Mark Bell's Power Project - Mark Bell's Power Project EP. 221 Live - Mike McCastle

Episode Date: June 18, 2019

Mike McCastle is a speaker, endurance athlete and philanthropist. He is the current world record holder for the number of pull-ups completed in 24 hours (5,804) while wearing a 30 lb pack. He is the founder of the Twelve Labors Project, a philanthropic organization in which McCastle performs feats of strength and endurance to raise awareness for causes. McCastle is also a petty officer in the United States Navy. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Find the Podcast on all platforms: ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4YQE02jPOboQrltVoAD8bp ➢Listen on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

In honor of our guest, you did some pull-ups this morning, Mark? I did. You know, I fell kind of short of 5,000, though. Well, fell short or, like, not even close? I don't know. I wasn't that far off. You had some for a few? I probably did about a total of 30 reps or so.

You know, spread out over the course of, like, 37 sets, you know? Yeah, I just suck at them. But I noticed that for me, if my body weight is even just five pounds less, damn, that makes a big difference. It does. It makes a huge difference. So, like, right now, I'm right about 250.

When I'm like 240, it's not bad to do sets of 12 on a pull-up. But damn, right now, it's kind of hard. Yeah, with my added body weight right now it's kind of hard yeah with my added body weight right now not that i was ever good at pull-ups but you know pretty good okay ish yeah you were moving around good on pull-ups and now it's very bad ish like it's it's tough man yeah so even just a little bit of body weight kills me were you as big as you are right now when you did that i was i was heavier i was too i'm 225 now so i was now when you did that? I was heavier.

I'm 225 now, so I was 230 when I did the pull-ups. And you're right. You lose five pounds, it feels like taking a weight vest off. But the national average is two, so if you did 30 this morning, you're well above. Oh, there we go. I used to mess with the ones where you pull yourself up and try to push yourself away. Holy shit, that's really hard. You ever try those? Wait, pull yourself up and try to push yourself away. Holy shit. That's really hard.

You ever try those? Wait, pull yourself up and put like the muscle ups? Yeah. No, not a muscle up. You pull yourself up and then on the way down, you push yourself away from the bar. I think you can do like one or two. Oh, that'll smoke you out. You're probably pretty good.

You do weighted pull-ups, right? Yeah, weighted pull-ups. But like I, when I do weighted pull-ups, I sometimes do these ones, but I like doing the ones on the inside just because they're easier on my shoulder. I know it's not a good move, but yeah, I do weighted pull-ups. Dude, that sounds like cheating. It is cheating. What's the difference between a pull-up and a chin-up? We need an expert in here.

Well, a chin-up, your palms are in. All right, there we go. We got some clarification. Pull-up is palms out. And so you did around 5,000 pull-ups in a day? 5,804. Oh, my gosh. With a 30-pound pack.

Why'd you stop? Why didn't you do 6,000 at that point? Rabdo? I came out there with a goal. I met the goal. A 30-pound weight vest? Like a pack. Whose record did you break it was a guy it was a guy named uh john bocek mit guy um so that was the second time when i actually beat

the record it was um it had been beaten twice since my first attempt so the first guy i wanted to be was david goggins had the record 40, I failed at that attempt, put me in the hospital, you know, tore my bicep, tore my forearm, rhabdo the whole nine, uh, came back a year later. By then it had been beaten twice by, um, a math teacher, uh, out of New Jersey. That's a bunch of bullshit, right? He was like 130 pounds soaking wet. He's a beast though he knocked i mean you gotta be weight categories damn and then you did it with a weight like uh so are the other people doing it with a weighted vest as well or is that no that was just my own yeah you know i failed the first time i wanted to come back stronger after failure and just show the world and you know you can come back stronger it doesn't have to be a setback to where you know and also the weight represented the cause I was doing it for like better and mental health issues. So I want to kind of symbolize that with like the burden that the mental burden that they carry.

That's insane. So 260 pounds times 5,800. I'm not a mathematician. Something like that, right? Yeah. Somebody said it was like something like four space shuttles in weight pulling up. Oh, my God. Wow, there we got some video of it. How do you break a record? That was the first time, yeah. How do you break a record? Is there somebody watching every rep?

How does it work? Yeah, so the standard was, or the requirement was, you had to have someone counting your reps all the time. So the whole time you're doing pull-ups, someone's counting your reps, and that person had to be certified to know what a pull-up was. So it had to be like a personal trainer, a health person, someone who can recognize what a proper pull-up is and if it's done properly.

And basically, they counted every rep, and then they would have to sign a log saying, okay, I'm signing off. This new person's taking over. Yeah, How many hours did it take? It took me 22 hours to beat it. Um, the first time I stopped after 17. So I did 3,202 after 17 and, um, I just couldn't, I had holes in my hand. I couldn't pull up, pull myself up on that bar anymore. Explain to people what a rhabdo is. Rhabdomyolysis. So it's a condition where

basically, um, if you're performing, if you're using the same muscle group over and over and over again, your, your body has to process that muscle breakdown, especially if you're not conditioned enough to do that. We see a lot of rhabdo and people who jump into CrossFit or something like that for the first time, they're not prepared, they're not conditioned. And they go for like max reps. And basically your kidneys have to process the myoglobin, which is like the muscle breakdown, and it can't process it fast enough, so it gets blocked up and it causes acute kidney failure.

And basically some of the symptoms are you blowed up and your urine looks like whiskey, and it's not a pleasant feeling. You just kind of get really fatigued and tired and your body just starts to shut down. Did your arms blow up or your lats or anything like that? You just swell up because, you know, when your kidneys start going on you,

your body swell, you retain more water because you're not processing it. And it's just like you just feel bloated. I mean, you saw the clip and my face was like two times the size it was now. Maybe that's what happened to my face. Yeah, so... Maybe I was permanent rap my face. Yeah. So maybe I was permanent rap.

Yeah. And that, that 30 pound pack, like why did you be, because you could have, you could have broken it without that on. Sure. So if someone wants to break it again, are they supposed to wear a 30 pound pack or? No, I don't recommend anyone put that pack on. I mean, I did it for, I did it for, because it was important to me. One thing is, anytime you do something, you got to do it for you, and you got to have a purpose and a cause while you're doing it. If you do it for someone else's reason or someone else's, I mean, it's just not that, it's not as significant,

and you might not do it because it's not your purpose. It's not your cause. So for me, it was significant because I had failed the first time at just the body weight. And my mindset was, you know, no failure, only feedback. And I wanted to show people that you can come back from failure stronger than you were. And the best way I could think of to symbolize that newly acquired strength, that rejuvenation, that comeback was to put a pack on my back. And I also did it,

the cause I did it for was for veteran mental health issues. I was in the service, I was in Navy for 11 years. I had several friends who took their own life and I wanted the pack to symbolize the mental burden that some of these people carry with them. Sometimes they never take that pack off. I could put the pack on my back for a day. Some of them never take that pack off. So I wanted to put that message out there. And that's why I wore the pack. Now, if someone else wants to go wear the pack and they want to challenge yourself, more power to them. I encourage everyone to try to, if you want to break the record, go ahead. I will help you. I can encourage you to, because if it wasn't for the people who set the bar before me, I would have never broke that record. I would

have never been able to push myself further than I thought I could go. Cause I, like I said, that record had been beaten twice since my first attempt. And if it wasn't for the bar setters, the people who weren't afraid to chase, chase after that record, I would never broke it. You said no failure, only feedback. I like that a lot. That's great. So you just kind of, some of the shortcomings that you may have had, you just, you take it as more information, learning process. Absolutely. To try to get better. Absolutely. Life is struggle. It's an unavoidable fact. So the only choice you have is how you want to look at it and how you want to respond to it. And that's where the feedback comes from. You could look at failure as a setback or get the lessons from it and the feedback from it. So at any given moment,

you have that choice to make. I chose to find feedback and lessons out of it. You can't really do things that last this long without tapping into some deep, dark spots in your mind, right? I mean, if something that lasts like 20 hours or even like you know some people run 100 miles or you know like david goggins runs 100 miles i mean you got to really tap in deep and go places you probably haven't had to go before is that right um you know some people tap into that dark place if if that's your you know if that's what gets you going that's that's great more more power to if that's what gets you going, that's great. More power to you if it works for you.

For me, I don't feel that I need to, I don't need to tap into a dark place. I find power from just a great sense of gratitude, a great sense of, you know, love for the cause that I'm doing it for. I find those things to be just as powerful as a dark place. And you know what? You don't need a dark place to go and get after it. You don't need to tap into some, you know, some mess of things that happened in your past and use that for fuel. I mean, you could use that too, but it's not the only way.

You can tap into good places as well. Family, you know, purpose, meaning in your life. Those things are just as powerful as any dark place you could tap into. And in my case, I feel like it's more powerful because that's in your life. Those things are just as powerful as any dark place you could tap into. And in some, in my case, like, I feel like it's more powerful because that's in more abundance. I mean, if, if you're guiding light in your life is every messed up thing that's happened to you. Um, I don't know. For me, that's just not, that's not how I, uh, that's not how I approach these challenges. I come from a place of like gratitude. My body's been through a lot and I put a lot of miles on my body and that's, I'm grateful for that. And that's where a lot of my strength comes from. It doesn't

come from like a dark place. Yes. Dark things have happened to me in the past, but I'm a person, like I turn my excuses and the reasons. So every excuse I have is easy for me to go to a dark place. I can go there. Like that's for me, that's the easy thing to do. And for me, it's like, it's kind of like I can use that dark place as an excuse, but I want to turn it into a reason. I want to, in spite of the bad things that happen, I'm going to do this goal anyway. And I'm not going to tap into it. Like I live now, not in the past. Like what's going to move me forward now is not the past. It's how I am, who I choose to be in the future that just made you about 150 times scarier i i went to uh jackson wink uh uh the uh fighting school down in new mexico and i talked

to some of the instructors there and one of the guys they said hey this is one of the better uh jujitsu practitioners in the building and he works with a lot of the top fighters and so we talked to him for a little bit and i was asking him, you know, do you get mad or you get excited or like, you know, where do you go to in some of these training sessions and some of the tournaments and stuff that you've done? And he's like, well, he's like, I'm really big into role-playing games. And he's like, I love video games and I love comic books. He's like, so I take the two and I mix them together. And he's like, and I just think about that when I'm, when I'm grappling with somebody and I was like, okay, this is the craziest guy in the building. You know, other people are smashing their fists

against the wall before they fight or something or, or getting themselves worked up in some other way. But he had this big old smile on his face when he was talking about it. And I'm like, okay, that's why this is one of the badder guys in the building right there. What, how do you realize that that's the way that you can go about things because i remember like you know when i started training here at super trading i saw a lot of guys getting mad so i tried to get mad didn't work for me you know so i started just like concentrating on being calm and that worked well for me so for you did you ever grapple with that idea or have you always just been that way yeah i mean it's always there i I mean, I'm human. So, you know, I have a spectrum. Everyone has a spectrum of emotions.

I get mad like anyone else. I get angry like anyone else. I get happy. I get sad. But for me, it's like, how long do we camp out there in that anger? Because it's an emotion. It takes energy to be mad all the time. And that's energy that I would rather use putting toward the, the actually, the actual feat or event itself. If I'm spending time getting worked, I'm getting mad, I'm burning matches. It's an emotion. It takes a toll on my CNS. It takes a toll on my, you know, parasympathetic system. I'm it's, it's an emotion. So I don't want to spend all that energy getting, getting worked at getting mad. When I could come from a place that's not anger, I can come from a place of gratitude, which is more calming for me. I go into it in a more relaxed state. I go into, uh, I go into the

event with acceptance of the worst outcome and the best outcome. And I'm not, I'm, I'm neutral. I go, I go into it with a sense of neutral alertness where I'm just kind of like, I'm not giving into either, or I just accept any outcome that could come. I'm not angry. I'm not happy. I'm not glad. I'm just kind of in the moment. I'm present. Maybe that's because of like the nature of what you're doing. You know, you're doing these labors for hours and hours on end, days on end. Maybe you can't just be mad every single day that you're going about that. Yeah. I mean, anger, anger is such a, it's such a primal emotion and it's such an easy, anger is such a it's such a primal emotion and it's such an easy it's for me it's like i can get mad it's for me it's an easy way out it's an easy reservoir to tap into i want to go deeper than

that anger is very it's very primitive you know so for me it's like why am i mad let's figure that out first if i if i'm tapping into anger i want to know why i'm mad all the time i mean if i'm if i'm doing these things for self-discovery, then let's peel back the layers instead of put on this facade of, you know, of this anger. Cause it goes far deeper than that always. What does that really mean about me is what I want to know. And when I do these labors, I'm stripping myself, I'm stripping layer by layer by layer. And to be honest, the anger is one of the first layers that goes, I might be mad at the start of it, but it doesn't last long. It's not, you can't stay mad like that and stay in this layer and to be honest the anger is one of the first layers that goes i might be mad at the start

of it but it doesn't last long it's not you can't stay mad like that and stay in this dark place because there's a there's a saying by nietzsche where it's like be careful when you're and this isn't word for word or something like be careful when you when you battle your demons or your monsters because you might become one yourself right right? Sometimes we focus only on facing on the demons, right? And we channel that and we lose sight of who we really are. And we take on this persona of this demon and this anger. And it's not, to me, it's not real. It's just a layer.

There's far more deeper layers to you than you even know. And once you start stripping away and you're really your true raw self, you're not mad. You're not angry. You are authentically who you are, and it's a beautiful thing to see once you really do that. Yeah, you know, I used to box in a lot of other sports and stuff like that. Yeah, you can only be – a lot of times you'll mess up if you're mad, you know,

and, like, try throwing a good combination. Try moving your head and throwing a good combination and being smooth if you're mad, you know, and like try throwing a good combination, try moving your head and throwing a good combination and being smooth. If you're all angry, a lot of times you're angry, you're going to be too tight to really execute. And we see it with lifting sometimes. Sometimes you get so fired up that you miss something on a squat because you're not as technical as you should have been. And we see it all the time. Like lifters tend to kind of like lose themselves. They get so fired up. They get so worked up. What about when you're lifting, you know, you're, you're a big guy, you're in good shape,

but what about like, uh, are you going for like a heavy deadlift or you're going for a heavy bench? Do you get yourself, uh, maybe not angry, but you get yourself like amped up, hyped up a little bit or more relaxed? Sure. You know, I get hyped up, but that's different than being angry. Yeah. Like I can be hyped up and extremely focused. Like if you really dial yourself into a lift, you're focused, you're excited. I'm excited.

I'm not angry. I'm focused. I'm laser. Everything else is a blur. It's front size focus. All I see is that bar. And all I see is that bar moving up off the ground. And that may,

it may project out is looking angry or seeing angry, but in my head is i'm a laser and that bar is the bar is my target i'm not gonna miss and everything else is kind of like a blur so um you can be excited you can be hyped up but you don't have to be you don't have to be like i'm not thinking back to when i was like eight years old and i got bullied and like you know like that's that doesn't go to my head like it's an easy place to go to like i'm not gonna go there like i'm not gonna give that moment in my life the power and credit for why i'm going to get this bar off the ground i'm not going to give some snotty kid who

bullied me when i was like hey the credit for why i it's no i'm i'm lifting this weight up because i want to lift this weight up because i'm focused because i choose to be so have you been a driven person um even before the military? Or was the military a big part of that? No, I wasn't always just driven. I mean, in high school, I wouldn't say I was driven. I think I was, you know, it took the military. It took a combination of things to kind of instill this in me.

One of them was 9-11, right? I was a junior, a sophomore in high school. 9-11 happened, and something about seeing 3,000 Americans get murdered on national television puts things into perspective, especially when you're not really have appreciation or taking things too seriously. Smoked a lot of weed and just kind of was just going through the motions. And then I've quit. I've quit in my life. Like I know what it feels like to quit. I know what it feels like to look in the mirror and see like someone who is a quitter and it's a bad feeling. And it's like, as a man, I don't, I want to be someone

that my parents and my dad could be proud of. My dad had to overcome a lot of challenges in his life. And also I don't have any kids, but one day I want them to look at my legacy and be something they could be proud of. I don't want to see someone who's a quitter. Um, so I know what that feels like. And so that in the discipline that the military gave me just kind of, and my passion for like fitness kind of put things kind of slowly built this person I am today over time. I think that's something that maybe sometimes people don't always realize is that, uh, you know, willpower discipline, a lot of these things can be built over time and it might take a long time. And, you know, I wasn't really like brave

or strong as a kid. I barely said two words, believe it or not. I actually was super shy. I didn't want to like, I didn't want to talk if I didn't have to. I never talked to adults, you know, except for my parents. But I was too scared to, you know. So I think a lot of times people don't understand you can, these things can be built up over time. You can make changes and it might take a long time. It might take 11 years of being in the military to change like that. When 9-11 happened, was it like, you know, you cut to a Rocky montage and you're off to training or was it a slow progression? What did that look like?

No, it was kind of like, you know, like, what am I doing? Like most people, most kids that were my age at the time, they were doing what I was doing, like most. And when you talk about what most people do, anytime you say, well, most people do this, when you say most, that that's average most people are average most of anything is average and i didn't want to be that because when i was what i saw on tv was a lot of debris a lot of carnage a lot of just i remember just gray the screens all the screens were just gray with smoke people running out people were running people were jumping out of buildings just to get out right but then there were people who were running in there were the firefighters the buildings just to get out. Right. But then there were people who were running in. There were the firefighters, the policemen, there were people that when the buildings were coming down and people were, people were dying, people were still running in to go get

them. And so I think I thought like, well, that's who I want to be. Who could, who could I be that person for? When, when, when someone feels like they're, everything's crumbling down around them, who's going to go in and get them? Who's going to inspire that person to keep going? And I wanted to be that person for people. And I come from, like, my family, my mom was in the military, my dad was in the military, and in that moment, I just had a deeper appreciation of, like, this sense of sacrifice,

this sense of discipline, this sense of being the strong person, not being average, not being most. So that's kind of what drove me at a young age. That's kind of what drove me to kind of start getting after it after that. And no excuses after that point. And you just decided to jump right in the military kind of right then? Yeah. So I was, like I said, I was going into my junior year and, or I was a sophomore and then I enlisted, I went into what's called a delayed delayed entry program and as soon as i graduated high school i was off to boot camp what'd you do um when you were in the military like what exactly what sect did you go to so i was an air traffic

controller okay so again like we talk about focus and having to like really dial yourself in when very little root margin for error and really compartmentalizing and just like focusing on, on one task and make sure you're doing it right. Because if you make a mistake, there's lives that will actually, um, lives are at stake. So that really built into me this idea of you can really dial yourself into something and go into that zone, no matter what else is going on in your life, because the cause, the reason why you're doing it is bigger than you. It's bigger than you. Whatever I had going on, girl problems I had going on, financial problems,

it didn't matter. I had a job to do and people depended on me to do it. So it's kind of like that discipline is what I'm talking about. It's kind of what built me into doing what I'm doing today. You're doing a lot of crazy different things. You know, the pull-up record is just one of them. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of these other things that you're doing? 12 Labors Project is the initiative I started when I started doing these people call it crazy things. I don't see it as crazy, but... Don't call me crazy, man. I'm doing it for mental health.

crazy, man. I'm doing it for mental health. That's a good, that tickled me. That's a good one. Yeah. So 2014, I was still in military. I started, you know, I started realizing like, man, like what could I do? What could I do that? What, what, how far could I go if I set a purpose that wasn't about me, about myself? If what was it about just personal gains or anything like that? How far could I go if I set the cause beyond my line of sight? So often we do things just for ourself and that's not a bad thing. You should always be, you know, self-mastery and all these things, great things, but how much further could I go if I set that line just a little bit farther? And so I did a test. I did a 40K run for children's cancer. Or it was a 50K. It was a 50K.

I ran it with a 40-pound vest on. And I crushed myself. I finished it, but I would crush myself. But at that moment, I realized, wow, I really, I did this, and it wasn't about me. And I was, I went further than I ever thought I could go. Okay, how much further could I go? So I set the goal to do 12 increasingly difficult challenges for causes greater than myself and that's where it kind of put me so I set the goal for the pull-up record after that you know I failed the first time came back beat the record I flipped a 250

pound tire for 13 miles straight that's a truck pull I pulled a two and a half ton pickup truck across death valley and i climbed the rope for 29,030 feet over 27 hours and most recently i ran 100 miles or i ran 20 miles every single day for 100 days straight so i've done six of these labors so far and i'm planning my seventh one here shortly so yeah that's the that was in may middle of the summer, 110 degrees. Which, which one of these things, which one of these things did you get into? And you're just like a hundred feet into it and you're like, Oh shit. Has there been anything like that where you kind of gotten into it and you're like, Oh my God, the rope climb. Yeah. You know, I thought the, you know, the rope climb is like, it's pull-ups. This is like, no, no, it's not.

It's like you're using your whole body to climb up that thing. And it's like so many points of contact when you're doing a rope climb. It was just something that I had. It was like nothing I've ever done. And these challenges, like, are they just coming from your head or are they suggestions? Yeah, they're coming from. So I want to make sure that the the event that i'm doing is so i start with the cause like what do i want to do it for it's always important to start with a

strong why and a strong purpose if the purpose isn't strong then when i get to like a moment like this what initiative what motivation do i have to keep going when i'm really raw in my most raw state this is about 16 15 16 hours in 16, 15, 16 hours in. And each step is not, it's me taking each step, but what's really keeping the momentum going is my purpose is the reason why I'm, that's where my head is at. And it's a hard place to get to, but once you get to that moment in the event, you're in it and you're going to finish. No man, nothing's going to stop you at that. Nothing was going to stop me at that point. I mean, if I died right there, I would have died right there on that road. Nothing would have stopped me.

So each event is for something different. Yes, yes. So like the truck pull, for example, I wanted to raise awareness for veteran suicide. At the time, the statistic was 22 suicides per day. And so I pulled the truck for one mile for each suicide per day, so each life lost. Each mile, at the end of each mile, I saw a face of someone, of an unknown person,

who felt that death was stronger than their problems. That was their only release at that point because they were alone, because they felt that no one else was out there. So I chose Death Valley because it symbolized the mind of the afflicted. It's the mind of someone who's going through depression, desolate, lonely, seemingly hopeless. But even in Death Valley, there's life out there. If you look close enough, there's life out there. It's actually thriving with life and it's never hopeless. And I wanted the truck to symbolize that whatever burden you're carrying, no matter how heavy it is, two and a half truck, two and a half tons. It's, you can do it. You can, you can get out of there very much alive. And there's people

out there that could help. There's people out there that are willing to there. So when I was out there, I had a lady who insisted on being out there. I told her, I said, no, I want to do this alone. I want to put my mind in this solitude place. I don't want anyone out there. I told her, I said, no, I want to do this alone. I want to put my mind in this solitude place. I don't want anyone out there with me. I don't know what kind of shape you're in. You could fall out out there. I'm not going to be in a position. I don't know if I'm going to be able to help you if you fall out. Like, I just want to do this alone. It's dangerous. She showed up anyway, the day of the event, she showed up and, and I told her, okay, well, I want you to stay about a quarter mile away from me, a mile away from me the whole time.

I don't want to see you. I was really kind of like almost a little rude with her. I was just kind of – but halfway through that labor, I hit a – in the road there were these ruts in the road. And one time my truck hit the rut, and the worst thing about pulling a truck is losing momentum, especially after you're pulling it for miles and hours. So I couldn't get the momentum going. Like this thing was stuck. And I remember like, it felt like a max rep. Every single time I try to get this thing going,

I was lean. I was, man, I almost had a hernia of trying to get out of this rut. And I sat down and I sat down and I was like, I'm gonna have to put this thing in a drive. I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to call this event. Like I'm, I can't get it out of this rut. I don't know what I'm gonna do. I was, I had tears in my eyes because I thought I wasn't going to finish. Like, and, uh, I remember looking in the distance and it looked like a mirage and I saw her taillights were out there and it was something about just not being alone out there. Something about just seeing somebody in the distance. It just gave me hope. Like it gave me this,

this urge, this sense like, like, what am I doing? I'm playing the world's smallest violin right now. Having this one man paper. I need to get this thing moving and get going. I'm not alone out here.

And the thing that like, that's it. When you're going through depression, you push people away. You don't want help. And at that moment, I was still making it about me. No, this is me in this labor. This is me in this physical challenge. But the cause transcends all that. And I saw that those taillights and I got the thing going again. How did the idea for the labors first off come about? And then along

with that, what made you want to have a different kind of cause behind each and every labor? Like what manifested this whole idea? Because I wanted to inspire people to chase whatever it is, their own greatness. I believe that everyone is destined to be great at something, whether it's a teacher, whether you're a coach, whether you're a musician. You're destined to be great at something. Not enough people push themselves far enough to know what that really is. They settle. They settle for

things they're kind of good at and things that get them by. But your true greatness lies beyond what you ever thought you thought you could do. And you got to push your limits. You got to push yourself outside that boundary to figure it out. So I choose different causes that are important to me, but to show just a diversity, like it doesn't have to be something physical. It could be any cause that you choose that you deeply connect with. So that's why I do different causes for that. It's really, I want people to know that they can, whatever it is they're choosing to chase, whatever dream or goal, they can dig deep enough and be able to pursue it regardless of what the cause is because it's unique to you. Are you passionate about mental health?

I know you said that you've had, you know, many, many soldiers that have taken their own lives and friends and things like that. But have you been in these spots yourself? Because you seem to know a lot about it. Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, I went in 2013, I blew my knees out. Right.

So I tore my left ACL, I tore my right menis right? So I tore my left ACL. I tore my right meniscus. And being someone who had always... How'd you do that? I was going through SEAL training. So I was running on the beach, and there was like 30 guys in front of me. And on the beach, there was like this divot in the sand. 30 guys in front of me ran down into this exact same divot. I jumped down into that divot and my knees gave.

I don't know why they gave. They just, my knees went one way, body went one way, left meniscus or left ACL, right meniscus at the same time. Had surgery, went through the rehab, couldn't meet the standard. I couldn't keep up to the standard that was, that I had to meet after surgery. So I fell into being someone who, who identified myself as some by my physicality. That's who I was. I put all my eggs into that basket. I'm a physical person. I'm dominant. And once that was taken away from me, I had nothing. No, you hear about like in the,

in the great depression when, you know, the stock market's crashed, there are people jumping out of buildings because they were their money. And you know, once you attach yourself to one identity and one idea, you actually weaken yourself because now you're, if that gets taken away from you, you're, you have nothing. So I fell into a deep, dark depression after that. I didn't want to do anything. I gained a lot of weight. I gained about 40 pounds, self-medicated with alcohol. I just didn't want to talk to anyone. I isolated myself from my family and friends. I didn't want to work out. I didn't want to do anything. And I think like a lot of people, you know, I just got sick and tired of who I was. Like I didn't want to be that person anymore. I didn't, I couldn't recognize

myself in the mirror. And I was like, well, I need to set a goal. I need to set, I need to set a goal that's going to get me out of this funk I'm in. My legs are shot. My knees are shot at the moment. What could I do to, what goal could I set that's going to give me that same drive that I had going through training? It has to be a big goal. So I set the pull-up challenge. I was like, I could use my arms.

I'm not completely out of it. My legs are gone, but hey, I don't need my legs to do pull-ups right most most people who beat this uh record um i think other than goggins like you know i don't know if they did leg day training for the pull-up thing i didn't need my legs to to really to really beat that record but yeah so i set the pull-up goal um it gave me a goal it gave me something to wake up every day and train get my butt to the gym at least i could only do 10 pull-ups when i started and um i just set the goal and six months later i did my first attempt failed at it okay no failure just feedback came back beat it you started at 10 pull-ups i could do 10 pull-ups consecutively when i first started and they were ugly and how many could could you do consecutively once you

got going uh i think going into the going into the pull-up, the first attempt, I could probably do like 35 maybe consecutively. It's not about, it was more about recovery between sets. So I would do like eight on the minute every minute for the first 10 hours. And then I would go six on the minute, then four. As the quality of reps began to diminish, I reduced my number of sets on the minute,

reps on the minute. Did you manage to eat anything during that whole thing? What did you do? So liquid calories, liquid carbs. Digestion takes so much blood. And I needed them to go to where they were working the most. And I think that helped me too. It kept me hydrated as much as I could.

And it kept me on the bar longer. And I didn't feel bloated and stuff. I really wanted a burger. During the truck pull, I ate two Hawaiian pizzas in the middle of it. But it was a different kind of effort. It was like a slow grind versus just being on a pull-up bar for 22 hours. Well, the pineapple has digestive enzymes in it, so it burns up all the calories, right? Yeah.

That's how it works, right? Yeah. That's the way it works, right? Yeah. I'm not, I'm not a nutritionist or anything. When you're doing the, we're going for the pull-up record. Are you allowed to use chalk? Like, are there any things that you can't use as far as like, try to get better leverages on the bar? You couldn't use like, you could use, you could use chalk. You could use things like that. There wasn't really, you just had to grip the bar.

I mean, the standard is pretty simple. Your chin had to clear the bar. You couldn't have excessive swinging through the lower body, so I couldn't kip. There was a certain – my upper body couldn't kip up to get it. You had to go from a dead hang to fully top. But I used a lot of chalk. Chalk was like my only – really my grip. top but i use a lot of chalk chalk was like my only really my grip um and towards the end of the first challenge i had the holes in my hand were so bad that there is a guy who's his only job was

to flush my hands out flush the chalk out of the holes in my hand and repack them in with chalk so for every set for hours he would just flush them out and with his hands push chalk into these holes in my hand so i can still grip the bar um and i did that for like a thousand pull-ups disgusting that must have been a really good friend it was a good friend austin helms his name was austin helms yeah somebody somebody's got to do it if you could kip how many pull-ups could you get there um like just i'm still going i probably do a lot of kips i don't know how many pull-ups I could do. Gotcha. Okay. I like it. No, I'm just kidding.

Kipping pull-up actually sometimes is hard if you've never done them before. Sure. They can be. It's a, it takes like, you got to synchronize yourself into it. Yeah. Moving. It's a new movement pattern. So I guess I could see that technique.

What else has happened to you during some of these during some of these things that you've tried? So like in terms of like to my physical body. 13 miles of tire flipping? Yeah, that one, I would say the most mentally challenged, like you're talking about mental challenge, was probably this tire flip. Because a big reason why I do these events is I want to know how, what my response is going to be in the face of the unknown when the unknown factors come into play. You could prepare and prepare and prepare, but unless you throw the unknown in there, you don't know how you're

going to respond. So I did this challenge, this 13 mile tire flip after I failed the first pull-up challenge. So the first pull-up challenge when I went into hospital was in July. This was in December of the same year. So my dad actually, my dad, he passed away the day before I did this tire flip. He died from complications of Parkinson's disease. That's why it's one of the causes that I do these things for. And when he passed, I had a choice to make. There's the unknown. Reporters were asking whether I was going to, somehow they caught wind. Am I still going to do it? Am I going to postpone it? Am I going to cancel it altogether? And sometimes, you know, success in doing things that are really great, it goes, you have to go against reason. You have to

go against logic. I could have quit. I could have said, I'm going to postpone this a little while. I'm going to grieve. That's what people expected me to do. And I could have got a bunch of people to agree with me, but I would have never known who I was in this moment. Like right here, this is the last 30 feet of this flip. I would have never known the kind of man I was. I would have never been able to test my mettle like that under this precise amount of stress, this unknown factor, if I didn't go forward with it. And I just thought to myself, like, if my dad walked in the room right now, what would he tell me to do? He would say, I want you to live your life with purpose.

And I want you to finish what you started. You set the goal, you finish it. He wouldn't want me to quit. And, you know, like, so I woke up the next morning. I started at 4 a.m., 4.17 a.m., and I flipped that freaking thing for 13 miles. I did it in 10 hours. You see the tire tread coming off on my pants right now. How much does the tire weigh? 250. Yeah.

250. Yeah, we got a 250 one out there. That's our freaking 13 miles i can't even pick that or push that thing to move it back to you know back in place a funny well funny story about this tire flip was about halfway through right so at the halfway mark i'm on the struggle bus and um this old man like pulls up in a car next to me like he goes out of his because i'm on like this 500 foot paved road he comes into the road and he has like a old like vietnam or not you know like a like an old like a korean war hat like he was like you know that thing rolls right

he pulled off just to tell me that like you know those things roll right and he just drove off i was just it was surreal i was just like what okay you're like yeah maybe if no one's looking i can roll it for a little while yeah you know with a lot of what you're talking about you mentioned that whenever you get to a really hard place and some of these labors that you have to you think about why you're doing it that's why you attach a reason you know i think you you mentioned i don't know in the very first pull-up challenge that you did was there uh was there a difference in the way you went about it that caused you to fail or i mean were you just like not prepared for it right i didn't have a strong i didn't have a strong enough why like i i did it again i did it to pull myself i was having i was in a funk right i was going through so i did it to prove to myself that i wasn't weak like

i had to i had to do this physical challenge to to show that I wasn't this, you know, I still could regain my physicality. I reattached myself to this idea that when it was taken from me before, it put me in that same place. It was like a negative feedback loop. I was just, I couldn't let it go. I was like, no, I'm going to show, I got it. I still got it. And it was about me. It was very selfish. And yeah, I had the cause out there on the surface. It made me feel good to do it for a good cause. And I was passionate about the cause. I still am. But the deep, if I'm being honest, the deep reason why I did it was to just kind of pull myself out of this, this thing. I didn't appreciate all the good that I still had going on my life. I still had my health. I still had a job. I still had, you know, food on the table. I still had a family. I still had friends. I had, I had support, but I didn't want to hear all of that because it was all about me. So when I failed the, when I failed the, uh, the challenge, right. I mean, cause I didn't, I was underprepared and there's a lot of things I could blame it on. Like the bar was moving. I had sandbags holding down this mobile bar. So over that many reps, just the shifting of the bar kind of got into my hands,

but those are excuses, right? So when I was sitting in the hospital bed, again, world's smallest violin, this kid walks in and this kid, this teenager walks in with a big smile on his face, doesn't knock the door, knock on the door, just walks in, walks up to my bed. He's like, look, I just want to say how inspired I am by what you tried to do. He didn't care that I didn't beat the record. He didn't care how many pull-ups I did. He was just inspired by the attempt that I would actually do something like that for other people. Come to find out this kid was awaiting an organ transplant that he needed to live. And I'm like, wow, this kid is like way, like, what am I doing? I'm over here making it all about me. And this kid is here with this great attitude.

doing? I'm over here making it all about me. And this kid is here with this great attitude. And I realized in that moment that even at my lowest low, even at the rock bottom in my life, I still had a freaking job to do. I could lead. I could motivate this kid. And the words that came out of my mouth was either going to build them up or break them down, regardless of how I felt about my failure. So when you're going through a hard time, people are always watching you to see how you respond to it. And you might not know it. It might be from afar. They might be too scared

or not have the courage to tell you about it, but they're seeing how you're going to react. And that was so profound. And like, it changed my life when that happened. And from then on, I was like, it's not about me anymore. I'm going to do it for that, for kids and others like him who might be going through a hard time, suffering in silence by themselves. And they see someone out there really pushing themselves for something, a cause that's truly greater than themselves. And keep going.

You are lifting a lot of people. Has someone lifted you? You know, when you were down, you said that you kind of these challenges uh ahead of you that got you out of the rut but was mom or dad or somebody uh you know in your corner a mentor or someone to say hey man like you're not being yourself dude like you're drinking you gained a bunch of weight what are you doing yeah yeah you know a lot of people like i all my work my co-workers they noticed it you know it wasn't i didn't hide it i didn't hide it at all um and i didn't care at the time i was just like leave me alone um my mom she came to one labor and never came back she came to the first of the pull-up challenge and you can see her she's in

that video when i'm in the hospital her face is just like never again will i like this is insane like i don't want to see my son go through like she watched me go through that so she never came to another labor she supports me and what i do she's just you know this how moms are i guess um and then yeah i have friends and stuff there's like yeah you're not being yourself and things like that but when you're in a state where again like you're you're battling your ego and you're um you're blind to those things you don't you don't want to hear it like i'm working it out myself and that's just all ego that's all you go you can't do it alone can't do it by yourself yeah you know i i always urge people that when they see somebody,

just start doing stuff out of character, you know, because I've dealt with a lot of losses in my life too, and a lot of it has had to do with mental illness and drugs, combinations of the two. And when someone just starts acting out of character, they start acting strange or a little different than normal check in with them but you know don't give them the typical hey how's it going because they're going to just say oh it's good and don't let them off the hook you know exactly you know maybe you might

have you might have to do something really hard you might have to give them ultimatum or something you might have to really it's a family member that would be really hard that'd be hard to do it'd be hard to say hey like i'm not your brother anymore if you keep being an asshole right that would be really hard to do but if it's a friend you should tell him like dude i'm here whenever you're ready to make a change but if you're not changing i ain't around goes back to just being the one to run in when everyone else is running out you know i gave this kid a hundred a hundred chances i'm done i'm done with them the, be the one person to give them 101. Right. That one extra chance. And really like, like you said, don't let them off the hook. That's hard. Especially when it's like another

grown man, right? You're is, is, is there's like a thin line there. Like you're, you're kind of in their space, but at the same time, it's like, you're coming from a good place, but it's like, when someone really wants to be left alone, they'll let know um so yeah you just got to just got to keep being there keep keep just be an anchor what's the next one you're going to do you think you got any plans yet seventh labor yeah so uh next month um i'm planning so this is my this will be my seventh labor i'm gonna take a long break after this labor because you know i did probably say that going into each one i bet yeah like uh you know after i did soon this is over yeah this is the last one um no i did six in three years it

took a toll on my body you know i'm i'm human um my my adrenals were shot are shot it took me a long time to recover from this last one so i think if i'm going to finish the 12 i need to take some time off and just kind of recover properly. So in July though, I'm doing another cause for Parkinson's disease research. And I'm basically going to go back to Death Valley. And Death Valley is the lowest point in the country, minus 242 down in Furnace Creek or Badwater. And I'm going to walk from the lowest point in the country to the highest point in the continental United States to the top of Mount Whitney. So it's going to be like a 15,000, over 15,000 feet of gain. And I'm going to do it with 130 pounds of chains on my, on my body. So I'm going to go from about 110 degrees all the way

to the top of Mount Whitney with 130 pounds of chains. How long do you think that's going to take? Four days, hopefully. People die from that, don't they? from like uh that low to that high people have done it people people have done it um i mean you could die you could die walking out of this building yeah i just mean for going from like low altitude to high altitude it takes a little while for your body to get used to it right but at four days maybe enough we'll see yeah it'll be enough damn that one's gonna be wild and then yeah not being well the change well like i was i was talking with david um you know uh the chains symbolize again the uh the the burden you know someone with parkinson's they they're trying to hold on to

their quality of life and each day it's a neurodegenerative disease so each day is chipping away at who the things they love to do. And you can't stop it. You can slow it down, but there's no cure for it. You can't stop it. It's a good analogy because it's not like they're unaware of what's happening. They're aware. They're aware.

Same with the rope climb. Parkinson's, they want to hold on to the things that are most important to them. So I held on to that rope. And again, the chains are the same thing. It closes your body up it's it just makes you look like a physical representation of what someone with parkinson's um actually goes through and resembles we were talking about that earlier what is parkinson's disease parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disease that uh that affects the brain and affects your motor your

motor skills uh primarily so symptoms of parkinson's disease is you see shaking in the hands, usually to one side. You'll see bradykinesia, which is like slow, very slow movement, stutter, step in, their voice gets small, their stature gets small. And they, they slowly just, it just eats away at your, at your nervous system. What do they ultimately end up passing from? at your nervous system. What do they ultimately end up passing from? Complication. So they ultimately will pass from Parkinson's, whatever condition that you get,

like say you get a heart condition or a kidney condition, Parkinson's disease just accelerates. It complicates things. It speeds it up. It's just a bad thing to have on top of other stuff. So if you've got like high blood pressure, if you've got like diabetes, if you got things like the Parkinson's will just make those things, it'll exasperate those things.

What do you do for your nutrition and stuff like that? Getting ready for these events, you know, when you're doing some of these things, cause they're, it's gotta be excruciating. Do you eat a very particular way or? Right. So my nutrition going into this this this challenge is i'm walking for a long time with a lot of with a lot a lot of weight on me right so i'm keeping my protein high i'm trying to get as durable as possible i'm loading my skeleton up my skeletal structure pretty good so i'm eating a lot of foods high in um vitamin k calcium things are gonna make my bone density that much stronger um i'm getting a lot of protein in. I'm getting a lot of carbs. Slow carbs.

Slow digestion carbs. So I'm eating a lot of sweet potatoes. I'm eating a lot of brown rice. Thanks, Dad. I thought slow digestion carbs were cookies. Damn it. You can eat them slow, but they don't digest slow.

It's the filling. I've got to reevaluate the plan I wrote out this morning. The filling and the chocolate chips are slow. It's the other stuff that's fast. That's what checks you up. Double stuffed too? I can't do double stuffed. Double the gains. Double stuffed.

That's why I am who I am. I'm still skinny. I gotta go for the double. Single stuffed. You asked who inspires me. It's Andrew over there. Are you gonna try to lose any type of weight at all to make it? No, no, no. I don't want to lose weight. I'm trying. Are you going to, well, are you going to try to lose any type of like weight at all to make it? No,

no, no. I don't want to lose weight. I don't want to lose weight. I want to stay relative. I want to stay my, about my size right now. I'm two 25 because of the weight of the chains.

Like I need, I need that padding. I need the extra, I need the mass to kind of give me that buffer between my joints and stuff like that. Because if I'm, if I lose any more weight I won't have the muscle to actually put the force into the ground to actually make it up because it's 15 000 feet of gain so i got to be pretty big and it's not a it's not a purely

glycolytic it's not like i'm anaerobic the whole time it's a slow grind so my cardio needs to be on point but i'm not like i'm not like anaerobic the whole time it's like a slow slow grind in terms of like exercise you're doing to prepare for this is there anything you're doing uh a lot of deadlifts a lot of squats doing a lot of uh a lot of core work yeah yeah just like a full gamut of things to kind of prepare um pharma carries and a lot of uh uh yoke walks yoke walks too and i do a lot of a long long hikes with loaded packs so i'm working up to i'm about 100 pounds now working up and down mountains with packs on stuff like you just mix things up a lot like when you do a yoke walk maybe you'll do a real heavy one for a short distance maybe otherwise you'll do a longer one stuff like that so my yoke workouts

aren't i don't do too much it's a yoke it's like a yoke workout so i don't want to i'm already over i'm already loading myself up and i don't super set it with anything i just go for volume for the yoke for the yoke walk and then i that's usually just the workout for the day is like a yoke style workout um i don't go like yoke walk to do like plyometrics or go into like anything like that no i want my such a cool like uh name for an exercise Yeah. That's got to be the best. That's got to be the best name for any exercise and like the dumbest

has got to be a good morning because they hurt so bad and it's just nothing good about it. Anything with a safety squat bar. Yeah. That's a terrible name too. It's the worst. The safety squat bar?

And it's hard. It really hurts. It doesn't feel safe. We get it by looking at it we don't have to call it that yeah it's trying to everything about that says safety you don't have to call it a safety bar anything else in your training that uh you know would be maybe quite a bit different than people might expect uh with any of these uh things that you've done yeah you know i try not to reinvent the wheel like pull-ups i, I did a lot of pull-ups for volume. I trained smart. I listened to my body. I recover. I don't

over, if the quality of reps start to go down, I readjust. I'm always changing my program because my quality reps start to go down. I need to readjust. I don't stick to it because I wrote it down on a piece of paper. And then I have to listen to my body. What my recovery is looking like. These events aren't one hour or two hours. go for days sometimes so i got to make sure that i'm staying in that zone that good recovery zone to where the quality and it's high concept low tech is the way i look at it like i just i i do really well at the simple things the the mundane things that people just kind of say it's boring right like a power lifting program is pretty boring right you're doing the same shit over and over. I'm doing the same thing. Like I'm doing pretty basic stuff. I'm just consistent with it. And I change it depending on how my my body is adapting and feeling. So if you looked at my program on paper, like, oh, there's nothing special about this. But it's it's the consistency in it. And it's the it's the volume in it. And it's kind of like just how I personally recover to, to the load. Yeah. Yeah. There's actually a article called boring, but big. Okay.

It's on a T nation. It was a really popular article years ago. And, um, it's just what you're saying. It's just quality reps, you know, like just get in reps that, yeah, that look like they would count in some sort of competition you know training training is hard and people try to find like that you know different things to do like to find some shortcuts to get in there but you know it's really just yeah boring but big isn't that Wendler um it may have been written by Jim Wendler yeah I remember I did that back in the day five through one yeah that was kind of that was the beginning stage boring as it gets yeah that

was the beginning stages of his 5-3-1 stuff. And, you know, one of the main principles in there is for you to have fun. Like he repeatedly talks about how he wants you to be, he wants you to have fun, but his version of fun is to be successful. And so he doesn't want you to miss reps. He wants you to have, as you just mentioned, good quality reps. I'm not sure why that is so hard for everybody to understand ego they just get so excited they just want to throw more weight on there every time ego is the killer i mean every you know we've had this gym for 12 years and the strongest people that have ever that have ever been here they never miss reps you know maybe

you shouldn't say never but they i can probably count on the two hands that I have. Out of the 12 years, I can go back and recall a few missed lifts from some of the best. Like the best squatter that we ever had here, he squatted 1140. I've seen him. I never saw him miss a squat. You know, the best stand efforting is the best lifter we've ever had here. I saw him miss one bench press the whole time he was here um and the list goes on i mean it's just and then when i try to tell people that in seminars they're like they're not understanding they're not getting it uh i i rarely miss a lift uh if i miss a lift if i was to miss something it would be because i

was doing really high reps and I wanted to do 25 reps and something just went funky on, you know, rep number 23 and I didn't make it for whatever reason, you know, that, that would be kind of the only case. Yeah. I think the only time I've ever seen you quote miss something, it was not even because you miss it. You maybe were going to go for a double and you're like, ah, this doesn't feel right. I'm going to call it there. Right. Other than that, I don't think I've ever seen you miss. Yeah, because the quality rep probably wasn't good. And I was probably like, oh, that wasn't great. It's going to probably be worse if I try another one.

Well, what about like there's some like, you know, novice lifters that say like, you know, you should be scared of the weight or whatever. So you got to push really hard. But like, is it just because you need to learn your limit or? I think there's definitely a learning curve that happens. You know, like if you if you're on a program and there's a bunch of different exercises in there that you've never done before, you might go from a quarter and then put a plate on there and you might like screw up lifting with a plate. So you're like, oh, my God, that smashed me.

I had no idea it was going to happen. But after a few weeks of doing like a floor press or an incline barbell press, or after a little bit of time, then you have some previous knowledge of what you lifted. And hopefully if you're newer, you're keeping some sort of record, you should write some stuff down. Just again, so you're not kind of falling into these pitfalls. But I think a lot of times people are associating the amount of weight that they are going to put on the bar. It's preselected for them by just the simple fact that we have 45s and 25s, which that's a huge mistake. We also have 10s. We also have 5s.

And we also have 2.5s that you could very easily use. So that's usually what I see happening. How about you guys? I see the same thing. Yeah. Like I had a guy um you know i was training and i put some fives and tens on there he's like oh that looks cute that looks that looks like all right all right let's go set a five he struggled he couldn't get it up i was like it's

cute though right yeah so ego is definitely a big killer for progress you know when it comes to that people go off of what they see what they look what they look on what the bar looks like and they feel like if it's not they're not lifting what everyone else is lifting then they're not lifting hard enough and it's just the wrong way to go about training you know on the subject you said you were training a guy the first time i heard about you was from the joe rogan experience i heard colin brady and he's like yeah my trainer is this guy who pulled a truck across death vows like who the fuck is that so like the question i have is, what do you do outside of the labors? Do you work with people like Colin who you trained to go across Antarctica?

What is it that you do? So I train triathletes. I have a couple group training. So I train high-level triathletes. I train a group of Parkinson's disease patients, non-contact boxing. And outside of that, I train guys like Collins. So guys who are kind of doing things that are kind of pushing the limits, right?

Got to think outside the box, got to make specificity. So it's hard to find, it's hard to think of exercises to do that are very specific to doing crazy stuff like walk across Antarctica. You got to get creative. I train fighters, boxers, MMA guys um something to kind of stimulate the research shows that if you can you know find motor skills and cognitive stimulation under high intensity so you get

their heart rate jacked up then you make them focus on the details find motor skills i make them stack pennies you know 50 kettlebells. Now stack these sets of pennies, right? Oh, matter of fact, do it in a plank, put your hands in ice or put your feet in ice and then, you know, stack the pennies, things like that to kind of give them multiple simulation, a lot of unknown variables and have them to still remain that focus and not get tunnel vision when it matters most. So when you're cold, when your hands are cold, your fine motor skills go, your cognitive function goes. You can train that though. You can, you can delay the onset of that fatigue, that cognitive fatigue, and you can delay the onset of that fine motor, um, diminishment, uh, through training, high intensity bouts, high intensity efforts, coupled with cognitive tasks

and fine motor skills. So that's what I did for Colin. Um, and with the fighters, I do the same thing. You're gas, you're, you're in round three or five, you're gas, you get that tunnel vision. No, we could train that. We can, we can, we can train those motor skills and that cognitive function to stay sharp and keep your peripheral wide. Um, during those moments, it's hard work. Um, it's a lot of unknown variables in that, but that's what, that's what a fight is. That's what an unknown environment is like Antarctica. Um, you're going to be hit with that stuff and you have to be able to respond to it because there's little room for area, a little room for error in Antarctica and there's little room for error in a, in a fight. For your, um, stack and pennies in between exercises. Um, you, you said you'd have them kind of in a plank position, right?

Yeah, sure. So I get up and get the heart rate up, boom, get into that plank, and then I'll have them either stack washers on a really thin, like a toothpick, or I'll have them stack pennies. So they're having to focus on stacking pennies, find motor skills to get it on the washer after they just got smoked doing some high-intensity work. So would that maybe help a fighter? They're in the third round or they're in the fifth

round of a championship fight, would that maybe help them to maybe try to calm themselves down and listen to their coach type of thing? Or what do you think it's helping with specifically? Being able to bring your heart rate back down while maintaining focus and work on the fine muscles. On whatever it is you need. They're working on their breathing. So as soon as they're done with that bout, alligator breathing, belly breaths, they're calming themselves down, they're stacking the pennies, they're working on their breathing so as soon as they're done with that bout alligator breathing belly breaths they're calming themselves down they're stacking the pennies they're focusing

on what matters most and it helps you trim the fat when you get rocked or you're really getting gas your brain mind is going like what is happening right now like am i what is my strategy what's going on no you focus on what matters most when it counts either was your coach told you or your game plan that you set out but you can't get tunnel vision and you can't shut down. You got to be able to do the small things. Your accuracy goes to shit when you're gassed. I mean, you can drill punches and strikes all day,

but if you're really gassed, your accuracy, because of your cognitive function and the tunnel vision, is going to go away. You can train that, though. Hit some burpees and hit a free throw. Oof.

Right? Yeah, yeah. Stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that yeah exactly yeah i'd imagine that come holler i mean yeah it needs a little boost and help right now you know oh go ahead no as you say like in a like a corporate setting like if you're going to train like an office or something i think doing stuff like that would be huge yeah i would that would be the one and last time that they bring me back if i did what i did right yeah no that was great i was just thinking like never come back whether it be team building or whatever but like if we did it here i mean i just i think everyone just got upset at me i said that but like yeah you know like doing some kettlebell swings and then i don't some kind of

small minor thing i think it would really like it would really help yeah it's good it actually is good for team building because you know when you do stuff as a team and you really smoke a team everyone gets tunnel vision and they forget about the team and if they if you can just make it about the team and not about you that tunnel vision goes away you know what's also amazing when you do stuff like that is you get to see there'll be someone in the group because it's not it's not just strength or muscle related there'll be someone in the group where you go not just strength or muscle related. There'll be someone in the group where you go, holy shit, I didn't know they had that in them. And it'll be somebody you totally didn't

expect, but they're whooping some ass. Or it would be the opposite. Holy shit, this guy's the one that quit. I would have thought he was the strongest one. You really learn a lot about people. It's a good thing. Yeah, putting my hands or feet in an ice bucket,

I probably won't do so great. I'll try. I'll try anything. It'd be fun. That happens a lot with Bud's training, right? You look around and you see the most jacked dude, and he's real cocky. They're out of there.

Yeah. They're gone. That's weird how that happens, right? Well, you get a guy who's been gifted and talented their whole life, never really had to work to make the team, made varsity their whole high school. You put them and you test them, and you take them out of their comfort zone. Now they're doing something. There's a lot of unknown variables.

Their mind goes first. Mom and dad aren't there. Mom and dad aren't there. Coaches aren't out there giving them a pat on the butt. Yeah, they say, I don't want none of this. I'm not good at this. And they go, first time they've never been good at something, not good at something. So I hear a lot of kids say that.

I think I hear it more now than I ever have in my life. What's that? A lot of kids saying they're not good at stuff. I'm like, well, you just tried it five seconds ago. It's not that you're not good. It's just that someone's better than you right now. Right. There's a difference between being not good at something and someone else just being better than you. You could still be good and have someone be better than you right now. There's a difference between being not good at something and someone else just being better than you.

You could still be good and have someone be better than you. So I think it's the language that these coaches are telling the kids or the parents might be telling the kids. It's like, no, you're not good. You just need to train harder so that you're at this next level. I see it a lot in sports like baseball where you can start playing baseball super young, and then there's just this really huge separation that starts happening as a

couple of kids, you know, are going through puberty and other kids aren't. And then the kids are like, Oh, I'm not, I'm not nearly as good as I thought. And then they just stop.

And it's like, Oh man, like you put in a lot of time and effort into it. You could probably be, you could probably be pretty good if you stick it out. It goes back to letting people off the hook. I just try a different sport then Find a sport you're good at. Okay.

When you work with some of these athletes that obviously like, you know, Colin and these other triathletes, you mentioned that your work in air traffic control helped you build, you know, a baseline of focus, right? Is there anything else that you do nowadays or that you teach people to do outside of their exercises that helps them build their focus for what they do? Right. So focus. That's a good question. Focus is like the way I see focus is that's your razor's edge of performance. So focus is a straight line.

It's here. It's now. It moves with you from second to second to second. It's fluid. Focus is fluid. Now there's fixations and distractions. There's a million things that will pull you away from that line. Relationships, your job, the email, social media, your relationship with coworkers, your relationships with people outside, a million

things. And by the way, your brain operates at about a 10th of a second. These things show up before the alarm clock goes off in the morning. You wake up in the morning, boom, distractions, fixations. So what I tell people to do is write it down. Write down all your distractions. Write down all these things that you're fixated on and start to say, can I let this go for one second? Can I let the emails go for one second? Can I let the social media BS go for one second? Can I let what my mom or my parents are barking at me about for one second just to stay focused in the now and all successes is just stringing those seconds along together if you could let it go for a second you

can let it go for 10 you can let it go for a minute till you get done what needs to be done when you need to do it and that's focus focus is when is clarity and concentration was when they converge and it's hard to do because there's so many things that pull us away from focus these days and people just say well you just need to focus more well what the hell is focus that's focus focus is your razor's edge focus is now so write down the things that are most distracting you and just start erasing them one by one erase them one by one that's what i tell people to do makes a lot of sense with what you do, like with, with all the labors that you do, you know, especially when I, obviously I can't imagine it, but when you're, you know, hour 20 in, it's just something that you're doing and you have to just take that next step. I imagine that

that's what you're, you're doing at that moment. Cause you're so, you feel so broken. No, I'm stepping on pepperoni slices at that point. Thinking pizza, man. So is pizza your jam then? You brought it up twice now. Are you trying to say it's fat? Nope, just curious. That's kind of rude. I'm not going to tell somebody to easily kick my ass at 30. Between you and me only, yes.

Okay. It'll be our little secret. I won't tell nobody else. Good thing this isn't live. Gummy bears and dark beer, too, are my jam. That's my post-labor. Usually gummy bears and dark beer. Nice.

It's a good combination. Post-workout? That's good for you. It cleans your blood. It's high in antioxidants. There's a study somewhere that shows that. Yeah, it's good. Drink up.

Yeah, your body has to deal with the alcohol first because it's like a poison. But then all the carbohydrates come shuttling back in behind it. There's definitely some science. We've got to research this a little further. Andrew, put that in the notes. All right, I'll call Joel Green. He'll figure it out. Yeah, he'll have some answers for us.

Joel Green. He'll figure it out. Yeah. He'll have some answers for us. I think a lot of times concentration is the ability to like you're saying, block out the distractions. So I think that that's great that you're teaching people that because I don't think people have a clear idea

of what concentration is. Like, I'm just going to focus in on this thing more. And yeah, that might work for a little bit, but you're going to go bink and you get distracted again. Multitasking is a killer of focus. You can't multitask and focus and be purely focused at the same time. You focus on one thing and you get it done. You set your laser, you set your target, you knock it out.

Boom. What's next? What's next? What's next? What's next? What's next? Because if 50, if 20,

let's say focus is that line and 25% of my focus is on the future, right? Or it's on the past. It's something I was stuck in traffic earlier today. And then 25% of my focus is on how bad the rest of the day is going to go. Cause I'm already late and I'm already, so what's left for me now? What percent is left for me right now? 50%.

And I don't think any coach in the world has taught you to to half-ass anything but yet we half-ass focus all the time because we're fixated on things either that may or may not happen in the future or things that have already happened that we have no control of any longer so trim the fat focus on now what could i do now that's going to keep me moving forward how do you teach people to to go through this pain? You know, is there, is there inner dialogue that you try to teach some people? I know, I know some of the people that are coming to you probably, you know, already have a strong mindset, but like we can all have a stronger mindset. And then also is there like, you know, outer dialogue that you give them

if you're working with them in person or are there things that you foresee may be a challenge when they're doing something and you say hey like you're gonna you know when it comes to this point you're gonna have to do you have kind of like words of wisdom to kind of kick to them and what do you teach them about inner and outer dialogue all right well the the biggest barrier that I get especially with high-level athletes who are competing at the very top level, is they tell me what is called their secret goal. Everyone has a goal, but everyone also has a secret goal. So they'll come to me like, yeah, I'm doing this Ironman. I want to finish with the pack.

I just want to finish. I just want to finish the Ironman. That's my goal. But their secret goal is like, if I don't finish in the top 5%, I'm going to be crushed, right? I'm going to be destroyed. And I'm going to take, they're going to take that. If they don't finish in the top 5%, they're going to take those feelings of, they're not going to be satisfied if they just finish. And they're going to take that into the next race. So I'm going to say, okay, well now what's your real goal here? Is it really just to finish with the pack? Let's unpack that a little bit. Is it,

or is it to finish a very specific goal? And what happens is they're scared to say that because either they don't have the time commitment to train for that top 5% or they have some fears about not being able to perform. So now we have something to work with. Now I'm like, okay, so you have some fears, you have some time commitment issues. Let's attack those and make this secret goal your actual goal and let's find a real way to get to it. But it takes a lot. You got to dig deep into someone to get to what those limiting beliefs are. Everyone has limiting beliefs. And for me, it's like with working with these athletes, it's like I want to know what those limiting beliefs are.

Okay, you feel like you're not good enough. What does that really mean? Who told you that? Okay, did your coach tell you that? Did your mom tell you that? No. Okay. Who told, Oh, you told yourself that? Oh, why'd you tell yourself that? Oh, you made it up. Okay. Like we, you gotta just unpack layers and it's hard. It's a process to do that with people. So I'm packing, I'm packing a lot of luggage to kind of get to the limiting beliefs. Then we destroy that limiting belief. So then when they come back to the surface, they come back stronger and more determined and focused than ever. And those

limiting beliefs aren't, aren't pulling them away from their focus anymore. You feel like some people may think they're not deserving of something. I'm not worthy is a big one that comes up. I say, I have them write it down and what'll always happen. I'm not worthy. I'm not lovable. I don't deserve it. I'm not good enough. Like, I'm not this. I'm not that. Those are, those are, and it, okay, well, what's underneath all that? You know, it's like, sometimes they'll say, it's like, I don't have time. Okay.

Let's go deeper. And it'll always narrow down to like, I'm not worthy. I'm not like, it'll get pretty deep. So we need to find the room. You can break it down and try to make it make more sense. And you can think, you can say, hey, do you honestly think the guy that won last year was really, you know, so that guy actually really better than you? Like you think that guy was born with like more gifts or more talented or you think he just wanted it more? Or you think he was just better at that hour, that second, that day.

Right. So the main reason you do this is like because like Mark Mark, he was asking like, uh, helping them get through the pain and you believe that helping an individual get to the most, the deepest why of why they're doing something is going to be the thing that helps them get through the painful periods of what they're going to be doing. that you give. Yeah. Pain is directly correlated with the effort that you're giving it. Pain is never the focus. So I don't, I don't teach people how to endure, how to pain, how to suffer more because that's not the focus. It's just the symptom, right? So if you're climbing a mountain, the focus shouldn't be on the pain of each step. If that's your focus and you shouldn't have started the climb to begin with, cause you weren't ready. If that's your focus, the focus is the, is the journey as a whole. Why are you doing this? So if you're focused, I'm doing this because I want to go through pain.

I want to suffer. I want to do. Okay, if that's your focus, I mean, I don't see the growth in that. If that's the focus, it's a symptom. It's going to be there regardless. The first of Buddha's four noble truths is life is suffering. That's a given. So why are you making something that's a given your baseline?

And if you really want to suffer, just don't train for it. Exactly. And by the way, if you don't train for it, you're going to suffer anyway, because you're going to suffer the pain of regret, right? So there's always, there's always a consequence for either. I, the way I approach is always have a bias towards action. If given a choice between to do nothing or to take action towards something, whether you were scared, whether you're not have a a bias towards action because people regret things that they didn't do, not things that they did. They regret more things that they didn't do. So for me, it's like pain is obvious. I do these events. Pain isn't obvious. It's a given. Let's not focus on that. Let's focus on why I did it.

What would compel someone to go through that type of suffering? What's the cause? That's your why. It's the meaning behind the suffering. Not enough people know why they're suffering. Who are you willing to suffer for? I carry these loads for miles, right? Whose load are you willing to carry? And by the way, who's carried your load for years? Who's carried your burden?

Who have you put a burden on? Why have you done? Like, those are questions you got to ask yourself. And behind those questions is why, is why is the purpose, right? I can see why. Uh, I remember when we were in the break room, I, you mentioned like the labors that you do. And I was like, Oh, that sounds like suffering. And you said, uh, you could look at it that way. And there's a long pause and I can see exactly why you said that perspective. Yeah. and I can see exactly why you said that perspective.

Yeah. I like what you're saying about this, this bias towards action, because I think we have a tendency to think that, you know, when we mess up, we have a tendency to think, oh man, okay,

shit, this slides downhill. You're not cheating on my diet. Most will keep going. And, but the reverse is true too. You can get, like you're saying with this truck pull, you know, once the truck stops, the inertia to try to get that thing to move again is really, really difficult. But with movement, it continues to move.

It continues to build upon itself. What I tend to share with people very often is the more that you do, the more that you can handle, do more, be more, the more that you have the opportunity to become. And so when somebody's, you know, sitting on the couch and they're kind of contemplating, should I, or shouldn't I, you should just, just should just go, just go, whatever that is that you were going to do, whatever that thing was that you keep talking about, just figure out a way to make it happen. And even if it's a half-assed version of you trying something for like people, a lot of times they ask yourself, well, I'm not ready to do it. I'm not ready to do this. This is a big goal. I'm not ready. I'm not ready. That's the wrong question. Ask yourself if you're, are you willing? Cause if you're willing to do it, then it'll, it'll, it'll fall into place. Cause you're never

going to be ready for, you know, the setbacks, the failures, the people that are going to just walk away from you. You're not going to be ready for the disappointments. You're not going to be ready for the early, early mornings, the late nights. You're not going to ever be ready for that fully. But if you're willing to go through that, because will is stronger than readiness. I'd rather be a willing person than to think that I'm ready. So you could be ready and still fail. But if you're willing, that's, that's going to, I mean, if you're willing, you fall on your back because you can get back up. So I'd rather be willing. So ask yourself if you're willing to take on the challenge that you're willing to to go into this fight, knowing that it's possible that you could fail. But at least I'm willing to do it. So, you know, that makes me wonder, like with with all these labors that you're doing. Right.

I mean, you said that people have done it before. I just can't imagine how you could even really know if you're ready for such a task, no matter how much training you do. You don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I know that I'm willing to do what it takes to get it done, but I mean, I failed the pull-up challenge. I wasn't ready for that kind of failure,

but I'm very willing to do these things. So I think that's what sets the difference. Where do you think that came from? I think my parents instilled a lot of this in me. I think my mom is, she's a hard charger. My mom didn't, she's your traditional like dragon mom. My mom's Filipino and she's like first generation. So she didn't take any excuses for me.

And it was, yeah. So she kind of let me know, like, you know, no excuses. You're going to get it done. And so that's kind of like the mindset I had. My dad was a little bit more easygoing. You know, big guy, strong guy, but just kind of took things easy. That looks hard to flip that log over like that. So this is training.

I was training for the truck pull a lot of these beach. So one thing with these labors is like for a truck pull, I didn't pull a truck until about maybe like a month out. I pulled a truck maybe two times in training. I dragged water laden logs up and down the Oregon coast and up mountains to train because my philosophy is like, if I'm stronger than my environment, there's nothing that can, that I can't do. If I can beat my environment, if I can beat all these external factors. So I put myself out there. I had these logs, I had stones up and down mountains. Um, and I really wanted to master my environment to master my internal environment. So, um, same thing with the rope climb. It's like, that's my dad right there. Um, that was the last

like picture that I took with him. Um, I didn't take many pictures with my dad climb. It's like, that's my dad right there. That was the last picture that I took with him. I didn't take many pictures with my dad. That's a bit of the tire flip. So yeah, so master your environment is one thing that I really, like if you're scared, like if you're going to box someone, if you're in a fight, I don't want to see that person every single day. I'm going to war with the rope or the tire or the truck. I don't want to be around it every single day.

I want to train. And it helped me find creative ways to, to still train for it and not actually do the thing that I was going to go to war with whenever I, whenever I did it, the labor. Um, do you have like your own gym or you got a spot where you train people out of, or you train people, you know, cause some of that stuff was like on the beach. Like, yeah. So, uh, before I moved to Portland, uh, when I was still in the service, I trained outside a lot of times. I trained at a gym called North End Fitness in Oak Harbor for some of my accessory work, but most of it was outside. I got out there cold, wet, rainy. In Portland, I trained out of a

gym called Evolution Healthcare and Fitness. They're like a comprehensive fitness facility. They have an altitude room, which really helped me. I was able to like simulate altitude up to 21,000 feet. Cool. Kind of helped my conditioning. I trained college in that room, too. So I trained and coached out of there as well. So it's a good little spot in Portland. You ever done a powerlifting meet or anything like that?

I never did a powerlifting competition. I'd be interested to know. You ever get into bodybuilding? Like maybe not even bodybuilding show, but did you bodybuild? Like a lot of us started with some sort of bodybuilding type stuff. I started with bodybuilding stuff. Curls for the girls. That's right. So in terms of like the type of people you're going to be training,

is there a, because obviously you train guys like Colin Triathletes, but are there other types of athletes that you have been able to train that you want to train or you're just working with everyone at this point? I work with a lot of variations, just a spectrum. I train high level. I train a lot of rugby players, football players, collegiate high school level, just a large variety of athletes,

fighters, boxers, triathletes, ultra marathoners, marathoners. Because for me, my philosophy is like, the foundation is strength. You get any athlete strong, their performance is going to go up. Then you get specific. Then you start tailoring. So, I mean, the formula is really simple. I think it's the mindset and the setting of the goals that really –

Oh, he's holding the plate. Yeah, this is Brayden Vary. He's one of my high school guys. We just had a camp, a recruiting camp. He's like a big kid. Yeah, yeah. Outside line. He wants to play outside line.

We just had a camp in University of Montana a couple days ago. We were out there. And Jacob Smith is this other kid who went to a camp at Notre Dame. So this is some of the movements. I love that trap bar. Yeah, trap bars are great. Waking up hip flexors here. What are, like, with your training,

what are some things that you might do in a normal training session like what does it look like when you're obviously it would matter kind of who you're working with but you kind of just uh throughout your philosophy of like just making them stronger it's going to help a lot so uh what do you normally do with people so we set goals first thing we go is we get very we take about take about two hours to just set some hardcore goals. The limiting beliefs, that's a session. And after that, you feel like you went through a two-hour workout mentally. So once we have the goals set, basically, yeah, we make them strong. I think strength is the natural human condition to be strong.

So if you get stronger, and by strong, I mean barbells. I get them under barbells, squat, deadlift, bench press, standing press. And then from there, we get their strength to a certain level, and then we get specific. We start adding in the variables, and we train power, depending on what their sport is. No one can ever not, anyone, any athlete can gain from being able to put more force in the ground. And any athlete can gain from, like, here we go, we're more specific here.

This is a boxer. He's getting, this is Chad McKinney. He's getting ready to fight in a couple weeks in California. Or, I'm in California. So, yeah, down in the Globe Theater in Los Angeles. Cool. Getting ready to fight. Yeah, he's a couple boxers.

So, yeah, then we get specific. And then throughout the whole process is I'm throwing, I put the volume up front, the volume work up front. Then we get specific and very, you train, you study often, you test seldomly. So I put all the basics, the volume up front. Then I throw in the hard stuff, stuff the intervals but very seldomly because i don't i crush you but i don't crush you a whole lot i don't test you every single day i give you time to study for the test and the studying is the basics so a lot of it what you don't see here's my parkinson's class this guy animals animals they're so focused such a good attitude andrew

nico uh works with a group like that as well yeah he previously was he he previously was. He's no longer doing it, but he was doing that, and he was very passionate about it. Yeah, a friend of ours was doing that for a few years. Yep, good group of guys. So, yeah, so put the volume up, Brett. Then you test seldomly because I don't want to smoke. I don't smoke you every single session. I mean, a lot of trainers, if you're not smoked,

then you didn't work hard. No, you're avoiding the truth, avoiding the, you're avoiding the truth. And the truth is like lifting heavy and getting on a bar is hard work. It's not really glamorous. It's boring, but you got to do that stuff to build. You got to build your strength up. And then towards the end, once we established an aerobic base, I throw in the tests and the tests are soul crushing,

but I don't do them often. But you learn so much about yourself. Like this test I did with Colin, I got a couple of videos up there, Colin with the ice buckets and stuff like that. If you go further down, but those things, I didn't train him like that every single day. I did the basics first and then, okay, let's apply it to some specific stuff. Let's get creative and see how you, how you transfer. So a lot of it's, you know know the way that you've been training should have there you go should have led you to handle this progression right uh yeah yeah yeah pretty much actually uh it's not that one i think it's further down the actual one that i did did you ever make the mistake

that most traders make of just like crushing people every single session um when i very very very i think i've been doing this for about 11, 12 years. But when I first started, I thought that's what you had to do. Like I crushed people and it just wasn't, they weren't getting the results. They weren't coming back. And yeah, it's higher.

It's up more than that. It's a couple of videos up. But yeah, so I used to crush people. I mean, it's a common question. I get like, do you crush people? People think I crush people all the time. No, that's just what you see. There's a lot of boring, mundane stuff that goes around in the background.

It would also just depend too, right? Like if it was somebody that just wanted to kind of get a taste of how hard they should be going, then you might give them a good dose of it, right? To say, hey, this is kind of what it looks like. I'm not going to annihilate you today, but we're going to get a little close so you can see and feel it. Maybe it's somebody that doesn't train with you all the time. Yeah.

Well, I have some basic assessments, like a very bottom line standard. If they can't meet that standard, if they're struggling, then we got some work to do. But it's never with the intent to crush them. They're just not meeting the minimum standard of where they should be for their sport or whatever they're doing. They might feel crushed, but it wasn't my intent to crush them.

It's never my intent to crush you. Well, actually it is. If I'm testing you down the line, then yeah, I do want to, because you got to know how you're going to respond when you're, when you're creating crush.

Do you do some of the workouts with people sometimes get them fired up? Sometimes if I'm having fun, but I mean the athletes I coach, like I gotta be, I'm looking for stuff like, you're right. I'm looking for everything. So like if I'm having fun, but I mean, the athletes I coach, like I gotta be, I'm looking for stuff. Like I'm looking for everything. So like if I'm working out with them, I might miss something that could be detrimental if I don't correct it now. So I'm not one of those coaches who work out with them.

They're welcome to work out with me when I work out by myself. That's on them. But I wouldn't recommend doing it while they're training up for an event. Right. And then your Parkinson's group, it looked like they were doing some of the same exercises that some of the other group was doing. It looks like they were boxing and moving around kettlebells and things like that, right? A lot of the fine motor stuff in the cognitive stuff I get from the Parkinson's class because it helps them. So if it can help

someone with a neurodegenerative disease, then it'll help you with the normal brain chemistry, even enhance those skills. Because it works. It's proven to work with them. It reverses the symptoms. It slows it down. So I pull a lot of that stuff from my work with the Parkinson's. Where did you get some of the, because like when you mentioned, you know, the stacking the pennies,

I've never heard of that before. So like where did you get some of these principles and ideas? Did you learn from someone or how did you come about it? A lot of it is, it just takes a lot of creativity like you you know fine motor skills are you are using like your fingers like okay so how can we how can we translate that into an exercise um so a lot of it is like what does the research show well they don't really go into detail what they're actually doing but they go into detail of what the the symptoms are the reduce okay so let's stack pennies let's see if that works okay that did it sometimes i'll i'll suspend a a 10 pound weight from some bands with a loop in it and i'll just have them poke a pvc pipe through it right from a lunch and i'll move

that weight back and forth so they got to time it it's in it's focused they're moving their heart rates up it's just little things like that it just takes a little creativity to kind of yeah um once you have the basic understanding of what's going on in the brain then you can kind of get creative with it for the uh the push-up we have mark bell slingshot is there anything similar to that for the pull-up for the pull-up i i wouldn't use i i don't really use bands for for pull-ups um and i explained this in the in the video that in the youtube videos we shot today is the reason why i don't like using bands for assistance in the pull-ups is because the initial movement to do a proper pull-up is scapular retraction pull the shoulder blades back pull them down in your back pockets the bounce at the bottom of the banded pull-up

eliminates the strength requirement of pulling back and down because you bounce out of it. So you don't recruit the rhomboids and you don't pull the shoulder blades down. People rely too much on the bounce to get that. So they're really training the top half of the pull-up with the bands.

And then they take the bands away and they're still struggling from a dead hang, a proper dead hang pull-up and initiating that first movement so i progress them through either negatives working from the top down to the bottom and we just do scat pulls scat pulls we work on the dead hang if you can't hang on the bar you're not pulling yourself up anyway so if you don't have the strength to really get a good grip on the bar activate the last by pushing breaking that bar in half, pulling your shoulders back and down, then there's no way you're going to do a pull-up anyway. A band's not going to make you better.

It may have someone hang for 30 seconds at a time for a little while or something like that. Exactly. A band might make you feel good because you're doing reps, but are you really doing reps? Or is that band really, you're bouncing out the bottom of that pull-up. How about some accessories then? Hollow body holds.

A pull-up is you're using your whole kinetic chain. So any accessory you do should incorporate the whole posterior chain, should incorporate the whole bringing force from that bar down your whole chain unbroken. So if you're doing accessory work, like I don't like doing lat pull-downs to accessorize pull-ups because there's a certain weight where you're pulling down where your hip flexors, the barrier, right? That's not natural to pull-ups. You're not holding a 90-degree hip flexion while pulling up.

So it transfers a little bit, but not as much as doing like a hollow body hold and progressing from the ground up, like setting the bar lower and starting on your bottom, lifting your hips up and pulling up like that. So I like to do the movement. The accessory movements should be specific to the movement that you're doing. And, and lap pull downs aren't, aren't as specific enough to replicate a pull up. How about like a fat guy row? You ever do those?

Like where you lay on your back and you set the bar in the rack and you, and you pull yourself to the bar. Oh, is that what they're called? Yeah. We were doing that. I just, I think we were doing those earlier today. I didn't have a name for it. I just found it to be an effective, but basically you're on, they're hard. Yeah. That's my call. We were doing that. I just, Fat Man Rose. I think we were doing those earlier today.

I didn't have a name for it. I just found it to be ineffective, but basically you're on your, They're hard, yeah. You're on your back and you slide, right? Yeah. Okay, yeah.

Definitely. Now to make that even challenging, put yourself in that hollow body hold, then pull yourself to the bar. Like that should be the proper way to do that. Yeah, we do those from time to time and it's weird because you just die on them

out of nowhere. Like at first, they're not that bad and you're like, oh, these aren't that bad. Right. And then all of a sudden your strength starts to go.

Sometimes we'll put our feet up on a box, you know, we're laying on our back and we're just pulling on the bar. Excellent. Yeah, it's a good movement. Lights your lats on fire.

It does, yeah. Feels great. You're doing it right. Yeah. Thank you. Well, how did you hook up with this guy right here, David? David Skolnick, yeah. He's a colleague of mine. He used to work with me at the gym in Portland Evolution.

And we did a couple of workshops together. He's a physical therapist working out of Santa Rosa now. Really knowledgeable. Started his own thing in Santa Rosa, Stronger in Motion. So yeah, we did a lot of workshops and seminars together. We got one planned for later this year. So he's kind of like collab on a lot of things. That's exciting. Good dude, too. Yeah, he trains out there at, how do you say it? San.

San. San. Nom San? I always say it wrong. Nom San? Is it San? Yeah, that gym is wild. Yeah, that's how they do it.

Yeah, he's up there with Nick. Yeah, that gym is freaking crazy you ever seen that gym before? which gym? Saiyan Strength? no I have not I've been there? I have been there

they got the Goku okay they have the Dragon Ball yeah I like that place it's pretty cool that place has like every piece of equipment that you could

possibly jam into a place have you ever had a chance to train with David Goggins or communicate with him at all? David and I, it's a funny story. So when I was in the Navy, I was temporarily assigned to the Navy SEAL and SWCC scout team and basically responsible for being mental conditioning coaches

and physical training coaches for teams that would come in for these boot camps right these little sessions and david um back when i was there we crossed paths briefly he was the the lcpo at the time and i was just there you know kind of under him and we would go on runs every once in a while he's a good guy beast of a man um really uh yeah he's really something else he's an animal so yeah definitely he set the bar for me to do the pull-up record, so all the respect in the world to David. Again, I appreciate

anyone who's willing to put themselves out there and set the bar because that takes a lot of courage to do that, especially being a guy like David's size and my size to do that and just take on the challenge. You have your eyes set on any other type of world records or any

trying to break your own pull-up record or something like that? No, I'm kind of, you know, honestly, like records will be broken. You know, people who broke records will be forgotten. And for me, it's more about the, the why I did it. I want people to remember the legacy I leave behind, the inspiration. I really don't care about the records too much. I don't care. You know, I encourage anyone to come and try to beat the record i will help anyone that wants to beat the record um i think

it's a great thing for people to get after it push himself um but for me it's not a personal goal to just want to keep one upping the same record i want to move on and do other things um i want to do some things in the water i want to do some things in the cold i want to do some things uh when i'm older i want to kind of get rid of the stigma that if you're a certain age you you got stop being active like no like so a lot of things on on the horizon that i'm looking forward to yeah the stuff in the cold is pretty crazy ever see like the stuff that wim hof does yeah wim hof is uh is another very special special guy yeah they've like done like tests on him and he's like, is changing the temperature of the water that he's in and things like that.

Look at the water he's drinking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's true too. What, um, uh, has anybody ever run any like tests on you while you're doing some of these different things to kind of see, you know, what the hell is this guy made out of? Um, recently I've gotten some, like just recently I've gotten some requests from some universities to do some tests. But initially when I first started this, I was kind kind of like no one really knew people i had doctors

that quit like quit being my doctor like oh they didn't want to they didn't want to be part of it they want to be a part of it they say it's humanly impossible your body cannot your heart will explode basically truck pull your heart's gonna explode pull-ups no you can't you're not your your tendons are gonna rip off of your bone like you're too big to be able to do that many pull-ups. I'm not signing off on this. I was still in the military. I went to an exercise physiologist. They gave me the science on why, basically the science of why I'm going to fail at this thing.

And I'm like, thank you. Men's Health Magazine did an article, and they said reasons why this was going to be hard and challenging and almost impossible. Most of the talking points are how it's almost impossible, but it never is. And, yeah, I was just kind of like, if anyone wants to do some tests on me, they're more than welcome to. There's not much I wouldn't do for science. I'm a big science nerd, but, you know, we'll see.

Do you get an opportunity to do seminars, things like that too? I do seminars, yeah. I talk to a lot of, like, college like that too? I do seminars, yeah. I talk to a lot of college athletes. Basically, I go travel to corporate side too, the team building stuff we were talking about. Because a lot of these things I think are applicable, especially on the mindset side of just kind of working with the team and being able to kind of cut the fat and really focus on what matters most,

whether it's job productivity, marketing, just working together as a team leadership things like that um i do a lot of talks and seminars on that that type of stuff yeah that's cool yeah um you work with any fighters that are uh in ufc no not currently um i work with a couple boxers professional boxers and you used to box quite a bit yourself no i wasn't a boxer i wasn't a boxer i wasn't a boxer just trained the strength the strength and conditioning component of it i i've kind of taken on because i just see i could just see the the it's it's applicable oh hit a bag for 30

seconds you feel like you're gonna die it transfers yeah and so and i'm really i'm really focused on on the mindset of it too so i think that's like 90 of it is just the mindset of of being able to keep going and and train so a lot of a lot of fighters especially um most more than most athletes have a lot they carry a lot of luggage a lot of baggage into these training camps a lot of personal stuff and you might have a very talented gifted fighter but if they're struggling with some stuff that they think they have no control over, that's going to reflect itself in their performance. So we want to chip away at that and we want to do some things that are going to challenge them in a way they've never been challenged before. What do you think comes first, being prepared or confidence? I think that people confuse not being prepared and thinking they're not prepared. So you can think that you're not

prepared. You know, you might have a lot of anxiety going into a lift or an event. You might think you're not. That's natural. That's normal to feel that. You might think that's. Then you could not be prepared. And not being prepared is you know in your heart of hearts that you didn't put in the work.

You skated off on those weekends when you should have been running. You should have been doing the conditioning. You didn't stick to your diet. You didn't train as hard as you know you should have been. You didn't stick to the plan. And that's not being prepared. And there's a difference between the two. Sometimes athletes might think they're not prepared, but they actually are.

And that we can work with. Okay, let's break that down. Now, if they're really not prepared, it's a simple answer. It's like you didn't do the work. It's hard work. And you didn't want to do it for one reason or another. So, you know, there's not too much you can do if they just didn't prepare. So. You're a passionate about mental health. And, um, we talked a little bit about suicide earlier. Do you really think you could help people, uh, you know, not end up committing suicide? Or do you think that some of the people that say like, I was going to do that, but I chose not to maybe just weren't

going to do it anyway. I think that talking about it helps. I think that it helps eliminate the stigma behind going through a hard time, especially, you know, um, it's a vulnerability, you know? And I think the more we talk about it, the more that stigma of like it being a weakness or it being something you should be, you should keep to yourself. The negative stigma around it is something that we need to chip away. And it happens locally. It happens in your circle of friends, in your family, in your community. You got to change the way you perceive it, the way we perceive people who are struggling, because there's not a single person on the planet who's not going through something in their mind at some point in their life. So it's kind of like having that empathy for other people and and just being there

being that anchor and being the one that runs in every single time so i think there's a negative stigma around um you know suicide depression and things like that so i think the more we talk about it the more like i'm i'm not i'm not afraid to be vulnerable i'm not afraid to put my heart on my sleeve i i'm an emotional guy. During these labors, I tear up all the time and talking about it. I'm very passionate about it. I don't care what people perceive me

because I want to be as real as authentic as possible. I think that there's a stigma about showing that emotion and being able, you have to keep this wall up. Like, no, you don't. It takes a stronger person to show that side of you. It takes a stronger person to be vulnerable. I mean, if a guy can pull a truck across Death Valley and be on this podcast and tear up talking about it, I mean, that's got to say something. And that just shows passion and you really getting in touch with your purpose.

And so I think if we can get the message out that, hey, it's OK. It's OK if you're going through stuff. It's just OK that you feel like you're in this dark place. We've all been there and you can come out of it. I've been there. I came out of it and I will be there for anyone who is going through it. So mental health can be complicated. That's for sure. Yeah. You know, you mentioned that you had that depressive episode after you, um, or you had depression after you, you know, your ACL and then your meniscus. Um, have you ever had to deal with anything like that since, or what is it that that's kept you, I guess, from that feeling? Um, I think, well, injury wise, that's probably the most, the worst injuries I've had was probably to my knees. I mean, I've, I've, I've had, when I did the a hundred day run, I had, I, I broke almost all the metatarsals in my feet.

You know, my lower shin, I had like six stress fractures in my right tib fib and a couple in my left as well. Kidneys started shutting down, but you know, you recover from those things once it's done. But the ACL and the meniscus, that was the longest injury I had to go through. And if you can get, if you can bounce back from one, you can bounce back from it all. It's just about the mindset, how you look at it. If I was in a wheelchair, I would see it as an opportunity to another vehicle for me to like literally a vehicle for me to inspire other people. There's no, there's nothing that could happen to me. As long as I have a pulse in my vein and a breath, I know that I can, it's an opportunity for me to still inspire people some way. It's not the end of the world.

And, and I think that's the biggest lesson that these labors have taught me is like, there's nothing like you could take away my arms. You could take away my leg, just keep my, my brain, my lungs, my heart. I'll, I'll, I'll push you to do better. I can do it. Like I'll, I'll find a way. How, um, what are some ways that you think, uh, can help some of these, um, people in the military that've had, uh, you know, PTSD and things like that talking about it, I guess is one way, I guess, uh, raise an awareness like you're doing, um, you know, would be another way, but do you think like the military, like, do you think that there's, it seems like there's more awareness about it now seems like they're maybe doing a better job of it

but you being in the military previously do you think there's some other things they could do better i think that you know the system uh you know the government there's things that can always be improved upon no system there's no perfect system there's always going to be areas for improvement but i think the focus shouldn't be on the system. You got to start from inside. The focus should be on, well, who am I being? Like, how can I improve myself even 1%? I have this big, thick wall of armor that's holding me down. How can I chip away one chunk away from this armor today? What is it that I keep telling myself today? What is it I'm not worthy? Well, why?

What is the evidence in your environment that shows that you're not worthy? Who's telling you that? And what makes their opinion of you that valid? Like what justifies that? And if the answer, I mean, if you really think about those things and the answer, like, why should I keep going? Why shouldn't I? Like, these are questions you have to ask. And you'll see if you're really honest with yourself and you'll see that, you know, there's actually a lot of people who really give a crap about you. There's a lot of people who want you to succeed. There's a lot of people who know what you're going through and have been there before and that are willing to talk about it. I'm willing to talk about it. And so I think that we could point our fingers at the government.

We could point our fingers at the systems. We can point our fingers, but you know what? I come from a place where it's like, and this is me personally. I can't speak for every vet. I can't speak for everyone. But I came to a place where I got sick and tired of pointing my finger. You know, like I turn my excuses into reasons. Because I'm going through this hard time. Therefore I will come back stronger because I'm heavier than most. I'm going to do 5,804 pull-ups.

I don't care what the doctor says. All these excuses that I had to point my finger at, I turned them into reasons to succeed. And it's a hard thing to do. But once you do it, once you start making things into reasons and doing things in spite of what most people say is wrong with you, average people, most is average. Most people will tell you, no wonder why you're messed up. Oh, you went through A, B and C and D. Yeah, you're screwed up, man. You need to get some meds. Most people will say that. Average people will say that.

But if you want to be extraordinary, you want to be outstanding. If you want to be, you know, if you want to break that stigma You guys start thinking no i'm not most people though I'm, not most i'm different. All right, and and that's that comes from turning your excuses into reasons Life will break you down six ways to sunday All you got to do is find the one reason the one reason that it won't take you down And it's a hard thing to do but it takes a lot of soul searching and it takes talking about it. So if anyone out there is going through anything,

I mean, I'm sure you can put my contact information up there. Reach out to me. I'll talk to you about it. If no one else. I like what you're saying a lot because I think a lot of times when somebody does have mental health issues, I think that they are thinking about medication.

I think they are thinking about a doctor stepping in and the government stepping in and everyone else stepping in. And it's like, well, I'm sorry, but you might have to step in on yourself. You know, like hopefully you got people around you that are going to support you because we all need that. If someone's really low and someone's really down, it's going to be hard for them to get momentum, right? But hopefully there's enough encouragement around to just get you that little boost momentum but you're going

to have to figure out something for yourself exactly i mean you can't really uh you can't cheer for yourself if you think you're a loser you know you have to there has to be an accomplishment there has to be something that you did where you're like, okay, well, I did that. I got up off the couch. I went to the gym today or whatever that small step would be. You did something. Now you got something to be proud of. Now you can kind of get behind it. You can get behind yourself and you start cheering for yourself and you can start getting that momentum that we're talking about. Little, little victories, value, the value of little victories. Yeah. Cool. Got anything else, Andrew?

Value the value of little victories. Cool. Got anything else, Andrew? What do you want to be remembered for? Now, I'm not saying you're not going anywhere, but like you came in today and we instantly hit you with pull-up tips, pull-up videos, pull-up mistakes, pull-up this, pull-up that. Do you want to be labeled as the pull-up guy or something bigger? You know what uh like i said the the physical stuff is just it's the vehicle for my message and you know i think great people they're not remembered people who we look in history that are that we say okay they're

they're immortalized they're they're it's not because of what they did defied death. It's because the things they did, right, are remembered forever. It's the things, it's the deeds. So people can, I mean, honestly, people can forget me, my face, my name, the records, whatever. But I hope they remember that at one point there was a guy who refused to be defined by limits, who wasn't afraid to step outside the box and challenge himself, get after it. And these are principles. These are values. These are virtues that have stood the test of time, discipline, courage, you know, bravery, being willing to push yourself. And they're cliche today, but there's a reason why they're cliche today because they've been around for thousands

of years, not going anywhere. They're strong principles, they're strong virtues, and we're losing sight of that today in a world where, you you know that's flooded by mediocrity and people are drowning out their uniqueness they want to blend in with everybody else you know um it's too common today so i think we need to you know remember me for someone who just wanted to get back to those core virtues those core values of just kind of you, not making excuses and knowing that everyone has a potential to be great at something. Right. And that's it. That's all I could ask for. This guy's a quote machine. This is awesome. Got them all in his head. Where can people find you and how in the world can someone catch a workout with you?

the world can someone catch a workout with you you can find me in portland oregon evolution healthcare and fitness is is where i'm at most of my time um i do a corporate fitness class for amazon out there too um you talk about the corporate what i do for them i do a lot of body weight like mobility stuff they're on their computer like this all day open up their thoracic so um you want to catch a workout with me if If you're in the Portland area, just, you know, reach me on Instagram at Mike McCassell. I have a website, 12 labors project.com. Um, if you want to look at some of the crazy things I do as all this stuff's on there. Um, and in my emails, Michael at 12 labors project.com. Cool, man. Awesome. Having you here. I love the cause. I love a lot of the things you said really, uh, vibe me really well. And I, and I'm sure our audience will appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.