Mark Bell's Power Project - Ido Portal: Mastery Is a Myth | Movement Is an Endless Investigation

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

Ido Portal joins the show for the first time — delivering one of the most profound conversations we’ve ever had on movement, strength, injury, longevity, curiosity, self-education, and what it truly means to evolve as a human being.In this episode, Ido breaks down why “mastery” is a myth, why safe training is useless, and why real progress only happens when you’re willing to explore, fail, investigate, and live inside the question.We dive deep into the squat challenge, the hanging challenge, spinal waves, tribal movement, injury as a teacher, the limits of modern fitness culture, and why most “mobility” advice is missing the big picture.This isn’t a conversation about exercises.This is a conversation about changing yourself at the deepest level.CHAPTERS:00:00 - Intro00:48 - Movement Movement Origins02:55 - Mastery: A Controversial Term04:59 - The Importance of Asking Questions06:11 - Understanding Squat Technique08:12 - Pursuing More Movement11:40 - Eido's Challenges in Movement14:36 - Avoiding Injury in Movement Practices21:09 - Understanding Your Body Better23:53 - The Role of Curiosity in Movement29:40 - Reevaluating Past Teachings31:30 - Defining Strength in Movement38:50 - Movement Strategies for Athletes43:10 - Free Rope Flow Course Offer44:00 - Movement vs. Movement Quality44:55 - Underuse vs. Overuse in Movement49:27 - The Value of Seeking Novelty56:25 - Purpose of These Videos1:00:27 - The Role of Breathing1:07:45 - Exploring Strength Again1:16:37 - Flow State Through Movement Practice1:19:50 - Methylene Blue Purchase Recommendation1:24:53 - Strength is Never a Weakness1:26:25 - Visiting a Secluded Tribe1:32:20 - Movement's Contribution to Health1:39:26 - Exploring Additional Topics1:44:30 - Smooth Movement Techniques1:49:14 - Rope Flow Techniques1:53:12 - Insights from Old Soviet Training1:56:20 - Enjoying Food While Staying Lean1:58:40 - Plyometrics Explained2:04:30 - Movement Facilities Overview2:07:20 - Breathing and Movement Connection2:08:12 - Investigating Traditional Martial Arts2:17:27 - Finding Ido Online2:18:23 - Ido’s Bodyworker InsightsSpecial 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 Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!🧠 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!

The fitness people should look up to the athletes. Not the athletes, look up to the fitness people. That's horrific. The word mastery robs me the wrong way because it points at the end of the journey. The master has nothing to gain. The student has everything. If you truly want to transform, first you've got to let go of something. Squat for 30 minutes a day in the bottom of the squat for 30 days.

And what happens is great transformation. Anything that is supposed to evolve you and develop you requires coming out of the homeost. static point. There are two types of guests on podcasts. The guest that would give you that oversimplistic answer and it would be satisfying, inspiring. The second are the guests that will tell you the complexity of the situation and it will not be satisfied, but it will open a door towards an investigation. So I was talking with Kelly Sturrette this morning because I told him that I'm having you on my show and he was super excited, but I didn't realize that you guys never met. No, we never did. He said, make sure you tell Aido Portel that I said,

you for all the different exploration that you've had with movement and he credited you as starting the movement of movement which i think is really cool honored how did a lot of this stuff get started for you asking questions and not getting many good answers and yeah in search of bettering myself and going always under under under to the source and looking for people who are working with movement and can address movement and getting disappointed each time with the general thing that was offered, getting great tools along the way, but always something missing. And eventually I realized, okay, let me try to tackle it, which eventually became clear that it. and which eventually became clear that it's impossible, really. That's why there was something missing

because it was so, it's a difficult thing to solve. Yeah, but the attempt to solve it is enough. You know, so as a goal that can never be achieved, I stayed with that. And I think it's healthy. These achievable goals are good for the temporary, but not for the long haul. I'm curious on that idea right there because, you know, I think as everybody wants to master what they're doing, right? But was there ever a time when you were younger that you ever felt like, you know what, I can package this? This is like, I've mastered this.

Has there ever been a time that you've thought of things that way? Or have you always been generally like curious on the next thing or on ways to continue to improve. I never had that point. Never had that feeling. The word mastery robs me the wrong way. Yeah. Because it points at the end of the journey. The master has nothing to gain. The student has everything to gain. It's not fun to be a master even if you're looking for fun. And anyways, the nature of things is they are endless and infinitely evolving and changing and so there was never a point like that but there was a point where you said everybody wants to become better at what they do there was a point where i abandoned that where it made clear to me it became clear to me that i want to become better at myself

which is very different than becoming better at what I do, X, Y, Z. So actually the practice goes there, oriented me there. I'll use whatever comes along the way, the tools, but they are my slaves. I don't want to become a slave to the tool and end up defending some dogma. I'm interested in myself, in my own self-evolution, and then I realized that everybody really should be interested in that or we'll get to that point at a certain stage or and if not it's a sad thing as well which most people don't maybe but i believe it's it's the the beautiful thing in life well self-improvement is something that i think everyone can agree uh that everyone can improve a little bit uh no matter

where you're at you know someone like usain bolt when he crossed the finish line and ran his fastest time he actually jogged across the finish line right so even he could say I could actually probably run still a little bit faster. And I think that that is motivating and inspiring to people. So I think when people see you doing some of your movements, maybe some of the movements they see you do sometimes. Maybe they go, whoa, like, I don't know if I could do that movement, but then they might pick up like,

I bet you I can do a version of that movement. And so a lot of what you taught us today, I thought was really interesting. The way that you taught us was almost as if you were a more experienced student rather than a teacher. Definitely. which is the way to share I come from a culture and a place

that appreciates the questions not the answers so much and I think that direction of asking the questions together and asking you questions and asking myself questions is more important than the verdict the solution

the solutions come along the way appear and disappear but the questions are more important so i i call this also that way of being living inside the question which means being in practice constantly and you guys also do that of course with what you do and and that's why you continue to ask those questions to bring the people to reflect to try to experiment you're willing to fail you're willing to be playful that's a powerful place you shared with us today that there's no perfect squat i thought that having your heels down and you know having your butt on the ground was perfect squat for pooping maybe in for a specific

structure and for a specific activity but if mike thysen try to use that squat to duck a punch it wouldn't work and he wouldn't be mike tyson so again like we want to we need nowadays the podcasts we need something quick actionable bits protocols but that place is dead that place is poor the good stuff is not in the rigid structures that we put so we are not willing to change ourselves. Give me something that I can integrate into my life, but your life sucks. I make a joke, but the understanding is this. If you truly want to transform, first you got to let go of something. So the perfect squat is easily conceptualized. For example, we used to say, push the knee out, but then the Chinese came and 12-year-old girls out-squatted our

champions with knees in so that will keep changing it's all specific to the demand there is no survival of the fittest in that sense relies on the scenario and on the structure and i and i said it because you seem to have you thought poorly of your squat and i said not necessarily not at all it might be very good squad for specific conditions and demands the flatfoot squat is very useful to develop strength but even that is not for everyone some people just got to work with split squatting and and you know they'll never really benefit from squatting they'll only get injured from it do you think that uh still a worthy cause to pursue more movement in that area like let's just take me for example like i showed you like oh my my heels are off the ground

like is that a worthy pursuit for anything in particular or just a fun goal just to say i squatted with my heels on the ground and maybe doesn't mean as much as some people may think i need to i need to work with you a little bit to find out definitely there is a lot we can do there is rigidity there there is limitations scar tissue don't get me wrong it might be great but i'm just opening the question again why and then we can start to work and discover what is the reason for it and you know doesn't make you a bad person that you cannot flat foot squat see i told you Don't look at me. Look at Kelly.

It doesn't even make you a bad mover. He's always telling me I'm a bad person. He's never said that. I'm kidding. But yeah, you know, I think for me, like one of the limitations is like through my hips. You know, and I was kind of mentioning like I'm, you know, tight through my hips. And what I mean by tight through my hips, tight through my hips for some of the stuff that I'm trying to do now, which is to sprint. So being faster at sprinting and having my legs move better, having my legs move faster,

they just more mobility I think will probably be helpful but I believe that sprinting will give me some of that as well it's true but again does the flatfoot squat is going to improve your gate not necessarily it's not specific enough it's not oriented enough to what you need you need a specific type of mobility in the hips you need your your pelvis is very locked up and is in it's one unit. The pelvis has all these options, all these movements. The SI has to provide these motions. There is movement that many people don't even know of. The separation between the tailbone and the ileums, the change of the pelvis this way. So if my pelvis is facing forward, the pelvic outlet and inlet can also change the relationship. There is so much. And maybe

this range of motion, I tell you, not maybe, is more important than achieving a, you know, know, a flat foot squat. But I popularized this flat foot squat years ago and hanging and a lot of stuff that you see all over because those are generally good directions to explore, but not the end-all-be-all. And again, it became a dogma. And I saw people distort what I'm saying and make it into something dead. One thing I'm wondering is, is the goal in their pursuit for that thing for just your average person of like, oh, man, my shoulders, like they don't move the way they used to. I think I'm going to work on some hangs.

I can't squat the way I used to. I'm going to work on some squats. You think the pursuit of that is probably just a generally healthy thing for people to try to go after because the cascade of things that may happen in regards to that. So, you know, hanging, you know, maybe their grip gets a little bit stronger. Maybe they do increase a little bit mobility through their shoulder. Maybe they're able to like kind of let their arm go a little bit more. rather than kind of like being tense and holding.

And then maybe when they're working their squat, maybe their feet get a little bit more mobile, their calves, their Achilles. And then maybe possibly therefore in their day-to-day life, they just maybe feel and move a little bit better. Yes. The answer is yes. There are three challenges that I issued years ago

that have made their wings all over. And the first one was this squat. We call it the squat challenge. And we had tens of thousands of people participate. and then all the copycats also pursuing. And it was just basic. It was always there. I didn't invent anything,

but I put it into a protocol. What I just said is problematic, but when you approach the general public, it's a useful thing. And I told people, squat for 30 minutes a day in the bottom of the squat, accumulated time. So not in one set.

This is advanced. Throughout the day, for 30 days. Don't continue to do it for the rest. of your life and what happens is great transformation but did some people get hurt from that challenge also maybe someone else wouldn't admit but you know i don't have any issues with saying that i i injure people many times because it's an investigation little injuries maybe the second was the hanging challenge which also became very very popular actually there was a person here in the US, a doctor, an orthopedic surgeon that promoted hanging and he refused to perform shoulder

surgeries on his clients because he realized if you do this hangs for a while, you might avoid a surgery. And that was in the 90s, 80s and 90s. And then I brought it back this idea of hanging. Nobody was talking about hanging. Everybody wanted to do pull-ups. I said, no, no, no. try to hang for total of 10 minutes a day for 30 days and again tens of thousands of you know participants and thank you letters I avoided surgery I was already booked for surgery and all this effects over the lower back effects over digestion effects over you know all kinds of things and the third thing is the spinal waves which also became very popular this motion this intra-segmental movements that I also these three challenges if I need to just

in a moment, send someone are covering all the major limitations and would in most cases improve your life, your movement in variety of conditions. But it's not perfect. One of them covers the most compressed human position, the squat. You basically fold the whole body. The second, the most open human position. And the third, the transmission between them. It's not a coincidence that I put these three together. And I didn't give a lot of these challenges over the years, because it's very tricky to give general recommendations. But those are the place and people can go online and put Ido Portals squat challenge, idoportal hanging challenge, idoportal spinal waves, and see videos and get instructions

and how to progress it and work with it. And it's a great thing to do. You know, you mentioned something right there in terms of the injury port, right? And there are coaches out there who when they're marketing the things that they put forward, there is a, there is what you just mentioned right there is the absolute opposite of what anyone should be seeking. Like if you're getting injured, you're doing it wrong. Injury is something to be avoided. And no one does want to get injured.

But I know of someone, I know of multiple coaches who will hear what you just said right there and be like, I can't believe he just said. you like injury is okay what are your thoughts there just because I I see so many people that it's like they want to put people in bubble wrap whereas I don't know if if you're going to progress no you don't want to get injured but I feel as if injury teaches you things sometimes yeah and the safe method is a useless method this is really the core of things that the bulletproof method, the safe method has nothing to offer because anything that is supposed to evolve you

and develop you requires coming out of the homeostatic point, out of homeostasis, out of this current state of affairs that have been stabilized within the system. Of course, I'm not pushing people into injuries. I'm trying to avoid them the best that I can. But even maybe today, I made you tweak things and injure things. And if I don't make you pass through all little tweaks and injuries i cannot really protect you for life so instead of getting the big injuries i opened the door and into the door comes small injuries after a while you would resolve them and you won't get injured again in that way that's in my eyes more honest description of the process that we all went through and go through in the first few years of a new practice you build a protective mechanism

system of protection. For example, BJJ, first years, oh my God, fingers in the wrong places and, you know, knees coming in. But then after that, you built a certain protection, right? And this has to happen in a variety of movement scenarios. You go to play soccer, the stop and start and the tackles. And you got to, you got to. So part of the movement practice for me is to make the person gradually go through this process. And that's actually bulletproofing the person. It's not going to happen by doing this exercise that exercise alone you have to face the chaos the entropy the possibility of error or this word that i use a lot hazard is not to be avoided it's to be embraced in the right way yeah louis Simmons my mentor he used to say uh the safest exercise probably aren't great for strength

100% and not only for strength he was right in a variety of areas he was revolutionary never met Louis but I followed a lot of his writing and yeah it's true not only for strength you know this safety thing that here in the US you know before taking a crap you need to sign a waiver and it's it went it went a bit out of control there was a time where I read an article that the Australians are making the playgrounds unsafe again you know why because it wasn't safe you know how the kids are petted with all these helmets and you know all this protector we were flying with tricycles off of ramps and and what did we know i can get hurt i can break my hand and maybe we even broke our hand or we had the fight in school and got a bloody nose but we were not stabbing or

shooting you know with with going crazy stuff that eventually later came on so the same way movement wise you got to pass through these tweaks how how many times did I sprain my ankles to the place where nowadays I can't sprain my ankle in no situation because of that protective mechanism yeah do you do you think that you look at injuries a little differently I've heard you speak upon them a little bit I've always felt like pain can be a good mentor but an injury can sometimes or even like you know obviously if like someone tears something so that's something a little bit different I'm just talking about like kind of minor injuries it kind of give you a playbook of like hey something's going wrong here like you're not getting enough

nutrients or nutrition of particular movement patterns and you might be getting too much of some other type of movement pattern yeah definitely it's it's a teacher a teacher came in i got injured okay let me recalibrate let me now enter a new phase of learning and hopefully i can come out on the other better there is no better or worse unless you have a specific point of view one injury can lead you to be a world champion another injury can take away from you the opportunity to be a world champion but nobody mentions the first one this is a new reality in the old reality they come to school they put all the kids in the basketball court and they go around and they They test their joints and they tell you, you go to soccer, you go to gymnastics, you to chess.

Nowadays, the kid that they didn't allow him to go to gymnastics because he has polio disease becomes a world champion break dancer and makes more money than an Olympic gold medalist and takes his weakness, the light legs, and makes it his strength. He can plunge like no one can, right? I have students without legs, multiple students with no legs. So this is a change in the perspective. A lot of your limitations are not there because of what you did. They allowed you to be a world champion power lifter, a successful power lifter.

So that rigidity, first you need to embrace it. You demanded from your body that. Now you can change. You can demand other things. but it's not evil or good alone. Too simplistic, too black and white. I'm curious different bodies. You know, as we were in the gym,

like you looked at the way my structure was set up, the way Mark's structure was set up, and you noticed different things about it. And sometimes when a lot of people are trying to get in better shape, you know, they don't know how their structure is different from somebody else. So they might just go on a program or go on something and expect to get to that end goal,

not realizing what's missing for them. So this question might actually be too large now that I'm asking it, but how can people start learning to understand themselves better, like what their body is able to do at this point in time so that they can make the progress they're looking for? It's a very good question, and I can answer it honestly, but you might not like the answer in that sense. and maybe I will do this many times.

The answer is very simple. Education. Isn't it in front of our eyes? You cannot know. You got to start to develop an investigation. What I do nowadays is mostly I meet people and they ask me for X, Y, Z. And then with them, I show them how they don't even want what they ask.

Because when they realize what they need to do, this requires intense adjustment. education, self-practice, observation, learning a lot. There is no other way. The other way is this. I'm going to tell you what you need to do. I'm going to give you the program. And it's not going to be what you need.

So there is these two choices. Look, there are two types of guests on podcasts. From my point of view, I don't listen to many podcasts, but I realized it a long time ago. First, because sometimes in the past, I would do podcasts and people would invite me all over the place, all the big podcasts. And then at a certain point, I started to speak on big podcasts and they don't invite me again. And I realized what it is.

Two types. The guest that would give you that oversimplistic answer and it would be satisfying, inspiring. Actually, the person listens to it is inspired for a moment, motivated. Two, three years down the road, there is no change. The second are the guests that will tell you the complexity of the situation, the Kruger-Dunning curve, right? And it will not be satisfying, but it would be real. And it will open a door towards an investigation. That's the only thing that I can do with many of the questions that are general, like you realized.

It's so open. This requires intense education, self-practice and research, which is what I do with people, which is what I do with myself. There is no easy, simple things. I can help you, like I looked at you move and we played a little bit and I noticed some tendencies and I can give you some initial tools. But even those tools will not be enough to truly transform and to change. There is a process that needs to occur over a period of time. And actually, I think one thing that's very, that one can learn from yourself is like,

you mentioned you work with people and yourself, is you've developed a breadth of skills through the years. I think something about you is that you're extremely curious and you dive into things and you've developed high-level skills and you've developed other things, right? And understanding that, it just seems that one of the answers to that question could be potentially to never stop trying to improve at certain movement skills, even when you've gotten to a point finding something else that you're potentially weak at. Definitely.

And curiosity is one of the most important things and missing components. And it relates to the questions and it relates to being in practice. And it's kind of funny because we're losing curiosity if you look around. Like when I was younger and I was searching for information, at one point I traveled 36 hours in a bus in Brazil to the north to sleep at some master's house and watch a video VHS tape of some movements and in the night I brought another video from a neighbor

and copied behind his back so he doesn't know because he wouldn't like it and every piece of information Louis Simmons texts the Soviet text Medvedev, Verkoshensky, Zatsyorsky, I remember hunting for the translations and first I got them in Russian and then I had Russian friend translate, but it was horrible, he couldn't translate the terms. All these things, or Charles Poliquin learning to speak German because in order to get to the information, which was a great inspiration for me, all this stuff, we valued and we had this curiosity. Nowadays we open, it's all tutorials. Seemingly we have all the answers and nothing works. In that sense, what do I mean nothing works? Of course, a lot works. But if I judge it

10 years down the line, not a lot works. That's the interesting thing. If I really go to the long haul, you work with an athlete, for example, all these training methods, rotational training methods, these training methods, look, the research on it is not pretty. Everybody claims for these improvements but who produces the actual results that was something that charles taught me back in the day because he was very much like black and white in that way so he would say like improve your latissimus dorsi strength it will do much more than any rotational training now it wasn't right about everything there is something to be gained there but there is a lot of claims too many claims and not enough wet tests.

My observation was that. So I went to the wet test. And I said, I might not have the answers, but I would at least be the guy who wet tests everything. So if I put all these wet tests around me, it would keep me honest, and that's what I did. These are these scenarios, like what we played. The scenario was different than new novel to you.

So it actually examined what you have in terms of movement before you can specialize on it. This is a much better diagnostic for that general skill and capacity than anything else. Instead of me watching you doing the favorite movements that you do and already seeing the fake it until you make it, the compensation that, you know, at times can confuse us. That's why many times people look at me and they say, wow, you're a great mover, you know, or they present me. podcast world biggest experts on movement and what do you know about it if i was or if i'm not do you understand no that last part no so i go on some podcast big experts the world biggest expert in movement how do you know in order to know that you have to be an expert yourself so it's just lifting You bring me in because somebody else talked well about me.

And, you know, we all kind of live to each other. And we don't need that. And like how we communicated today. And you guys are just eye level, down to earth, willing to try. I'm the same. I come in. I'm coming from the met. I don't need to protect anything.

I don't. That is much more humane. That is much more going to make progress for the people out there if they communicate with. And yeah, they will need to listen to a three-hour recording. or I don't know what and it will require difficulty and challenge and then they will need to go and research and no tricks, no protocols, no, you know, yeah, you can start with the protocols. We mentioned them, but it's not going to be enough. I'm not going to make any promises. So we don't really know. Those systems often come and go and they didn't produce the results along the way. And I'll say it

for myself. Most of what I thought over the years was wrong. And it worked. When you say it was wrong then, what do you mean? Because what do you mean? In relation to what I know nowadays, I realized, oh, there were better ways to do it. But even when it was wrong, it sometimes worked. Why? Because there is other components, no less important.

My intention, the way of doing it, the why of doing it, we totally ignore this. all models are wrong but some are useful is a very powerful saying i use from george box all models are wrong why because essentially a model will never represent reality the map and the territory are not the same but some are useful in certain places in our lives now when we put it out there we can continue to remain functional and productive we can go into the gist, we can talk about things, and we can offer good practical tools, actionable bits. But first we have to start from here.

I'm not going to resolve some major illness with this trick or that trick. If you have major depression, you're not going to resolve it with all these biohacking schnecks. You've never met someone with a serious depression if you think so. so yeah maybe you can get some things from methylene blue you maybe it's great but it's not going to be a major solution and the same when you want to transform movement and posture and way of being and self it's not going to be just either giving you a squat challenge or hanging challenge it's an invitation it's an open door go deeper that's been some of the things i've seen you know

looking at social media and seeing that, you know, people talk about mobility and then somebody will proceed to do something that requires a certain level of mobility that probably a lot of the people listening or a lot of the people watching don't even have. You know, let's say, hey, you know, even, even, hey, hang out in this 10-minute squat and you might be squatting down, you know, in this super deep squat with your heels flat. Somebody else might look at that and think, oh, I can't, you know, I'm not there yet. And I've seen a lot of that in the mobility arena.

And it would be equivalent of me saying, oh, you want to bench 500 pounds. Here's how you do it. You just do 455 for a couple sets of, you know, five sets of three. And you progressively do that over the course of a few weeks, and that's a 500 pound bench very easily. See how easy that is? You just got to bench 455 for sets of three, and you're there.

Exactly. And it's, you know, it's a heavy load, right? It's take a long time to even get there. So I do understand the point of, you know, people are trying to share information they're excited i'm with you i also understand right and but i think that some people uh have these ligaments these tendencies joints that they're i don't want to just say that they're born with because they probably worked for it in combination with being born with it um and then they kind of produce this program or push this thing out and then we have a tendency to

look at that and go oh my god like that guy moves great i want to do that yeah you you said it you said it with sensitivity with humility and you I'm with you 100% and I'm not against sharing that's why I'm here but I always make it a point these days to mention this other side and I and I move people away from that thing even saying great mobility great movement great strength like what strength what strength I can show you angles hundreds thousands angles exercise which you cannot curl the pink dumbbells. Do you agree with me? Yeah.

So what is strength? Strength as this general remark, that's, and who is close to that strength? The closest you can get is to wet test as wide as you can, which is what I'm trying to do. So that totally transformed my concept of being a strong person. Even mentally, mental strength is under the same umbrella. We tend to think, oh, this guy is very strong.

The toughness of a special operator is not the toughness of a ballerina. I've studied ballet for one year very intensely, and I tell you, you've got to be tough in other ways. The toughness of a sailor dealing with the elements, the cold, the wind is not the same as the toughness of a long-distance runner. There is no one thing. Mobility, for example, yogis, they tend to think of themselves as very mobile. They're some of the most rigid in some ways.

You would be amazed. Micro movements, totally missing, totally gone, inside, in between the vertebraes, in the rib cage. If you talk to therapists, massage therapists and body workers, they will tell you yogis are some of the most rigid when you actually place your hands on them or if you play push hands with them you will feel that rigidity but then a moment after they'll do like a beautiful asana and a posture so we tend to think in these black and white ways he's strong he's weak you know one strength here makes you weak there so there is only an investigation

towards where you want to go and how you want to test yourself what is it that you're about living long? What are we talking about? V-O-2 max, muscle mass? Go to those blue zones. What do you see? V-O-2 max? Where?

In which blue zone? They don't even jog. Which muscle mass? No, you've twisted this into an American concept of longevity, into a Western. And when I say American, I'm also American. In that sense, we're all American in the West these days.

I'm a product of a similar culture. So I think, don't get me wrong, V-O-2-Mex is important and we can use it, but it's not going to resolve that thing. You meet some folk dancing teacher from Slovakia in his 90s, moving with perfection, everything moves well. He cannot do the splits because folk dancing doesn't include those ranges of motion. He cannot lift heavy weights. He never sprinted or ran.

and he lives long and very fluidly. It's not that guy in Miami with the prune face and the bodybuilding and the TRT. It's not the same. The concept of longevity have changed. I'm not against muscle mess. It's important if you're going to get wasting disease. But it's definitely not important to that place

where you see somebody buffed for longevity. It has been taken further and further and further and further. And we start to, again, five, ten years down the line, we go back. Why don't we already stabilize ourselves? Right now we're only seeing people in their 40s and 50s being kind of jacked. And that's not that old. Yeah.

Right. And again, like I think we might discover better ways through this investigation, but somebody got to call it as it is and somebody got to say, wait, wait, wait, have a look. You don't need to be 220 pounds if you're looking for longevity. is. That might be fun to you. That might be an ego thing for you, but it's not necessarily connected to longevity. And that's just a question of longevity. I'm not the longevity guy. Performance, same thing. You suggest, for example, to someone that if they improve their squatting numbers from here to there, they will be better performers. We know that's not the case. We know that the

person in the gym is rarely the best person on the playing field. Michael Jordan, look at you seeing bolt lifting. Oh, horrific. Horrific. He is there in spite of his training methods, not because of the reverse curling, you know, power clean. Horrible. Okay. So this brings me on to something else, you know, outside of the sport of bodybuilding and the sport of powerlifting, because if you're going to be in those sports, you're going to focus on everything for those sports, okay? But when we're talking about sprinters, martial artists, et cetera, there's on the side of strength and conditioning, there seems there is a focus on a lot of things in the weight room because some things in the weight room can be helpful. But I've also noticed from... Very helpful. Very helpful.

Yes. But I've also noticed with with a lot of these types of coaches that there seems to be it's what we're doing in the gym and then sort of specific on what we're doing on the court or on the court or on the mats as a fighter. You worked with Connor McGregor for a period of time and people saw you doing so many variable things with him that kind of turned that world on its head, right? My curiosity is, what are the capacities do you, would you believe athletes should be thinking about building? Because, and this is the last part, I tend to just ask these questions that.

have too much to them. But on the strength conditioning side, you know, you'll hear coaches. I've heard coaches say that there's a correlation between people who can dance and good athletes. But then when these coaches are looking to apply things, there is nothing on the side of rhythm or variable movement or fluid movement or anything that has dance elements. Usually they actually look down on those things and they look at people who can dance as just, it's a genetic thing. They just have that skill, right? So how would you marry, you already do marry these ideas, but how would you suggest that somebody think about bringing these ideas in, these different capacities? There has to be an investigation into the weaklings. What is holding us back from the

performance that we're aspiring to get? And if the answer is related to dance, then you will get better at dancing but let's not forget who were these great dancers and also great athletes were they dancing and became better athletes or were they the people who were already dancing because they could sugar ray robinson worked as a tap dancer and as a fighter and you know what he did but he couldn't get a fight he would dance for money he could do that that maybe not necessarily what made him the fighter that he was. I'm not suggesting not. There is benefit and I'm using a lot of these stuff, but it has to be examined. So when I work with a fighter or an athletes or an NBA player, I examine what is needed. Today we talked a little bit about

archetypes, for example, the archetype that is maintaining shape or changing shape. So that starts an investigation. I look at Mark, I see he's better at maintaining shape. So, okay, I look at his movement and I see a difficulty of changing the shape often quickly in a coordinated fashion. So I will attack that. By improving that, I will look at the outcome. Many times I will be wrong. It wouldn't work and I would examine again and examine again until I find a weak link. That would be the investigation.

It can be related to rhythm. It can be related to coordination. It can be related to a subject. Many subjects I use, they're not even known. connectivity, not strength, but how the body is organized, organizational capacity of the body. We tend to throw these big terms, but when you do what I did, just dive into it, devote your life to it, you discover there is so much more to it. So today, I made you tackle various organizational challenges.

Right hand, left hand, squat, launch, place this, don't make a sound. hey don't these are ways to examine something and to open and now we can maybe make tools out of it those are the required tools that's what i try to do with people many times they don't understand it many times they realize they don't even want to improve what do i mean i they want to improve but they're not willing to actually go through the real thing that they need to go through in order to improve and that's also okay I make sure I get paid so even

because it's very frustrating to me to come in and to tell someone your concentration and focus are on such a level that I can't help really help you with what you want but there is no desire to improve that that effort of limbic friction

that suffering of trying to focus it can be something as simple as that. Or I would point at a weakness that is exposing someone and he's not willing to deal with it, you know, something like that. Power Project Family, how's it going? Now, over the years, I've learned a lot from guests that have come on to this podcast, and I've taken the time to learn many different movement practices. So, for example, if you wanted to learn rope flow, which is a practice I think is just beneficial for everyone, I have a free Ropeflow Foundation's course at school.com slash

the stronger human. Now, the stronger human community actually has over 11,000 members, so it's a great community there, but you'll also be able to learn rope flow for free, along with many other things I teach in there like kettlebell flow, kettlebell juggling, all that good stuff. So head over there. Along with that, if you're looking for where to get your equipment as far as ropes, maces and clubs, sandbags, all that good stuff, you can head over to the stronger human. store. And on that site is where I have all of the different functional fitness equipment that I use to become a stronger human. So check those out. Let's get back to the episode.

What do you think it is about movement that leads to, like, a lot of deterioration? You know, like, I'm not sure what happens first. I'm not sure if the movement disappears first or movement quality disappears first. But the quality of someone's sight, the quality of someone's hearing, the dexterity of someone's hand, the skin, all the things that we associate with youth, it almost seems like, and maybe, maybe, you believe this. I'm not sure if you do or not. But it almost seems like the body ends up with like a giant kink. A hose gets kinked. And then you can't really get the blood flow to all the different areas that you need to. And maybe some of these things are leading to Alzheimer's disease, erectile dysfunction, and all the different things we're hearing about all the time. What are

some of your thoughts on that? Do you kind of think that that might be some of the ways it works? We can unpack it two major directions. Underuse, overuse. The underuse is understood. Use it or lose it. Sometimes we don't understand that everything is trainable. For example, people lost their sense of smell and taste in COVID. One of my students did.

I say, yeah, we train it back. Can you come up with a way to train it? it back i came up with a way so he can train it back every morning wake up this is 10 minutes you do these things you take these condiments and very strong condiments in the beginning can you sense it good and slowly i start to decrease and start this process got them back perfect back so everything is trainable everything every tissue ideas are trainable emotional makeup the self is trainable There is no stable self. There is a current thing that is semi-functional and it has this instability and can change its shape.

Your organs, I just talk to you about it, like your guts can travel lower in the body. You can be better mobilizers of the inner guts. So by being able to bounce your guts into the pelvic floor in a way, you can achieve a lot of athletic things. these are concepts that are going beyond our current understanding of adaptation because it comes from bodybuilding it comes from it comes from that most of our understanding of fitness is related to that and i'm really turned off by fitness in the sense that i much more prefer what you guys represents these days the fitness people should look up to the athletes not the athletes look up to the fitness people, train like the fitness people.

That's horrific. So we get nowadays boxers training like fitness people. And then they're getting knocked out by a YouTuber. That's what happens. UFC fighters with incredible training methods, instead of looking up to dancers, acrobats, climbers, traditional martial artists with many beautiful pieces, they look up to what is available.

So, nowadays we're moving to a, we can move to a different direction. You can be interested in general health or fitness and you can look up and you can spin ropes and you can do stuff which is actually looking up to those movers. This is a much better direction. So our focus, adaptation, Kaizen principle, right? Overload, supercompensation, we need to widen it. It can happen neurologically. It can happen on the level of connective tissue.

It can happen on the level of ideas, like I said. It can happen on any level, and we can apply it. We can develop rhythm. We can develop neural networks, different organizations in the body. We can develop pressurization in the body. We can develop certain movements of the organs or the lymph system. It's just a question of being aware enough and finding the key. Then, if you understand that, you will find a lot of solutions which are still invisible for us,

for specific injuries and other things, like how to feed your intravertebral discs. Since they don't have a great blood supply, they're supposed to be fed in another way. So, for example, those spinal waves will start to create little micro movement that will actually feed them, pump them into life. This is an understanding that I used to develop those tools or to bring them about. Most of the stuff I didn't create. I just went around. I'm an information broker. I take a piece from climbers and I bring it to the dancers.

But then I take from the dancers, I bring back to the climbers and this allowed me to open a lot. of windows and to widen and to tell people think of yourself a little bit bigger you're not just okay you're an NBA player great but you're also a mover you're also a human being all these layers have to be addressed you know I with what you're saying there that's that concept of taking from different things has been one of the reasons why at this point like I'm not in pain with jujitsu because I used to I used to not think I'd be able to do it for a long time And now I can actually see myself doing it for decades. So that piece I love.

But, you know, what would you say to the criticism of being somebody who's just seeking novelty? Because someone, there is coaches who hear, we'll hear what you said right there and be like, well, if you're just going and doing every little thing, how are you supposed to get very good at one thing anyway? It's just novelty seeking for novelty's sake. That's the criticism a lot of coaches have to some of these ideas. What are your thoughts on that? Because I'm not engaging in novelty for novelty's sake. We just talked about the problem solving.

I'm identifying, investigating, and then I integrate. But for them from the outside, something else. Most people, most of my critics out there, I never met them. And those I met, I met for two days or for five days. They know nothing about what I do really deeply inside. People see, I don't know, people have a concept of how I trained Connor McGrath. You have no idea what is going on there. I've never outlined it.

I've never described it. He never did. You don't know what it takes on the level of mental, emotional in the week coming up to a $150 million paycheck. That alone, the stress alone, you might need just addressing the stress, just being playful. Just being playful, just opening something might be worth many millions out of that 150. So people look at it from outside and say, ah, this, this, this, this. It's not novelty for novelty sake. It is oriented and geared towards a specific outcome, but it is open enough to really ask the

question, what is really needed with no prejudice, with no preconceived ideas of who you are. oh i'm not going to dance i'm a fighter you do what you need to do if you really want to improve or and i don't just bring that for the sake of bringing it but for with another athlete i would do something strength training that's part of my background and i keep all those tools there you know i used to do external rotator exercises in mid 90s back home people would ask me What are you, arm wrestler? Reverse arm wrestling? What are you doing?

Peterson step up, 90s. And I still use those tools. They have a room and place. But I also found other things, which were no less important down the road. For example, I used to do Cuban rotations with close to my body weight, strict Cuban rotations. Yeah, like a Cuban press kind of thing, right? Yeah.

But just the rotation, you know, pure. Yeah, yeah. No body English. involved with your body weight almost with my body weight i know only one more person a student of mine who who has done it and i've tested these things and developed them tremendously but nowadays for example i don't do external rotator strength i have a full slap there on the left shoulder but i don't i never meet it so i found other tools which made the external rotator strength obsolete so in a way like what i said all the tools were wrong, but they worked because external rotator strength, I understand it

today in a deeper way. There is ways around it. If your rib cage is going to change its shape, you don't need that external rotator strength. But it still worked back then because I couldn't change the shape of the rib cage. So this is related to this openness to understand what is needed. By the way, the understanding is very simple, if we want to give an example of that. The scapula, what is it? A bone. Yeah. Does the scapula change its shape? Yes. Well, the bones don't change their shape, but you can change its position. But not its shape, right? Like, not majorly. It changes a bit throughout childhood, but then, you know, you got this and it's slightly curved what is underneath it the shoulder the ribcage

oh right the scapula is gliding over the rib cage if it has a specific shape and it cannot change its shape how important is the groove underneath it to allow that motion of the scapula to occur so the all the strength in the world around the muscles around the scapula is not going to change this lack of you know matching or the matching of it. So this made me realize that the position of my rib cage, the stiffness of it and its shape made the external rotator strength I needed to do a Cuban rotation with my full body weight in order to spin on one arm and not injure my shoulder.

And I knew it because whenever I deteriorate my external rotator strength, I would start to get injured. Nowadays, I can do still the same things with no external rotator strength because I address the cause of changing what can change. change the rib cage, which is a lot more malleable, diverse, and affected by breathing and other things. We worked today a little bit on that. I forced you to change a bit, a bit of the rib cage. And you felt very limited because the rib cage was for you more than Nasima, more limited. So that position, you have to soften all this. You have to soften all the structure

because the scapele is stuck. I make it stuck, right? Yeah, I noticed that people that have severe like shoulder injuries and stuff like that, when they go to raise their shoulder that hurts, you know, they have to kind of like tilt their whole body, you know, kind of in coordination. To avoid that motion.

To avoid that pain, yeah. And on the other side, they can express it more. Like, they might have the same injury on the other side, but they're able to move the rib cage around probably the way that you're talking about. Exactly right. And again, we might be now confusing because we open the real investigation and we show the full breadth of it.

But this is really where the good stuff is. This is the truth. Like this is where it can go and we can find real solutions for people who can't find them any other way. What are you doing? Like in a lot of these videos, you know, where you're just like, is this stuff completely random does some of this stuff just come to you nothing is random i go back to that nothing is random yes there is playfulness yes there is manipulation of people's attention i used to do this a lot more

are you just high what's going on i'm high totally totally and a lot of this is manipulative like for example this stuff i don't really do that in the day to day but it draws attention and then i take the attention and I place it where it matters, where I can really help people and what I believe is really important. So I used to do that a lot, take my shirt off, do impressive things to get attention. Once I got the attention, I needed less of that. I started to give more honest things. Some of it relates to it.

It's important to say. Other is contains a certain movement content, a certain liquid. I want to deliver to you into your system. certain lessons but how do I carry this content I have to use a container I can't bring you water from the river with my hands I'm going to end up with nothing so I take a cup and I fill it with water and I bring it to you what do we do these days you chew on the cup instead of swallowing the liquid and discarding the cup all of these are simply scenarios containers that contain something in relation to

to movement in relation to the body, to the self, many things. But people don't understand that. They just focus on the container, not on the content, which is invisible. That's why we have to use containers. There is no way for me to teach movement without using some vehicle of transmission. Scenarios like what we did today. I'm dropping the stick. I don't care about the stick.

Tomorrow we do something totally different, but I care about the content. For example, today, we talked about principles of contralateral, ipsylateral, and their switches. That's what I really want to deliver. It's not going to happen if I just talk about it and show you on a piece of paper. I need you to go through those changes. That's the practice. By the way, that is also a criticism that I have towards not fitness things, but towards other areas, that nowadays became all talk.

and we are in a place where we feel as if we're picking behind God's shoulder into his notebook with AI with everything we're almost there and yet we're in the shits with all these wars with stupid you know things and as human beings we haven't really progressed a lot we've made tremendous progress with technology but as humans look at the presocratic authors read permenides Heraclitus I was like that back then but they were impressive humans we've moved away from it

you know so what do I believe is the problem there is no practicum no practice we need that's why I went into the body because I was on a path to a different place to work with the mind

with mathematics with music I could work. But my realization, I lie to myself up here. But the body never lies to me. And the scenarios inform me. So I believe that the practice bits, these containers, are very important for all kinds of transformations, as a culture, as a humanity, as human beings,

not just for movement-wise. We need those scenarios. We need those tools, exercises, to carry the real change, the principles. You know, I, you were talking about, you mentioned within that a little bit about breathing and the breath and in fitness there's a lot of, you know, there's different sects of ideas and then there are breathing coaches, right? People that really focus in on the breath.

And I know you could probably. talk two hours, three hours, four hours on different ideas of breath and movement. But on a base level, I'm curious how you've seen kind of the breath lead to limited movement sometimes with people, because you know, you'll see sometimes when people are doing something, a new person comes to jiu-jitsu. You have to remind them to breathe while moving a lot of times when they're pushing, they're holding their breath. So what you've noticed with the breath and movement then also So maybe some things you've noticed when it comes to breathing through the nose and breathing through the mouth. I'm curious things for people to think about there.

Probably the worst thing that you can do is mess with your breathing. Learning breath work. I don't like it. We have to create again a scenario in which you transform the way that you bring. breathe in order to address an issue this cerebral breathing do this do that these instructions they don't hold water on the playing field Michael Jordan was not like inhale you're going to it's ridiculous we made an industry from it that's the truth that's what's there I much prefer a different approach where again I create a scenario like for example I put my knee on your

stomach in a top position and you allow it we create this scenario and now you have to manage yourself under this pressure and find a way to breathe when the knee is in your stomach or another scenario which I use often I ask people to sing a song together with me very simple song like sounds while we're doing a very effortful practice and I can hear when they hold their breath and they have to keep singing so this is an example more of my approach of things and then breath transforms but when i engage too too much top to bottom i dislike the results and they become limited you can do some beautiful manipulations but when the shit hits the fan it's not going to be there because you're busy with something else and you haven't really transformed

how your body is breathing how movement should be breathing you you shouldn't be breathing the movement should be breathing you in many scenarios. Another thing that I do is pay attention to the breath, not lead it, but pay attention to it so it will transform by this paying attention. You don't need to do much. These are other, like more evolved ideas about breath. Breathing through the nose is an example. People will naturally breathe through the mouth.

So one would say, but that's what's natural to me. Natural is not a good word. It's not the word I use. What is natural today, tomorrow will be unnatural and vice versa. You are a product of many bad habits. You're a product of many, many things. So it's not necessarily the, you know, what you feel is a lie to quote John Bruce back in the day. Yeah.

Many times we're, hey, you got to listen to your body. No, no, no. You don't know how to listen to your body. You don't even know what you're hearing there. We think we're in control. intuitive, we know what we need. It's like, look, examine it. Examine it. We don't even have the basic stability that we believe we possess.

So how can we listen to the body? I make an appointment with you. Tomorrow we train here at 4 a.m. Tomorrow at 3.30 a.m. You send me a text message. I'm not feeling well. I'm not coming. I don't know which Nasima is going to wake up tomorrow at 3.30. Nassima A, Nassima B, this is the reality that we live.

so in order to go and address this issue this instability that I felt inside of myself this inability to listen to hear I don't know what I'm listening for example I feel agitated but when I examine it I actually discover it's some kind of a stomach ache plus thoughts that I put around it and the moment that I realize it I'm not agitated anymore

so this paying attention is one of the most important practices. This self-observation transforms things better than the instruction, how to do, the technical instruction. Follow me. One, two, three, four, Zumba classes. It's not self-education,

and there is only one education, self-education. It comes from industrial revolution education. We were made into better workers, slaves. this is what it is you follow me why all the military is in the world march in that way you indoctrinate people's movement then you indoctrinate their mind

so they can run into the fire when you need to these are later it becomes karate these strict forms it invaded us look at all those lines in the room these straight lines they invaded our movement do you think somebody in India

a thousand years ago stood like this in a warrior pose this doesn't even look traditional and of course when you go to the sutras of Patanjali there is no description of asana yoga who was designed

the white yoga for the westerners who came in and the Indian the poor Indian wanted to offer something that it was more affected by Swedish gymnastics than what we think, traditional practices. The real yoga doesn't look like that, the ancient things.

And you look, you look in China, you look in India, you look in the Orient. You never see these straight lines, these modes of operation. They come from our science, they come from our architecture, and they invaded our movements. And this is a good thing that happens in the movement field, that we start to use tools, which are a lot less linear and a lot more beneficial. Again, traditionally, you would never bench press. You would never follow this strict path. And if you need to press someone off of you, as you know,

it's not correlating with a bench press. You know, look at how Marcelo Garcia looks. His whole body is bent in this way, his toes, his grip. And when he grips you, forget about getting. out and it's not he's not using grip strength he's not using a gripper or something linear in that way it's an intelligence you i used to have the captains of crash in my car back in the day and i used to have like number one one and a half and two and they were just in the car and i would pump it from time to time when i was driving this old Renault 19 i used to have no power steering

yeah you got a stretch before every corner you know prepare so So one day I took it to the garage to fix it. And one of the kids working in the garage, these 14-year-old kids, poor kids, saw it. And he said, ah, can I try? So sure. But start with this one. I smashed the trainer like nothing. Then he went to the first and one and a half also closed.

And then he called all the other kids. And they all closed it like nothing. And I was like, oh, fuck. You know, what's going on here? These kids are just every day. They're never training linearly, no Kaizen, no grip. They just open bolts, close bolts. In all these different ways, they use the pliers.

And it is a movement intelligence of their hands. It's not even power or strength in the way that we think. And when they shake your hand, you feel it. Very, very powerful. Or, you know, I recently saw some guy in Africa lifting an engine out of a car. Have you seen this video? I've seen some of the stuff before. He lifts an engine, rounded back deadlift, deep, deep, deep,

to the car and just lifts like it. Yeah because he's standing on like the outer part and he's yeah reaching super low. And the grip is horrible and the weight of it and you see that's power. Wiery guy, tiny guy, my size. And that is for me a lot more movement oriented. But by the way, some of the strongest grapplers I've ever rolled with, I actually these strongest grapers I've rolled with have been laborers. So. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. If you ever worked with cars, you know, what an engine weighs it's a wow a few hundred pounds for sure yeah and I've seen others I've seen one with where he's without a shirt even more impressive but even that is crazy what do you think strength is do you think it's a like neural like service central nervous system derived it's many

things of course it's also contractile it's also structural it's also sarcoplasmic it's also myofabreel it's a lot of things it's density it's connective tissue and we focused a lot on certain aspects but but strength unless you test it widely you will never know if you're strong or not and in relation to what you know have you noticed a lot of people have an inefficiency i don't know how many like bodybuilder or lifting people you worked with but have you noticed some of those individuals maybe having like an inefficiency in terms of like keeping muscle tension on too often oh definitely yeah one of the first things is to try to pull your perineum up the anus contract and pull it up and hold it most people when you pull it up through like the pee muscle kind of thing

as if you're trying to prevent the poop from coming out clenching your bowhole yeah and when you do it all right slench let's go most people they feel a vibration actually it should be a lock what which is called Banda, the Mula Banda, a lock. This is also very highly correlated with willpower. In times when I was very sick, like I got dengue fever once, malaria, I was traveling around, so I got a lot of stuff, I was a sickly kid. When I was always sick, I paid attention and I noticed that I have a weakness there. And it kind of vibrates and I cannot hold it strictly.

And in the times of my life where I was most disciplined, seemingly, I felt this correlation. And this is not just this magic muscle that you're going to work on again, like flip it around. I'm going to do dance, so I'm going to be Sugar Ray. No, Sugar Ray could do dance, maybe. I don't know. So, but it's something that we can address. And this, what you're mentioning, for example, the strongmen people are a lot stronger than the power lifters in that wide sense. we know that we know that they will go to powerlifting and they will do pretty well but the power lifter goes

to strong and forget about it here is another example the yogi goes to a contemporary dance class he will do horribly the dancer goes to yoga just does the whole thing better than the teacher there are certain aspects like this which are important to understand because they pass through more movement. Powerlifting is narrowed, very narrowed down. So it developed these capacities tremendously. Strongmen went wider, more movement based. Playing basketball is more than playing soccer from the perspective of general movement. Good basketball players are good movers in many ways, but in football, in soccer, try to find a good mover that's rare. They're rare.

You found that soccer people are maybe stiff? Steve, not intelligent in their movement choices, uncoordinated in many ways, and there are exceptions. And when you have exceptions, you got a Messi. You got Tetek. You got a Diego Armando Maradona, who you see him in a video knocking a guy out in the middle of the football game with a flying knee.

It looks out of the UFC, hard knockout. The guy was training like a boxer. You look at his warm-ups, great mover, or Rixon Gracie. Look at how he was training himself. Look at how he did. It was a lot more movement than this just speciality. And I'm not suggesting it's the only solution because we have world champions which are not good movers.

By the way, Michael Jordan, you know how he did in baseball. He's no Bo Jackson. Bow knows. There is different levels. And you can become a world champion by being a specialist. And you can become a world champion by being a generalist and move on to another field. You know, you know, what did, you know, Bo did?

Deccatlon, right? Like a track and field, you know, everything. You know, and then, you know, breaking that bat over his head, you know that video? Yeah. Just like, he supposedly looks fake, right? Like, yeah, yeah, he breaks the bat right over his head. It used to break the bat over his knee all the time.

But he supposedly never even saw a pole vault. And in high school, he just was like, all right, I'll watch a couple people do it. And then he did it like on the state level. Yeah. He's just like, he just was able to figure out all kinds of stuff. Who knows exactly why? But it sounds like he grew up with an environment where he was like just playing a lot. For sure.

I can see it. I can see it. And how he did it. For me, it's more even than what. Like, okay, break a baseball bet. Okay. But how he broke it. Look at how it breaks.

He's just like, look at it. Look at it. It's, look, look, pluck. Like, and the speed, the descent speed of the hands, right? Like, pluck. He was just all muscle. Yeah, and the position, it's like a pull-up. It's essentially a pull-up, right?

That's the angle that is pulling down. Very, very powerful, running over walls, you know, that famous video, you know, just like running up the wall, crazy stuff. Or he's throwing mechanics and again, it's an example. of unique once in a generation of a great mover. Michael Jordan, which was an amazing basketball player, could not translate it into baseball. Maybe it was because of the demands of basketball, which are too far away, but maybe it was because he's not that great of a mover as much as he was an amazing, maybe the best basketball player of all time. We don't know, we tend to confuse. That's why

people say, Ido, you're a great mover. Again, what do you know about it? If you haven't researchers, you wouldn't know. Don't confuse my ability to do some fancy movements. And then, you know, like I had a friend once. We did one-arm handstands. He's a Cirque the Solet performer. We did one arm handstands in the park. And then one of the kids kicked a ball and it rolled to us. And then I saw his face looking at me and he needs to kick it back. You know, you see that moment of like, oh shit, I'm going to fuck this up. It kicks in the most ridiculous fashion. you know and the kids were like what this guy just stood in one arm has nothing to do with good movement you know one thing that i i'm curious about is the idea of having some type of movement

practice or something that can move you into a place where you're in a flow type state right You know, when you're doing martial arts for a while, like for me, I can, I've been doing Jiu-Jitsu for a while that, like, I can get there with that practice, and it feels amazing. And I have other things that allow me to get there, but a lot of people, when it comes to fitness, they don't have anything that lets them get there. Maybe they did when they were a kid, but it's going to not be hard getting there when you're doing repetitions of bench press or repetitions of movement in a gym. It's going to be very hard to do that.

do you think that there is an important to that to finding things that can allow you that or should that even be a goal it's tricky tricky question again like there is a lot that goes into it and we have to examine what do you really want and again this question ends up being answered I don't know we come up with something like I need this like today i asked you what do you want to do and you had even difficulty to articulate that but then you articulated something and as you articulated it i didn't ask you in order to address it i asked you in order to see the process that you're going through and to open that process i need more mobility i need more strength i feel pain here i do i need that or people will tell you like you

asked me today about your wrists you said i need more for example someone would say i need more strength in my wrist i was like not necessarily so the examination has to start from that let's have a look what you really need what do i do i start to create a diagnostic field we play a game or a scenario and then we look at what is there what is really not there i wet test is it really the limitation of the range of motion of your wrist is it actually the flexors what is it about that bothers you that you want to improve your wrist capacities and what are those capacities that you need so i asked you where do you feel the limitation that's very important because people say like i feel limited in my hips but where when you wake up all day long when you're doing

something specific or not that will inform the investigation with Without that, the general recommendation have to be taken, which we've already said, like, go do some deep squats and stay in there for a while. Don't train them like fitness, but actually develop it, hang, compress the body, open the body, do some spinal waves. Okay, these are general recommendations. Or, for example, I say, integrate more play into your, like reaction. We talked today, reacting to things, working with things.

This is a general recommendation. will it really hit the mark i don't know we have to take another step then and to see it worked it didn't work you know with you when you you reached out to me a few years ago and and i looked at your stuff and i saw all these people running through and coming through and one of the first things where you get all this information coming through but are you doing something with it because many things probably because so many things come through you might not even be able to give each one a fair chance for you to see so this was something that I also look with myself

I did certain training models and methods and systems 25 years ago and I completely erased them and 25 years after I realized oh what a mistake I started to do BJJ in the late 90s, late 90s. I was probably maybe one of the first, if not the first person back home who did it. It was by chance. I was in the university in my hometown doing backflips on the grass. And a guy, an American guy, walks up to me.

He was an exchange student. And he told me, teach me how to do flips. I'll teach you Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He said, Brazilian. I did Japanese jiu-jitsu. What is Brazilian Jiujitsu? And we did the summer of it. And in the end of the summer, I had three tricks,

which were enough to submit everyone, you know, back then. And he asked me to bring strong people to test it. In my school, there was this military academy, which was half of my school, so I brought these friends, and we played with it. And I never ended up doing BJJ after that summer. Because it was kind of cool, but I thought that was it, those tricks, and you know.

And, you know, I first started hearing about transcriptions from Thomas to Lauer. Yeah. And, you know, Thomas is somebody that's an animal with working out. You got a chance to work out with him. I worked out with him. And he's kind of always on the front lines of, like, you know, finding out about these new companies that have cool things. But I didn't really realize that proscriptions was the first company to put out

methylene blue. And now look at methylene blue. It's so popular. It's everywhere. It's one of those things. If you guys listen to this podcast, you know, I'm very iffy with the supplements that I take, because there's a lot of shady stuff out there. You've got to be careful.

The great thing about transcriptions is that when people want to get methylene blue, usually they'll go on Amazon, they're going on there, these other sites. It's not third-party testing. It's not dosed. A lot of people end up with toxicity from the blue that they get because there's no testing of it. Troscriptions, they have third-party testing for their products. It's a dose so you know easily what exact dose of methylene blue you're getting in each

troki. So you're not making some type of mistake. There's not going to be anything in it. it's safe you can have it dissolve and you can turn your whole world blue if you want or you can just swallow it they have two different types of methylene blue they have one that is i believe dose at 16 milligrams and they have another one that's dosed at 50 milligrams so make sure you check the milligrams uh i don't recommend anybody start at 50 milligrams but uh the 16 i feel is very safe you can also score the trokeys and you can break them up into smaller bits yeah so i do and in addition to that

On top of the methylene blue, they have a lot of other great products of stuff as well. They got stuff for sleep. They got stuff for calming down, all kinds of things. I got to say, I use it about two or three times a week. I use it before Jiu-Jitsu. And the cool thing that I've noticed, and I've paid attention to this over the past few months, is that after sessions, I don't feel as tired. So it's almost like I've become more efficient with just the way I use my body in these hard sessions of grappling.

And it's like, cool. Well, that means that, I mean, I could go for longer if I wanted to, and my recovery is better affected. It's pretty great. I know Dr. Scott, sure, we had him on the podcast, and he talked quite a bit about how he recommends methylene blue to a lot of the athletes that he works with. And they're seeing some profound impacts. And one of the things I've heard about it is that it can enhance red light. So those are you doing red light therapy or those of you that have some opportunities to get out

into some good sunlight. It might be a good idea to try some methylene blue before you go out on your. walk or run outside or whatever activity is that you're going to do outside. And this stuff is great, but please, like first off, they have stuff for staying calm. They have stuff for sleep. But remember, this stuff isn't a substitution for sleep. This isn't a substitution for taking care of nutrition. This is supposed to be an add-on to all the things that we already should be doing.

And it's going to make things so much better if you're doing everything else too. And I think this is just a little different, too, than just adding some magnesium to your diet. I think this is a little different than, you know, treat these things. appropriately. Make sure you do some of your own research, but... Oh, if you're taking medications. Yeah. You better talk to your doctor first. Don't be popping these things. And if you're taking any medications at all, it'd be good to double, triple, quadruple

check and make sure that you're safe. Transcriptions has a lot of great things that you need. So go and check out their website when you have the opportunity. Strength is never weakness, weakness, weakness, catch you guys later. Years after, it was a big regret. Oh, I should have kept with that, you know, with that practice because it's a beautiful practice.

and i came back to bjj and i practiced more but it shows you something or or you know a certain moshelden christ a huge inspiration for me a huge voice of movement and i ran into the stuff and i did the stuff you know 20 years ago and it kind of didn't work that well for me like what we did today is oriented from that that lying on your on your hands years after i understood oh wow this is the potent stuff but i couldn't i did not stay with it and i couldn't yet conceptualize it i was in a different body in a different state of mind i don't know if i answered your question we've had we've had you know a lot of guests on the show and some things stick and some things don't um some things might get we might, I don't know, might go one ear in, one ear out the other type of thing.

But there's a lot of practices that we've been able to adopt. And it's been really cool. It's been a great, like, this has been a recording of like our own exploration as you're going on yours. Maybe all of yours aren't always recorded because you're doing things. You're going to great lengths. It's recorded, but not shared publicly, but a lot of it is recorded. Can you tell us a little bit about?

the experience that you had going into this jungle like that sounded crazy yeah so a lot of the things that i used to tell people and we all talk about it is this paleolithic point of view about movement about nutrition and i was one of the kind of the second generation you can say of the paleolithic diet in the 90s already talking about it and you know art devaney was one of that first voices and then came, you know, Rob Wolf is a good friend. And you're one of the original CrossFit owners, too, you told me. Yes, funny enough.

So that was a time. But I never really went out into these cultures, these tribes, this tradition. And I always knew like, yeah, it's okay. I see them on YouTube, you know, like, no, no, at a certain point, I decided, let me go out there. Let me go see. I went to Africa. you know, in Egypt, I was in the Orient, in China, in India, I worked quite a lot, and I had

many opportunities. And recently I took 10 people into this expedition into quite a secluded tribe. There are people who will tell you that there are no real untouched tribes around the planet, which I don't believe in. I believe they are. But the price of getting to them, again, we might not. be willing to pay and we're not maybe ready for it and this tribe was in a medium level accessible enough but not accessible enough that I knew not a lot of people would make that journey it was

harsh it was difficult there is no one of us almost died on the way out and one of us got denge fever severe denge fever in there we were without electricity why were you exploring this why were you going to see this tribe to see movement to see the bodies to see the minds and to be honest when i tell people i don't know much but here is what i saw and and to tackle it myself to move with them and to see my own limitations and to see my own advantages because you are not following those people around the jungle you are in in a second they disappear on you you can't follow it doesn't matter how fit you are it's not going to it's i've i've done a lot of rocking and intense stuff in the military and out and in all kinds of ways but those people

cannot follow you in new york city you'll disappear on them that's another thing to to understand and there were a lot of things about the for example chew with your mouth closed that's horrible for your movement that's horrible for your neck actually we are meant to chew in a very expressive fashion my grandma knew shoot oh mine as well mine as well totally you got to use your whole face right yeah and and you know harbivores chew like this carnivores up and down omnivores like us three-dimensional all these movements of the jaw are very important for the development of the head, the cranium, the various interactions downstream, vocal development, general nervous system development.

What do you see there? You see how people chew. You see what they eat. They predominantly live off of some kind of a palm tree that they grind. how many hours a day do they need to spend to to survive one or two hours on average that's it you know we have this thought it's harsh it's hard once you figure it out most of their time is leisure gossip talk laugh i did not see in our whole stay one bad mood on the whole island didn't exist doesn't exist depression forget

about it i also didn't see much greed and the one i saw came from us so for example they saw us with these phones filming them and there was no interest they've seen it before but they're kind of like it's not related to me or we brought a sky link with us because all of my employees went into besides one went on this trip so we had to maintain the operation so they asked me what is this and they know the word internet somebody taught them and I told them internet stars I said okay that's it was like okay but they could not understand another story that stuck with me was one of them was taken in the 1980s on a helicopter trip to see his own island

which he never saw from above. He never left the island. Most of them never left the island. And when he came back, he never told anyone anything because he could not describe what he saw. He didn't have the words in their language. There are very few words compared to ours.

So the whole thing totally transforms who you are. This is a new concept that I introduced to people lately. I take them on adventures, but inside these adventures, we practice physically and otherwise, because I realized it's hard to make people transform and change. It's not enough. First, I started with events. Then I started with intensives, long duration. I take Nasima for one month.

He's going to come back different. In two days, it's limited. Then I realized even debt is limited. but if I take you to another scenario and we have to walk in to walk out we have to practice there we have to become aware their dances their rituals goes into the night seeing how they move seeing the rhythmicality what about the slaughter of animals rough rough forget about these stories about humane slaughtering and this yeah they thank the animal but they slaughter slowly huge boars deadly two hundred pound boars from two from two meters high six foot fence with ratan little strings that will tear your hand they catch it from above and lift it deadlifted up some of the strongest people i have seen these kids teenagers doing it resilient strong looking at their feet looking at their backs there was one guy who broke his back when he was a teenager his whole

is deformed. Of course, no hospital, no spinal fusions, nothing. He fell from a coconut into a fire. He's also burnt because he fell into it like, you know, Mr. Bean, you know, Mr. Bean, like the most ridiculous like accident, but he was there on the island. He does not, I asked him, do you have pain in the spine? Do you have pain? Spine, we didn't have the word for it, But pain, it was like, no. Maybe if he did all those surgeries, he would be in pain. Maybe not. I don't know, but it was an eye-opening thing.

And how much movement contributes to that? Because he had to keep going, hunting, doing all this stuff. Even the next week after his injury, he started. See this finger? You know that injury, right? That basketball injury is like all my fingers like this. A while ago, I snapped this finger badly. One of my friends and employees is a gymnast, he's American guy,

and we were in Germany, and he was swinging from handstand on parallel bars, you know, those swings between the parliad really high. And we used to play with each other all these tricks. Like my favorite would be to pass underneath, it's high parallel bars, he's in a handstand, and to fart. So it goes up, and you're stuck in the handstand. There is nowhere to run, right? Gymnest tricks.

And another would be to pull your hand out when you're swinging down from the handstand just to pull his arm. So I went to pull his hand out and he came down into my, and he got caught between and totally snapped back. Okay, I went to the ER. They did an x-ray and they told me

you need a cast six weeks and my sister is an orthopedic surgeon. So I told, I asked them, is it in place? Do I just need the cast or do I need traction? I said, no, no, just a cast. I said, I don't want a cast. They gave me a bunch of, you know, forms like, you need to sign this. You know, nobody was. The next day, I took a tennis ball.

First, at night, I taped it together because at night I didn't know if I'm going to turn in any kind of way. The next day, I woke up and I started to press on the table just like this with an ounce of pressure. I walked around with a tennis ball the whole day, gently squeezing it. In six weeks, I was doing fingertip push-ups in a day. demonstration they wanted to take the cast of six weeks because once you place the demand over the bone it heals in a fraction of the time osteoblastion and you give it the stimulus once you put it in a cast it takes a lot longer but we they cannot trust you to do that so it's never offered it's another example of how these people keep moving rest ice compression elevation throw it out

all to the garbage and replace it with one word movement but how the dosages the weight no less important it's not going to work if you're just of course going to slam into my finger you know when it's when it's broken into a wall what what about um you mentioned like their feet and all the different things because they were like uh i think you said there's like a lot of logs and mud and all that kind of stuff it's another thing when we are doing a lot of stuff on rails and on you know the way that we do it i thought it was good and there I saw everybody was walking turned out which when you walk on a rail you don't walk with your foot out

that's the world that's the bad way but actually the situation is slightly different and I started to correct the person in front of me telling him no no no straightened the foot he said yeah but they're doing it in this way said wait let me have a look and I looked at them for a full day I realized I'm wrong they're doing it their whole feet totally turned out because they're they're running on these logs, it's very slippery. So it's not like a rail that you, you know, usually it's, and they're running and they're carrying stuff and all this.

So actually, they need the margin of error. So their feet are incredible. I'll show you photos later. I'm seated in front of these tribe elders, these shamans, which never come together for many years. This was a special ceremony that we were facilitating for them and hence were invited that Westerners did not attend for 20 years. No one was there.

And you see all of their feet. And then I compare my foot, which is very muscular to theirs. And it's their size, but they are this high. They reach my chin. So the proportion is crazy. And very soft feet as well. No calluses, since they are in very wet environment. So they're stepping on mud.

they're stepping on logs, it's always raining and green. It's not the callous feet that we would expect. All these lessons were eye-opening. And again, you're going to go to a different community. You're going to find a different body. Thankfully, we have the capacity to adapt and to address in such a wide manner. And you can live a new life after you live the life of a power lifter and change your whole physiology, your mental state, your emotional state.

Thankfully, you know, imagine a soldier. coming back from war and having to raise his children which happens all the time and you cannot change with which hands do you grow your children with the ones who held the weapon that's death you bring in you have to find a way currently now you know you'd mentioned and you described going out to visit this tribe of people and and seeing the way they moved that they moved that brought new knowledge to what you do but i'm curious maybe a long with that what else are you now exploring that is maybe it's not new to you but it's it's somewhat challenging to you everything i do is challenging to me if you will see me in the day to day

practicing you wouldn't be impressed because i'm always challenged just like you were challenged today's like that's the point of staying within that challenge i have no interest in doing what i already do well I'm only interested in what I can do so all I practice nowadays relates to difficulties a lot of it is very somatic very quiet you wouldn't want to spend a week with me with my personal practice it would be painful boring difficult in ways that you wouldn't want and it took me a long time to to get to this point because I wasn't interested in that practice also a lot of it is related to the organization of the body and that relates to the organization of myself which

was made very clear a lot of it is related to attention and to weaklings very hidden weaklings we talked about diaphragm we talk about pelvic floor we talk about things I never thought much about this you know when I was squatting heavy or when I was doing these things I you know it went into one year came out the other but at a certain point I collided into the wall and I saw I can't resolve it with those tools generally we can speak about two types of systems one system is compensatory systems systems systems systems that base themselves in the ability to compensate the other system is optimization systems a lot of strength and conditioning is actually compensatory it deals with your ability to add tensions

where you leak to seal those leaks in that way of patching with tension and then there is a totally different direction which is optimization making the pathway not leak by unclogging the hoses and allowing the maximal fluidity to go and none of these approaches is the best what i believe and what i think is unique in my work is that i am the one who combines it the feldon christ people can benefit from doing strength training and the the strength trainers can do a lot more of that and these are just general examples so this is related a lot to what they do these days the finding these combinations for example with somatic work little blobs of somatic sessions like the one we did today laying on the ground can give a bjj practitioner

the next level if they will go through that journey one, two, three years of addressing all these little junctions and sections and paying attention to them. And then you will feel when you touch with them incredible strength, stability, which you know from some people naturally, right? So I'm interested in that. I'm interested in really resolving the problems for real, not just having a patch, a temporary patch like that external rotator strength that allowed me because I was not in an optimal

position to still hold things together but I needed this crazy strength right like nowadays I need less and less the first thing that happened I could never take weight off of myself the only thing that happened was like in heavy endurance activities where I lost weight but immediately once I stopped I gained muscle again and that is the only thing that actually was a When I started to do that, my body got rid of a lot of muscle because the efficiency was there. I kept on challenging myself in all these strength situations, but I did not need it. These added engines. Another engine and another engine and another engine and another engine.

And in between these engines, their form collisions, reactive forces. The approach of the optimization is one engine, one transmission, smoothness no collisions no reactive forces when you're doing some of these practices is that a concentration for you to be smooth because it looks it looks super deliberate your movement looks super deliberate smooth coordinated but i guess it depends on what you're doing but rarely does it look like real explosive or chaotic is that like a thought process for you to kind of keep it smooth they're slow or deliberate.

There is a lot of chaotic and fast things. It depends on you can watch and you can see me flipping around and doing a lot of stuff or, you know, or exploding in all these ways. Different stages. But I'm not aiming towards this smoothness. It is a side effect of something. It's important to differentiate.

We talked about it before. what is the origin of our fascination with the glutes the butt i know what mine is but that's not the correct answer but where does it come from originally what is it about the glutes by the way it's not a female thing only when somebody walks in with big glutes it used to correlate to the ability to explode to sprint or fertility. So we are attracted to it, originally. What do we do now? We have the biggest glutes ever

without the underlying cause. You train your glutes to look like that, like, and you actually damage your athleticism. Not always, but if you want to really enhance the glutes, you know how they don't train the waist and they let the waist shrink and the quads have to be small so that looks bigger you actually damage something originally we took something and we thought we're improving it we're going to make better glutes those glutes

that i saw in brazil at 16 years old are not the same back then nowadays it's fabricated and it does not carry the same thing i remember like watching the because you know for me kind talking about like building up the glutes so much that it starts to kind of pull on the pelvis and that sort of thing maybe but it's not just that it's just about this aesthetic thing this is the outcome that they want yeah they want your attention they want that you know so they do whatever needs to happen for that to look like that it's not an athletic pursuit it can improve athleticism to a certain point and then you pass that point it actually destroys athleticism my point is this if i go for smooth movement as many people in the movement culture these days actually terrible movers fake

movers they put a camera for three hours to capture some lucky moment they look great and then i meet them i met people now in this weekend in los angeles it's like any scenario it's like what what movement expert millions of likes on instagram there is nothing there it's like what what is going on And my thing was like, Ido, watch out. So you don't go down that road. And it was early on, I was like seeing all this stuff, it's like, Naseema, today we played. You have some good movement inside of you.

There is something that you're dealing with it also, even emotionally, even mentally be able to, okay, I'm not coordinated. Okay, it doesn't work. Okay, receiving criticism or even more, asking for my criticism. And how you deal with it, your ability to change. And I'm not just blowing smoke up your ass.

I'm just saying what I saw. It can be better, but I've seen so much worse from people speaking about movement. So trying to be smooth, trying to be beautiful, moving beautifully or aesthetic body often does not take us there. When you met in the 1900s, a muscular guy, watch out. but nowadays it means nothing everyone everyone looks like you know the body of a bmw the engine of a lada jiguli the old russian soviet cars it's like what is going on here this is instagram this is all that we see what we see there so we trained ourselves into that the performance went out the door longevity sometimes don't join and definitely the self is not there i want to you know we were talking a bit

about rope flow before and it's something that a lot of people have started doing some people will say it's become a bit of a trend right and it has in a sense and i'm curious because you know you've you've done many things many aspects of movement right when you when you see that practice what do you see that maybe is lacking for people to and well what are some issues that you might see with the practice and then also what are ways that you think people can if they enjoy it how can they improve it how can it be how can you have an awareness of what you're doing to actually make it useful for the way you move it's it's a it's a great practice it's a great practice it's a scenario, it's a container,

and it carries a certain content. Will it be enough? No, I don't think so. Will it transform deeply, all this? Again, I gave you the example of many performers who've been using similar things, like the Poi manipulators, et cetera. They're not good movers.

I'm not saying that the rope work will not work. It can work. It depends on the application. I love stuff like that rope thing and I use similar things but I keep changing them up and I keep building bridges into them that's one side

the other side is the back end and the front end the expression of the proper mechanics inside this rope flow or many other practices can come from the seed

the innate organization of the body or it can be faked like the fake butt and if the rope is not really requesting that you truly transform the depth of it it will become a fluff a practice of the exterior but this is true for everything and I like the rope flow I like it

it has a potential to offer it became a lot trick tricks based and that's cool you know but it's a speciality the special component, the component which is specific and the component which is general are mixed together into the practice. The majority of the benefits

you're going to get from something really, really simple. That's why boxers jump rope because it is a useful practice. But the boxers don't jump rope like Buddy Lee jumped rope. They cannot do six unders, but they can do double unders. I can juggle four balls, three balls. two balls but I cannot juggle five because for me through my investigation I realized it's too

specific it becomes a strict pattern so the rope is great if you use it correctly and this is true for everything else definitely I saw much worse trends it is why from a few different perspectives one everybody can get a piece of rope that's the reason why I use sticks tennis balls, I never trademarked anything or tried to control it. I am about you being high tech, not the tool being high tech. You use high tech tools, low tech you. And I like it from that regard. And then also it's very simple and it creates a scenario which has a potential for developing

something because to fit yourself inside these patterns and to maintain balance and stability, there is a lesson there but take it in the right dosages in the right way is no less important which is actually the method of practicing and the actual practicum your ability to work with the tool okay i'm not sure if you're familiar we had a guest on his name is fred duncan and fred brings up a lot of the russian training um from years ago the old soviet union um what are some of your thoughts there because it reminds me like some of some of the things that you explore they seem to they seem to have put a lot of variation in their athletes Ryan maybe you can try to find some clips but they seem to put a lot of variation in what in what their athletes were doing whether they were figure skater hockey athlete wrestler Olympic lifter things like depth jumps throwing med balls catching stuff even things that are like very what would be considered like low intensity like i know that you said you do some flips and you do other explosive things but some of the stuff i see you doing is also low intensity maybe a little bit like

the rope flow stuff too um which i i just think has tons of utility when you find these things that you can do and you could do them often and have them not have a big cost to you i think those things are really effective like what are you're you know after being somebody who studied all these things over the years, studying Berschansky and all these different great Russian literature. What are some of your thoughts on the way that they were doing it, I guess, in the 50s probably, or 60s? Yeah, there was a lot of great stuff in there. Of course, the word GPP comes from there in their perspective of separating the components.

But there is a lot of issues also. And let's be frank, the reason why you see it online all of a sudden, connects to a romantic idea those black and white's videos and I'm going to put them on and inspire the people you know what I'm let's be frank they're not jumping that great

look at nowadays at some of your athletes here on the NFL's like forget about it forget about it but we at the moment we get inspired because of the black and white we kind of

ignore it oh yeah oh the training method and Americans have this romantic idea in relation to the Soviets. Rocky, remember that? Absolutely. And you know what? There were a lot of issues there, just like there is in any other place. The training methods are great. You remember the claims of the kettlebell. You're going to do the kettlebell training. There will be all these wide development of, you know, the physicality and the athleticist. I never saw that. I met some of the biggest experts in kettlebells.

And when tested, actually, wet tested in a third medium, I didn't see that. But the kettlebell is a great tool. I use the kettlebells and it's a great tool, again, in the correct application. The problem is people turned it into a romantic idea. I only lift kettlebells because they offer me this great, you know, whatever. So this is first thing to mention. Now let's go into a lot of good stuff. All these methods of training,

we kind of try to take a component which was a little bit unfamiliar until today, like pleometrics, and try to put the same umbrella as strength training with it, but it's actually a different beast altogether. All right, Mark, you're getting leaner and leaner, but you always enjoy the food you're eating. So how are you doing it?

I got a secret, man. It's called Good Life Protein. Okay, tell me about that. I've been doing some Good Life Protein. You know, we've been talking on this show for a really long time of certified Piedmontese beef. And you can get that under the umbrella of Good Life Proteins, which also has chicken breast, chicken thighs, sausage, shrimp, scallops, all kinds of different fish, salmon, tilapia. The website has nearly any kind of meat that you can think of lamb. There's another one that comes in mind.

And so I've been utilizing and kind of using some different strategy, kind of depending on the way that I'm eating. So if I'm doing a keto diet, I'll eat more fat and that's where I might get the sausage and I might get their 80, 20, grass fed, grass finish ground beef. I might get bacon. And there's other days where I kind of do a little bit more bodybuilder style, where the fat is, you know, might be like 40 grams or something like that. And then I'll have some of the leaner cuts of the certified Piedmontese beef. This is one of the reasons why, like, neither of us find it hard to stay in shape because we're, we're always enjoying the food we're eating. And protein, you talk about protein leverage it all the time.

It's satiating and helps you feel full. I look forward to every meal. And I can surf and turf, you know? I could cook up some, you know, chicken thighs or something like that and have some shrimp with it or I could have some steak. I would say, you know, the steak, it keeps going back and forth for me on my favorite. So it's hard for me to lock one down. But I really love the bovette steaks.

Yeah. And then I also love the rib-eyes as well. You can't go wrong with the rice. to buy. So guys, if you guys want to get your hands on some really good meat, you can have to goodlifeproteins.com and use code power for 20% off any purchases made on the website. Or you can use code Power Project to get an extra 5% off if you subscribe and save to any meats that are a recurring purchase. This is the best meat in the world. It has totally different adaptive capacities on the connective tissue, on the neurology.

The activation is very, very different. And we tended to combine them into one and to say like, and we treat it in the same auto-regulatory way as well. Three sets of these. What was always ridiculous to me. You do six jumps and then you rest like, never. So a total of 18 jumps or something. You know what I mean?

As a heavy lifter, it's like, and then you mentioned the other side. Sometimes you need very high frequency, low-intensity exposure, to actually develop the skill. Bounciness, low-intensity, long duration at times to get the actual practicum, the practice, the neurological repetition. Not that I'm against, you know, depth jumps or something like this. Of course, we grew older, we moved away from it because there is a high cost. I mimic a lot of the stuff while avoiding the impact I'm a big fan for example of stair jumping

even better than box jumping because as you jump up you don't have the drop of the center of mass and you don't have the impact and it's great it also includes accuracy and includes all other components that I really love to work with stairs

and I do it a lot one foot two foot variations yeah yeah like in most steps the separation between the the men and the boys would be six steps but depending on how athletic you are i know people who do seven steps standing in most steps you probably can do can do that but for someone in of my skin color inside it's more challenging i was i was skin color is that I was sprinting in high school, you know, and my best result was 11.2, one time.

That's very fast, by the way. So I always say it's not bad for my size and skin color, you know. That's right. When you're doing like six stairs at a time, I'd imagine you're probably sprinting and then. No, no sprinting, standing still. So with running, you do more. It's a great practice because we can do it into older age.

Of course, you have to adapt first, because there can be errors with the ankles. But if you build it up correctly, with the right quality, you can maintain explosivity without the hammering. Box jumps are also good, but because they're just up, less applicable widely.

The stairs include a long jump and a high jump together. And the coordination of putting some, well, I guess like, and putting some in a row, right? And all these variations into a single leg, into double leg landing only with the balls of the feet on the edge not all the foot inside so there is an accuracy component what about sound we address sound that was too loud i measure the sound all these things and it's a great practice most of the stuff i don't really put out there about coming

down also just walk down or you can walk down if you want to minimize that but there is more interesting ways to come down which i really like i'll have to show you where you really reach back almost like a very deep lunge and touch and then transition, which is actually a great component, a centric component to mix with it. And we do all kinds of stuff crawling. Like lunge out from the step. From the step down.

Yeah. Interesting. And walking down steps with the leg behind. So I'm stepping each time down, kind of sawing my leg behind. All kinds of patterns that I use. I just take people to stairs. And for an hour, an hour and a half,

we just do this stair, thing working on i'll never look at stairs the same oh they're so stairs rails that's what i use most of the time um because again it's available everywhere and it's measurable and i can quickly see changes and no impact but there is still fear it's when you're standing there there is a fear component which i want to put in there is accuracy there is quality of movement great practice well and if you were to get hurt in that scenario if you were like fall is definitely less, it'd probably be less harmful than a box jump. 100%.

When someone lands their shin on their box like that, it seems messy. It's more scary than what actually occurs. When you miss, you actually realize it's not such a big deal and you kind of take a few steps down and the body orientes. Yeah, you can still have errors, but like we said, the safe methods are not really offering much. I always like that there is some component of accountability and controlling it, of course.

So with someone I would do one step, two steps, three steps. Slowly, if I see the quality is there, I would go further. I'm not going to push it maximally before there is safety in your ability to handle amiss. Like I used to teach Olympic lifts. I used to teach dropping the weight. That's the first lesson. And we practice it. I couldn't imagine how people teach Olympic lifts without ever teaching to drop the weight.

What are we supposed to do with all this fear? So I would teach people how to drop a snatch behind, in front, from a deep position, from a clean, a bed clean. And the same thing I used to teach acrobatics. My basic thing was breakfalling. Once you go through breakfalling 101, we start flipping. I couldn't imagine how people learn acrobatics without the failure. Learning through negation, I call it. First, the failure is experienced.

Then we can go for the actual performance. it maps the correct skill by marking the boundaries of what is failures all around it, much safer, much sounder. We have the University of Davis here in town, and their stadium is usually open. So I go over there and run the stairs sometimes. It's really nice. And I do, I don't necessarily jump, but I usually, like, run the stairs. And so I'll take like two at a time.

But I'll try some of your recommendations. That sounds like it might be fun. Yeah, maybe next time we'll go there and film a little piece, and I'll take you through some things. it's going to be very different. It's not a track and field workout. There is components to it that are like that, but I use a lot of other stuff as you saw.

And I combine tennis balls with it. I combine all kinds of things. Like I'll bounce a ball into the stairs and I'll run as I release the ball, jump, catch the ball and land accurately to put all kinds of components inside. That's because, again, like I'm interested in a wide development. But it's fun, it's interesting, it's always fresh,

I like these kind of things, hybrids. Does it make sense to you why people hate the gym? 100%. The gym is very uninspiring place, depending on the gym. The global gyms are, you know, horrific in my eyes. The music, the, you know, the people placing their phones on something, the hamster wheels. Of course, this is not such a gym. This is a great playground.

I look around, I see all your little permutations of bars and clubs. This is great. I would love to play here. It's immediately called my name. It's still very oriented towards the strength you'd say. Like I would want to see a lot more other tools to open up

more movement, but it already is a huge change. The box brought it back, right? Like a little bit more. And then we tried to go a step further into our movement facilities where we minimized even more the strength tools and we

maximized the floor the walls and various other tools which are less about strength but more about movement it's easy to do it's cheap it's simple and when you go to such an experience like a movement class you're coming out with a beautiful experience of it there are pockets of our students all over the world with facilities like this and it's i it's great i think 10 years from now the most popular thing will be a squat rack. I can see that. We'll be just kind of keep going in circles. I can see that for sure.

And it's an amazing tool. You remember when we used to hunt for squat racks, you couldn't find them anywhere. When you were traveling, you know, hotel gyms, pooh, squat wreck. And we used to improvise all these kind of things. And yeah, great tool.

Still have it, own it. I do. And, you know, again, you've not only have you, gone through many, not even gone through, but investigated many aspects of movements, but I'd assume that you've been investigated different aspects of martial arts. Like you did a lot of capoeira, you did some jiu-jitsu, you've worked with amazing fighters. Something that I've been thinking about, and somebody in the stronger human actually brought

it up too, because he had a background, I believe, in Kung Fu, and he did some Tai Chi as a child, right? And now he's doing a lot of jiu-jitsu. He's been doing that for the past five years. But he mentioned something, and he said that, you know, when he was doing some of these martial arts, they had a big focus on the structure, the aspects of breathing with the movement, these things that, oddly enough, you know, I've been doing jiu-jitsu for a long time now. And my instructor is great.

But you don't hear many of these things talked about when it comes to learning that martial art. Or actually, a lot of martial arts that people in the West focus on that are very damage-based. like I'm going to damage you. But when it comes to some of these martial arts that people look like as a joke, like the internal martial art of Tai Chi or Kung Fu or these other things, there seems to be a focus not just on damaging a person,

but also what the body is doing and the shapes you're creating. And I'm curious if you think there should be things that are investigated there by people who focus on the hard martial arts, like the Brazilian jiu-jitsu, the boxing, the MMA. I'll tell you what I think about it.

First, I think that most traditional martial artists are actually movement people. They would love to actually do what I do. But it wasn't there back then, and they got into martial arts. But actually, their interest is not fighting. Because, let's be frank, fighters fight. Most traditional martial artists were never in a fight in their whole life.

My boxing coach used to say, we get hit more after the bell rings than they get hit in their whole career. Now, of course, there are differences, but that's a general thing. Traditional martial arts can still offer tremendous tools that have been neglected. because of that because fighters don't respect that because fighters fight and they know and they have met

and after you remember the early days of UFC and how that ended up when somebody with some delusion came in some posture some hand shape all the theories you know that's how you close your fist you do this you do that's like you hit like that

forget about it now we have a laboratory And we have another laboratory, by the way. It's called YouTube. It's an archive of human videos, and you can find and analyze street fights from all over the world, from gas stations in Ukraine, you know, from everywhere. And there are bodies around the world and people who investigate into it to draw conclusions.

It's enough that I have some friends who are Navy SEALs here in the U.S. to find out that, you know, Navy SEALs used to practice Kung Fu at a certain point. The delusions go deep. You know, military bodies all over the world, special units practicing ridiculous things in the 80s, but then slowly coming to terms with reality. Yet, what is the fighter? The fighter of modern times, that athlete, that fighter, with those damaged bodies,

fighters don't have great movement capacities. Not compared to our athletes, basketball players, NFL players. They're very damaged. They're not fast. They're not strong. There are exceptions. But most fighters cannot deadlift much,

cannot pull up much. So what are they? Drivers. You give them any car, Toyota, and you go against them with a Formula One, and they win. They take these bodies, but they know how to drive that body. You might have a fitness body or an athlete's body, but you don't know how to drive. What are the traditional martial artist? They are garages. They fix cars. They develop pieces, shiny rods on the car, pimp my ride.

They have an offering. The fighter needs to improve the carburetor in the car. Modern fighting does not offer those tools. So they need sometimes tools from traditional martial arts. For example, modern MMA fighters, you would be surprised they don't hit very hard. And you see it, for example, when they go into big gloves and you see boxing, And you see that they don't have great success there. A boxer hits hard.

You know who else hits hard and doesn't even practice punches? Baseball pitchers. You hold pads for baseball pitchers. You just teach them how to throw a punch. And you'll be shocked at the power coming out. Because somebody stands there with a radar gun measures the speed of your throwing. In fighting, we have those sensors, right? but all those sensors are bullshit.

Because if you understand deeply a punch, you understand that there is so many other components not measured, not just the depth of penetration, the restitution, acceleration, the speed of transmission, and more and more and more. It's much more complex physical equation than what we think. There has been attempts to measure it, but I've never been impressed with it.

you can deliver some more mass and not have a great punch because it's too slow or it does not penetrate correctly or it's not placed accurately and modern fighting does not care about the power of the punch nobody measures that your knockouts is what matters your wins the then traditional martial artists many times hit very hard

because they have specific practices to perfect the punching mechanics Not all of them, but some of them hit very hard. Because of those specific practices, the hardest punchers in history were not the best boxers. Muhammad Ali did not have that power punch. Ernie Shavers did. But most people don't know who he was. Not necessarily the best puncher or the best kicker in football.

Yes, we have a Roberto Carlos, who was an amazing player, and a great kicker but it's not always correlates now once we've mapped this and we put it around we can start to understand how a modern warrior fighter can benefit from traditional martial arts tool physiotherapy tools movement tools to address and improve themselves and it will not be about the driving of the car i'm not teaching connor mcgregor how to fight i'm not a fighter i yeah i did some things but I am trying to bring all those tools and address the things that are not addressed and vice versa the traditional martial artist who is interested in actually doing a martial art should engage with sparring should

engage with these things and if this is not engaged with in my book in my humble opinion you should not talk about fighting this is not what you do. And I think this is the biggest scene of traditional martial arts. They speak about something that they don't engage with. If you engage with it, you can speak about it. And some martial artists do. You can find kung fu schools, karate schools that actually engage in regular sparring. And how does it look? How does the tradition, how does the sparring look like everybody else is sparring if it's good? And if not, it looks ridiculous and it doesn't work. I think that there is many great examples of traditional martial artists transitioning to modern fighting

because they could make that transition work and brought those skill sets like karate people and point fighters. I worked with Michael Van Gogh, who is an incredible mover and fighter and very, very powerful. He looked like a basketball guy, thin, but he has devastating power. He has the worst injury in all of MMA, he induced it, broke someone's skull in. You know, just like a hole in the skull. And when you look at him, you realize a lot of it comes from his traditional martial arts, but then he was able to bridge it into that work. So it's an example, you know. Well, we'll definitely have you on the podcast again. I know you said some people didn't have you're better because he didn't. How did you want to come back?

Well, next time, I think you can tell us about how much you liked in semen and I's glutes. Oh. Because we tried to get them caked up and plump for you. Oh, right. You can't always do that stuff for it. How are you doing? Because it's funny. Strength is never a weakness.

You have, you know, you're here. You have a seminar coming up, right? So if people want to take part in these, how can they go and how can they learn about that? They can find me online, on Instagram, on Ido portal. and yeah we we are in the education department and we offer online support for people guided practice it's all tailor-made very hands-on much more demanding and expensive but not on the level but on the dedication department you and we do events of various sizes to support this community I still do a lot of work with athletes with government bodies I do movement design for

movies. I do a lot of different things, work with corporates, because those tools cross boundaries, right, into all kinds of areas. And people can find online. Yeah, I'm sure they will be able to locate if they really want. And you mentioned you have like a body worker guy or something with you too that you're doing some stuff with as well. I'm always collaborating with good people which are hard to find. And when I found, I grab a hold of them. And yeah, and one of the things, I talked before, there is a certain frustration that starts to happen when you're interested in helping people and developing a practice where you feel it doesn't really transform them. It doesn't really go.

So along the way, one of the things was talking. The talking, the instruction, sometimes doesn't go very deeply. But there is other forms of teaching, like going to that tribe, sharing time, touching. It's another thing. In my workshops, I touch every student, even if it's just a tap on the back, and many times I let people touch me when I'm moving or place their hands because your nervous system is going to steal that information without even your cognitive understanding. So another form of teaching is receiving movement from someone. It's not known. It's not a very popular or known thing and something that we further developed in the last years through this contact

between us his name is eagle furman and he's traveling with us and he's basically moving you while you are observing what is happening and confronting you but in a very pleasant and playful way with habits and tendencies that we never see because you know the fish doesn't see there the water and that is another form of teaching there are many things many lateral things that i try to install to get that phase shift yeah strength is never weakness weakness weakness never strength catch you guys later bye