite Athlete Archetypes3:03:30 Final Advice for Coaches and Aging3:06:25 EndSpecial perks for our listeners below!🥩 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/TRT/PEPTIDES! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com and use code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off Self-Service Labs and Guided Optimization®.🧠 Methylene Blue: Better Focus, Sleep and Mood 🧠 Use Code POWER10 for 10% off!➢https://troscriptions.com?utm_source=affiliate&ut-m_medium=podcast&ut-m_campaign=MarkBel-I_podcastBest 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 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🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!➢ 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 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=e

I've been able to train 21 Olympic and world champions. Those people move better. The brain's not worried about you squat and a thousand pounds. It wants to survive. I want more athleticism. Like, I would rather have somebody that's a lot more athletic and a little less strong. I'm okay with it. If you can't absorb the force, then you can't change directions or reapply it.

What I'm doing today is setting me up for 18 weeks later to be successful. And people don't want to wait 18 weeks for nothing. This is the most beneficial weight room exercise. The first day that we tested this, Went back over to sprints, and some of them were moving 0.7 meters faster in that sprint that day. Sleep's number one in recovery, but the next thing that people have ever tried was a 20-minute walk. If you don't have passion for what you're doing, you're never going to practice that hard with that intentions. There's just no way.

All right, Caldez, it's been a while since you last been here, but somehow, while you've been gone, you won a gold medal. Yeah, thanks for having me back. I do appreciate it. It's awesome to get back here and talk shop. But yeah, I was fortunate to be part of the gold medal in the 26 Olympics in Italy. Milan, Italy. One of the best sandwich shops I ever had in Milan. Yeah, it was unbelievable.

My daughter got a visit and brought me this sandwich. And if you ever go to Milan, look up the best sandwich shop in the world. Their claims are the best. There's a line. What kind of sandwich are we talking about? All kinds. But it was the bread, the way it was made in the past, you know, the pesto. Yeah, it was the real deal.

Man, this is exciting. Yeah, yeah. And then we won the gold medal. I think I put, I was pretty good with my weight during the Olympics until the end when I found that thing. In the last week, I probably put on eight pounds. Found that. Yeah. It was, it was, I got to go to the sandwich shop and try, you know, a bunch of different ones, right? Absolutely. You can't just knock them down. Yeah. So, yeah, I've been very blessed to be part of something special that won that gold medal in Italy with the U.S.

Women's Olympic hockey team. It was awesome. You've coached a lot of different sports. And I imagine, like, you know, most sports, it's like, you know, it's like, like, you know, like, okay, well, it doesn't hurt, I think, in every sport to be like explosive, to have some good strength, to have some good endurance, to have some, you know, good coordination. But maybe what's unique? Maybe people don't know that are listening. What are some unique things that you run into with something like hockey? Yeah. It's honestly, you would consider it's one of the most, and I've coached wrestling, swimming, football, all of them, right, as a strength coach mostly. And the one thing about hockey is you need the speed, but yet you need an endurance to sprint all

that time. And then there is the lactate part. So you need all three energy systems. It's one of those sports that rarely is uses all three of those energy systems, the short sprint, the alactic, the lactate, the aerobic, and you need them all to be developed. So other sports, there's more focus towards one. Would it be maybe, I mean, obviously depends on your position. If you're a goalie, then it's different, right? Right. But would it maybe be a little similar to maybe soccer, maybe rugby, like, is there some crossover?

I would say it's closer to maybe soccer. Yeah, soccer, rugby is a good example. The short sprint, though, compared to soccer, would be more intense, right? Because, I mean, a lot of hockey's like sprint for three to five seconds, rests like three to five to see where the play's going and then sprint again. So and then you do that for about 40, 45 seconds and you should be off the ice because you start to slow down it. And that sprint is probably pretty intense because you're on ice, right? So you've got to like, you got to kind of gun it. You got to accelerate. It's harder than sprinting when you, you, right? Because you think, oh,

they only sprint in for five minutes, but compared to the sprint like there, because it's, I think sprinting and running is more natural for the human and that skating is not. So you're using different muscles that you would not normally, and you're using more muscles. So it is definitely more taxing. And then you've got to do that over three periods, right? You might get from eight to ten shifts a period, and then you're going to do that for three periods.

What are kind of most common injuries? There is a lot of groin for most people, right? Some hamstrings. A lot of it comes from the shoulders are just the contact that's in the sport. You know what I mean? So people get hit a lot in the, you know, just running into the boards, whether it's other people.

And then there are some concussions, but then there's just over time, like there's some hip impingement problems and people have a lot of hip problems, which then can lead into the groins and the hip flexure problems too. How do you balance some of this out? Like, are you got these guys doing Copenhagen's all day long, or is that kind of a mistake to, you know, overly hone in on something like that? No, we do do Copenhagen's, and we just try to, make sure that we I don't leave anything out and then I do take them through

definitely a triphasic series where we we do an eccentric motion for the muscle and then after we finished a couple weeks of the eccentrics and then I switch over to the isometric and then I switch it over to the same muscle we're training it in the power phase so loads about 50 to 75% resistance and then we get into the the one thing that I do do now is we do the high speed stuff I'll do a lot of bands so let's say we're standing there and you have two bands hooked to like stretch to cross you know remember the the big black bands that nobody uses for anything right well we put them in between pegs and we have our athletes put our legs between them and then they violently rip the bands back and forth right so ultimately

when you're doing that like it's training that muscle to turn on and off faster which is a key factor for some of the best athletes i've ever do you know where we would be able to find a video of that just so we can kind of um i believe it'd be an ab abduction like if you look up abacction banded on my YouTube page. That sounds super interesting. Yeah. When we get to those, it might be under oscillatory too along there. But we look at it's so connected.

It's so strange. You know, like you, like, you know, sometimes you look at a particular muscle. You look at the way that somebody's potentially getting injured. But I'd imagine in hockey as you're skating. Yeah. The way that you move your shoulders and stuff and the way you rotate would probably be kind of connected to the potential groin injury. Like if you're not shifting, not rotating very well,

I just imagine that everything else is like stuck and maybe not moving the way that it needs to. Absolutely. And sometimes it's a guarded, but you can see that was the exercise. Yeah, show that one more time. Just push, that guy is pushing out. He's pushing out, okay.

But you can push in to you. You can do both, yeah, you do it both ways. And what I've done is instead of just doing it one way, and now we just do it both ways at once and becomes very violent. Does that ever bug someone? one's knee or is that that seems that pretty safe no I haven't had any knee problems okay with that and and it's pretty violent and it's fast and again that goes back to the principles

of hey you are you're trying to train this muscle to shut on and off as fast as possible right that's the coordination when you talk about it like people that are coordinated so if if I take if you and I would go into a room of 50 people and identify the top three guys that or females that athletic, they would do that at a very fast rate compared to the ones that we identified at the bottom, right? They'd be comfortable. They'd be comfortable, but yet something about them, be able to switch that back and forth.

And that's that, you know, this is a really weird analogy, but the way that I kind of look at some of this stuff is that, especially like getting older and like, you know, I don't know, sometimes you're just like more careful and you're like, man, I'm getting old. But the way I kind of look at this is like, if you can picture somebody walking across a parking lot with no shoes on. Like how would you walk across? You would look kind of uncoordinated and you would kind of if the surface was like

not feeling very comfortable to you, right? As opposed to the person that just has appropriate shoes on, they're like, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-n. They're coordinated and moving nice and smooth, right? Right. So that's kind of the way I look at it. I think our mind is like connected to our body and it's smart enough to say

that was cool that other person moved that fast, but you shouldn't do that. Absolutely. Well, like the amount of information, I've heard the analogies, it's like two or three high-depth movies being uploaded into your brain every second about what's going on around your body. Wow. Right. So a more attuned person in their brain, everything's, let's say locked in or like functioning at a high level, they can process more information. So their brain then allows them to move more smoothly, faster to do those types of things.

If your brain can't process that information, I think it's a survival mechanism and it just slows you down so that you don't hurt yourself. Yeah, just imagine if someone puts you on a treadmill and you have 20-20 vision and you're like, okay, and you're just going whatever speed. Well, let's just say your vision is compromised and you have 20% loss of vision and now you're trying to run on that same treadmill. You're like, maybe holding on longer. You're like, you've got to slow it down, right? It's a survival mechanism. Yeah. Like I've seen it too many times where I'm thinking, oh, this is just a weakness.

So why does the brain do this? But the brain's not worried about you squat in a thousand pounds. It wants to survive. So it assumes, you know what I mean? So when I say that, like I've seen the foot when somebody's running like internally rotate when it shouldn't. That's a bad technique. And I'm going, why is that? Well, I started digging around the person and found that they had a problem in their groin that they didn't even know they had.

So I touched this spot on the groin. and they jumped off the table. They didn't even know there was pain yet. But the reason they adjusted their foot was to protect the groin when they were running so it didn't pull itself apart. The body's a computer. It's a computer, right?

So that changed my thinking about 12 years ago, I think it was. And I stopped thinking that, oh, the reason they're doing this is they have a weakness. So I'll just train it. That's what I used to think. You're weak. Let's do wide box squats. Right.

Well, I can train you out of that problem. Then I realized the brain's doing that for a particular reason. Now I have to figure out why. Because it's trying to protect itself. The brain doesn't care that you want to do a box squat or some type of a squat that's going to, you think you need for your sport. It cares that it's not going to tear you apart when that happens, right? So there's a compensation if you've got a problem that you don't even know about. Like these compensations, the brains will show me things and your body does things that you don't even know there's pain yet.

But it's coming if you don't get to the if you don't solve the problem. Yeah, I'm starting to develop so many questions. This is pretty cool version of the same drill where the guy is like in a plank position against the band here. Yeah. And I've switched to the standing only because I can get more reps. But yeah, that's one of the ones that I'll do, I've done in the past. It's cool to see these variations. So what I can't help but think is like so many things have to do with learning.

Right. And then once you kind of learn something, you're like, okay, I get it. And now we can start to speak on a higher level. You taught me earlier about plyometrics. You gave me like a definition for plyometrics. Like, okay, now I understand the definition of it. Now when you start to talk about it,

I have a better comprehension of what the hell it is you're actually talking about. And I think that if we apply that to movement, well, man, like let's just slow everything way down. So like Mark, you can't move as fast as this other guy who's able to do this. well maybe we should take movements that are similar but maybe just go slower and some of your triphasic where you're going through the eccentric right eccentric we can go through something real i could i could do wide stance squats or maybe a squat with a kettlebell or something and i can go eight seconds on the way down right then maybe the next couple weeks maybe i do some iso or i'm in

like horse stance holding some weight right or have a weighted vest on or something like like that, something that we agree upon or something that you've seen effective for people and doing static holds with Copenhagen's and stuff like that, then you start to think, man, well, all that stuff makes so much sense because now I'm slowing my, I'm slowing everything down. I'm telling my body, hey, this is okay, but we're still training that area and we're still working that area and we're still, we're still strengthening, we're conditioning that area, right? Absolutely, right? You hit the nail on the head because, Mark, if somebody got into that one, exercise where you're moving fast and you can't move it fast. The brain's going, it's not okay.

It's not okay that you move fast right now. Bail. Your tissue may not be able to handle the load, everything. Then you nail it when you go back to moving slower under very controlled stress, like eccentric's isometrics, and then you build a tolerance. And what I found is that isometrics, if there's a old bad pattern like, hey, you injured yourself at this point before, isometrics kind of let the brain know that you are okay as you said and then once you do that then we go back to the fast stuff they're faster they're better so there's a process here like and i i know with with instagram everybody wants everything instantly now like social media right you got a like everything's so fast food hit the button and it's coming in 10 15 20 minutes right to your

house where this is this is a process and that's what a lot of people i think live lose interest or or make mistakes. They got to realize, hey, what I'm doing today is setting me up for 18 weeks later to be successful. And people don't want to wait 18 weeks for nothing. Do they? They don't, right? Yeah, that's, well, that's a couple months, right?

But what is exciting is if I told you, Cal, man, I've been doing some sprints and I got this groin thing and it just, I'm in pain just standing here, you know? You can say, hey, well, let's look at some mild faster release. look at a couple of these techniques, right? And it's Thursday today. Maybe by Monday. Maybe by Monday of next week I could start to feel maybe not like better all the way better, but I can feel better than I have felt.

And I can call you and say, yo, that's stuff we're doing is working. Like I can sleep. I don't have the same level of pain. The pain is decreasing. And you're like, that's great. Now let's maybe, you know, and then we can have an intervention about like exactly what exercises do or how to prescribe them. But I can actually make progress really, really fast.

So you're talking about 16, 18 weeks because that's what a responsible strength coach is going to tell you is like this is going to take a little while. But I would notice progress pretty fast within just a couple days, which is definitely still longer than the DoorDash takes. Right. You could notice some really good progress. I've been with some great strength coaches. They've helped me with all kinds of stuff.

and I've had hamstring things, and I've had within a week, a tweak in the hamstring where you're like, I think this is like a two or three or maybe a full month recovery thing. And they helped me in five, six, seven days later, I'm like, I think that son of a bitch is gone. Yeah, yeah.

Well, and I've seen instant results, right, where people have small things or whatever it may be. And then you realize where the real problems come up from, especially with like maybe your hip was out of place and you got a tight hamstring. Right? So maybe your hip was rotated. And then the Cairo just pops it back in the place. And you walk around the next morning they wake up.

And it's pretty good because that rotated hip, whether it was kind of pulling on the hamstring, right? So I've seen bones out of place in your foot, like the talus bone and the cuboid bone, causing problems way up the chain. Because like your foot's so important, it's the only thing touching the ground when you're moving and you're running most likely. right so so if that feedback loops bad there's a whole cascade of effects that go up all the way through the entire body right yeah hopefully it's the only thing hit in the ground well yeah right but like um that's what people don't understand is how important that foot is to be strong vigilant right and effective so that's that's so important what are some things that you've done over the years to address the foot i know people get all right crazy about the foot and

we've had people go on and on about the big toe i just think some of the stuff's fun and funny because it's like, I don't know, we just spend so much time talking about like building up your chest and building up your back and building up these like really large muscles and then we start talking about like the big toe. Yeah, well, two of the things I do is I like to do the spring ankle exercise. So I basically get the foot in an isometric position and then they hold that position. And it's really with a low heel on like the lipper. I just put two plates down and they stand on a plate and they have a low heel isometric hold for, you know, 30 seconds if you're holding the dumbbell. and then I do a high heel, isometric hold on one foot, right?

And that's a big one is that spring ankle exercise. And I know there's so many foot exercises out there, but I have 60 people running through my gym in three hours. I can't do all these detailed foot exercises. And I found that that spring ankle is one that I do, and I do it isometrically. So we'll actually get on the edge of that plate. I put the squat belt on, hook it to the right to like the rack,

and then they're pushing their foot into the, that plate on the forefoot of their toe. And when we measured it, we had a 200 pound kid pushing over 550 pounds isometrically just like that. Right? So when they're pushing that into the ground and they hooked that in, he's hooked down is symmetrically, but that, actually it's just a plate holder, right, that we move there.

And so a 200 pound person is now putting 550 pounds on their forefoot. So I use that exercise. And then along with that, I do squeeze the big toe, which if people wanna look it up, it's called, I call it the toe glute reflex. There's other reflexes out there like Babinski, but that's when your baby's born

and they rub the bottom of the foot to see if they squeeze their toes, right? But it's not by definition that. I have fixed so many hamstring problems by having people just squeeze their big toe when they walk. So the foot hits the ground, they squeeze their big toe. And a lot of my athletes, if you pull the insoles of their shoe out, if they come out,

there's a hole in the big toe, right? And in that, what that does is it engages the glute at the right time. So then the glute fires first and then the hamstring fires. Because the problem with a lot of hamstring problems is that when they go to do hip extension, and you can see the sequencing order right there, right? If you went back where the glute fires first, then the hamstring. And then the contra-l-Q-L. But if you can get the right order of muscles firing, you have the right patterns.

And by using the big toe. So I, Mark, I even coach our athletes. to use their big toe in any hip extension exercise, but also even on the bench press. So if you're going to bench press, if I was going to push you, I would actually have to stabilize my glutes so that I didn't push myself back. And for you to stop me from pushing you,

you would have to use your glutes, right? Well, but your big toe needs to grab the ground to help stabilize the glutes. So I actually coached my athletes, squeeze the big toe, and then your glutes fire when you go to bench press, right? And if you want to get down to the details, the bench press, the glutes should fire about 100 to 200 a second before the bar reverses at your chest.

So the glutes fire a little bit. And I know in powerlifting, people would lose their mind because your glutes may come off the bench a little bit, right? But the sequence needs to happen that my toe squeezes as the bar's coming down. The glutes fire right before the bars reverse. Because there's a sequencing in order that the glutes should fire. Then the muscle tension runs through your abs all the way up to the left. the chest muscles and then reverses the bar at that point of impact when the bar comes down

to push it up faster. So that's like a little detail coaching thing that I'll look for in my athletes. And the great ones that I've had, I've never had to coach that sequence because they naturally have it. So I kind of build things sometimes off the best ones that I've never coached in a certain thing because they're very good at it. It's kind of like you see Usain Bolt, you see him running 100 meters and you got guys like David Weck talking about like head over foot and these these various concepts, which I think are really cool concepts, but I don't know if anybody really ever taught some of these high-level sprinters or mentioned to these high-level sprinters, hey, head over foot, I think it was a byproduct of them just hauling ass.

Well, yeah, haul-and-ass having all the bold genetics that they ate, right? Because they're bull genetics most days. They have great genetics. But yeah, everything's sequenced correctly. You're exactly right. And when you say haul-in-ass, to me, it's just what happens for survival and what's natural. and it just that's the way they do it and that's what works very well

and you might have to sometimes teach these things though to other people I mean I've taken people on exercises like a deadlift and I said hey you know what I try that again I watch them go again and I'm like I just taught the entire class I just showed everybody how to keep their back flat

can you try this rounding your back I just taught everybody keep their head kind of more neutral you mind putting your head down and I'd watch them go and I was like okay that that looks a lot better. Yeah.

So sometimes you have this individuality of specific athlete where I don't want them to like round their lower back, but sometimes I'd have to have them crane over a little bit with their thoracic spine and then try to keep their head more neutral. I had to have them, you know, looking down at the ground a little bit more as opposed to a female athlete that maybe gets in a way better position from the jump. I might have to instruct her on completely different form. Absolutely. I mean, over the years, I've done the same thing when you're looking at,

somebody and then eventually I figure kind of some things out where hey their torso is really short so this is a different this is a different exercise for that person than my swimmer over there who has a long torso you know what I mean you just can't box people in right well and that's a little bit of you have to do squats and you got this person with this long ass torso who's really struggling right and that's the art of this right the coaching and versus being a rigid person in regards to like oh this is how you do it this is like like well maybe not so much right that that might get somebody injured, right, if you're forcing them into a rigid box. On to what you were saying about bench pressing.

I've been talking about that for a long time. I've mentioned many times that I think if you're bench pressing correctly and you're kind of just learning it, that your ass should be kind of sore from benching. Yeah. Your glutes should be, you know, on. And actually, when you mention that, if you have glutes, which not everybody has like, you know, some packed in glutes there, but if you have some glutes, it actually is going to help keep them on the bench because you're going to be flexing

them and you're going to make in your butt like a little bit bigger, a little bigger. Absolutely, right? So it's actually helpful. And I used to kind of like almost like leg extension my leg. Now, there's various ways that people will put their legs and their feet and stuff. But like for the most part, I was flat footed when I would bench press. And I would try to like kind of drive my foot into like the front of my shoe. I mean, this is how particular this weird stuff gets.

I actually would intentionally wear a size 13 shoe, which I'm normally like a 12 and a half, and I'd push my foot into the front of the shoe so that, you know, you would be able to see like the heel would have space in it because I was really working on keeping my foot flat. And one of the reasons for that is that when you try to arch in a bench press, so what would happen is, and it's kind of hard for me to demonstrate here, But what would happen is a lot of people that go off their toe when they bench press,

they would get like, they would move their knee up and then they would like fold in like this. And their shoulders would be rotated forward when they're trying to bench press. And so I was like, no, flex your glute, you know, engage your glute and almost engage like your quads and your glute and lock all that in. And then you're able to kind of like arch your way into it. So just as you're mentioning and you're saying like as a person is coming down almost in the bench press, that's like the most ideal time to do that. And you're dead on. It just happened.

It just happened. And I only picked it up because, and we're talking, I figured it out usually around 50 to 60 percent load. Right. My athletes are moving it very violently. And they'd bring it down. And right then my best ones, I would say the best, not the strongest, but the most athletic kids that just things happen naturally. Like they can pick something up so fast. I saw their butt squeeze 100th to 200 a second right before the bar reversed.

And it just seemed like, hey, and if somebody, even the kids that were with bad technique, they didn't squeeze, they squeezed too early or they squeezed too late. I'm like, okay, there's something here. So this is what the timing is. And again, it gets to just being natural like Usain Bolt, just being fast, right? Just being fast. So, but even the back to the toe blue reflex, I call it, even if you squeeze that big, toe and your hips push into the pads for the lap pull down.

When I tested it, like they could pull down more weight. They could pull down things faster. So like to me, that glute firing correctly is, look, let's go to the core. The core, in my opinion, is the glutes in the spine, right? So I've never seen anybody have a strong core and weak glutes. Now somebody will say, well, you know, I don't have any glutes, but I can do an ISO bridge for five minutes. Well, but if I put you in a functional movement and try to test your strength with your core, it's not going to work very well. Now, I've never seen somebody with super big, strong glutes and a weak core.

It's just never happened. Look at my wrestlers, power lifters. They have these big glutes or strong hips. Their core is always strong. The wrestlers, you know, people say, well, how much core training do you do for the wrestlers? Well, like, look at, there's the thickest humans I got on a body weight ratio through the core. Like, have you ever been put in a gut wrench? Like, or somebody's trying to throw you across the mat?

Like, you have to have a strong core. You'll get folded like a lot of hair. Yeah, Kurt angle comes to mind. Yeah, right. You know, he was like, he was super fit. He's an amazing shape, but he just had this like block of a body. Block of a core, right? Like, yeah.

And my point is, is that if you got strong hips and they're functioning correctly, the spinal stabilize, the core, everything's working that. I've seen the core just be extremely freaky strong, but guess what they also have? Strong hips. And then years ago, as a young coach, hockey gets a lot of pucks shot into their feet, right? And they'll break a big toe. So we'd have their foot broken. But I've correlated that when I was young that, hey, guess what happened to that glute on that one side?

It shrunk when the kid broke his foot because he couldn't use his big toe. So then I started correlating one of my freakiest athletes, they had 44 and four. inch vertical and not and not the the arm circle verticals people are showing on the internet right where they hang in the air we're talking his hands on the hip was 270 was 39 inch vertical hands on hips holy shit yeah and then when i tested his toe strength because he had big glutes when he goes to push against my thumb because i was just testing on his big toe he damn there dislocated my thumb he pushed so hard right and i started correlating like my biggest strongest glute athletes have super strong toe Big toe.

And that's what I correlated. Like, there's a big deal here. They must, maybe they're getting like hundreds of thousands of reps because they just have always done that. They've always used the big toe, right? Yeah, I think so. And people ask me, but I've seen it before, Mark, where, hey, I've had people visit me and spend a couple days.

And I just get them walking with their big toe in their shoes or bare feet, whatever. But ultimately, the glute turns on. And I tell people, hey, you can. come to my gym and I can train you and let's say we do two 300 leg reps and I get you to use your big toe but if you don't walk with your big toe the five 10,000 steps you're taking a day, it erases it. Even though as a trainer I can get them working in my gym correctly, you need to make sure they're using the outside the gym or you still have problems. Getting all those extra reps in.

Extra reps. How are you using the big toe? Are you trying to have your feet oriented a very particular Are you trying to like walk a particular way? Well, I do change up foot position and exercise. I call it my three way foot, just internally neutral and external. Let's say on a glute ham where you know you're in the glute ham and you'll have the three way foot, you'll have one time we'll do a set of glute hams with the foot feet out, sometimes neutral, sometimes internal. And what you'll do is just hit the different heads of the hamstring.

But in exercise, yeah, we're trying just to have them squeeze their foot or their toe. And I, you don't want to coach it to you want to coach it so it happens right before the toe squeezes right before the glute needs to work. Okay, so that's the sequence of how it works. But and ultimately, then when they're walking, you know, I tell them, hey, strike with your heel when you're walking. The weight should go on the outside of the foot. And then the outside of the foot, weight shifts over across the front of the foot to the big toe. And the big toe is the push-off point, right? And that's why people wear that hole in the bottom of their insert.

And is it like kind of like a short foot? Like you're trying to like squeeze your foot or you're trying to actually like just press the big toe bit? Yeah, I'll short toe. I call it short toe, but yeah, you're exactly right with the short foot. It presses the ground and then that toe should shorten and squeeze and like the top of the middle of the big toe should like raise up a little bit. Kind of an interesting thing of the short foot

because like people are always talking about toe splay. Right. You know and. And it should I think. It should. But then when you go to put the pressure on that the big toe. Yeah, it's nice to be able to. do all of it. But a lot of times when you do look at an athlete's foot, you're like,

it's not what you expected, you know, it looks like it got smashed a bunch with a hammer, but I think a lot of times it is, you know, they're in cleats and particular shoes, basketball shoes and skates and so on, right? But I think they are like practicing like, you know, clenching their their toes together a lot, probably. Absolutely. And then, you know, the other thing that some of my athletes I got frustrated with was, hey, they've been trained with me eight, 10 weeks, they go on vacation, go to the beach and they wear their, they're, they're, they're, they're flip-flops. And the flip-flops, you've got to keep your big toe up to keep them on when you walk. So your big toe's dysfunction starts there. They come back and now they got a problem.

I'm like, why aren't you moving correctly? I think of vacation, but they stopped using their big toe because they were on vacation and they were wearing sandals everywhere. Got to keep that big toe moving. Got to keep it big. Is there, when it comes to something like sprinting, you know, I've heard Charlie Francis used to talk about driving that big toe up in the in-between phase, you know, when you're driving your knee and you're driving forward. Obviously, when you hit the ground, things get a little different. You're probably, you know, popping off of the big toe. But that's also pre-stretching the Achilles tendon, right? Absolutely. And then it's kind of helping the foot stay rigid, right? So when that foot strikes the ground

and that toes up, there's a rigid part of the foot that then helps absorb the force, which then transfers it, and it'll go right. right through the Achilles tendon to cause a great stretch reflex because that's where we get all our power, right? I mean, if you wanna see the power of a stretch reflex, just take 50% bench, just bench it as fast as you can up and down, and then bring it down, take the stretch reflex out

by just pausing it for five seconds, and then bench it as fast as you can't. You're gonna see a 20% difference 10 to 20 in bar speed. Now that varies from person to person. Now the fast switch fiber person and the ones that we talk about can jump high naturally, right? they're gonna lose about 15 to 20% maybe. And the less, the less rigid,

or the less explosive people might only lose 10% by pausing it. But when you take that pause out, or take that bar reversing out and that stretch reflex, like that's what we're trying to do when we load that sprint when that leg slams down. But you're exactly right. And if you're sprinting and you're,

you're kind of landing more so on your toes, and some of my understanding of it is, you might have more ground contact time because your foot, you're landing like this and then your foot is like forming to the ground and it's going to take you longer to absorb all that force and then redistribute forward again. Yeah, you're exactly right. And I think, but here's the thing I've always done.

I want it to happen naturally for this, right? So if I get into coaching somebody, especially when I found on engineers. So when I'm coaching a young athlete that's an engineer, they try to analyze everything, and I've seen things just fall apart because they're over-analizing and they're thinking too much where the athlete that just, okay, I'll just do that, coach. And he just goes. It falls into place a little bit better. You know what I mean?

So over-analyzing or overthinking it sometimes is probably the wrong. If it slows the movement down, I'm like, all right, I did something wrong as a coach. If the movement has slowed down. And that's where I tested all of my principles and theories. If I do this now, and the athlete in 10 seconds did 18 reps, but now I coached them and they're only doing 12, I did something wrong. You know what you mean? They slowed down. They're over analyzing or something's not correct.

So I've seen many mistakes that I've made over the years. So yeah, something could be slightly off with your, and that happens a lot because there's, again, there's that individual variation of how someone's going to be able to interpret the information that you're sharing with them. Absolutely, right. Yeah, and with the foot, like it's a very complex thing. And then just running straight ahead, but many of these guys, you got like rugby soccer, they're running to now they've got to land with a slight adjustment because they're going to make a move here. You know what I mean? So there's all these variables that you've got to look at.

Yeah, it's endless. That's the magic of sports. We're never going to get to the end of it. Tell me a little bit more about this experience with the hockey team because it seems like, you know, coaching is kind of a selfless thing. You know, you'll get credit from the athletes. they'll say, hey, coach, you know, it's unbelievable. Thank you so much.

And you get some of that. But being part of a team that wins a gold medal for the United States, like that had to be unbelievable. Yeah, I mean, over, we go over there with, you know, 23 of pretty amazing young and older ladies, I should say, because, I mean, we had some that were, you know, going on second kid, right? So, and so, and I've coached a number of them,

and they were just all in, right? Like the magic, people talk about egos, and the women on this team, the egos weren't there, right? And they were so good, and the coaching staff did a wonderful job of just bringing, like, taking things from when we started a year ago,

bringing that whole team up, and just the experiences, right? Like, just seeing these athletes, and when we were over there, they spent, you know, I had oarings, and I was able to watch them. their recovery each day and we were working on it. We'd send individual emails to people,

hey, you need to work on this, that, just by looking at their readings of recovery. And these guys, these women were doing everything they were asked, right? Made them aware of, hey, make sure we get in the sun, make sure we, you know, get up in the morning. Circadian rhythm, the whole deal. Like we were, and I could go, but the,

when you have everybody committed and truly committed, Mark, it was, it's pretty magical. And then we got to a point where, you know, being one of the most dominant women's ice hockey teams at the Olympics, we'd outscored people 30 to 1. Right? And you're going into the last game, and I don't get nervous too often, I get excited,

but I walk into the arena just before warm-ups mark, and we dressed in a different arena, walked across, and it was like, the arena was practically filled at that point with all the fans, the energy hit you in the chest, and in the nerves of that game, like I got nervous right there, then and we're talking 40 minutes before the game starts and you're going oh my the electricity right

and then just hopefully you did everything right and I felt like we did and we were still down by one with three minutes left before Hillary Knight was in front of the net was able to get one to go in right to tie it up now you're tied and then you're going okay then we got a now it's sudden death and the nerves that were involved in that right like and then Megan Keller was able to get that last goal and bury it. And it was pretty exciting. But during we're there, you know, people ask me, well, what's it like? And I'm like, well, you know, there's so many things that we did. Fans are going nuts. That's great. That's so cool. Yeah. It's, it was unbelievable. I mean, they worked so hard. And I mean, I'm there and we're training them. And we literally probably

we trained every day and we were playing games every other day or every second day. Or, third day and then you know I had the 10 I had a 1080 device over there and we were watching her sprints they kept getting better and faster and what we were doing was we're just clearing patterns right to make sure that they were healthy working on small things um using the big toe the one was the big toe right we got them on every exercise people were using the big toe now most of them had been coached by me before but we we just got their glutes and everything working correctly with that big toe reflex um all the exercise we were doing how we sequenced them you know one of the things that I like to do that I felt was very important was sequencing.

So instead of doing like a squat and then a box jump, I would cycle, instead of doing quad, quad exercise maybe for a cycle, I would go, we do the squat, and then we would do a hamstring exercise. So we went from quad to hammie back and forth. I love it. Right? It was an old school Charles Poliquin type of stuff. Yeah. And what we did was we'd cycle, then we'd do a plio with the quad and then we do like

a prime time run, which is a straight-legged run. And it's kind of a plyometric for the hamstring. But what I have found over the years, the last three years was that if I just kept doing a quad exercise after quad exercise in like a French contrast cycle that I used to do, they wrote about in Triphasic 1, what happens is the quad, the tone of the quad, so the tension in the quad just starts creeping up after each exercise. And what happens is it creates bad patterns. So, for example, I'll give you this example.

If a power, like, let's say I warmed an athlete up and then they did 10 sets of five on squats. And then I had them sprint. That sprint has changed its form from the very first one before they did that, right? So what has happened is you've caused some patterns that weren't conducive to running. You've caused good patterns for squatting. And powerlifters need to do that. But my running athletes or skating athletes, they don't want to get those bad patterns. So I found that I've been able to offset it if I do a set of squats and then maybe do a glute ham hyper and go back and forth switching from the quad to the hamming or the glutes from the quad.

Then they don't form those bad patterns. And so I have them do 10, 20 sets and they come back and they run. The running form looks like it did before they did per se the 10 sets of squats. Man, that is awesome. That is so cool to hear because I know exactly what you're talking about. We had a friend of mine was here at Super Training for a few years, and he was one of our videographers, and he was also a former Division I football player,

this guy, Terrell, and Terrell was super fast, and so I had him doing a bunch of, we were doing leg presses and lay extensions and doing stuff back and forth, and I just killed him with a set. We just did like this set that just annihilated both of us. And right when he got done with the set, I was like, let's sprint.

So I like to hit him on the shoulder. And we went over to the turf. And I just like, hey, I beat you. You know, obviously I can't beat him in any sort of sprinting since he's insanely fast. So I totally cheated. But to your point, both of us, you know, he just got done with his set. So he was worse off than me. But both of us, like couldn't run very well.

You run like an old granny. You know, you can't really get much hip extension. It's because your body is like at that moment, it's kind of deformed almost. Well, it's adapting to what. but you just, the stress that you just applied, right? The body's like, this is what we're doing, this is what we're doing, this is what we're doing, then you hit it with something completely different. But if you kind of do it sort of more gently in between,

you're doing something different between every set, that's a totally different ball game. Yeah, and switching from a quad anterior chain to post-tier chain exercise, I have found great results. Now, look, I don't recommend it for power lifting, right? Or Olympic lifting, because you need to get good at the squat. That's why you would not, you know, I call performance pattern cycling if somebody wants to look it up. I wrote articles about it where like you don't benefit. It's a benefit to sort of get, it's a benefit to grace the groove of that movement.

It's also a benefit to sort of be kind of like stuck and restricted to that movement and that movement only. In the case of power lifting or Olympically. That's exactly it. Like I would say maybe in the offseason you might want to do performance pattern cycling, but you go into maybe your 12-week cycle to get ready for that powerlifting me. You do not want to do that, right? But I want my athletes to move really well, right? I don't want to move like an elite power lifter.

I'm just going to be honest with you. You know what I mean? That's the last thing. None of my athletes in my gym move like elite powerlifters. It's way too many inputs of one thing. Of one thing, exactly, right? So if people look that up, it's pretty profound in regards to the, and no, look, people would say, well, do you want to get super strong?

And I think your strength, I could probably get somebody just a little bit stronger if I just back squatted them if I was measuring them in the back squat. But I want more athleticism. Like I would rather have somebody that's a little bit more athletic, a lot more athletic and a little less strong. I'm okay with it. You know what I mean? Yeah, this has been some of my conjecture about lifting in general. One thing that I've noticed with myself is that when you lift really hard, how do you feel two or three days later? A lot of times your body is like really stiff.

And what you're talking about is like during a workout, how immediately it changes the patterns of how you move. And what I'm talking about is how it can disrupt your movement pattern like all the time. Absolutely. You know, you could just excuse the word, but you can like retard your movement pattern with very brutal lifting all the time to where maybe now your hips aren't rotating, your shoulders aren't rotating.

we all know how, you know, legs day feels and then you have to go upstairs. Well, your pattern to go upstairs is now changed and you're holding on to the railing and you're trying to get your ass, you know, up the stairs. Or what about going down the stairs? That eccentric. Right. And how important is eccentric for sport? Like eccentric is usually the best athletes kind of handle the eccentric's almost better than

maybe they can handle the concentric of the gym, right? Absolutely. Well, if you can't absorb the force, then you can't. change directions or reapply it very fast. And every human movement has an eccentric, any normal natural human movement. I mean, deadlift's not normal because you're just pulling it right off the ground, right?

But a squat or a bench has an eccentric component to it, right? So it's very important. And the eccentric, if you can't handle the force, that means you can't stop the weight well. So to be able to move something, you have to be able, and that includes your body weight,

that you have to be able to absorb. That's why I feel like when I figured out trifasic 25 years ago, And I waited 10 years to write the book, right? Like I was like I didn't even think about the book. I didn't even know what the name of it was for eight, eight years before, after we came across. Like I would, you know, my coaches were like, and I was very fortunate when that, when I created trifacic, like, I went to my track and swimming coach who won multiple big 10 titles. And I was like, I think this eccentric stuff and this isometric then will work.

I think we put it in this order. And we tried it both ways. We all got the best results for our athletes if we did eccentric ISO. And I was like, I think we're going to get slower coach at first. And they were like, okay. And then, I mean, these were season coaches like, well, we're going to make sure we do it in the offseason and we'll watch and see what happens. But I think we'll get better later. And they both let me try it.

And eight weeks after we started that, like, because they did get slower. Every athlete in the pool and track got slower. And we're to Division I, Big Ten school. You'd think they'd probably say, hey, we're going to pull this. But you know what? They wrote it out. And then eight weeks later, everybody was getting faster. Wow.

So I was very blessed, right? But you're right. that eccentric component. And the magic body centrics is, realistically, what happens is the muscles kind of tearing itself apart at the micro level, like at the actin and myocin, the head, we go back to the physiology days. And then the immune system, you'll see the immune system like react because there'll be an increase in white blood cells. They go in, they clean that out. And then the body rebuilds it thicker, those actin mice and it's thicker. So the muscle is now stronger.

And it has more tension strength, right? So then you go and do an ISO after. after the muscles rebuild itself. And what happens is you create, you got a thicker, stronger muscle with more potential, and then you make it super strong with the isometrics. And then you go try to get it moving faster with the power phase and the speed phase. So yeah, it's all a sequence.

Back to the process. You know, one thing that I sometimes think about when I think about like athleticism and certain aspects of athleticism, maybe not being built in the gym, I think of some basketball players. and Dennis Rodman comes in mind. I don't know if you can try to bring up a clip, Ryan,

of Dennis Rodman rebounding, but like the amount of times he would hop off the ground to get the ball because Dennis Rodman was like really smart in terms of like where he'd positioned his body. He was also very, he was unbelievably strong. People don't accredit him with that because he was tall and like slender. He's like 6'10 and he's thin.

But he would just, he knew like if I could tip, the ball, if I could touch the ball, I'm going to be able to rebound. So he would just go after a rebound, just like a lunatic, and you would see him get off the ground, get off the ground, get off the ground. It wasn't just one jump up all the time. A lot of times it was multiple, him getting off the ground, getting off the ground, getting off the ground. And that's a lot of what plyometric is. So I think a lot of times people think plyometric is just maybe like a jump, but it's not necessarily just a jump. It's being able to handle those forces, right? Well, yeah. And speak of that, I remember when I was working basketball in Minnesota, they had a rebounding drill.

And one of one of our kids, it was an amazing rebounder. He, I watched the drill, and he was on his toes. He'll never touch the ground for like 20 seconds during the drill. And I started to realize, I'm like, that's when I started realizing. I took, he. Rewind that, Ryan? This is a sick clip right here. Watch how many times he jumps in this, in this sequence.

This is when he's with the pistons. Yeah. When he's a young man. Boom, boom. Right? I mean, I don't even know how many times that was. It was like five, six times in just a second or two. And, well, there's the mental part of that, too, that the fact that he thought that was his basketball, no one else deserved it, right?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's the other part of that. Well, yeah, what an amazing athlete. But back to that thing. And this was years and years ago, Mark, I took key, because, you know, back in the day, people said, oh, your knee can't go in front of your toes, right? Like, that was a big thing. Well, I was like, wait a minute.

Not one of my athletes move that way on the court. Anywhere. Their knees are always in front of their toes. So every strength coach at Minnesota back then was not doing knees in front of their toes, right? And I was the only one like, but watch my athletes move. They all have their knee in front of their toes. So we're going to do pymetrics that way. We're going to do our squats that way.

And I think I'm more right than wrong. I don't know if there's any definitive answers out there. Well, I do think that, you know, the knee over the toe thing, I think it originated from people trying to coach against it very specifically when it came to like a squat. Yes, exactly. They were like, no, no, you don't squat with your knee going over your toe. And if you think about a squat where you're trying to like, if you're only going to parallel in a squat, then that might be okay. But if you're trying to like get lower, then it's harder to get any lower without driving the knee forward.

Depending on, you know, your leg length and your torso and like all these other factors. and whether you tend to hip hinge when you squat or there's a lot of different things going on there. So I do understand personal trainers or maybe back in the day of trying to coach that. Maybe their clients had knee, you know, knee issues and stuff. But how that ever extended outward into sport was a huge mistake of like, don't ever put your knee over your toe. I think where we're at now makes a lot more sense. Like, hey, goblet squats, lunges, very particular movements. But maybe, hey, if you're if you're thinking of loading up four,

five, six hundred pounds on a squat, then maybe do that very particular way, the way a power lifter may do it, or maybe the way an Olympic lifter may do it, and maybe avoid your knee excessively going over your toe, because maybe you could, you know, blow something out that way. But I think in terms of sport and in terms of training for sport, I'm a huge fan of, you know, I'm a huge fan of people not even getting close to parallel for sport a lot of times, right? Right. And then also what you had the guy doing that exercise for the foot, his knee was way in front of his, way in front of his toe, but it was an isometric where he was still in a high position. Yeah. So I think we've got to have like the right, you know, context around these things sometimes.

And I think the only case I can really see for like, hey, don't put your knee over your toe would just be these like maximum full on like power lifting squats. And I'm not saying that your knee can't go over your toe. I'm just saying that might be disadvantageous and you could potentially end up with an injury if you weren't sitting back into the squat. Yeah. With those massive, massive weights. But that'd be the only exception.

But otherwise, sport-wise, you've got to have your shin's got to be forward. Right. To move forward, you've got to have it forward. But you're exactly right with the, like the wide stands powerlifting position, especially if an athlete's got a weak posterior chain. Like, it's a wonderful exercise. And that's when you would coach them. I personally would still not coach them

to put their knee in front of their toe in that particular exercise, right? But when people took it into pymetrics and I'm like, well, look at my track kids when they move. Like, look at them do hurdle hops. Like that is magic when they do her. I mean, we're talking about world class 400 meter, right? Or 100 meters, you're like,

I mean, these guys come over the hurdle. They hit, it's like a rubber ball. You're like, oh, that's scary good. It's insane. I mean, I mean, what percent of the population can even jump over a hurdle? I know. Period.

Period. And they just do it. Like, it's magic. They do it like they're. Buck's Bunny. Completely made out of something different than the rest of us, right? In their cartoon, you know? And yeah, but 25 years ago, I took a lot of heat when I would do these things that nobody thought was.

You know what I mean? That nobody thought was right at the time. I'm like, ah, it's all right. I don't care. Like, whatever, it is what it is. I've taken a lot of heat over the years and it's all right. You know, it's unfortunate too because then you do end up with people like myself who did take some of that instruction. And I didn't really explore.

that that much. I just was powerlifting, so I didn't even really think about it much. But I didn't do, because I wasn't playing any other sports or wasn't participating in anything other than just power lifting, I spent decades without ever having my knee really go over my toe, except to maybe occasionally getting out of the car and like maneuvering a very particular way, picking something up or something like that, but I had never got into those positions. And then so I've been without that, I've been without that for a long time. And now I'm trying to work on sprints and I'm throwing like med balls and stuff. And it's very hard for me to get a really good forward lean. It's hard for me to have that kind of lower shin angle because my body's not used to being in that. It's very unfamiliar

territory for me. Yes. To do some of that. So I mean, I know, you know, we obviously had Ben Patrick on the show. We've talked about knees over toes stuff. I remember Charles Polackwin mentioning this a long time I go too talking about he was like no he's like I have my skaters and my people that ski and all these people I got them doing these lunges and their knees are way past their toes right and so those are those are great movements to do for sure 100% well with mel siff right I did you remember mel sith oh the super training guy right like the the super training book not the super training gym yeah but you know ultimately like he he he would argue and fight against that I remember on his i was on his YouTube or as yahoo back in the day his feeds and and people get crazy and

And, but, but he, he brought up so many good points about, hey, all these athletes, watch, watch the Olympic lifters when they squat. I mean, they're, they're six inches in front. They're needs six inches in front. Their toes, they're holding, you know, 200 kilos at the bottom of that front squat when they caught it. They caught 200 kilos, it's 440, right? They're like, yeah, at a body weight of 180.

You're going, oh, that's, that's pretty impressive. You know what I mean? So, well. But, yeah, I just, it just seemed like when I watch, but, but even you saying here, hey, I'm not a big fan of like going below parallel with athletes and I'm like I've been the same thing because I've never seen one of my athletes go below parallel and never right now they may be go below 90 maybe right because they're skating and that when that knee gets way in front of the toe then like if you go below 90 but but you're not parallel to the ground you know you may your knee joint may go

below 90 but you're still not parallel the ground because if the knees out in front of the toes then that 90 would be like this right so they may go below 90 But they're really never parallel to the ground. It's not even close. And I should specify a little bit more, too. I mean, first of all, I'm not even a strength coach. So it doesn't really matter what the fuck I say. But basically what I would instruct someone to do is like,

I do think maybe an underdeveloped athlete could benefit from a lot of variation in different types of squats. And so maybe exposing yourself to various types of squats would be a great idea. And maybe some squats where you are breaking parallel here and there isn't. the worst idea, but I don't really see, like, I would say with like a back squat, I personally just think most people would be better off squatting high or squatting onto a box that's kind of high. And then if you want to do stuff that's lower, breaking parallel, that's where I would have a goblet squat or something where you're just going lighter. Maybe the focus is a little different.

Maybe there's some eccentric component because you're like, I'm doing a knee strengthening movement. I'm not really trying to like, you know, bear it out. Like the benefit of a squat, you're trying to elicit this kind of like anabolic movement that can really cause a cascade of bringing some strength to the whole body, right? And one of the advantages of a squat is we can use a lot of plates, you know, whether it's a male or female athlete, you know, you're going to see the female and the male athlete like be able to use the most amount of weight on something like that. I know we got like things like a leg press, but leg presses don't really count for much. You're going to be able to use a good amount of weight, overload your spine, overload your body,

maybe get some of that bone density and get some of those advantages, right? The disadvantage though is that like, you know, try to teach someone how to squat. That takes some time. It's not the end of the world. You can teach people how to squat. But trying to teach people how to squat below parallel becomes problematic. Trying to teach people how to keep their form below parallel becomes. is very problematic.

I've trained hundreds, hundreds of people on the squat before, and it can get to be a nightmare fuel pretty quick. But if they squat higher, that's much easier to maintain position, maintain form. So my recommendation in terms of squats would be, you know,

explore your squats lower with lighter stuff and then train a little heavier and train higher and train safe and keep good positions. on those higher box squats and stuff like that. Absolutely. And the way I would look at, the way you said it was, like if I do go below, like you can do the goblet. I like to do a high step-up so that when they start in that deep. I love step-ups, right?

And my athletes do them. But like we're just, but using those different tools, you're creating a very diverse muscular system so that they can then maybe get lower in the squat later when it's time, when they feel good about it, right? And you've been there. Because the last thing you want to do is take your heavy squat deep for the first time ever below parallel, right?

I agree with you. Like, do what you can, stay above parallel, but condition them, get them ready with those other exercises. And there are a lot of other exercises that can just make you super, they can help you to be super strong. I just posted a video recently of Grankowski, Rob Grankowski saying,

man, I missed a whole season. He missed a whole year when he's in college. It's like junior year in college. And he's like, he almost never had the opportunity to turn into what he turned into, which is a Hall of Fame tight end, one of the greatest of all time, just because he thought,

like, I'm going to, you know, get in there and do squats. I know, I think JJ Wa is another example of someone who he basically lifted himself right out of the league. He loved lifting, which is awesome. Like, I love lifting too. But, and there's people doing that that aren't pro athletes that they're just lifting themselves to death. You know, you hear people using the term over-indexing,

you know, over-indexing. You know, you're over-indexing on this whole strength thing. And again, I love strength. I'm a huge promoter of it. I will lift until the day I die. I enjoy it. I love it. I understand.

I understand like cranking some ACDC and getting after it. I get it. But there's a lot of other exercises to choose from other than just a bench, squat, deadlift, an overhead press, even though some people don't think so. There's other things that you can do. And there's things that maybe would be a good idea to explore just so you have different and maybe have more access to better movement patterns.

Yeah. Well, I mean, years ago, I went to a clinic and it was the, it was down in Iowa, it was a weight at a weightlifting center. And they brought the godfather of Chinese weightlifting. And he wasn't going to be around long because he, at that point, they knew he had had cancer. Right. And he, and he went to the Soviet Union, then he went to Bulgaria to learn their methods. And he basically bowled it down to two things.

you do the Bulgarians stick with certain lifts and that's what they do. The Russians did a more diverse, they used assisted lifts. Okay. And then he took that back to China and he told the story where they had a world champion that broke their arm. So all he did was all these assisted lifts. And then they allowed him to do his full lift about six weeks before Worlds, which you would never let him go to.

Well, he went to Worlds and broke a world record. So the point is, is the value of what I saw there was that these assisted lifts can get rid of a lot of weak links that you may have and get you through pat toes, which Louis would agree with, right? Westside you would agree with. And the magic was that I'm like, that's why the diversity I feel is important. Now, diversity, especially for a power lifter, maybe in the off season, and then when you get close to the competition, you've got to be very specific, obviously, right?

But ultimately, even with my athletes, I love having very diverse. even exercises that I'm not a big fan of, but it gets them in a position that I'll never get into, let's do it. At least when it's not specific, you know what I mean? At least to build the foundation that's better and more injury resistant

is what I'm saying, right? What are some of these assisted lifts that you're talking about? Well, I, you know, things like, I like the deep step up. You know what I mean? And the way that we do it. And then...

Because your hip is like you're in a below parallel position. Yeah, below parallel position, yeah. Some other things. I do, well, like all my assistants, I like the reverse hyper, right? It's, that lift alone has, I found when I isolated it, fixed the five-yard dash the fastest in my athletes. So I'd have athletes and I ran some tests and whoever was slow into five-yard dash, we put them in different exercises mainly and drop other ones and reverse hyper seemed to fix it

the fastest. Reverse hyper was good for explosive activity, huh? Yeah. And then I would do it isometrically too. So starting. You have to show us that in the gym. Yeah, so starting strength. And then I can kind of see a lot of compensations with the reverse hyper.

So if somebody does the reverse hyper and they try to bend their knee to move the weight, I realize that they're trying to use their hamstring too much and not their glue. And then the other part, there's another one where if their back moves first to go to move the weight, then you know that they're using their small little QL muscle to fire their hips, right? So they're, and then another one that I like, well, the reverse hyper, I do like if you can, could look up razor curl um power razor curl power calditae reverse hyper is a really interesting one to observe people because you can really see how that spine moves yeah observe how that spine moves so this is live mark one hundred look at the speed of that exercise that's nuts and and people are like

well yeah i took so he's doing him a glute ham raise it's basically a razor curl right he's going straight in and out not coming up swinging like if you hit that first one again yeah yeah either or it doesn't matter so one one of them single leg yeah here's single leg now the speed that's real life speed and so the so there's band around his waist and that's that's helping him a little bit come back yep right and then he's pulling against the band so um there's some accommodating resistance going on here both ways right both directions got you and the you know again i took some heat for this exercise. But here's the thing. If you've been through an eccentric and isometric phase and you do that exercise in our power phase, you don't pull a hamstring

because your hamstring is working optimally now. Right. People say, well, I wouldn't do that with my pros. Well, there was about a $60 million pro in the background. There was another $30 million pro in the background that had been doing the exercise all day. So, but ultimately, that's just an indicator. Now, like with those exercises in the glute hams, love the glute hams, I love, the other exercise I love is the safety bar single leg squat, right? I think I was the first person to do it over, overloaded eccentric. So we'll do it. We'll get to that a second.

Can you play that one more time? Because where he's pulling into it, that last one you had, this, this looks like almost like a squat, like the reverse of a squat. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. So it's like, it's like if you were standing up, you would be pulling yourself downward towards the ground. That's neat. I think that's a really cool exercise.

And to tell people where why these exercises, I get to this. Like, so first training is slow. Next training phase is is asymmetric. And then we get to this is my better athletes as we talked. They, the best athletes I've ever measured, the Soviets did it in 1960, is that they relax their muscles faster. And moving like this teaches you to relax your muscles faster, right? and this is what I do when I'm trying to create the better athletes.

You know, I've been very fortunate to put my hands on people that spent the year with me of the Olympics or world championships. I've been able to train 21 Olympic and world champions. Those people move better. And maybe not in that exercise right there, but when they go to run and do their sport, they move smoother because there's a level of coordination. Have you noticed that like when you, if you physically, you know, have to work on these people because their hamstrings bother them or something? Have you noticed when you like press into their hamstring or you press into certain body tissues they have that they're they feel different? Yes, they do. And well, like a power lifter would be like you do the erectors of a power lifter or Olympic lift.

Like they're the tone is so intense, right? And they need work on it. It's like a like tonic. Yeah, it's very. Yeah. Yeah, that's tonic. And then as I work on them. But yeah, they're their muscles, they seem they have complete control.

And and what which when I say that like it's an interaction between the sympathy. you know, the stress system and the parasympathetic sleep system or recovery system. So even my best athletes, they can, there's three qualities that I've found over the years that the best athletes have. The first one I mentioned is that they can relax her muscle, right? And then the second one also comes from the brain is that they can go into a back squat. They might get their heart rate to 180, but they can calm down. They can bring it down to like, I had an elite wrestler once after he went to 180 and then 30 some seconds he was down to like 16. Oh my God.

Right. Now he's a pretty elite fitness, right, at that level, right? So they can handle, they can go from stress to relaxed, back and forth. Now that's an indicator that you're in great shape, but it's also an indicator that your brain can switch from a stress state to relax state to calm down really quick. And if you can calm down, then guess what? You're recovering faster for the next set. Does that make sense?

And then the other one was basically, it's just a hard number of your relative power output for body weight, right? how many kilos of per kilogram, how many watts of power you can produce? And then how would you usually test that? I usually test that on a sprint. You can do it on a vertical jump, but like a sprint with a 1080 device measuring them, right?

So when they sprint, like how many kilograms per, or how many watts per kilogram? And those, but if you look at the other two, if you can relax faster, you're going to be able to reduce more power output. Because so if you're going to accelerate and you're at a point in the run where you're trying to use the most out of your quads to push you forward and your glutes.

And if the hamstrings carrying too much tension, your quads are not going to produce all the power that is potentially there. And then if your foot's weak, Mark, the one big thing is people with that spring ankle exercise, we talked about, the one thing people have called me and said, Cal, I implemented this in my high school team. I had a couple of kids put six inches on in three weeks. They're vertical. And I'm like, they're like, thank you so much. I'm like, look, you had already built the hip in the knee to do that. If the foot's weak and you don't have the stability to use all that force, the brain's going to downregulate you from using all your potential.

So all I helped you do is find a weak link, took the weak link away by implementing the exercise, and now the hips and the knee unlocked all their power. They had it. They just weren't going to use it because there wasn't, the brain goes, you don't have enough stability in your foot to let me unlock the entire power output. So that's why that foot training is so important.

Yeah, you think you're going to get hurt. The brain thinks that we'll go back to the survival part that we talked about. Your brain says, I'm not going to let you destroy yourself. Even though you don't even know that you could destroy yourself by the power in your hips and knees. But if you do that a number of times with your foot being weak, you're going to hurt yourself. Again, it would be like if you were trying to run on a rough surface with no shoes on,

your brain's going to be like, we're not used to this. and it's going to reorganize, reorganize the way that you're moving. It's, it's going to be like, why are you moving like that? You're moving ridiculous. Like, well,

the ground hurt. Well, hurt my feet. Right? Well, let's say they were running on perfect ground and then for 20 meters and you videotape

and then watch them run on the bad ground. Like the perfect ground ends, the parking lot starts. You're going to see them change everything in their body. You know how fast that happened? The brain did that so fast and so instantly. that's the magnitude of which the brain's involved in. It is.

It's fast. It is so fast and magical. Like I get back and I appreciate it, right? I step back. I go, wow. And I've watched hundreds of videos. I used to watch animals run just to see what a horse looks like.

And it's pretty magical when it runs, right? Like, it's pretty scary. Oh, yeah. Well, their muscles relax really well. You see them contract and relax. And you're like, well, they're so muscular.

You can see it all. See it. I know. And you're going, okay, the problem I think too is that we live in such a sympathetic state with the lights and in the phones, right, that I don't think our muscles are relaxing as they should in most people. Does that make sense? Because they're always hyped.

Well, look, one of the methods I use to calm people down really quick, I do, I call it a triple-stack sniff. I have people sniff through their nose intake. three times and then they exhale through their teeth, which vibrates the teeth a little bit, which are connected to the cranial nerves, and then calms the brain down. And then the biggest part of this, the next step is to widen their vision

because I've found just widening their vision. So I've had people watch their phone, their heart rate goes up. And then they pull the phone away and widen their vision and it slows down. So a lot of animals that... widen your vision by just tracking something? Nope.

You just look straight ahead and focus. on widen, like what's on the peripherals, right? That's it. All you have to do is think about widening, because if you're stressed, you get tunnel vision. And then when you're relaxed, your vision opens up. So in between, you get out of your squat or get out of the, whatever exercise we're doing or interval when they're running, sniff through their nose three times, breathe out their mouth, and then widen their vision, right? It's a pretty, it's the fastest one I've seen to bring down your heart rate. But the vision, and I've isolated did each one of those things, the vision widening has been the best.

But like before a game, we want our kids to kind of calm down. We tell them, hey, don't use your phones. But if you're on your phone and your tunnel vision, so you're starting the game even more stress than you normally would be. And it's just going to take its toll. Not that you can't play the game, but the total stress of the game is just adds on to the stress of the game. You know, I know that they say like if you sleep in a hotel,

that you get like what they refer to as like a half sleep. like you don't sleep you don't sleep the same it's not as deep it's you can kind of track a bunch of stuff but there's a belief that you're you're on edge a little bit because you're sleeping in unfamiliar territory i mean people go all the way to the point where they may have athletes like hey bring your pillow from home because it has the same scent and like you know a lot of these a lot of these things are those things that you did you employ any of that with your athletes when you're traveling because i'd imagine like traveling's got to be just add an element to being a strength coach that, you know, maybe there's things that a lot of strength coaches haven't run

into before with the amount of travel that you've done. Yeah. And the big one that we preached, and it would be nice. And some athletes did bring their own pillows. But it's really the protocol before bed. Hey, try. If you do this at home, do the same thing. Take your shower, right? This is what you do. I think it's that mindset, hey, I'm going to follow this protocol. This is what works for me. And bring whatever you need, because sleep's obviously premium. Like sleep is premium. recovery, right? If you had to do and all the, well, you know, I had the, I had some machines over the years and I've done around 15, 20,000 tests on a few of them. But the one thing too, obviously sleep's number one in recovery, but the next thing that people have ever tried was a 20-minute walk.

I've measured it and it's literally the best recovery method. Great. Right? Perfect. Go outside without any sunglasses. You know what I mean? Now, and I didn't do the sunglasses before, but, but when I measured things. I mean, I went hot, cold tubs, everything I could. Now, the 20 minute walk, you actually need, so you can do an exercise. Let's say you do it too much. Get that big toe going. Right. Do the 20, do your training session. And I tried to, I measured the recovery after that, doing the walk, it didn't work. What you need to do is you need to, after a training session, you need to wait about two hours. And then the walk became effective because I think the walk was just noise at the end of the workout. Does that make sense? So you actually need to calm down,

cool everything down and then do the 20 minute walk which moves blood the walking is still like your your body's like we're still we're still in it yeah we're still in it if you did it right at right at rate at rate post i actually went uh i did a bench press i had a bench press PR in the gym i think it did like 555 or something like that for two reps and at the time i was uh in a i was in a yoga class and i look at my watch when i'm in the gym i'm like oh shit like i got to go hit up that yoga class so I haul ass over to the yoga studio, but I'm all still amped up from my bench and like I do the yoga class and I couldn't get into any positions. I couldn't like do anything. It just, you know, the lights are off.

This is like the type of yoga where you're just like you're not doing a whole lot. It wasn't a stressful type of yoga. It's more like relaxation and just stretching and opening your body up a little bit. Wasn't effective. Wasn't effective. It wasn't able to even halfway concentrate on even, you know, be present and do all. You know, and try this. And I'm like, everything feels like I'm just going to cramp.

My body was like just so like stuck together, I guess you can say, you know. Absolutely. And I tell, so like at the Olympics, we were really focused on, hey, make sure you get out first thing in the morning, get your metabolism going with a 20 minute walk minimum. Because it just gets a metabolism going. Metabolism is the number one, the main thing for you to recover, right? I mean, there's been say that certain Olympic organizations, they shouldn't, but they were prescribing thyroid medication, small doses to speed up to metabolism, right? Because I imagine it wasn't tested for it, right? That's what I've heard through the Olympic grapevine. And there's people out there that are trying to push the ads, obviously. But the point is, is metabolism, get up, do your 20-minute walk, get your coffee at the same time, whatever you want to do, whatever works for you, but get that 20-minute walk to start the metabolism to start to recovery process. and then do it later. And now we know even like, hey, and bodybuilders,

it's crazy the nutrition that they've known for for 30 years. And some of these nutritionists now are going, oh, yeah, this is a good thing. Well, if you just ask your local bodybuilding expert, he would have told you how good this was, right? But like a 20-minute walk after a meal or a 10-minute walk just helps with your insulin stability, right? Your insulin sensitivity and everything just in getting a new, right? It's a bodybuilders were decades ahead of some of the nutrition that we're seeing.

Now, oftentimes that's the case. The meatheads. The meatheads. And I mean, I know people that barely, if not, didn't finish their high school diploma but have gotten, it sounds like PhDs in areas of biochemistry. Right? You're going, this is amazing. And just, well, even the classics, like the liver tablets before they had amino acids,

they knew those work. Yeah. The nutrient dense in liver, the density in liver, it's unbelievable. Desiccated liver tablets and they were gigantic. And they were, you remember those? It was it the animal pack once too or whatever it was back in the day, right? Yeah, you open the thing up

and the whole thing stinks like crazy. It was wonderful. But liver back then, I mean, yeah, the bodybuilders knew. Even nowadays, like you talk to certain people and they're like, well, you know, morning carted fasted cardio doesn't work. And I'm like, I know what the research says,

but I think it does work. I'm just going to tell you, right? Everybody, everybody, you know, you get in arguments that people. It's tough though. If something is, like works pretty good mentally, kind of hard to challenge it, right? Absolutely.

Like if you really believe in that and that moves, you know, if you feel like it's moving the needle for you, then it probably is. It has to be, right? Right. It has to be. And then just your belief might even make it more effective. Right. But if it sets the tone for the day that you can be more strict about your dieting and

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like, go with it, right? If it's moving the needle, that's all I've ever done. I've tested everything that I've ever thought. thrown out there from like the goat drill to the glute test or the the the toe using the toe in exercise and I'm like I move the needle with these people so I'm going to go with it right right just test everything and I've tried things that didn't work that some people think are standard today and I'm like oh I just didn't see it move the needle so I'll figure something else out right I mentioned that you know kind of half sleep type thing in the hotel room but I think that we end up with this

a half-ass version of sleep nowadays from, you know, just being on the phone too late, watching TV too late, just over-stimulation, maybe what you're watching, maybe what you're consuming, you know, maybe consume, like, if you're into politics, if you're consuming a bunch of politics and it's pulling you one way or another, right before bed might not be the best time to do that. I heard a comedian recently he was talking about, he was talking about his dad. He's like, my dad sits there and watches Fox News until he can't take it anymore. He's just watching and watching.

He's making all these comments and he's mad about this and he's mad about that. And he's agreeing with this, agreeing with that. And he's like, ah, I'm going to bed. And he was like, what a great way to go to bed. Like all stressed out, all worked up. I mean, the only protocol there is like, you know, you just brush your teeth, maybe use the restroom and then boom, you're in bed. Yeah, expecting yourself to have a restful night of sleep.

No chance, right? Yeah. It's going to be tough. Well, to say the least. And yeah, just that hormonal dump at the end. Like, just calm down, right? Like, hopefully, yeah, our athletes, but they, you know, we had one when we were at the Olympics. Like, you know, different people, different groups taking heat.

And right before bed, I could, you know, here's a bad Instagram response. That probably nobody really read. Right. But through the sleep off, right? Nothing came of it, right? You're just like, but don't let that, let's let not that creep into your life, especially like at the Olympics or something. You know what I mean? Like important nights, whatever it may be.

Yeah, people. And then, you know, I've seen, well, over the years I had a testing device where I measured a guy and we were measuring him to see what his stress response were before we had the oarings and before we had all the whoop and everything. And he was, you know, one day he came in. He was pretty steady. And then one day he came in. he was on ESPN for something that shouldn't happen. Okay? And you're thinking, you're thinking, okay, this, this, this, this, this is going to show him

stress, right? He walks in. No, not, not stressed one bit. I was, and I didn't say anything. And then I test him, I'm like, you're not stressed. He's like, why would it be stressed? I'm like, well, the ESPN thing is like, I don't care. Like, what?

Okay. Okay. And this is national, this was national news. Right. The next day, two days later, he comes in, Mark, and he's so stressed. It was like, I'm like, oh, something bad happened. And he's like, oh, I just got off the phone with my ex-wife. You're like, wait a minute, you were on national news and that didn't bother you.

Right. But your ex-wife got you so fired up. Right. I'm like, that's it. But it's all your perception of what the stress is, right? So the point was, is like, it's really just the perception of what you're letting bothering you. Now, hey, whatever it is, if it was a butterfly landed on your notebook, that bothers you, then that bothers you. Like, it is what it is, right?

That's whatever you are. You know what you mean? That damn butterfly. Right? I'm going to kill it. I'm going to kill it. But ultimately it's your perception. That's when I learned and this was like 15 years ago, I learned,

oh, this is relative to the person. Because what you think's bad, you know what I mean? It might not be bad for you, but it could be horrendous or a trigger for somebody else, you know? Right. Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned using the aura ring and, you know, some various things like that.

Like a lot of people don't have the access to some of the stuff that you've been able to use, like particular 1080. machines and some of these things can be expensive, but a lot of the audience probably does have aura ring, whoop, they probably do have some of these things. First of all, you know, what are some of your what are some of your favorite tools when it comes to that, tracking sleep, tracking recovery, maybe tracking HRV? And then how are you using it? Like how are you interpreting this information with your athletes? Yeah. Well, I think, you know, whoop or ring either or is good. It's kind of like the red light. Hey, I had a bad night of sleep. Why did I have a bad night?

night of sleep, right? You got to go back and reflect whether for me, like eating late's a pretty bad deal. You know what I mean? I have a lot of fly around and then you also do social events. So I realized that I got two drinks and then after that my sleep goes south. Yeah. And on this, and if I have two drinks in a dessert, it's bad or if I have two drinks that are high in sugar, like an old fashion, there's no chance I can sleep. You know what I mean? So these are just the things that people have got to be. You learn about yourself. You learn about yourself, right?

So I think, hey, my sleep was bad. Like, you've got to consciously maybe think why. And it might be the fact that I was on the phone really late. You know what I mean with on social media, you know? And then the big thing, well, what I would do at the Olympics is then we would, we would be able to isolate. And I use other devices, but ultimately say, hey, this system in your body is not operating effectively.

This is a type of recovery you need, okay? Some people didn't respond well, like we try things like a cold shower and they really hated it. You know what I mean? Or even cold tubs. And one of the things I found with these when I was able to measure, like I know cold tubs a big thing and some people love it and they get a great response. But the rule of thumb that I've come up with, I came up with this about 15 years ago, 12 probably, was that if you jump in there and it takes your breath away that day, like seriously

takes your breath away, it's probably too stressful that day. And I would, and then we realized, and I got feedback from my athletes was like, yeah, some days it's stressful and some days it's not for me. Well, if it's stressful you get in, you might want to just jump out. I've had that happen before where you're like, whoa, like, what is this? And that's days where what's interesting about that, that's days where I felt like I needed it more because I'm like, I want the recovery aspects of it. But like, I think my nervous system was just like blown to pieces. And then I got in there and my body's like, this is, we, we have too much other shit going. on please get the hell out of here you're exactly right mark because when when

it's freezing in here when these people when those athletes wrote it out guess what happened when I could test their nervous system I would do it on a device with DC potential it it shot their nervous system so if they stayed in it when that happened their nervous system got worse and even the next day was horrendous so it took them longer to recover now the other days when they jumped in and it was cold whatever but it was fine they were recovered the next day they were fine. So that was one unique thing I thought about cold tubs, right? That way we realize, hey, if it takes your breath away and you know it feels like you shouldn't be in there, you need to get

out. Has there been anything universal that you've seen really work really well for people? Like an example, you're talking about doing cold before bed, but I've heard doing warm before bed is great. So like a hot shower because a hot shower supposedly raises your temperature up, but then when you come out as a defense, it's within the next half hour hour you're trying to drive your body temperature back down and supposedly you need your body temperature to drop about one degree or so to help the restful night of sleep right absolutely cooling off that cool off thing is is a factor uh i like the cold tubs in in the morning per se for the athletes and then um we found some that liked them before the games because it appeared because that dopamine release like they they got more focused okay but then um

with the athletes, then the hot in the evening and then if you can give yourself an hour, hour and a half and maybe catch that window of that cooling is exactly when that happened. You're exactly right. Whether it's a hot shower, whether some of my athletes have a lot of access to saunas too, so they'll time their sauna up, especially after their meal. So if they can go get their meal. The one universal, Mark, was the 20 minute walk for recovery. Like that across the board, I've never seen that. Just approximately two hours or more. after your workout or in the evening.

Yeah. So if you work out in the morning, then the evening recovery walk, especially after dinner, is going to be, is wonderful for people. And that's the one thing that we did at the Olympics. Like we had our athletes walking basically twice a day, even though some days they had two different workouts. What measures did you see change that got you so excited about this? I used the omega wave, right, for years.

Yeah, explain what the omega wave is. Yeah, the megawave is a combination of HRV and they have some great formulas like on. They even figured out how much, like, energy you have. So there was created like 20 years ago or so. Maybe. So I think it was even, they started doing the research on HRV. I think I actually got it from a, a guy that defected from the Soviet Union. He had three doctorate degrees.

He oversaw Chernobyl. He was at the University of Minnesota. Wow. He was a Russian doctor, right? And he was the chief medical officer for Chernobyl. And Victor Kuschev was his name. And he, apparently. he wasn't friendly, but so I walk in and what do you do when you're meeting in Russian?

You bring a bottle of vodka. We sat down. We had a great conversation and I got to ask him all these things, right? And he talked to me about HRV where it's starting a space program. They sent somebody up and they didn't know about HRV fully yet, but when they and they had to bring somebody back because of appendicitis. HRV is heart rate variability. Yeah, I'm sorry, HRV. You're measuring the heart rate. And this was early when they were sending people in the space and they had to somebody back because of appendicitis and they looked through all the data and the only thing that was bad on this guy's physical was is hrv so they realized that this could be something showing us there's a problem before before they went into space so then the the sports aspect of the Soviet Union they

dug into it and there's dissertations on it like seven 800 pages that i've seen and um the magic was is that they the the omega wave company had all these formulas that they figure out where hey you're low on energy, right? And I do in a megwave in the morning and somebody was low on energy by their standards and they'd go through the standardized practice and guess what? Their heart rate was higher than it's ever been. So I was like, okay, so this person needs to carve up over the next few days and lo and behold, the energy in that test went up. Lo and behold, in practice, their heart rate was back to normal. Carb up a little bit to maybe control cortisol kind of thing. Well, if you're low on cortisol or if you're low on carbs, then your cortisol is going to shoot through

the roof also. Yes. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of dynamics of survival there, but you're exactly right. Because if you don't have enough energy or carbohydrates in your body, then your body's going to send the cortisol out to break tissue down so that it has energy, right? So you're exactly right. And so like that interaction with that type of stuff, realizing, hey, you're not recovering because you don't have enough energy in your body.

So you need to eat more, especially carbs are wonderful, right? For people that have to repeat. You know, I know people say, hey, carbs are bad and everything. like if you have a repeated sprintability athlete playing football or hockey like i've seen guys and i and i used to follow people with these hrv devices and and they test every morning and they were pros and in one time i had a guy that he's paying me to get him optimal and i can't get him optimal after three weeks i'm like dude what's going on he's like well my wife started a low carb diet so i did too i'm like okay bud that's over because he felt he felt terrible and now he's a nchel

athlete playing in the NHL. I'm not saying that look an endurance athlete or other types of athletes can't do the low carb he could not recover there was no way and we carved him up guess what two days he's back to normal right yeah and there's a lot of factors in there I mean if someone gets used to a low carb diet maybe they become like you know fat adapted and maybe they can handle it easier or whatever but it's wonderful but still carbohydrates you know I've been talking about this for a long time too carbohydrates are they they can could be looked at as like a superhuman you know like utilizing carbohydrates surrounding workouts and or just because you work out or because you have hard tasks to do that are physical makes a ton of sense absolutely and especially these

even if you want to be low carb just it still makes sense to eat some rice and some potatoes here in there some fruit here and there um if you are someone that's exercising well especially on interval based exercise like high intensity stuff you have to have them right you just you You can't perform ultimately. Well, you're not going to find a lot of champions that are very low carb. No. And this is a reason why someone can be lean and someone can do something casually. You could be a weekend warrior that way and you can probably, you know, do some triathlons and do some various things and probably still perform well.

You should. But, you know, when it comes to a lot of other activities, a lot of other sports that are maybe more dynamic, the word needs. is a really strong one, but most people would need some carbohydrates. Yeah, and you can time it up, right? You know, hey, nowadays, I'm, you know, hey, I got my workout in two hours. I'll knock down some carbohydrates so that I'm ready to perform for that lift. But I, even in hockey, I've had athletes that needed to lean up and we went low carb, but we can't do it around practice time, right?

We have to perform around game time. We got to do it at other times, especially just cutting those carbs out that last meal a day. You know, and now, now how I would pair it up with HRV is if your HRV, you're HRV readings are bad, then we wouldn't allow them to do that because there was less chance that you could recover on that low carb diet. Playing the high intensity sport. Endurance athletes are different, right? No, they need to, in my opinion, they need the fat.

They need obviously protein, but is the carbs as necessity? Not necessarily. But if you want to get a real quick recovery spike, the carbs are always a good thing to do. Yeah, and you've got to think as an athlete, it's nice to have basically everything topped off. So you have your glycogen in your bloodstream, which might be normal if you're really low carbohydrate. However, your glucose in your muscles, muscle tissue might not be there if you're not eating carbohydrates. So that, you know what I mean? So if you're like a collegiate wrestler or you're a hockey player or a football player, like it just makes sense to at least

have some carbs. How much you actually need, that's up for you to like determine and to figure you're out kind of on your own because I don't know what amount you would actually need, but probably definitely something north of like 200 grams depending on your size. Absolutely, yeah. And like you said, if you give somebody that needs carbs and is trying to train on interval-based stuff and then they don't have carbs for a week and then you load them with carbs, watch what happens to the result. Like it gets really, you're really good, really fast.

Yeah, and you're trying to, you're just trying to make things more efficient. Absolutely. You're not always trying to make everything. Sometimes it's wise to make things. more difficult. You know, sometimes it's wise to like, oh, I'm going to add this wrinkle in. You know, you had me do the figure eight walk and then you're like, okay, you know, pass this thing around your body and behind your back and then, you know, count down from 50,

you know, in intervals of three, yeah, number three. So I did that as I was walking. So sometimes it makes sense to increase the difficulty of something. But a lot of times it's like, well, let's make this. let's make this very manageable. You know what I mean? Like that's the words. Like how do we manage this?

Because we all know like people listening. They know a lot about training at this point. But sometimes people don't know how to manage it. Absolutely. You know, they just, they go and they're like, oh, I heard about this exercise.

I heard about that one. And I heard about this other thing. And I'm on a low carb diet. And I'm doing this. And I started that. And they're fasting and they're doing all these things. And it's like, man,

this is wonderful that you're engaging in all these different things. but are you going to actually be able to manage it? Yeah. And the answer could be no. Right? And is it, yeah, manage it with sustainability, right? And hopefully, well, even things like, you know, like we'll do, when we do our morning workouts at the end of the season, we give them two weeks and we come back and we kind of

build a fitness base. And I know people say, well, you know, I tell them, hey, no carbs the night before. And then we're going to do this hard workout. not the intensity of intervals, but like long duration. Like we're going to slow cook you. And I tell you like, guys, tell my men and women like, hey, if we cut our carbs, you're going to get more training effect. You're not going to be able to train this as well, but I don't care because the season

starts in four months. We're fine. But doing low carbs at that point. And I know the research will say, hey, but they're not low carb diet. They're not depleted of carbs. I'm like, I know, but if they come to these workouts without breakfast and we do the same workout, their heart rate is so much higher because they have an eight. You know what I mean? So I know what the science says that, oh, there's still glycogen in the muscle and the liver. I get it. But I'm getting a

higher heart rate doing the same work. So that's exactly what I want to get them in shape. So I'm like, I'm going to do it. I know what the research says is not, you don't believe me, but I'm just going to tell you. Because the next day, if I tell them to carve up and eat before for that workout, guess what? Heart rates are lower. So, you know, I've been in arguments with people, not You can use things very specifically for very specific reasons at very specific times. Absolutely. And whatever pushes the needer or gets the results as you want, again, as you said, let's use it, optimize it. And it may, you know what, just because your neighbor's doing it, you're going to do it with him,

doesn't mean it works for you either, right? Let's talk about this safety squat bar. You were kind of mentioning because like that was something that you showed me last time you were here. Yeah. We did the safety squat bar, I think like a safety squat bar, I think like a. single leg, right? Yeah, single leg safety squat. And you were telling me like the weights that I was going to hit on there and I'm like, well, I'm still pretty strong, but I'm like nowhere near as strong as I was when I was power lifting. You're like, no, no, no, you're going to be able to do this

fine. And I was like, I think you're on crack, dude. I don't know. Yeah, right there. Look at that. But yeah, we were able to load this safety squat bar up pretty good. Well, you know, so the original idea behind this lift mark was that I was trying to get a super maximal overload. on athletes because when you talked about bone tensity already today is that I wanted to just get that leg and it's kind of a hack for a leg press right so I said hey I want to overload them eccentricly and let's say I took my throwers and I had some of those guys they do the Olympic style squat with 700 pounds so now I got to overload them at 770 that's not that's not that safe right so I said well I'm going to try this single leg safety squat block and Mark this was 15 years ago right and and I'd never

seen anybody use it, a single leg like that. And I threw it on there and I throw it in there. And lo and behold, the first day, like my throwers went like 400 pounds. I was going, okay, well, by the end of the week, the second lift in the second week, Mark, we were at 600, 650 pounds, right? And I went, okay, well, let's just see what happened. So we took a group of throwers and I think they're, they're max. We averaged everybody. The average max was 600 pounds. And then we pulled squat on back squat and then we pulled back squat did single leg safety bar squat single leg ran through cycles we had some guys used an 800 at the end of that single leg safety bar squat damn right and then we maxed their back squat out the next week and the average of the group went up

60 pounds to 660 so i realized i went oh this is a very unbelievable left so think about it that instead of having to hold the bar in the back squat, which is part of the problem, you know, you're cranking your shoulders. It's a huge part of the problem, right? And people don't like it. It makes them uncomfortable where they were able to use these pads and do a single leg.

So you're talking with their body weight, there's the throwers that were doing 800, they had a thousand pounds on their bone. Right? Right. And we got wonderful results. And then the other thing was for the men that we noticed, was that the hormonal response,

like their testosterone. went to, but when you, well, think about it, right? You're, you're holding 800 pounds and you're going through a range of motion. So, Mark, this was a staple and then we, you know, we did our, our, I used it with my women and I mean, I had 150 pound women doing 450 pounds single leg safety bar squats. And then we did dexas scans and lo and behold, my women had some very high bone density, which we know is a very important part. Absolutely. Of just general health, right? General health. So, yeah, it was pretty impressive and you were doing a great job right there. So, so, and we do the floating heel if you want or not but it also strengthens that now mark if you look at

the way you were squatting right there and you put you in a sprint angle that's the exact position you would be right when you were sprinting forward so that's why the specificity to me this is a very strong and very specific lift right for my athletes and and then but also the assistes I would do for squatting that time would be the deep step up like goblet squats whatever me just to get into that deep range of motion you know what I mean yeah with um that range of motion right there with that single leg um like split squat type of movement it seems like you're getting a lot from both legs yeah you know it's like it single leg work is kind of funny because there's no such thing right hardly I guess you can do a leg extension but even like a Bulgarian split squat

anyone that's ever really pushed a Bulgarian split squat knows that the the back leg is like gets on fire. Sometimes the hip flexer gets on fire, right? Because it's like you're holding kind of a static position. So single leg work is interesting because it's a little bit of an illusion. You got both sides working. And then when we talk about knees over toe, Ryan, can you bring that up one more time, you know, some of that video? People forget about the back leg. Yeah. The back leg. You're stabilizing with it, right? Yeah, your knee couldn't be any further over your toe on the back leg. Well, and then I, like it has to be. Like how I couldn't do the movement. Right. And, and to me, then though the magic there with the back leg and the front leg working together is that I'm working

the muscles in your hips so that the hips can coordinate together right like and that's a big factor in athletics especially if if anyone's ever trained a female that came back from from giving birth right that interaction between the right and left hip appears to be off because of that pelvic floor isn't interacting well so so what but with you right there then with that back leg back and you can go heavy weight in your front leg functioning like I think there's a huge interaction that's very important for your, for your hips to interact together. You do some isometrics with that as well. Yeah, we do it. We do it eccentrically, so we bring it down. Like, you know, in this summer, I had a 850 pounds single leg squat with a 185 pound hockey player. Damn. Right. And people,

people call me like, oh, my athletes will never get there, like an NFL team. And well, they're like, we cap people at 800 on the second day because they were so strong. I'm like, I know they're freaks, right? They're freaky people. But yeah, yeah, this is a, this is a highly effective lift and in the things that we've seen out of it. But ultimately, you know, you're building tissue tolerance because your tendons, your bones get more dense, right? Especially on the eccentric training block will, we'll have, you know, people take glycine because it helps with the recovery, right? Glutamine, all those things to help with eccentric recovery, you know. We have Keith Barr here right in University of Davis. He came in. That's right. And taught us a

bunch about isometrics. I saw that. And he mentioned a lot of that. He talked about collagen and glycine and the combination of collagen or I guess glycine and vitamin C. Yep. Having a lot of efficacy around isometric training and stuff like that. Yeah. Well, yeah, I actually tried the protocols. He, when he first came out, like literally I saw the first, the first week of the publication when his first original came out with all that. It was, and I was like, oh, this is magic. This is good stuff, right? It was, uh, so, I didn't know about the vitamin C part of it. I knew about the glycine because I researched a bunch.

I may have got it from Charles. I'm not sure. Vitamin C is supposed to like, I guess, help with the absorption of the glycine or something like that. Absolutely, yeah. And when he came out with the vitamin C on top of that, I was like, oh, this is gold, right? When I found that, I was like, I was so excited. You know, one of those Christmas presents for me. It's fun to find these little tricks and stuff.

with that exercise it's interesting because with things that are like geared a little bit more towards strength they can make you sore but a lot of times they really don't make you very sore unless there's like a stretch component to it then maybe you might get more sore but with that movement in particular

I love stuff that you find that's a really nice input but then the input's not like sitting on you for the next five six days absolutely it feels like with that movement And it doesn't, from what I recall in doing it a few weeks after you left and stuff like that, too, I didn't recall feeling super sore from it. Well, I think, one, it's, as I said, when you got into that deep position, if we looked at you sprinting, it would be kind of that position if we leaned you forward, right?

So I think it's a really natural part of the movement, right? And then also, I load people at such high levels with that, and they don't have the crazy soreness that they would in certain other lifts at that level of loading. Does that make sense? Yeah. So I feel that just the biom mechanics of that is so, so much more, I would say, natural to some of the more natural movements. And then when we super load it, yeah, you're right, the soreness wasn't what people thought. Because I think you remember, I don't know if we got it on recording that you thought your knee would never be able to handle. Oh, yeah. I think I'm going to, my knee's going to blow out. And you were like, oh, my knee feels actually fine. So, and that's what

we've found over the years and I got a number of my athletes that I think I had six in my gym that had been with me over 15 years this year and we're talking training heavy loads all the time and and I think there's a number of reasons for that but ultimately and then one guy he had a meniscus problem that had developed uh with with playing hockey and then the doctor took his his knee pictures of his knee and they're like this is one of the best knees I've ever seen for some of your age but he's been playing hockey for 17 or training with me 17 years. And it's not that reason only because he takes care of himself, right? He takes supplements, nutrients, collagen. But ultimately you're like, at least I'm not screwing him up was my first line. You know what I mean? Right. I've been like,

I'd hate it for the doctor to the orthopause to say, hey, this is the worst thing I've ever seen. I'm like, oh boy. But, um, but, you know, I think when I say natural, like, it's, it's more of a natural movement, right? It's going to be in the same position that you would be if you were squatting right there. Or I'm sorry, sprinting. You know what I mean? probably one of the bigger things to practice and to do as a strength coach is probably not to be married to one thing right and to like you must have seen over the years some some some people that have particular issues maybe with some movements or some exercises in the gym and you're scratching your head and you're trying to solve it but they they kick ass on the field

or on the court and at some point you must just be like well why don't I give a shit like Like why, why am I trying to solve this problem that's like, it's barely there, you know? Like, if you run into things like that before, like, I'm, it's because like the love of the game, like you love what you do. Yeah. You want to solve for this particular, like, little tiny glitch that someone may have. But maybe they just don't really need it, you know? Well, Mark, that's the thing.

Like, whose glitch is it? If this kid's performing on the field and I'm the strength coach, but I want him to squat better, that's my glitch. That's not his, right? Like, so, yeah. And I think the sooner a coach can come to the realization, like, hey, I realized early this, this wasn't about, this wasn't about, they don't like lifting as much as you and I like. None of my athletes really liked lifting as much as you and I liked, right? But, but you know what?

When you watch them perform and if you don't appreciate how they're doing that, even though they can't squat the way you want them to squat, you've got to get over it, right? You literally have got to get over it, right? And I'm just here to watch them. And I don't, look, I don't, when I see excellence, I don't care what it is. If it's ping pong, Mark, I watch those people play ping pong. It is terrifyingly amazing what that looks like, right? I'd rather probably watch the Olympic weightlifting at the Olympics, right? I'd rather watch a world champion power lifter perform the squat.

But if it's ping pong, I'm watching, like, I just want excellence. And I know the back squat's not going to help the ping pong guy. Right? So let's just watch. Let's just help him play ping pong better, right? Like, that's the goal. What are some of your, there you guys, the championship?

Like this is, wow, look at these. And then once they break this and they get back. Don't even even think about how quick and nimble they are with their feet. It's unbelievable. Look at that excellence. Yeah, how far back? I know. I know.

It's. The reaction time and all the stuff is pretty. The hand eye, right? Pretty amazing. Do you have athletes participate in some different shit like this? Like maybe not ping pong, but like, like break out a soccer ball here and there, like with football players. And just because like the footwork and the different dynamics that sports,

other sports bring up, maybe you have some guys chuck around a football, but they're not football players. But just for the footwork of it, just for some of the fun of it. Well, I think so many people in their sport can get like the brain gets very specific and everything. And in my opinion, the more diverse they are. But if we go back, I can give you a ton of qualities. just use ping pong. Some of my best hockey players that went on to make a lot of money were the best

ping pong players on the team. Wow. Yeah. So is it is it the ping pong or is it just the diversity of their ability to hand eye? Hand eye the space time continuum. Hey, that ball's coming here. Like the amount of calculations that happens when you play sports, right? And then I mean, I had a great one. Thomas Vannick was a great score for us and played in the NHL a number of years. You know, was on some wonderful teams, but he couldn't dribble a basketball, Mark, but he was really good at soccer. But when we played basketball, he never played it.

He would score all the time. He knew where to be with the dynamics of the game, couldn't dribble a lick, couldn't really shoot, but knew when to run in there, catch a pass, and lay it up. He knew it all the time. Like, he was unbelievable.

It was shocking how good he was at basketball. But the rest of the team had, they were good at basketball, right? We would play, they were American kids. he played soccer it was scary how good he was but like you're going but the point is it's like it didn't matter what he played if it was a team sport he knew how to score right and and just little things like that especially young young kids growing up they need they need exposure like ping pong's a great one because you don't have to you can just play with your dad in the basement right you know what

I mean and then when they if they get good I think things like playing left-handed off-hand you know I mean focus on that is very good you know our buddy Jesse Burdick yeah you know his his girls wanted to play baseball when they were young they wanted to play softball when they were young and he's like you know he loves baseball he's a strength coach he's like if you're gonna play you guys are both gonna learn how to be left-handed yeah because you're gonna you're gonna kill it and both of them have scholarships both of them college right now playing college and both of them uh participated uh as freshmen um they both kicked ass their freshman year so it's like that's wonderful yeah it worked and he's it's not one of these dogmatic parents who's like forcing it's

anything. It was just, he was like, hey, if you're going to play, like, we're going to have you do this because you're going to have a better opportunity. Absolutely. To maybe play onward, you know. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, you know, like, well, the one drill that I talked about, you know, for people, it's called the goat drill, right? And, and, um, some stories about that is I've gotten people. Is there examples on you? Yeah. If you look up GoT drill Olympian, there's some scary. This is the best one I got. Right. This is a 19 year old at the time, Olympian. He's since went on to play in the NHL for them. I got some, some questions. I got some questions on this one. This is a, this was a fun drill that you had me do earlier today. It was really

cool. And right there it is. So this is a little different. I did it with two things. This is three. So this gets pretty complex. Mark, they started this drill and they're counting down for, they're having so much fun though. They're counting down from a hundred. And they actually ran this through twice and got in the 30s, both of them. Wow. So and, and what for people, Are they laughing hysterically the whole time? No, they're counting down, right? Yeah, yeah. And for people watching that, what was happening was they are, they're running around there watching an object, counting down from 100 by threes.

So they're doing math and moving a ball around their waist. And then what we did was we put things on the floor because when I first started doing that drill, like there was a lot of bad foot movement. So then when I put those little weight room floors, I cut the weight room floor up and then threw it down. then the foot strike was much better when they were running because their brain just knew. I didn't even tell them to miss the things. Their brain knew there was a problem. So what forces the brain to do is put their foot in a good position so they never landed on their heel. And this is a simple game day one where this is what we'll do on game day is we just have them and the guy's doing math.

And he's rolling through these drills, right? And what just does is it locks in the right and the left hemistricistency of the brain. And I've seen athletes that had balanced problems. we started doing this is within a couple days, it just locked the brain in. So, and then to get to the young, the youth point of this is you can have your, and I had a dad reach out to me, both parents, Division I athletes, had a daughter that had grown, really clumsy on her soccer team. And they're like, hell, something's not right.

So I actually had him do the goat trail while she was playing video games. So she'd use a remote controller and just walk and do the, video game and guess what six weeks later they said she became really coordinated as one of the better players on the team now wow because all it did was lock the brain in that's crazy as a young kid right that's cool and then the other another one a friend of mine same scenario mom was a d1 soccer player and they did it and uh they had her watching her shows with subtitles she was a seven year old and they're like hell the coordination and i've had a number of people talk me about that but hey if you can have your kids do that hey if you're going to play

video games you're going to walk and do this drill while you play the video game with a remote and it's it's a wonderful brain development drill yeah because you know when this guy was doing the drill if you can play some more of this ryan when this guy was doing the drill it was interesting how he whipped his head around yes he's trying to find he's trying to concentrate on the same spot yep it seems like here it's the head whip yeah it seems like that's actually like a great drill and i mean how many sports do you how many how many how many how many different types of sports do you end up playing where you do have to take your eyes off of something to do something quickly but then you have to get your eyes back to a particular spot right like even even like a wide receiver running a particular pattern may have to like look forward and then look back and then

he might have to readjust you know as the balls in the air same thing with an outfielder and baseball right there's all these things and you have to relocate the ball or relocate the quarterback or relocate whatever it was you were looking at and you're, disoriented. Yes, I know. You turn around and you're like, shit. Like, you know, sometimes see even a pro, the ball just dinks off their helmet or something.

You're like, man, that looked goofy. That looks silly. I know. That looks silly, but it's so hard. I mean, there was an example of a guy, recently, I'm not sure if you'll be able to find this one, Ryan, but a guy recently, there was a, someone popped one up in the outfield and this guy

casually put his sunglasses on and caught the ball. Did you see that? I did not. Just like, I mean, how well trained, you need to be in the sport. And how long you have to play the sport to do that. But like he looked up and he's like, I can't see shit.

He just goes, poop. And he catches the ball. Yeah, yeah. Well, he's got, yeah,

things are locked in on him, right? Like, it's crazy. Um, it's this, there's the vintage Jose Canseco where he, uh,

has the ball dinked off his head. Yeah, yeah. Exactly right. Like, well, and look, for people,

like the drills you saw were, were, I call it a three ring one. and you can do this in your house around two different object. You don't need three. And then you can do it doing all these drills or doing it playing video games, whatever it may be, watching TV. But ultimately, like, well, and the people you saw there,

the one guy was a 23-year-old two-time Olympian already in ice hockey. So, like, he's the standard. He's the standard I've seen, right? And a great athlete, but ultimately just his athleticism and skill, right? The skill that he has is pretty profound. So, but, but like you're not going to look that good and you don't have to. People, I've talked to people, oh, I didn't, I did this for six months. I didn't want to progress them.

I'm like, it's okay. It's not about getting the drill perfect. It's about causing the brain frustration a little bit because that's what happens. Because the research now shows that you're shooting free throws and you really don't start to learn until you start missing until you miss and you get frustrated, which releases three, like the dopamine, acetylcholine. and the epinephrine. And when you get all that released, that's when you really start learning. And that's what that does before your workout. Does that make sense? And when you do that,

you release all those chemicals. Now you have a cocktail there, ready to learn how to lift, ready to learn the movement pattern more effectively. It's been pretty magical. It's a staple. We did it at the Olympics every day. Okay. We do it in my gym every day. Yeah. And why would you get frustrated with a free throw. Well, because you're like, you want to get better. You want to get better. And it's so simple. You're like, this is so simple. This is a joke. How can I, how did I just miss three in a row? I don't understand what's going on. You're like, do I need to arc it better? Do I need to release it? Do my wrist need to flick better? Do I need to watch a video? Do I need a coach? You start thinking all this stuff, right? But if you didn't have that problem and you were just

sinking a bunch of them, you wouldn't really have to think about it that much. Well, you've already mastered it, right? Yeah, you're already good. So there's no learning. And like, and, and, to, the other end of the spectrum, Mark, as you, we were and I talking earlier, like, let's see you have a kid that you're trying to teach something, but he doesn't care. He's not going to learn it. Right. He's just not going to learn it. Not interested.

He's not interested. Because there's no, there's no care. There's going to be no hormonal release of those neurotransmitters or being released that, okay, coaches tell me to do something and I'm not getting it. Now I'm frustrated. Not at the coach, but just frustrated. And sometimes young kids, they hate frustration. Yeah.

They don't really want to meet up with it. No. No, right? It's pretty, yeah, and it makes coaching hard sometimes, right? What do you think is some valuable things that people could know about training young people if there's some people listening and they want their kids to participate in sports and stuff? It seems like more recently there's been people like, you know, playing, you know, soccer and just diving all into that and playing that from a young age until they're older and not participating in a variety of sports.

And it seems like most of the literature and most of the, most of the information, most of what we know, seems to point to like, hey, be like broader when you're younger and then maybe as you get older, you narrow it down to one sport. Yeah, it's so hard, right? Because if you want your kids on the good teams, you got to play all the time. So there's a, there's a conundrum here, you know what you mean? So I think the big thing would be, in my opinion, is if your kids are playing a lot of one sport, like then it's your job. Honestly, I think ping pong. Get a ping pong table at home. Do other things. at the house that brought, if they, if they're not going to go play a basketball game.

It was recreational. Right. Like, you know, and I know nowadays you can't, you can't jump on a bike and ride into town for six hours like I did. You know what you mean? And I was part of the rubber knife game, right? Like it's young kids, you're 14, I mean, you're eight year old to 12 year old self. Like we had a blast, got thrown out of the pools, you know, about every other day. You know what I mean? We had the good days. Those were the good times. But, and we, we play basketball. We do all kinds of things. So then you're like, Let's see who can jump the furthest, you know, off this rock into the water or whatever, right? Absolutely.

Those kind of things. So I think it's, you're right, we've got to be diverse. So the question is now it relies on the parents for that diversity to come because if the kids are playing the same sports all the time. It's, it is very tough. And I'm a big believer like you in regards to being the diversity. Like, yeah, just because you're preventing injury. It's, it's no different, playing in other sports, just like doing a different exercise versus

going to the gym and we're going to back squat. That's all we're doing. Well, that kid likelihood, the kid that's back squatting only versus the kid that might do five other leg exercises is less likely to get hurt. So playing a different sports, just training somebody to be a little bit different, right? With diversity. Yeah, giving you some of that variety. And, you know, you got, there's all kinds of other activities you can do. We don't really tend to think about, we don't think about recreational stuff that much.

You don't really think of ping pong being like much of anything, really. It's just like it's just play. But that's exactly what we need when we're kids. And even just taking your kids on vacations and having opportunities to go snowboarding or skiing or water skiing or having a kid feel the balance of being on a jet ski or a skateboard or surfboard. Like all this stuff, man. Like you think about like Rich Froning. I mean, he was really kicking the shit out of people in CrossFit for a long time. And so much of his background was he just like ran around on a farm.

forever. Yeah. You know, when he was a kid, he played a bunch of sports. He was a baseball player. Obviously, he's been lifting years and years

before CrossFit ever came around. He just happened to be a fit guy that just really enjoyed, like the outdoors, but he had a wide variety. And now he's still, you know, he's running on trails,

you know, in his backyard type thing. And he just seems to really enjoy it. So if you find those things that your kid enjoys that are still activities, then that's like, that's incredible.

Because maybe they won't be, you know, a champion surfer, but man, like there's so much value in surfing. Yeah, well, even if it's once a year when you go vacation and they get on the surfboard, like there's so much in the first few stages of learning a new skill that your brain will retain, even though you think, oh, it's once a year, it can help. You have no idea what it can do, right? Because even just jumping on that surfboard for a couple days on vacation, the benefits of that

could carry over in many, many ways. You have no idea. So just don't disregard it because, hey, we do it like three days a year when we're, well, no, like it's very important. The more things you can be exposed to. And then the other part is just confidence, right? I mean, I mean, some of my female athletes that I've, like, the confidence they have in themselves compared to other people that might not have played sports even, right?

I'm just like, she just walks in a room and lights it up and it's like, I'm here, I'm ready to go. You know what you mean? Like, let's, let's kick ass right now. I'm like, okay, here we are. Yeah, and you show, kick ass. You show someone like that a new exercise.

They're like, okay. Absolutely. It looks like a good challenge. They're not scared by it. They're not like, oh, I might get hurt. Well, like one of my best was Abby Murphy. She was blowing up.

If you want to look, I think there's a, Abby Murphy move on YouTube. There was a one of her things where she hit the puck in the air, went around the defenseman. And, yeah, the second one that, absolutely disgusting move, right? So this, oh man,

that's a penalty shot. Well, let's see what she did here, right? She just, when she walks in the room, her confidence, and I've enjoyed her for years. Well, that was pretty good. She had,

just made it look so easy. Right? If we go back, there's, you can see the confidence in that. Right. Like you're not. Best of movements.

Oh, no. Happy Murphy. Was there a particular play? Yeah. Yeah, there was a huge one. it was on YouTube. I don't know if it's on YouTube. It might be on social media.

Abby Murphy was with her assist with Bella. See if Bella's on there. Oh, yeah, here we go. That's right there. It's the first one on the shorts. Might be a better one. There it is. Yeah, so as she's moving,

she picked the puck up, smacked it back down, was a little out of reach, smacked it across. Oh, nice. Right? Like the internet was blown up without. So that's something

that's not talked about much, would sport is finesse. Yeah. Kind of forget about that part of it. But, you know, it's interesting too because, like, it seems to be difficult for people to have finesse that don't, like, it's almost like, it's almost like if you don't have access to, like, a lot of gears, then looking beautiful while you do something is like harder. Yeah.

You know, if you only have like gears one, two and, and like three, you're like redlining, then, then playing in the middle is going to be harder. But if you have five gears access, you've got access to these five gears, you can go absolutely berserk, and you can go way faster and you're way stronger than people, and then you can just slowly just kind of get this thing

that's like a level three, just past everybody that they can't keep up with it. Yeah, you're level three, you're smooth and they're going like crazy. Exactly. And that's just not fair. But right with Abby, and you watch her do the goat drill.

It's smooth. Oh, that's cool. It's smooth. When she does movements, it's with intention. It's, it's, the patterns are correct, right?

Like, you'd see it. And, like, I'd be watching her play, and all of a sudden, she might not be moving normal, and we'd get her in the weight room,

and I, I do testing on her, and, like, muscle testing on me, and be like, all right, we got something right here, and we'd find it.

But, like, yeah, she was a limpian, integral part of our team, obviously, at the gophers, and she was just, when I talk about confidence,

walk in the room, you know, she's, it's one of my favorites. She'd walk in, and there'd be visiting coaches there and she'd walk by the group of people and go, hey, fat ass, right? And everybody would be looking and like, yeah, that's one of my favorites.

Don't worry about her. She's awesome. Just constantly talking trash. Yeah. Oh, her and I talked so much trash. It was unbelievable. It was awesome. That's the way it has to be.

Well, it's so, yeah. I mean, when you know, you know, right? Like she's a badass, right? And her and I saw it. And she was wonderful. So, you know, I've saw some videos of Patrick Mahomes training. And it kind of reminds me of the goat drill. Yeah.

Where Patrick Mahomes is able to like almost, almost make his head like a chicken, you know, a chicken. I don't have you ever seen someone rotate a chicken's body around. Yeah. But their head stays like Steadicam locked in. Yeah. Disassociate. Yeah.

Yeah. Disassociate. But Mahomes is able to do that really well. I mean, he's able to, you know, run to his right and look real precisely to his left. he's got really good movement with his neck. You know, he's not like an owl or anything, but he can, he has full access to be able to move his head,

but he also can lock his eyes in, and he's able to throw because he's, you know, so athletic, he played baseball. You think he might have played basketball even. He's so athletic that he can, you know, throw across his body if he needs to because he's strong enough, but he also can, like, you know, he can be looking this way,

shoulders could be faced in that way, but then he can actually turn his shoulders while he's still running this way and dink the ball in there with some finesse, which is like... Finesse, right? It's like unbelievable. It's like you got all the shit going on.

There's, you know, a bunch of 300-pound dudes chasing after you and you're still able to have that awareness. And they have bad intentions, right? They're not there to just tap you on the shoulder, right? So, and then to finesse that in there. When you're... The magic for me is that he's running extremely hard

and then the arm's able to separate and then finesse that. Like, I would throw it way over that guy. Yeah, to be able to disassociate the body parts is a very difficult thing to master. Yes. Then that's what I see with excellence, like the pincon guys, running extremely hard, but do a light tap to serve that ball right into the right. So that's magic, right? What are some of your, like, most mutant athletes that you ever worked with?

I had some throwers, right? Why are throwers always so freaky? Oh, there's just free. Like shot put discards? Yeah, those guys, right? I mean, I had one that was, he would do, yeah, the 44-inch vertical, and that was just touch, reach up and touch. We measured him in 39 hands on the hips inch vertical.

So, I mean, yeah. He weighed 270, you said. Yeah, he's 270, right? Freak Show. I had three or four guys clean four, three guys clean over 200 kilos, 440. Nice. A couple could jerk it. And that wasn't their sport.

That was just what they did, you know. They're like, okay, I'll try it. Yeah. had some explosive humans like Phil Kessel he he played what uh 1500 games maybe maybe not oh no he went he went over a thousand without missing a game oh wow um but he ran a his 10 yard dash was a 1.5 which is flying if you're 1 7 165 you're pretty good for an NHL guy and you're like um just freaky explosive the track well in the the 400 meters runners right we had two one year Mitch and and Adam, they ran the world's fastest times two weeks apart.

Wow. And they were in college still, right? So, and it was early in the year, but you're going, people were wondering, like, what are you guys doing with them? And like, yeah, they, I think when they got recruited, we were the only D1 school that recruited him. And then three years later, and we had a wonderful track coach, Phil Lundee, who had his PhD in Biomechanics and was just a genius in training.

And he's my mentor, right? Boom, and he produced some, we won some big 10 titles, like five of them together. So, yeah, and, you know, didn't have all the big numbers of recruiting, but it was pretty magical. And just seeing super freaks, like just people that, even on my baseball team, where, hey, they're great baseball players, but you go, you go play pickup basketball with them and you're going, oh, man, are they good at everything? Right. Yeah, just, just freaky people. Wonderful people, right? And, and more for me, it's, it's, yeah, the freaks are great.

I just hope that they're always hope that they're just normal and they appreciate what they have. Right. Because, you know, you didn't make that. You were handed, you, you won a lottery of genetics, right? Like, it's just, you know, normal people. You had the genetics and then you had the determination and willpower and stuff to kind of follow through on it, right? Absolutely. And the guy doing the goat drill, his name's Brock Favor, right?

And, you know, it takes a lot of supportive family, right? I know the parents and they are always giving him. him opportunities and he's a type of person that that appreciates that immensely right and he was given the opportunity and he performs very well right plays in the NHL now and and he does wonderful he was really smooth right I had a number of people though the one thing is about I appreciate it's not necessarily always even the power but just just the smoothness that those people have but a couple of my one of my throwers the big the big freak like I can remember we were trying some Bulgarian methods training three times a day over the summer one time, right? And I would try to

train twice a day with him. And I can remember on a, like, he would tell me he'd get out of bed on Saturday morning to do three more lifts. And he, he like, you know, he'd talking about how he rolled out of bed, couldn't get up, right? And then people, you get to a point when you have to roll out of bed and you just can't stand up. And then you're going to go train three more times that day, right? That's just the mindset too sometimes. And not all the hockey guys have that mindset, but the wrestlers, their mindset is like, you know, they're hard human beings.

And I've trained some hard people. One guy, he was a captain for ours, I remember on the hockey team, and he wanted to set a new record of this stadium run we did. And we put the heart rate monitor on him. He did it voluntarily. And the heart rate had him at 260. And he had lost his, he couldn't, he didn't know who was standing beside him

when he fell on the, the ground he was actually and this is self-induced i'd never seen a human push to push himself that right and uh when he crossed the line he was shaken and he fell on the ground and he wasn't uh he was vomiting damn and you're going and like i i sense and he broke the record he was a beat right this but he had something broken inside that you shouldn't be able to go like right you know he didn't have a regulator it was a minute 15 that he pushed himself wow to set that record i I sent somebody down to the defibrillator in the arena. Because when you pulled off the wall, it calls 911.

They just stood there in case I yelled because I was at the top of the arena. And yeah, so, I mean, but he was a great leader force, helped us turn the team around, went to the Frozen Four with him. Yeah, it was pretty awesome, right? Cool. Yeah, it was just special. I've just been lucky to meet and find good people in my lifetime. Just I'm very fortunate for my career because of that, just the great humans I've met, right?

and just humble people. I think the atmosphere, when you got the right team and you got the right group, even if they're not humble when they walk in and there's an environment that's right, then they get humbled. Do you know what I mean? And just meeting great people,

great coaches from across the world. At the Olympics, I walked in. I was in the Olympic Training Center training people at the Olympic Village. And about the third day, people realized who I was, right? Because they saw me doing all this stuff and they see my YouTube channels.

And they're come up and they're like, yeah, American coach? And I'm like, yeah. You know, Caled? I was like, yeah, yeah, I know him. He does this stuff, right? And I let it go the second day, yeah. And then the third day, the guy comes up and goes, you're Caldeets.

I was like, yeah. Yeah, it was fun. He's like, we read your book. Like, we do this, we do that. So, you know, it's good to hear. I'm glad people wrote it. He's like, well, be honest with you, I didn't, I didn't buy it. He says, we stole it.

Okay, that's why. I can't believe that that fucking guy got his heart rate up to 260. Hey, I thought he's going, I was like, dude, do you got to stay here an hour? I got, you know, I call him that and I'm like, hey, you feel it? Okay, he's like, yeah. He was a monster of a human being. Like just, he was only 195 pounds, but he, like, if you were going to war, you're like, I got these 10 people or this guy, you're just taking him, right?

You're just going to, you got to choose between 10 or him. You're like, well, the rest are just going to collect bullets. Like, he's going to, yeah. He's going to survive. He will harvest souls for you. Yeah, he was intense. You have a few exercises you wanted to show us? Yeah.

Want to bring up here? So like this one, this one is one of my favorites to, and we talk about patterns. So you see her, this is called a prime time, a straight leg run. And if you can, if you can run that back like slow speeds at the slowest speed, we can appreciate what's going on here. And she's a four-time Olympian, eight-time world champion for us for me. In what sport? In ice, women's ice hockey.

Okay. And to watch her get to this point, right? So she's driving. And if you want to pause it on the next one, maybe, right there. Okay. So it's called a straight leg run. This movement is helping her get the right gloop movement pattern, right? Now, this is magical right here because if you, so the year this was filmed,

the next year I had interns come in and they saw her do this, which this is about eight weeks into training. When you see her do it week one, she can't do it that well. right so the training takes care of the weaklings now people will look at this and go okay like the split that's in her legs when she first starts doing it she can't do that split that well and people are like oh her hips need more mobility it's actually what i found in this same with everybody is that if her feet aren't strong enough what happens is the brain won't let you get a big split in your hips because when you slam your foot down if it's not if your foot's not strong enough to handle that force

the brain goes, I'm not going to let you split your hips, so I'm going to shorten the hip width. Okay, so a lot of times I've seen people just loosen their hips up by getting their feet strong. Because the brain goes, hey, if your foot's not stable, I'm going to create stability and it locks down the hips. Yeah, the body feels kind of heavy and feels like this is not again. It feels unsafe. Right. And then the biggest thing with this movement, I think all athletes should do it. I have all mine is for two coaching points, Mark, would be keep a slight forward lean in your upper body.

and then you need to push out the back with your hips, right? And if you can do that, and it's not going to look this good right away. Like I've been to an end up. It's a little bit of a deceiving movement because you kind of think it has to do with your leg driving forward, but it really has more to do with your leg. Pushing out the back. Snapping back. Yes.

Yep, yep. And the snap back is key, right? And even like even that foot, if you watch how vertical her, her, shoe is when she pushes off like you get to that point that's a world-class sprinter foot position right not that she's a world-class sprinter but just to push all that way um so if if if your foot comes off the ground instead of here when you're pushing that way if it's if it's like this you know you need more foot mobility and foot strength right and then that forward lean like look at that that that's pretty good but that's 10 eight to 10 weeks of training before she could get to that point

right there okay um and that movement has has been very beneficial in speed development. For every, I don't care what sport you play, it's huge in speed development. Then the second one is, I like the Yuri. This is the most beneficial weight room exercise. So Mark, she's got a couple bands in there, and she's driving herself forward, right?

And when she pushes, you can see her with her big toe doing that. But she's driving extremely hard forward. And what we did was we measured people's sprints, got them warmed up. They did the best they could. The first day that we tested this, we had them do that lift and went back over to sprints. And some of them were moving 0.7 meters per faster in that sprint that day. That's the only thing. So this is like a potentiation exercise for sprint.

Yeah, absolutely. And we do it a number of different ways. And we've had more resistance. And I'll probably release it. But I have another, we have like a, a stress. that we put on, it's just a rehab strap, I think, and then we hook bands behind you. So while you're doing that exercise,

then there's bands hooked to both legs while you're pulling your leg forward. Mark, it's been phenomenal this summer in our results. So you can imagine that. But that lift alone, by adding those two lifts. So let's say you're a high school strength coach or just working with somebody, you do a back squat, and then you maybe do a glued ham,

and then you go do a plyometric jump, box jump. I would follow it in the mix. I would put the Yuri in there. And then what the Yuri does sets up the prime time to cause huge speed benefits. And if you haven't even done that exercise yet this year, and let's say you're starting football season, you need to put those in your end season program. These are two exercises that I won't go without that I've seen transfer.

And I've been very fortunate. Like at the Olympics, one of the reason is like we got some of the, although we were able to get a lot of our athletes fast. at the Olympics and what happened was when we put these I put these two exercises in I think this was the key one of the key benefits that exercise right there the band is just going across the hill yeah right across the power rack into the hips and she's driving her hips forward right and again the big thing mark is to get that big toe to squeeze because if you're doing that exercise watch how her heel comes up

if you're not squeezing your big toe guess what your heel doesn't come up so I know I don't even have to have them do it barefoot I can watch and if that heel doesn't come up, right? And then the other thing, too, is a slight forward lean. Now, if you really want to get detailed, and I'm going to, I'll probably release this on YouTube. But if you get the eyes in the right position, so if the right foot right now is driving her forward, you would actually want her eyes to look to the left and it'll activate the glutes even a little bit more because it cycles into the glute cycle or the gate cycle, right? So there's been two times when your brain explodes in development when your baby when you start to crawl

and when you start to walk. So a lot of my exercises, if you look on YouTube and I have my programs out there, if somebody could search it, trifacic training, current programs, you can see if you really pay attention that a lot of my exercises are tied to the gate, like those two, right? And I have found I've gotten huge responses. And people come to watch my programs, right? I've had many coaches visit this year and they go, how do you do 80 or 90 sets? And what it is is I do a lot of exercises that are associated with gait. So even even my bench press, I will make sure my feet are staggered. Okay. And I've gotten better responses when I say that with an exercise like, well, let's go back to the yury. If you notice she has her hands in a certain position,

it's matching the gate cycle. Because I've actually, so that when she's doing that, and we've measured her. Let's say she gets 10 reps in 10 seconds. And then we've done it where we've put the hands in the wrong position matching gate opposite. And she can only get six or seven reps in the same time. And then we switch her back to the good positions, the gate cycle. Boom. So what people have to realize is that I try to be a, I called a positive neurological response, but a brain-friendly the exercise and that that lift is as brain friendly as I can get it's you know pretty miraculous that you can get in so many sets but when you prescribe the right exercises you can get in a ton of work you can get an enormous amount of volume and even though you know she's moving fast and there's

some good intent there um these kind of movements it's odd you know when you do them versus watching them you know you're looking at the exercise going man she's dynamics, she's moving great. But these exercises don't blow you apart. No. Well, that's the thing, right? Like these are, when I say brain friendly, like if she got out from doing that exercise and you put her on a balance plate, her balance is, might even be better than it was just normal. But if you put her hands in the wrong positions, these are experiments we've done. And she does the exercise and pull her out. Guess what? Her balance got like 30% worse. So we knew the hand positions are important because it's a positive neurological response within that exercise, you know. And honestly, well, let's go to

back squats. I haven't found those to be a great positive neurological response. But if you stagger stance and do the single leg and then put the hands in the right position to match the gate cycle, I've gotten a positive neurolott. So really, I've realized that playing sports is a positive neurological response running around because you're gate cycling, you know, you're walking, running through the whole thing. But yeah, and when I say 90 sets, I'm talking about three sets of neck on one cycle. So they may do four or five sets of neck, right? They may do grip training, too, with those 90 sets. But the point is, is like, we do a lot of value, but again, it's a positive response. And then at the end of those 80 to 90 sets, we may have people hit the best sprint of the day.

So we know we've stacked good quality exercises on top of good quality exercises, which then, in my opinion, the feedback is that the sprint hasn't slowed down or if it has slowed down it's only slowed down a little bit versus if I did 90 sets of a bunch of exercises that aren't as brain friendly, guess what? They're going to slow down a lot. So I test everything, right? Like, that's the magic I have in a wait room with a million and a half dollars with equipment and right and a lot of testing equipment with the exercise or the things that I use from the 1080s and so on. is that we test everything to get us to this point to make sure we're trying to do the best exercises we possibly can.

We've talked about the different types of athletes and how explosive they can be and all these different things. Who are the stronger athletes that you work with? I know that you mentioned like throwers and stuff, so I'd imagine they'd probably be kind of at the top of the list in terms of like strength. Yeah, absolutely. The term of like weight, weight room strength. Yeah, the weight room strength.

And, but, you know, and getting back to, I learned so much from the throwers, right, where I remember one year I had a coach that wanted to get a guy a lot stronger, and he had already benched, I think he benched right around 400, yeah, because then we got him to a 460 bench the next season to start it, Mark, and he was a shot putter. You know how much he, how farther he threw the shot put that year? Three inches was it. So we spent so much time getting to 460 because the coach wanted to get him stronger. When, when I knew. that at 50% load, so at 220, right, he couldn't move the bar as fast as another guy that could only bench 350. So he's stronger, but yet he moves a bar with a lower load so much slower than that guy.

And that guy could out throw him by seven, seven feet. So you're like, are we focusing on the right thing? You're right? But the throwers, yes. I mean, those guys are, and I mean, there's, I've worked with some strong. Well, Dave, a friend of mine, Dave Osslin, lives in Minneapolis. He took third in the world's strongest man behind Savicus that year, I believe it was, and Brian Shaw, right? So Dave took third, and he was 6'8, 360, right? And, you know, he just missed the 900 pound deadlift in the gym one day, but, you know, it hit eight monster. Yeah, monster. So you see some strong people, but the throwers were unbelievable. The 100 meter sprinters and the short sprint guys in track were also strong.

Like they were freaky. But then you go to a pull-up, right? And some of those, some of those mid-distance or the sprint guys in swimming, they could do pull-ups all day. All day. You know, they try, you know, like a fortunate to train a David Plummer as an Olympian in Brazil. And what he could do, he could turn himself inside out for 45 seconds. He was a 100 meter.

He's a backstroke guy, right? and he would let it rip for 40 to 45 seconds. And you're just going, and anything he did, he would let it rip. And you're going, that's terrifying. The juice you have for that 45 seconds. Yeah, I know. And then the 400 meter runners, those are probably the guys that, that's one of the hardest events in regards to like, when you're done,

you're going, oh boy. You know what I mean? Because those guys, I mean, they're world class. I think they hit in the 44s. Wow. Right? And yet they throw up, like one of them would throw up after every race because there's so much lactate that they just turn themselves inside out, right? And that's just, that's the grit. And then the wrestlers, you're going, oh boy, like I know how. Yeah, I mean, some of those guys and the type of people that might lose, the heavyweights can lose like 10 pounds in a practice and they're drinking all the water they want. And that's how hard they push them up, right? Just hard. Well, the heavyweight wrestlers like a Cole Conrad. He was a three-time NCAA. Two-time NCAA. champ force in Minnesota. And I remember, you know, and I'm still strong at the time, like really,

really strong, I thought for a 30 year old. And I remember his second year, he redshirted, did an Olympic red shirt. So he's wrestling his third year. And he grabbed me. And I was a college wrestler. And he had, we had an over and under. And there was that point where you realize, like, there's nothing I could do against it. Because when he locked down, you're like, yeah, he's got it. And he went on to be a two-time NCAA. I mean, we're champion, right? So you could talk about freaks, but I know if when he locked in on you,

it wasn't, the best analogy I could get, it was like trying to wrestle a bull or grabbing somebody's bumper on the car and they just were driving backwards, just shaking the car. There's nothing you can do to stop the movement. Like, there's just nothing you can do.

And yeah, he was, he was a monster. He was a beast. So we've had a few come through Minnesota. It's just been fortunate to. Brock Lesner, right? Yeah, Brock Lesner. Him and Cole trained together when they were fighting MMA.

So yeah, it was interesting. So what do you think are some components that make a really great strength coach? Especially nowadays. Well, it's obviously, I think the dinosaurs that were just hard. Like, you have to be a people person now. You know what I mean? I think in the early years of the profession, I met so many people that were just like,

why would you talk to people? You know what I mean? You're just like, yeah. Drill sergeant style. Yeah, the drill sergeant. You're like, man, now I think willingness to learn. But I think for young people, it's just to even get in the field now, you've got to probably network a lot.

You know what I mean? Networking, you're going to have to sacrifice to be a strength coach. You know what I mean? Unless you've got the right connections right out of the shoot. And you're going to have to put in time and take jobs where, yeah, you're definitely going to have to sacrifice, you know, income or whatever it may be. And then the qualities, I think, honestly, if you can, you know, the big one is, is, hey, you might identify a problem, but you got to come with solutions. And then you've got to figure out that happy medium of, you know what

you want to get done, but also talking to the coaches because the head coach and the assistants are going to, who are probably going to dictate, you know, your success to some level only because you have to figure out the communication of how to relay this message to this coach, right? And I think the big one is, hey, how's in your conversations, how are you talking to him? Figure out how he thinks and then you got to relay the message with that intent so that he can deliver it. And it's not your fault. It's just he has limited knowledge of what you're doing. So you've got to relay the right message the way that he sees it. You know, I think it's a way that will benefit him. Yeah. And then maybe even educating, right? And then don't paint those coaches

and tell them the wrong, don't paint them into a corner where they can't back out of, right? I've had coaches, hey, we need to do this and this. I'm like, okay, I'm like, what do you think? Well, I'm, I think this is a good idea right now, which maybe I didn't. But I'm like, and then when's that point, do you want to transition to get more sports specific? And they're going to, oh, yeah, well, let's do this for like three weeks. Okay, we're going to work them hard for three weeks. We're going to do this training that I don't agree with.

But then we can transition them into something more sport specific. So, you know what? You can't. A little give and take. Yeah, a little give and take. Be flexible. It's hard, right? Because the field is tough, right?

It's definitely going to be. And the people that I remember when I was young, I remember I went to NSA conference and there was a football NCAA conference right after that at the same spot. I can remember being at that conference, all the people that wanted to learn at the NSA, but then the guys that were getting the jobs

didn't even go to that conference. They came to the football conference to smooth with the football coach. coaches, right? So that's part of the deal. Like you got to, you got to have that network. Like, that's a big deal. You know what I mean? That's just the truth. Yeah, a lot of people listening are probably like, man, I was hoping he would just say go to the school or read this book or obviously your books are going to be a great start. Triphazic one and two. Listening to various podcasts and learning from coaches and doing some of the sacrificing that you mentioned, you know, going to seminars,

you know, maybe spending a little bit of money on certain things that you don't necessarily have that much money to go and do, but you might have to do that to educate yourself. You really do need to learn and you need to probably observe and really watch and maybe get next to a strength coach and see, see how they're interacting with everybody. Because to see them, you know, coach some players is one thing, but then to see them interact with parents, perhaps, or see them interact with other coaches, that's probably where a lot of the real magic is. No, absolutely. And, you know, I think social media can be great right now, especially like, I'm sure there's going to be clips of this and people are going to hear you talk and they're going to go, oh, okay, Mark's talking about this. But like, maybe you might need to go another layer deep and see if there's more videos of Mark talking on that subject or just find other people talking. Like, people really don't know how deep some of this goes, right, and how it's tied where you've gotten to a point of providing information for these young coaches. And yet they don't, they don't understand that, oh, yeah, I've heard everything Mark say.

So I understand everything what Mark says and I'm as smart as Mark in this field. Well, there's a lot of layers behind you that they don't even know about that got you to this point. Right. So I think people have to go deep, even deeper into what they see on maybe social media when you're looking at a subject. Because, you know, I'll have somebody come up to me. Oh, yeah, I've done research and, oh, this causes cancer, that causes. I'm like, well, back up. Like, there's a whole lot of things that can.

can be associated with cancer. Yeah. You can't say this one material or this one vitamin is going to stop it all. If it was that easy, then it would be done. You know what I mean? When I dug into it for a long time, it's a pretty dynamic problem, right? And there's a lot of things that can help. Yes.

Right? To prevent, you know what I mean? Whatever. But ultimately, life is deeper and a lot of these subjects are very deep, especially when dealing in physics, biophysics, physiology, everything, right? Yeah. I mean, just like any other profession, you want to be good at it. You got to live it.

And so you're talking strength, conditioning. The time you wake up, the time you go to bed for the last 40 years. Yeah, I know, right? Yeah. Reading, I mean, I don't have to work Sundays because of the schedule. But in the fall, I'll probably work out of 15 Sundays. I'll probably work 15 of them. You know what I mean?

Because I choose to. You know what I mean? Happy. Well, my kids are out of the house. So right? Like you're, I'm at that point where I can, and I really do enjoy the field that I'm in and keep learning. And because I'm always trying to find the next thing, right? And in my gym, like, I'll watch the athlete do exercises. And what happens is I see them move the way they shouldn't. And then what I do is I go, I'll go test them. I'll muscle test them. And I'll go, hey, I found a muscle that's not working. So I tell people for an example, like when I see somebody, running and if they have an arm out when they're running, most coaches will say, hey, let's put that arm in, right? Well, to me, I can tell them to put the arm in, but I didn't fix the problem the reason why the arm was out. And what I've tracked it down to is that it's a foot stability problem and what I'll do is an archery set. And then when they run, they've put their arm in without me coaching them to put their arm in. So I actually found that it, I found the real problem.

I didn't tell them to hold their arm in while they run. I just worked on them, got their foot strong. Guess what? Or like the prime time that my Olympian was doing there, Lee. When she first did her prime times, her arm was out. Well, I knew her feet were weak. So once the feet got strong, then the arms came in. So I figured out that I didn't need to coach the arm.

Actually, I left the arm out, even though some people would say it's bad form, because I knew her feet were weak and that her brain was saying, I hold my arm out to stabilize when she run. So let's not fix her. Counterbalance, right? It was a counterbalance. But I didn't correct her right then. I just left her feet fix the problem

because I got her feet stronger over the next five to six weeks. And then guess what? The arms actually just came in on their own. So those are some of the things that in my gym. I actually try to figure out what the reason somebody is moving in a way that I don't like or I think might be a flaw, right? So if they're doing an RDL and I see them straight in their knees before they move their hips forward and their back goes up,

I realize that they probably got a hamstring compensation pattern that we got to fix, right? So those are some of the little things. And it gets deep, right? It gets really deep when you really break things down, right? And to be a good strength coach, in my opinion, one of the things I would have started years ago right away would be just learning the muscle test to see what's going on

if there's a flaw, right? Just muscle testing the body. I know chiropractors do it and everything, but I have found it to be massively helpful in my own education, figure out what's going on with the body. And, you know, this could have to do with maybe particular sports, and maybe I'm not thinking of, you know, I'm not being considerate of like all sports. But Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps. Michael Jordan.

I've just observed, Bones Jones, I've just observed this like body type. It's like, I mean, give or take an inch or so, give or take a couple pounds or so. 6.5, 6.6.

There's, you know, 6.4, 2 something, 2.0 something. Right. And you have like, you know, the goat, you know, in particular, fields. Not all the time, not always, right? There's, there's other people and other sports and stuff, but like, for the most part, for the sports that people love here in the United States, you see that in basketball, football, um, swimming. Why do you think there's that archetype

or that person and that, I mean, that, that Bones Jones, I mean, the way that Bones Jones can handle, like his, he's like, uh, just like hyperintelligence of, of, of how he can leverage his body but there must be some really cool leverages associated with those long you know uh phelps has the i think the longest ape index in the history of sport or something like that's like nine like he would be like eight and a half feet tall or something right towards to how long his wingspan is or something yeah well i think it's the right ratios of of everything have fallen into place you know what i mean but well with michael jordan right his ability to his tendons and everything that was wired and he had enough fast-switch fibers to to when he went to jump stop the muscle was able to yield and then stretch the tendons to

propel him forward and and these guys have these frameworks that are ideal and then they have Usain Bolt had the he was taller than most and then he had the ability to move his limbs and that wasn't supposed to be yeah that wasn't supposed to be a thing a benefit right but when he could move his limbs fast enough to propel himself at that speed then that's when it was a benefit right like so it's a combination of yeah it's there's there's a lot to it in that we won't maybe ever know but ultimately you can move and and be fluid with that type of body type because if you're taller or michael phelps he's digging through the water to find to find power to generate he could do it better than anybody with that limb that he had you know what i mean but the question is if most people

have anyone had those limbs before sure but why he was strong enough and had the ability to keep retaining that skill and propel himself. And Michael Jordan, well, there's just something special about him, right? Yeah, when I kind of looked it up, because I was like,

I think all these guys are built about the same. When I looked it up, they were like literally about the same. I was like, man, that's interesting. It is. Similar body weights, similar height. And then obviously they all like,

they wanted it, right? More than somebody else. That's a... That internal drive, right? Like that internal drive. And then, his whole life i mean i'm sure they they all spent their whole life with the intent to to do it violently and hard you know what i mean and how many michael phelps his intent to swim fast how many repetitions

did he get to be able to do it right move his limb that fast right like and if you don't look if you don't have passion for what you're doing you're never going to practice that hard with that intentions there's just no way right there's no way so that it's it's that combination of the body type the sequence your training, well, the environment that you trained in. What if one of those guys had a coach that was just a bad experience? That may have deterred their entire life. And maybe they did. But instead of deter them, it may have lit a fire that says, I'm going to show him.

They always talk about Michael Jordan being cut from his basketball team or whatever, but it's like he was cut from his varsity basketball team as a freshman. Right. That's what actually happened. And there was great basketball there. Yeah. They were all good. Yeah, it's hard to be on the varsity team, you know, at that young of an age.

Also, you know, what about some discrepancies in a person that most of the time he'd be like, ah, it's probably not ideal to work with. But like we mentioned Bolt and his height, how we haven't seen up until that point anyone being that fast. And in fact, when he's blasting by everybody, you know, everyone's like, consider. quite a bit shorter than him. But I believe Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps, I think they both have scoliosis.

Yeah. So you look at the back and you're like, man, that guy's kind of, I don't Bolt does for sure. Maybe I'm miss speaking on Phelps, but that's interesting too. Because when you look at his back, he's got this big, you know, weird curve in there.

And you'd be like, well, he'll never be, he's too tall. His back's all messed up. Whoa. And you talk about the slings and everything, right? Where some of those curves may facilitate some quality. right? Because then the muscle gets tighter so it can react and have a greater stretch reflex coming in the back in the other direction. You know what you mean? Who knows? Yeah.

Yeah, who knows it might have given a little extra gear, you know? At least in one movement of the running cycle it may have. And most likely it would be for you saying it would probably been that leg being pulled back because that long limb is harder to pull back, being taller. And now maybe because of his curve where the soas hooks into it, that hip flexer could pull it back hard. Who knows, right? Like, it's scary. Yeah. Yeah, he's, he also is somebody that doesn't get credited with, you know, being one of the stronger athletes of all time, but to be able to produce that amount of force and be able to handle all that shit going on through your foot, running that fast, being over 200 pounds is a lot of sheer forces on the body. Well, the forces. I remember,

I was in the Olympic trials. I think it was in 2012. And I think it was in San Diego. It was in California here somewhere. And I was able to get down by the 100 meter start for the best, it was the finals for the best 100 meter guys going to the Olympics for us. Mark, and when, when they ran by, I was about on the 20-yard dash, the ground vibrated. And I was probably eight meters from the closest guy. It was like a herd of horses or cattle running by you, right? you're going, that amount of force going into the ground is terrifying. And people don't realize that the specialized human like that when you're talking, you know, these elite sprinters, they're, you know, I've said over the years, like, I wouldn't always, like, you can't just

take what elite sprint coach says and apply it to your high school team fully. You know, it's, that elite sprinter man, I trained a number of, I think it was, it was two years ago. I had a number of guys in my gym at the time. There was like 20 pro hockey players, 25. And I had an elite female coming through just for a couple days to work with her. And she took off at a sprint. And all these NHL guys

and some of her are really fast go, oh my, that's what speed is. Like, yeah, she ran. Oh, yeah, track athlete. She outran all of them. They had, like, they stopped. They weren't running with her. They just stopped their workout.

And you're going, these elite people at sprinting are very special. And back of the point of that ground vibrating, I was like, oh, that's different. You know what I mean? That's a different human being that's pushing like that, especially in the 100 meters.

Like those humans are wired. It's special. Like, again, I love seeing excellence. When you watch something like that, you're going, oh, that's pretty awesome. Have you ever seen, what did you find here, Ryan? This is just like a slow motion video

of Phelps swimming, and I thought it was kind of cool. Yeah, it's unbelievable. grab that yeah he grabs the water and there's yeah yeah back um Phelps also he he won one of his races untraditionally as well there was always this debate about whether you would win in the water or out of the water and he won out of the water he which makes sense because your arm's going to move way faster out of the water yeah but they felt that if you stayed down longer um that it was always a hypothesis so they you know and my wife being a swimmer she's like this is what they always taught us you

you stay in the water and stretch forward. And he came out and he beat the guy by the most milliseconds. At the Olympics. At the Olympics. At the most millisecond that you can possibly imagine. So it's just disproving, you know, just over and over again. You know, but the belief in yourself is probably the take-home message there. Yeah.

Well, so many times, too, how many old adages of coaches and their beliefs have, and we're not talking to just strength coach. Oh, yeah, there. Here it is. Yeah, right. And we're talking. In the butterfly. So that's important.

Yeah. Right. And you're going like premonitions and people living off things. Like how long didn't they drink water in practices? Right. Yeah. And that's just like let's, I think one thing that'll make a great coach is just, just don't always believe the status. What currently is the status quo is the norm is actually the right way.

Keep looking because there's got to be more. As dynamic as the human body is, just. because this has worked for people doesn't mean you can't make it better you know what I mean have you ever seen the way that um gout gout's foot moves you ever you ever seen that I've seen that on seeing the runner yeah yeah if we can kind of bring a clip of that up just because we hear people you know they have a fit about the foot should be very specific way it can't point out it you know but this foot like look how springing it can't point out any further right but yeah it's like I don't understand I'm when a coach watches this how they just they're like oh

his toes you're pointing out, but they're not paying attention to how much spring is going on with that damn thing. Look at that thing. It's a loaded spring transmitting force, right? It's magic. And that's, that's, that's free energy. I don't want to say it's completely free. His feet are coming out of the picture, out of the frame. It's like how high is he? He's still pushing, right? Look at that snap to propel him. You know, they say that, uh, the best sprinters in the world, they, they, they run like above the track you know and not necessarily like on the track that's what they're that's what you're seeing right right exactly he's like floating the amount of ground contact is very minimal well when you have that small contact but a lot of force and that tendon gets stretched and that's when you get a lot of how fast they're

going that's when a lot of free energy is transferred into the body so they can propel down the court right it's that because if you didn't stretch the tendon then you'd have the muscle would have to move the body fully by itself and that's so inefficient right these guys have are wired they think about like a boat like a boat has a regular boat has like a motor right a motor that goes like in the water and then propels you that way but then there's those budwiser ones that go like above the water right and they go yeah and they're like hydroplaining the whole time all the way to the point where they'll flip over but those more efficient yes those go like 200 miles an hour i think right as opposed to the other boat if it's able to go 60 or 80 miles an hour you're lucky. I know and well one of the the things I saw when I years 25 years ago

was that looking at was it uh you know 500 meter runners uh what separate them they found was that at at like 3 to 4000 meters the the ones that that lost the pace of the leaders their hips when the foot struck the ground their hips would unjulate up and down and the guys that kept the pace that were the race, that hip didn't undulate. But what that tells you is that the guys that were undulating, they lost that snap that gout got out had right there. So they weren't utilizing the stretch reflex. And that's free energy to propel you forward versus the guys that kept it. Now we're running on free energy, right? And that's actually a really big skill because when that foot strikes the ground, you have to think every killies, right, the calves, the hamstrings, everything has to hold tension

so that that impact can happen and stretch the tendons. And then if it lost that tension in the muscle, then you would lose the stretch reflex. So what's happening there is you keeping that tension and then holding that stretch reflex to propel you forward at a faster level. People ended up with a big efficiency dip. Yes.

When they're not able to maintain what you're talking about. You're essentially using more energy in the muscle to propel yourself forward. We talked a ton about a lot of different subjects, but let's kind of bring this in with talking about older people training, people that are 50, 60, 70, you being a strength coach for as long as you have and you understanding the many aspects of strength, not just the power lift or the clean and jerk or whatever it is, understanding strength at a broad spectrum

and understanding conditioning, what do you think makes the most sense as we get older? I actually, I have a method I use. It's called fiber specific density training. And basically, I realize, like, okay, I want to train the fast switch fibers. So one of the most effective ways to do it without like pyometrics, heavy back squatting, was I take an isometric load. Let's say roughly about 50 per 60%. And I have this an article I've wrote over the years. People could search it. But you basically would hold a bench press for like 40, you can hold it up to 40 seconds at 50%. So if you can bench 200 pounds, you'd hold 100 pounds. And what that does, holding that in an isometric position, in the stretched isometric position. Maybe a little bit off the chest. Yeah, a little bit off the chest.

It's wonderful for remodeling tissue. It's kind of a yoga stretch with actually weights and using like a load. And then the isometric stops the blood flow going into the muscle, which then if there's no blood flow, it's kind of like inclusion training. It's supposed to be amazing for blood pressure. Yes, it is.

And then what happens is, is then the only muscles that are getting worked with that load are the fast switch fibers. Now you can only do them for 40 seconds. Because after that, it created such an acidic environment I found that it could, in my athletes, it would hinder work capacity because it hurt the mitochondria of the muscle.

But the point is, is that if, and you can do it between 20 and 40 seconds. It doesn't matter if you're older. And when I'm saying this, I'm talking about guys that were 40 and 50 have surgery and then started doing this workout and found great results. And then people go, what about the slow twitch? Now, once you're done with the 20 to 40 second isometric hold to work the fast switch fibers, which remodels the tissue, and then you wait about 20 seconds and do the slow twitch muscles, which you grab dumbbells or the bench press and you're doing a light load that you're going to go slow and controlled for one minute. minute. You're already pre-fatigued. Pre-fatigued, you get a burn. And the rule of thumb is about 30%. If you don't know what your 30% is, you don't want to fail, but at the end, like the last 50,

seconds, you want somewhat of a burn at that point. And now you've worked to slow twitch fibers and the fast-switch fibers separately. And I've seen some unbelievable work capacity increases, not only in my Olympic athletes when I need that, but my buddies have gotten out of surgery that they're older and they can do that workout in a hotel gym you can do any exercise so let's say you're gonna do four sets of chess that way it doesn't take long and for me i'll i'll hey i got eight minutes between this group of the next even a push-up kind of comes of mind maybe you'd have to hold it a little longer but a push-up you know push-up you could get nice and deep absolutely put your feet up on the thing and then the next one maybe um well doing a push-up you would maybe hold it for 40 seconds right

then to do the slow twitch part of it, you'd maybe do the push up nice and slow and controlled on your knees because it's a light load. Right. Because the reason you want to go with a light load, so then you're not recruiting the fast switch fibers. Does that make sense? And I wrote this up in an article,

but I have found that it makes my joints feel better because I'm doing everything in a stretch position. Like I'll do a pull-up with a slight contraction in my lat and hold that position for 40 seconds. My shoulders haven't felt better in the last three. years because I'm stretching it's like a stretching effect with a loaded effect working the fast switch fibers and then I drop down I'll do a light lap pull down for one minute to where I get a burn at 60 50 to 60 seconds and I'll do three to

four sets of that and it seems to do an effective job not only for me but but my friends have have talked about that but not only that like I think cardio as we get older is obviously more important whether you do zone one whether it's intervals I think mixing it up is obviously probably better intervals are I think very important. But as you get older, everything that I've gotten into, and the reason I like isometrics, the one system that affects the heart and all the cardiopulmonary is the vascular system, right? And the isometrics have, even in my Olympic young athletes, have had profound effects on the vascular system. So when your heart pumps, then how is the piping

getting all the blood and all the nutrients where it needs to get? And then the vascular system in my opinion, people need to look into it, educate themselves on what supplements, how to keep that healthy. Because that vascular system, right, is how your heart gets everything to the muscles so that it works and back to the lungs and so forth. Even with some of what you're talking about, I'm thinking like even like an ISO of like holding a fairly heavy med ball and then walking with it. Absolutely. Because it's like, you know, isometric contraction. The med balls that I have, they're pretty big. And I take like a 40 or a 60 and I'll maybe walk like 200 yards with her or so it just smokes the shit out of you.

And so you have isometric contractions going on. You kind of have to flex your stomach isometrically. Absolutely. You're pulling it in towards you. The biceps are definitely flexed. But then you're also moving at the same time, which is this kind of prevents, it kind of presents a lot of problems for your body to try to figure out how to solve in real time.

Well, right. What makes that so hard is that when you're squeezing that ball, everything you're squeezing isn't getting much blood flow. So now your body's working super hard to try to get blood flow in there. Your heart rate cranks up. Because if you, let's say you could rig something up that you're holding the same weight on your shoulders, but you don't have to do anything isometric. Your heart rate's not going to be that high.

Oh yeah. If I just rest it on my shoulder. Or you put a backpack on, you can just walk normal with no isometric. Guess what? That's not. But when you wrap that thing up and you're holding it symmetrically or you're going to drive it? Yeah, it jacks up your heart rate. So it's kind of a conditioning.

hat. Yeah. Absolutely, right? And as we get older, I tell you what, I love the hacks. If I can do two or three things at once and get a training effect, I'm in. What about some jumping? How do we figure out, like maybe how, yeah, just even how to incorporate some jumping if you're over 50 and you're not used to it? Right. I think jumping up onto a box and walking down, especially at the beginning, is a good start. So you don't get that high force of landing hard, right? Jump on, jump on something maybe low. Yeah. You're sure you can land on. It stepped on. or step off, right? I think what's great for setting up the jumping is honestly like sled pushes,

you know, heavy sled pushes where I think that can condition your Achilles. Because one of the big problems with older athletes is they go play pickup basketball and they blow their Achilles out. You would love to have people be able to, you know, be able to do depth jumps because of what they can do for you, but they're too damaging to just jump right into. Right?

So you definitely, I think like sled, but I'm a big fan from the youth athlete to do sled pushes to get strong. to older adults to use sled push. Obviously, progress them wisely. Because you can still blow an Achilles doing a heavy sled push. If it's your first day and you're doing a 200 pounds. I've seen people get hurt with the sled and it's like they almost always, I only saw one person ever get hurt with the sled kind of like more like walking.

But usually it's somebody trying to like sprint with it. Well, they probably had the injury before. Yeah. They probably had something before they did that walk and hurt themselves. Right. So there was something there. you know what I mean um a lot yeah if I I think you know and I don't do a lot of warm-ups as I said but in the last what five years of since I didn't do a lot of warm-ups I have one guy that that had a

calf problem that appeared but I found out they did it in softball the night before it's a softball right so but he doesn't get he didn't get treated by our trainers if he did it softball so he said ah yeah it happened during our work okay well whatever didn't I know better but like it didn't he told me later but but but the point is is like yeah progress up build it like our age the orthopedic problem is that that uh when i say our 40 50 60 year olds is that Achilles problem right you don't want it when you start getting hyperactive i think you got to you got to build you know you got to build that up to build that tissue so that it can tolerate those impacts because people don't realize like a depth jump as you're taking that's that's five three to six times your body force instantaneously

on a joint so you just got to be aware of that right Right. And yeah, doing something out of nowhere, just, you know, if you're going to try something, like maybe the first place to start with any sort of jumping would just be some nice and easy pogo hops, you know, and see if you can get yourself to work up to be able to do a couple sets of like 40 seconds or something. Yeah, exactly. Just start real low and slow. And then as you're mentioning with that, even that elite athlete, you're like, she could not do anything near the prime times that she was doing in week one. But X amount of weeks later. So same thing with any of us. Allow, allow for some adaptation to occur. Give yourself a beat. Give yourself a second. Before you go out and try to do some, you know, 40 meters sprints out of nowhere

because you're watching an NFL combine, you're excited, you know, start out on a pretty steep hill for maybe 20 meters and run, you know, gradually, maybe over the course of weeks, maybe increase the percentage at which you're running. Maybe start out at 50 percent, go 60, 70. If you just take your time, you build the strength and you'll build the tissue. that you need to be able to eventually do almost whatever you want. Whatever you want, right? Just to be resilient, right?

Yeah, I mean, the, again, we go back to the process, right? It's a process. It's a long-term vision, right? And when you start at week zero, like, if you're truly starting at zero, it can be dangerous if you don't, like, and one injury can set you back. Like, I mean, to set you back way too far. Oh, I mean, and I had a freak accident. I wasn't even training.

I fell over something. My foot slipped and hit. tore my quad tendon. Hey, and that, it was nine months before I felt like it was actually pretty decent. That sucks. That's a long time. Oh, it was brutal. I mean, three weeks is a long time. Yeah. Never mind. Nearly a year. I know. And I'll still tell you to this day, if I go to sprint, there is literally something holding it back a little bit. You know what I mean? I could feel it. I could still sprint. It's not that. It's not great like it used to be when I was young. Hanging out in there. There's something, you know, and it's probably all mental, but still, it's there.

You know what I mean? Yeah, they're still there. So, awesome. And so great to have you here on the show today. Thank you so much for your time. Where can people access some of your books and check out some of your courses and check out where you're at and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, they can Google Triphazic Training.

Like I said my programs right now. I literally have a bunch of programs listed with videos and everything. You can look at what we did this summer. I'm grateful that you have that YouTube channel. You have all that free information. That's awesome. I think I give more free information away than anybody, right? And I want people to learn.

I enjoy the emails and correspondence. But like Triphasic 2 is the website for my book. Triphasic Training 2. My YouTube channel, I think I'm doing, done a series of lectures on just educating people on a lot of things. You know what I mean? And then I have a Trifacic Training website. If people want to find my programs, I would search Trifacic Training and current programs and that page will come up.

and I literally have all my programs listed five day a week programs for people. They can take a look. It's a lot to chew on, but you can see how I do it, right? I have on that page, I have blogs, and I write a lot of free information. I give a lot of way. And I'm only because a lot of people have, you know, I have created a lot of things,

but like people have been willing to share with me and have these conversations, especially as a young coach. Like I remember talking with Dr. Michael Yeses and having these conversations like you and I are having. And back then it was more one-sided. Obviously, he was brighter than me, right? But now I appreciate these conversations and getting people's thoughts, right? That's the magic.

And I'm on Instagram, TriVasic Training. But that's where people can find me. And if you want to, I tell people, if you want to email me, Caldeets at Gmail, put on free beer or free tequila. I usually get to those first. You can't click fast enough. I know, right? Fall for it every time.

Yeah, I do. I do. It's like guys got a question about isometric leg extensions. Damn it. Yeah, and then I, and I look at it's like a Homer Simpson thing. It's always click on that one, right? So, yeah, I enjoy getting this. And if I don't get you, I usually try to hit me again.

I'll usually get you by the second time you hit me. So I appreciate, but thank you for having me on. It's been wonderful. I enjoy talking shop like this. Favorite book? Or a book that's impacted you the most as a strength coach. As a strength coach. You know what?

I wanted to impact me probably the most. there's some obviously great strength coach books but the legacy one that I read it's about the all blacks. It was more of a team thing right where how they dug in and

realize like all the parts to make their program great. You know what I mean when they re-evaluated their program right? Like and then I forget the saying that they use but it's basically plant trees that you'll never see the shade. Leave it in a better spot. You know what I mean?

stuff like that's cool and that's what we're trying to do obviously some really good philosophy in yeah you know what i mean uh it was a great one um with the all blacks is one of the greatest sports teams that's ever been around the last 100 years if they've won more championships right and uh it was kind of the way they revamped their system but you know that that was on on coaching and right and then i've talked to my athletes about those things so i think that made a big difference um physiology wise like i think super training was a great one for me you know what you mean because i i spent a not a week, but four days at Mel Siff's home, four nights, five days. It was back when he was in Colorado or something.

Yeah, it was in Colorado's wings. Yeah. Did you go there? I never went there, but I did meet Mel Siff. I went to a seminar. And it's the reason why my gym was, my gym was named after him, and after the book. Yeah.

Because I went, I went to a seminar in, it was really weird. It was at the Bellagio in Vegas. And it was like, with Louis? Yeah, Louis was there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was like, is this seminar really happening? Cause like we kept, I remember I saw a bunch of other meathead guys kind of looking for a seminar. And then we ended up in like, we called the boiler room, but it was kind of like the basement of like the Bellagio.

But yeah, it was Louis Simmons and Louis Simmons never traveled at that time. Yeah. So I was like, shit, Louis Simmons is coming to the West Coast. And I lived in California at the time. So I was like, man, I got to go to this. And so I went to that seminar. And I was looking at super training. I'm looking at the book.

just kind of checking it out at like intermission and mel's like oh you're thinking about buying it and i just didn't have like a lot of money so i'm like it's like 80 bucks or 70 bucks or something and i was like yeah i was like i think i need to go like today at a little bit and grab some money and and buy the book you know and then he was just like hey you know what um he goes you're going to put it to good use i said yeah i i sure would yeah he's like well why don't you just take it and so i was like i I, yes, thank you. Yeah. I will.

I will take you up on that. And then he died, like maybe just, maybe two or three months later. Really? And then I was sitting down after a hard workout with a bunch of my friends and we had a bunch of equipment in, in a gym in Woodland, California. And we got done with a session and somebody's like, hey, we got a bunch of guys together. And now we're, you know, now we're competing as a team. And they're like, we need a name. Like, what's the name?

I'm like, super training. It's super training. Yeah. Awesome. And then one of my friends, you know, because everyone's like, we're always like making fun of each other. The guy goes, well, that sounds pretty stupid. I go, well, of course it sounds stupid. I just named it just now.

Over time, it will matter more. It will make more sense. We'll make it not stupid, right? Exactly. Yeah, if we're good, it won't suck. Yeah, it won't suck. It'll be great. But yeah, if we're not very good, then it's going to be stupid.

Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I spent days at his home. I remember we're answering emails on his email group that he had. And it took me twice to catch it. he would always reference what he was talking about. And we're in the dark room like 11.30 at night. And he runs back to his library. He had an entire wall of books, probably four times the size of the studio of books.

And he grabs it. And I didn't catch it. He comes. He references it. So we do another email. We're looking at that. And he goes and grabs another book in the dark. And I'm like, and he comes back.

I'm like, how did you find that book? He's like, oh, I know where they are. He had memorized them. Oh, shit. Yeah. Yeah. He was a PhD in engineering, right? And was everything he talked about, right?

I'd say he had unbelievable wisdom in regards to the physiology and everything. Training like methods, he had some great ones with him. You're like, I think his view was a little bit less like, less broad. He had an Olympic Olympic thing and that's what his main deal was, right? And that's the only thing. But he was a wealth of knowledge, right?

I hoped to got a little bit more out of the training, But I realized I didn't need that with him. I just needed to learn what he learned in all the variables, right? He was gold. He upset a lot of people too because he would say, well, you know, this research would say this. And people would get upset because that was their thing. I'm like, that's all right. Like, hey, the research is what it is, right?

If you can get results, if you can move the needle, like you said, that's, that was the magic. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness. Weakness never restraint. Catch you guys later. Bye.