Mark Bell's Power Project - Mark Bell's Power Project EP. 226 Live - Brad Kearns

Episode Date: July 1, 2019

Brad Kearns, 54, is a New York Times bestselling author of the book The Keto Reset Diet, Guinness World Record holding Speedgolfer, and top-20 world-ranked professional, and former national champion and #3 world-ranked professional triathlete. He works with Mark Sisson to promote the Primal Blueprint lifestyle with books, seminars, retreats, and online multimedia educational courses. ➢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

Yeah, it might be frustrating for somebody to have to try it for a few months. Wow. Imagine that. What a sacrifice. I know. Well, if you're like running or something like that and your times are getting worse or you just don't feel good, it would probably suck, right? I think you can just loosen it up.

Yeah, loosen that guy up. There you go. You can maybe. It's towards me. There you go. Yep. There we go. Really. There we go. Really crank that thing down.

He did like 20-something pull-ups the other day, so his hands might be. Yesterday, yeah, man. I couldn't believe it. So then I crank it down. Oh, it's higher. Okay. Yeah. If you don't crank it down, it'll get lazy on you, and then midway through the podcast,

you're all the way hunched over. Why is this going? Drooping down. Yeah, it gets droopy. There we go. You got it fully erect. Just to see if I can sustain it for a long enough time. I know.

I got something for that. Hmm? Huh? What? Got a little something something for it. So it's not every day that we have an endurance athlete here in the house. Nope. It's actually pretty rare.

We've talked to a few. Talked to a few people that run like 100 miles and shit. That's crazy stuff. Run really far. You have a lot of experience with triathlons and stuff, right? Long time ago. Yeah. Now I call myself a sprinter just for fun.

And it's been a nice evolution after, after racing on the pro circuit for nine years, professional triathlon circuit, your full endurance machine. But I discovered that I wasn't really fit overall. I did not have total body fitness or I did not have attributes that promoted my health. I was just suited for one thing, which was to swim, bike, and run in a straight line really fast on a two-hour race or up to six, seven, eight hours. So after retirement, I changed my athletic goals to trying to delay aging, have a comprehensive look at fitness. And my first transition was when I coached my son in soccer, basketball, and track for many years. And I wanted to dominate those little kids for as long as possible. So that

was my really strong athletic goal, where I'd go out to practice. I was like the participatory coach. All right, let's go. Let's bring it on. Yeah. And that lasted from third grade till eighth grade. I was the MVP of every team that I coached of these little guys. And then right around eighth grade, they started to transition from little pipsqueaks that I could dominate to pretty soon I was pushed off the court by 10th grade. They didn't even want me to play pickup anymore because I couldn't guard anybody. So that was the end of my era there. But now I'm really focused on sprinting and trying to get stronger and, you know, have more and more foray into strength training. I wish I had when I was a triathlete because it would have helped me a lot because we didn't touch weights because we were too tired from doing

all that extreme endurance training. And now I think the evolution of training is realizing that there can be some great benefit to kind of mixing and matching and not be so extreme with just the endurance, even though that's your main athletic goal. How do we end up getting to this point? I think it happens quite often with a power lifter or like a bodybuilder. Really anyone that ends up starting to compete in something, the competition itself, which we may have started to be in better shape, maybe feel better about ourselves.

I think when you're young, you're not really necessarily thinking about like direct impact of like overall health or longevity, but you do want to like look better, right? And you want to live better and you want to feel better. And so it kind of starts with that. You're like, oh, I just would love to go to the gym and like have my arms be a little bit bigger or something like that. Maybe that's the thought that you have when you're 15 and you start lifting weights or something. And maybe, you know, in your case, uh, you're thinking of, um, you know, taking just some simple running cross country stuff into being like a triathlete. What's the problem? Like what, what happens to us? How do we get lost as competition itself, a problem? It can easily be a problem. And I think the more serious you are about it, the higher level you rise to, the more you put your health at risk.

Ask any NFL player walking around 10, 20, 30 years after their career. It's a huge sacrifice. And in the case of triathlons, this has been an alarming recent revelation that many of my peers that I raced with on the circuit and in the endurance sports in general are coming up with blown out hearts. Years after they're seemingly the picture of health and fitness on the planet with which is traced to repeated inflammation and scarring of the heart muscle from extreme training, where you're going out every day and pegging your heart rate up at 150, 160 beats per minute for five hours, especially in the sport of cycling, because you can sit down and put in hours and hours of working that hard at a high heartbeat, getting up the next day, being able to do it again and again. And it's not a pretty picture after decades of doing that.

What does the worst of it look like? Like when you're competing, I've heard like cyclists say this before, like sometimes you watch these long races and if they fall off the bike, like they don't get back on and go again, you know, and watching it on TV as just somebody watching it that's never cycled like that before, you're like, I have no idea why that guy can't get back up and get on there. But a lot of it has to do with, first of all, they may have been racing for days, which is understandable. But they're very depleted, and they want to weigh a certain weight to be on that bike. They want to be a low body weight. So they're probably under-eating.

So what does this look like when you're competing as a professional triathlete? Well, you have to hit that point. You have to go right out to the edge where you're, you're, you know, have, have a risk of stepping over the edge and getting a upper respiratory illness, for example, or getting an injury from your lower extremities from running. And then that sets you back and that's a terrible occurrence. So I was deathly afraid of catching a cold when I was racing on the pro circuit, because I knew that no matter what, my training would be subpar for two weeks. The first week was super lousy and you probably shouldn't even be exercising. And then the second week you're coughing stuff out and your times aren't as right and you just don't have the right energy. So, you know, trying not to cross over that line was a really difficult

challenge because it so often would come with all the global jet travel combined with the, uh, the hard training. Uh, but so I had to get smarter and smarter over time to realize that that one extra workout that's so glorified by Hollywood movies and come on rock, you got one more, you can do it, you know, that kind of stuff, a lot of times could be counterproductive. And I also feel like when it's time to compete and when it's time to really put yourself there on a peak performance effort, that you can rise to the occasion and bring out something special if you're a healthy, happy person and not necessarily having to go there over and over in training. You don't have to exactly approximate the challenge of the competition day after day in training. You don't

have to ever do it. You just have to, you know, develop all the parts. We were, in my case, I was swimming, biking and running, right? So I'd put these workouts together, but none of the workouts were as impressive as race day. And that was by design where I could do something special and harness all my resources. You know, what are some principles that you try to help athletes understand? Because when we, you know, you were just touching on high level competition and longevity and wondering if they're both something that can be achieved. But what do you think about that? Like we look at athletes like LeBron, who's, I mean, he had a groin injury this season, right? But still he's probably one of the NBA players who's had the most games with least injuries.

Tom Brady, you know, he's been at it for a long time. And these are athletes who've been able to keep themselves off the injury block. How can you let athletes know that they don't have to have every single session be like death and when they're at a pool of sweat where they feel like they got a great workout in, even though that's probably something

that's damaging them more in the long run? And is it possible to get to high levels of competition without that? Yeah, those are two awesome questions. And the first part, I remember, you know, many times having this come to Jesus conversation with clients and saying, Hey man, you know, what are you all about? What does this whole thing mean to you? Because I'm looking at your questionnaire that you submitted to me when we signed up to work together. And it says, want to be a role model to my kids and achieve goals and balance my busy life as an executive. And it's like, that doesn't really line up with you heading to that race with 101 degree fever, because you already paid your entry fee and you didn't want to pull the plug. And so anytime

we're compromising our health or going away from, you know, sensibility, then what's it for? Is it for feeding your ego demands? Is it because of peer pressure, insecurity, or the need to vent out nervous energy because other areas of your life suck? And those are important conversations we have to have with ourself of why are you doing this extra workout when it's really not meant to be? And you know it deep down, your intuition is telling you, geez, I'm heading down the wrong path here, but I still keep banging my head against the wall. And that goes from recreational athlete all the way up to the elite athletes and the guys. I'm friends with Tim DeFrancesco. He was the Lakers strength and conditioning trainer for 10 years.

Yeah, we know Tim. He's been to super training before. Oh, nice. Yeah. And I asked him, this might be private knowledge, but anyway, I said, so, you know, when you come in and you get these, these draft picks, these players, I go, what percentage of them buy into what you have to say and what, how many of them are just out there partying and spending their money? And he gave me some percentages and the thing that they don't understand. I mean, his insight was like, when you sign in for the NBA, you're making millions of dollars. You're a kid coming out of college and life's pretty good.

You got your $12 million contract. But now, as we know, if you can just make it through your Wookiee contract, which is a few years, right, three or four years, then you can sign these max deals if you perform even at a competent level, not superstar, but you can get massive amounts of money that dwarfs anything you did to that point if you just get in there and do the work and stay injury-free and be a good teammate and all those things. And there's a huge percentage of even the top professional athletes that don't have that whole picture going for themselves, top professional athletes that don't have that whole picture going for themselves.

And they're compromising not only their longevity, forget about that, just their general health and their career longevity. But I guess the next part of the question in SEMO is, you know, can you do this stuff and still promote longevity? And I think for the most part, you're getting up to, you know, 90% level, and then you're going to make some sacrifices if you want to be an elite performer. But I don't, I don't think it's, I think there's a way to do it. Like LeBron has shown and Tom Brady and some other guys, some of the great runners like, um, uh, Meb Kofleski in case anyone wants to hear about somebody other than Tom Brady and LeBron James. Mebka Flesky is the greatest American marathon runner, but distinctive about his career is he

lasted until he was 41 years old running the marathon, the most grueling, craziest training regimen, which is unheard of. These guys crash and burn in their 20s and they're gone. They get an Olympic medal and you never hear from them again. So he was able to create this lifestyle and eat the right diet and get all the therapy and continue to perform at a world-class level in the marathon. So arguably, I'm looking at him at 42, 43. He's retired now. He's probably doing pretty well because he was able to deliver these world-class times for so long. What did he do that was different? Do you know? he was able to deliver these world-class times for so long. What did he do that was different? Do you know? I think smarter training nowadays and the folks up in Portland, Oregon, Mo Farah is arguably the greatest distance runner we've ever seen on the planet. He's top 10 of all time

in the 1500, like the mile race. And he's also one of the top marathoners ever, but he won multiple Olympic gold medals in the 5,000 and 10,000 in the Olympics and the world championships. So he doubled, doubled, doubled, and no one's ever done that. And so, you know, these Africans that are running based in Kenya, and there's massive training camps of them, and a few of them rise to world cost level, and they perform well, and they win Olympic medals, but you don't see that longevity because the training and the lifestyle is still rudimentary. So here you have the best of the genetics that we find in East Africa, where there's a concentration of the highest talent and distance running,

just like from West African ancestry is the absolute dominance in the 100 meters and the explosive events. 496 of the top 500 times in the history of 100 meters are athletes who trace their ancestry to West Africa. So that genetic factor is pretty big. Okay. So you take East African genetics and then bring them to the Nike performance lab where they're doing some of their runs in the water. Have you seen these water treadmills where you're immersed in a coating of water, like a bag, and you're running, but you're getting 20% less impact, or 30% or whatever. If your leg's a little sore, you're still getting the workout in. And Meb was famous going on the beach in San Diego, where he's from, on the beach bike path with the elliptical,

the outdoor elliptical machine, the Elliptigo, they called it. Oh, look at this. Very quick action water treadmills. Now you got to find the elliptical for the viewers on YouTube. You can get a similar stimulus with less impact as kind of the basis of something like that. Yeah, man. I had only one really bad running injury

in my triathlon career because you could always balance the training. I love stuff like that. That's great. And I got a running vest. So it was like a flotation vest and I ran in the pool

and I found I could do a much more high intensity workout in the water because of the lack of pounding. So I'd do, you know, 10 mile repeats in the water, which would be five minutes running hard at full stride and really working through the water. And that was something I could never do on land. It would be too hard. I'd maybe do five mile repeats would be a great workout. So the cardiovascular and even the muscular conditioning was as good as you can get to approximate it. But again, we know that if

you're not out there pounding or doing exactly what you're doing, you're going to lose a little bit of that. But it's a complimentary approach better than sitting on the couch if you're trying to run in the Olympic marathon. Have you seen the ones that use like air, like they almost like kind of fill up like a balloon and you're kind of just like floating instead of using the water? Oh no. I haven't seen those. I've seen a couple of them here in Sacramento. Yeah. Yeah. And you said elliptical? Elliptical. Yeah. You know, what you're saying is like a lot of, we've been seeing that a lot in powerlifting too. You know, a lot of people are now taking on the idea of doing a lot more submaximal work, you know, because typically it used to be that they'd be always doing triples, doubles and singles all the time. But now there are a lot of powerlifters doing more 70, 80% work. And then they're touching those 90% every few weeks and keeping them in to continue getting stronger. It just seems like that's the overarching principle with all of these sports, figuring like spreading out that maximal work so that you don't touch it too

often, but you touch it enough so that you can continue to make progress without getting injured. Yeah. Here's my crystal ball for the future of how we're going to continue to break records. And here we go. You heard it on our podcast first.

So I think that, particularly in the endurance sports where there's this question of how much volume you can do, and then you can't run more than 140 miles a week as a human. That's 20 miles a day. And the elite marathoners,

they're there now. They've been there for many years. You're not going to be able to train twice as long and break records in running or triathlon. Not for any sustained period of time. Right. I mean, there's not going to be able to train twice as long and break records in running or triathlon. Not for any sustained period of time. Right. I mean, there's not going to be a Hawaii Ironman winner that's training 60 hours a week instead of 30, which is the top athletes now. It just doesn't compute, right? But I think what's going to happen is we're going to have these blocks of training where the body is pushed to

extreme levels by going, let's say, three days in a row, riding the bicycle for 10 hours straight in the mountains and coming back and doing it again the next day and the next day. And then they're going to go put them in a medically induced coma, and they're going to go sit in a float tank for 48 hours. And there are probably going to be some pharmaceuticals involved. But to have that deep recovery that probably the athletes today aren't really getting because they're trying to hit these weekly schedules, which I think are sometimes still ill-advised. I think I learned the hard way in my triathlon career.

I had to pull the plug for a couple weeks now and then. Just go, I'm going to stop training because I'm in a downward spiral. And it took a lot of strength to say, nope, I'm out. And then I'd come back when I felt that natural regenerative mindset as well as feeling the body come back. But everyone's afraid to do it because you feel like you're going to lose these gains. But I think if we increase the severity of the stress and rest cycles for all athletes, powerlifting, I mean, I don't have to know anything about your sport. If you increase the severity of your stress and rest cycles such that on your high points, which is when we should measure and judge how you're doing, on my high point, I could

ride this many hours on the bike and climb 17,000 feet in the Sierras, and that's my best workout. What'd you do the next day? What'd you do the next day? I don't know. I rode to the grocery store and back. That's going to have an athlete that eventually makes breakthroughs versus someone who says, yeah, consistently, I ride my bike three hours every single day. I never miss a day.

Oh, good for you. That's not going to fly once you get to the elite level. To get from the couch, to get in shape, yeah, get your butt in the gym every single day and move some iron around. You're going to get in shape. Then what? You're going to hit the ceiling and go, how do I get better? It's harder, hard workouts and easier, easy workouts. Okay. That was summed up pretty good right there. I really like what you just said right there. The thing that frustrates me is I think a lot of times, you know, people just think like CrossFit is CrossFit and powerlifting is powerlifting. And this is the way that we got to powerlift. And this is the way we got to do endurance running. And this is the way we got to do cycling.

This is the way we got to do swimming. And it's super frustrating to watch because it's like, no, a lot of these things, there's so much crossover going on here. And, you know, sometimes somebody like yourself who comes on our show, somebody might not listen to it because you're not a former Mr. Olympia winner. Right. Don't listen to me.

We have things to offer. But yeah, I think there's a lot of crossovers, a lot of benefit. And I always say this too. I think whatever sport that you're in, it would probably be great if you explored doing some stuff from other sports. So if you're a power lifter, it would be great to figure out some way of getting your heart rate up and some way of having something sustained. I don't know if running would be great for a lot of guys who are over 250 that haven't run in a long time. But let's figure out something.

How about yoga or something? Yeah, something different. Could help everybody. or something. Yeah. Something, something different, right? What about a bodybuilder trying some power lifting or a power lifter trying some Olympic lifting or a triathlete, you know, trying some power lifting, right? And did you, have you utilized any power lifting when you were a triathlete or any strength training? I wish I had. I just, you know, um, it was, it was a, it was a missing element in the training system because there wasn't enough energy there. So, uh, just working out too hard on the three main things you had to worry about. Yeah. And I think if you're going for, um, a two hour or longer endurance event,

your incremental gains that I'm going to get from improving my deadlift from 200 to 250, I mean, that's, that's impressive, but it might not be the best return on investment when I only have this much energy. And that's a mistake a lot of athletes make. Like I remember, um, uh, you know, people ask me all the time, Hey, um, is, is, is yoga good for, for my triathlon? Go. Yeah. Uh, how about, how about strength training? Yeah. How about, um, you know, overload over distance rides? Yeah. How about overload, over distance rides? Yeah. How about sprint interval training?

It's all good. It's all going to deliver a fitness benefit, but then you have to go, okay, what's the best use of my time and energy and my return on investment? And in the endurance sports, it happens to be that spending more time building an aerobic base and doing workouts that are really comfortably paced so that you get better at fat burning without the interruption of the stress response and the breakdown and the burnout that comes from high-intensity exercise. What happens is the athlete's allowed to build, build, build a higher fitness base, and then when it is time to do a

high-intensity workout, they're going to perform so much better because they've put this time in to work that aerobic foundation. And so even someone in a, in a explosive sport like the CrossFit games or something, I mean, I watched that thing. I was blown away how, I mean, the endurance required to come back and do another heat or come back the next day and do the next round that, that athlete has to have a tremendous base of endurance rather than just being explosive to be able to do the required thing that took two minutes and then, you know, go away. What's an example workout of what you were just speaking of? There's something that's high intensity enough where you can build that anaerobic threshold or that aerobic threshold without building up so much fatigue that you can't like work out the next day. What's an example of

what that looks like? So here's the big one. If this is new information, it's going to change your life if you're out there trying to throw in aerobic work, but not doing it with the proper framework. So there's a heart rate cutoff that represents, it's called the maximum aerobic heart rate. Dr. Phil Maffetone is the leader in this movement. He's been pitching this for many years.

And the calculation is 180 minus your age in beats per minute. So you do your formula. If you're 30 years old, 180 minus 30 is 150. And so that would be your cutoff. You did not exceed that heart rate in order to get a proper aerobic training session. If you do, then you start drifting into the anaerobic metabolism, greater burning of glucose and less burning of fat. So what you want to hit is this point where you're experiencing maximum fat oxidation per minute. So you're burning the most fat at this heart rate. And if you were to go any faster, you're going to burn more calories, but you're going to deprioritize fat and you're going to start burning more and more and more glucose as

you get up to a glycolytic workout, a high-intensity workout. It's going to be all glucose or the other fuels that you do for really explosive stuff. But this cutoff point is really important because after you exceed that, the workout starts to become a little too stressful and a little too stimulating of glucose burning, which is going to affect your appetite and your ability to burn fuels at rest. of glucose burning, which is going to affect your appetite and your ability to burn fuels at rest. So if you become this fat-burning beast, like Mark Sisson talks about, you have the diet component too that supports that. So you're eating a nice fat-adapted diet, minimizing that intake of simple carbohydrates that's causing the fat burning to shut off. Now you're getting good at burning fat during workouts, and you're getting good at burning fat because of your diet. And then you have tremendous endurance to the extent that if it's time to speed up, let's say in a race situation, I'm so comfortable running at six-minute miles.

It's time to speed up. I can speed up to five-minute miles in a race situation. But training day in and day out, trying to run five-minute miles because that's what I want to race at, you're going to tailspin into just like you talked about with the power lifters going up to 90% all the time. It doesn't work. And so it requires this tremendous patience and a change in mindset that you don't need to push yourself every day to get better. And in fact, especially in endurance, slowing down or backing off, if we want to make the analogy to any athlete, can generate tremendous improvement because that's how the body works. It regenerates and gets fitter through stress and rest balance.

It's really hard to do in a group setting. And I imagine if you were running with somebody or cycling with somebody, it's kind of nice to be next to each other, I'm sure, right? Even though you're probably not talking a whole lot because you're training, but it's kind of nice to have your buddy next to you. And if someone's, you know, faster or more talented than you and they're way ahead, you know, you might be trying to keep up and your training might be suffering. They're training, they might be going too slow. You might be going too fast, right? Absolutely. I mean, these group workouts are the essence of endurance

training. And it's so, it's so wonderful to have that social connection. And those workouts are really good for the fittest people in the pack, and they're terrible for the least fit people in the pack, and they're probably not very good for the percentage, the majority of the pack. And that's just too bad. I talked to you before we got recording about my college running career, which I had such great aspirations as a high school runner.

I did well. I went off to Division I program, UC Santa Barbara, and I got destroyed. And the reason was is because these fifth-year seniors who were mature 23-year-old men were trashing me every single day just with basic training because I was a young kid trying to transition from high school running program to college.

And so the workout was well-structured and thought out by the coach who was planning our season and trying to build us to, but it wasn't good for me to hang with my teammates. I should have been individually coached and said, hey, you young scrubs over there, I want you guys to run three miles less and slower pace, and we're going to build you up naturally over time to where maybe you'll be the person at the front of the pack when you're 23-year-old, fifth-year senior. person at the front of the pack when you're 23 year old, fifth year senior. Yeah. I feel like sometimes the other countries do a better job with some of these things where we're maybe wrapped up in some of the wrong stuff. Like a lot of the Russian lifters, they would, they will bench, squat and deadlift in the same training session. That's very uncommon here in the United States. And there's a lot of reasons for it. I think the evolution of like bodybuilding equipment and just even talk about bodybuilders and a lot of strength influence coming from bodybuilders and even the way that gyms are set up. A gym would be set up where it would have, you know, a leg press, a leg extension,

leg curl, squat rack all near each other. So people started to kind of superset and go back and forth between these exercises. And it became very uncommon to train optimally. Instead, you would train maybe, you know, maybe you would train to like reduce time or maybe you would train to kind of induce muscle mass, but it wasn't necessarily regardless of how the gym was set up. And they're also very, they seem to train regardless of, it appears they seem to train regardless of the amount of weight on the bar. They're not obsessed with the weight on the bar. Where here in America, I feel like somebody feels like they have to have, you know, 405 on the bar.

And it's just because of like that's the amount when you have four plates on each side or you have 315, you have three plates on each side. And you feel like you have to either lift that or with the 25s. But the Russian athletes that we see that dominate, even though they're still lifting in kilos and they might get excited about a 400 kilo squat or whatever, whatever it is that they're lifting, it seems like they're less attached to that. And there seemed like they're just more about like, I don't really care what's on the bar. It just needs to be a weight that I can lift optimally. And it's not a load that's going to be maximal. It's not going to stress me out.

It's not going to overstress me. It's kind of some of the stuff that you're talking about. Yeah, same with, and Seema mentioning doing the varied activities. Steve Nash is great about this because he had such a long history in soccer and it informed so much of his basketball style to see the entire court and do those backwards passes and things that, you know, he came from that soccer experience. And he emphasizes strongly, like for the young players where now we're so focused on the highly competitive

youth basketball scene and youth soccer scene. And here we are getting our ass kicked in the Men's World Cup and not even making it to the 32 round in the World Cup, getting beat by Trinidad and Tobago, population less than Sacramento, California. It's embarrassing. So why is this happening when these kids are getting pulled out of their neighborhood community experience and going to the competitive soccer? If you want to be good, you've got to go on the comp team and travel around, and oh, it's

a year-round program, so you can't fit in other sports. And same with basketball. The AAU scene is crazy. It's ridiculous. Yeah, we see one and done athletes ready to go pro because they've been developed so quickly. But again, talking about Tim, like he gets these draft picks in and he does these assessments of their basic fitness competency, like their form going down for a squad and coming back up. And a lot of these athletes have not been properly trained because they've been playing only one sport basketball since they were 13, not enough rest in between the seasons.

There's constant, you know, repetitive stress on the joints rather than in the old days, you know, Tom Brady took off his football uniform and went out to the baseball field and everybody else were these mold. All of them were multi-sport athletes back in the day. LeBron had to, they had to kick him off the football team in 10th grade because he was too good at basketball, which is probably a smart idea.

Because you don't want some guy taking out the six foot eight tight end when he's catching a 12 yard pass for random Cleveland high school. But it's a, it's a huge, it's a huge issue in the youth world. And then now we're talking about adults. Like, yeah, if that's all, that's all I did was triathlon training. And then when the rains came and we had to go get sandbags at the store and lift the sandbags

and help the old lady next door to protect her house from flooding, the next day I'd wake up from lifting 25 pound sandbags. And my back was so sore and my left knee also got kinked there. And I'm like, I can't do that anymore because it's going to affect my training.

But it's like, I was good for nothing except for those three things. And I think overall, these athletes that have the broader fitness competencies can rise to the top and also prevent injuries and have longer careers. You know, I'm wondering, because there are a lot of powerlifters that are listening in and a lot of powerlifters here.

What's up, powerlifters? Yeah. What's up? Anyway, there are a lot of guys here that are doing something called fat shaming, and it was by Jesse Burdick where they go out, they'll do maybe some sprints or they'll do mile walks with kettlebells or something. It's us fat shaming ourselves. Yeah.

Why is it called fat shaming? That's Yeah. Why is it called fat shaming? That's hilarious. Why is it called fat shaming? Just because it's a funny name, funny title. It's us fat shaming ourselves, like identifying like I'm too fat. I'm going to go outside and do something. It's a joke and powerlifting. We all kid around about getting fat because even just the act of getting fat makes you

stronger. You know, just like when you're on your bike, like the act of not eating makes you perform better, which sounds completely crazy because you don't have the nutrients in your body. But if you weigh less, it's easier to tote yourself around the bike. If we just weigh more, it's easier to squat, bench, deadlift. And that's why that a lot of them are sometimes scared of doing cardio because they feel like, oh, if I do too much cardio, it's going to affect my strength. So what are some like, first off, what are some modalities of cardio that you think would be really beneficial for helping them drop body fat, but also maintain high levels of power output in the gym? Because you wouldn't imagine that they'd go out and run six miles, but what should they think about adding?

I think the aerobic component would be an obvious first choice where you're not out there stressing yourself on a sport that you don't care about and you don't intend to compete in. And you see these people huffing and puffing down the bike trail or whatever. And it's like, dude, honey, what are you doing? Why are you killing yourself out here? You're going to hate it. I'm not going to see you here next year because they don't have that sensibility that it's not supposed to be pain and suffering when you're going out for a run in the neighborhood. Now you got to get the heart rate monitor and see where you stand with your aerobic conditioning. And for many people, a run is going to be a jog walk. And that's a perfect aerobic training session. That's the same training effect as Meb Kofleski, the guy in San Diego, the marathoner, is running five minute and 20 second mile. He's

flying past you like you've never seen, but he's jogging and talking to his, carrying on a conversation as a sign that you're in the aerobic zone as opposed to going too hard and huffing and puffing and getting red in the face. So the strength and power athletes that are coming and wanting to dabble in aerobic conditioning, slower and easier is better. And check that heart rate with that 180 minus your age formula. You will be shocked at how slow it is. It's almost frustrating, especially for endurance people. It's so frustrating to hear that beep go off at almost every workout. I still have been doing this 30 years. I still get the beeper going off on a short little hill going up from the bottom of the levee to the top, an 18-foot hill, it's going to

beep. So you walk and you be patient and you make sure that you stay in that fat-burning zone. And then you get finished with the workout and you feel refreshed and invigorated and you've kick-started the fat-burning process that carries on for hours after rather than exhausted yourself and want to go have a Ben and Jerry's 7-Eleven at the end of your run. And for a lot of the athletes that haven't really messed with it much, having their heart rate up even, you know, at like 135 or something, it might be hard. It might be hard for them just because they're not used to it. And to do it for a sustained period, how long, you know, how long, what should this look like? You know, should this be like a 10 or 20 minute like walk run type of deal? Like if you feel good enough to run, go for it. If you feel good enough to keep a fairly

fast paced walk, stay with that. Yeah, the heart rate is going to be the regulator. So you just don't want to exceed that number. And I'm going to guess for most people who are not competent endurance athletes or carry a lot of weight, like you said, a brisk walk is a fantastic aerobic training session. Same with pedaling the bike if you want to do low impact, but I think eventually you'd get up to the point where you could do some weight-bearing activity and still make it aerobic, so you're going to be slow jogging. That's the cool thing about aerobic training processes. You get more and more efficient burning fat and getting those aerobic energy-producing enzymes going that over time, it might start out as a brisk walk now and you're going to hear the beep.

And then six months later, you're going to be able to do a slow jog and you're going to hear the beep. So you're going to get more efficient. You're going to run faster speed at the same heart rate, but the heart rate is always the regulator because that's determining what kind of metabolism you're using. And you want to use fat burning metabolism in this example, rather than a sugar burning run, which is going to get you right to Ben and Jerry's. The show is sponsored by Slingshot, but not Ben and Jerry's. Okay. How critical is form when it comes to a triathlete? Like what I see a lot in powerlifting is we get a lot of questions here about recovery and people like, uh, and SEMA does jujitsu along with coming in here

and, and lifting some heavy weights. Um, and people will say like, ah, how do you mix the two? Well, you know, and they're kind of curious on, uh, or for myself, I do a lot of, uh, you know, powerlifting type stuff. I do a lot of conditioning stuff after the workout and people are kind of confused. I've been doing it for a long time, so obviously that helps. But what I've noticed is a lot of the people

that ask these questions, their form and technique's not locked in. And like we were already talking about, they're going too hard. And I talk about that a lot. Have the strength to pull some damn weight off the bar. Have the courage to do that. Hey, let me see a pull plate off the bar. Oh, very good technique.

Yeah, right. Bend at the knees, put it back on the rack. Nice. Right. But technique seems to be a huge thing because if we're getting all crooked on a bench or a squat, like, yeah, you're going to feel it in your knee or your elbow. And I'd imagine it must be critical on, you know, as a triathlete doing these endurance runs or doing some of these things. It's got to be a big factor. Well, it's more critical in golf or swimming, right? A hugely technique dependent sport.

So swimming is the best example of like you can go in there and fight that water like a real beast and put out a ton of calories and heart rate up to the roof. And you're going to get passed by a skinny little 10 year old girl who I used to train with the junior national team members down in Los Angeles. So these girls were like 10 to 13. And I was in their lane as one of the top triathletes in the world. And they would smoke me, you know, they had no muscle mass, anything, but they had incredible efficiency through the water, like little hummingbirds just floating along and never getting tired. It was pretty awesome. But cycling, you sit on the bike, you pedal, don't move your upper body. That's your tip of the day, right? You just keep your hips level and pedal the bike. It's not a technique-dependent sport.

Running is a little different because you're weight-bearing. And so you have impact trauma with every stride. And if you don't have a balanced center of gravity at all times, where all of your strides land under a stable and balanced center of gravity, where you have a straight and elongated spine, and every time you run, you're landing in the same, you know, in the same position, you're not extending out and moving that center of gravity back and forth. You're not doing these common errors like heel striking, which means that your center of gravity has lost that perfect position over a midfoot landing. So there's some things you can learn with even just slow jogging that'll greatly improve your efficiency and minimize the injury risk. And that's why this minimalist shoe movement has

been such a big deal in running scene. Because if you, for example, take your shoes off and I'm going to ask you to go run on a paved road with no shoes, you're going to exhibit a tremendous improvement in your running technique instantly because the penalty is so severe for running on pavement with bare feet that you're going to be forced to all of a sudden be running like a deer and be light on your feet and not making those technique errors. Because when you do, you'll slam into the ground and you'll heal or you'll feel impact in your knee. So to correct form, you want to be light on your feet like a dog or a deer. Watch your dog run along and you see how the dog is landing beautifully with the balance center of gravity, four legs instead of two. But great lesson to see how the animals run.

And so if we can just imagine ourselves being lighter on our feet and more graceful with our stride and trying to stay, stand up tall throughout the running stride. I have a video on YouTube. It's like Brad Kern's running technique instructions. You can see me talk you through it, but that's the basic one for a weight bearing sport. Pretty important. So when you're talking about, you know, hitting your heel on the ground, are you, are you more so meaning that when people are running, they should more so be landing on the ball of their feet with every step and never really landing on heel-toe, heel-toe? Yeah, but you need a slow motion video camera to really understand this and convey it. And so

you probably don't even need that thought in your mind because it happens so quickly. But what really happens, the way that we absorb impact as humans is we land on the midfoot and then the Achilles tendon and the heel will actually collapse and touch the ground. And that's the way to absorb shock. So we dissipate the shock through our midfoot as well as allowing that foot to come down to the ground. And then the spring occurs the same way where we snap the Achilles tendon and launch off the midfoot. So it's kind of, they say, are you a heel striker or a midfoot striker? And it's a little bit, oh, there's the guy teaching you how to run. Yeah. So it happens so fast that I like to convey

the thought differently so that I don't mess people up thinking about where on their foot they're landing. But naturally, you're going to land just before your heel touches your midfoot. You can't even see sometimes how quick it is. Same with Olympic marathoners. Yeah. Yeah. It's just barely. It's just barely.

The heel is just barely hitting the ground. And then springing. So the way to run with more efficient technique and lighter on your feet is you want that foot on the ground and off the ground as quick as possible. And when you allow that foot to slap and stay on the ground for too long, then all your energy is going into the ground rather than being used as a spring force with the Achilles tendon doing what it's supposed to do. How many years did you train without the knowledge? How many years did you train before you, you mentioned earlier about getting in large amounts of sleep and we've talked a little bit about nutrition and you mentioned how you were coached by Mark Sisson and stuff. But how many years were you just slamming your head against the wall?

Was it a long time or did you learn quickly? Oh, yeah, I would say I learned through the devastating experience that was my college running career. And so I put the hammer, I put the gas pedal on starting in high school. I got serious about running. I got in with some really great, my lifelong friend, Steve Dyche, Steve Cobrain, they're just hammered. They were just always running and we'd run as far as we could and work as hard as we could. And we did pretty well, but of course, way below theoretical

potential because we were just indiscriminate dispensation of energy every day with trying to run as many miles as we could in a week. And then when I crashed and burned in college, that's when I had my first reckoning to go, wait a second, I have more competitive intensity than anybody. I'm willing to do whatever it takes to win. I'm focused, disciplined, motivated, all those great things.

I'll get up at 4.30, maybe 5.30. But all that, you know, ability to push your foot on the gas pedal, big deal. So does the next 2,000 people in the rankings, right? It means it's insignificant. If you're a lazy ass, then if you're listening to the show and you're a lazy ass, get your ass in the gym, put some plates on and move some weight around. Congratulations. Thank you for listening. Now, when we're up at the next level, that's when we got to start thinking, how can I get smarter up at this? How will sleeping more improve my workouts? And

then you start putting these pieces together with diet and even technique, I guess, could go in that category. And so I realized early on, I wasn't as strong as many of my peers on the pro circuit, where these guys were just superhuman specimens that never got tired. They were like robots. They'd get up every day and just go all day. And I was more whiny and wimpy and I'd have, you know, my back would hurt or I'd feel tired and I'd have to figure out like, this doesn't seem to be working for me in the same manner as my peer. So I'm no longer going to compare myself to them except on race day. And if I can race, and this was Sisson inspiring me tremendously here where he says,

look, man, just match those guys on their best day. And don't worry about the other days. Take more time off because you're a different human organism than your peers. Some guys are just genetically adapted, just like I'm sure in your strength community. Some guys can slam it every single day and some guys need a more nuanced approach. And I was the very fragile athlete, but I could really put it out there when the time came, but I had those crash and burn patterns. And so you just have to go with your strengths and not try to fall in line with whoever the guy

that's a little stronger than you or a little faster than you. And did you realize that like, like, cause you stopped when you were around 30, right? Like that's when you said you retired. Did you retire because of like the beat down of your body? Because you, I mean, you mentioned you were, you were a lot down in my psyche and my body. Is that what you're saying? Well, yes, the answer is yes. And Seema, thank you for asking. But like, do you think you could have

gone longer by doing something different? Because like you mentioned that you were one of those individuals that backed off when you needed to back off and push the intensity when you needed to. So you are already doing that. Is there anything that would have allowed you to continue longer or you think you would have still stopped at that age? Yeah, I was forced out with poor performance and I realized that I had hit my peak already. You never want to think you hit your peak. When you hit your peak and someone says, hey, Mark, are you at your peak? Is that your best? You're like, no, man, I'm going to go get it next time.

There's no sense of that because when you're at your peak, everything's going great. So you have optimism and think you're going to break your record again. But then when you have a chance to look back and it's such an honest and dramatic way to learn the lessons of success and failure in life in the athletic arena where I just, you know, I do my workout. I know from the bottom of the Canyon in Auburn up to the green gate is, you know, I knocked that thing out in 15 minutes. One time

y'all go out there and try to run from the river to the green gate at stage coach in 15 minutes. It's legit. That represents national champion, third ranked in the world, was my best on the triathlon circuit. Then there I am two years later, dropping a 1612 or a 1638, looking at that watch going, dude, this is your retirement watch that I bought myself. It wasn't a gift. It's like, you're on your way out. It's so graphic that you can't lie or figure out your way around it. So would I have got more years out of my body if I'd done things differently and were smarter? I would say certainly I could have. But at the time, the trade-off that I was going for was, let's say that we did Olympic

distance racing, which was a mile swim, 25 mile bike, six mile run approximately. And the winner would come in there in around an hour and 46 minutes. So for those of you unfamiliar with triathlon, that's pretty damn fast swimming a mile. That's pretty darn fast getting on the bike and pedaling for 25 miles in less than an hour. And then you're running a 10 K at just over five minute per mile pace after being tired from the other two sports. So some guy putting up 146 somewhere on the globe, and that's on a sticky note on my mirror every day, that is an ambitious goal. And getting to 150 or 149 or 148 is maybe, let's say, a piece of cake, right? If someone was paying me $20 million to do an hour

50, don't worry about 146. I would have lasted five more years, right? Because I wouldn't have pushed the boundary in the envelope. But when I came home from these races and called up Mark Sisson in tears going, pig's still ahead of me by two minutes on the bike. This guy named, last name was Mike Pig. He was one of the greatest athletes, but he would get a gap on the bike and then he'd pretty much jog the run and no one could catch him. So my goal was like, how do I catch that mofo or get closer to his ass on the bike so that he can start turning around and watching the current strain coming to get him. Right. So I had to push myself way beyond what was normal and sensible. Just like you want to get 30 more pounds on your, on your squat when it's already up at 800 or

something that ain't, that ain't effing around that's not that's not sensible it's not promoting longevity but that was the sacrifice that i made was like a win on a professional racing circuit was way better than six fifth place finishes in many ways and then i could move on with my life you know when i was 30 rather than hanging on till 35 a little bit below now if i'm in the NBA, yeah, I'm going to get that final contract where it might not be the max contract, but I'm just going to be a contributor off the bench, like Robert Horry and get a couple more rings or whoever these guys are now that are still sitting on the bench. Like, oh,

Marcus all still playing our pals still playing too. I didn't know that. Yeah. Good for those guys, man. Just stay healthy, stay in shape. When I call my number, take off the sweats and go contribute. Yeah. Hang in there. But my case was a lot different. Once you fall off a little bit in a small sport like that, we'll make sound effects. You're gone. Yeah. Did you notice results right away when you backed off? Like you mentioned earlier about sleeping like 10 plus hours a day and stuff like that. Did you notice a huge impact from that right away or did you maybe feel like lazy or did you feel like even almost tired

from like extra sleep? Sometimes sleeping more sometimes make you feel worse. Never. I think in real life, sometimes you get in those bad patterns and there's research supporting that, that you're sleeping too long, you're dragging ass, you need to get your butt up and get some sun exposure first thing in the morning and get your hormones reset and all that. But we were so tired from the training regimen that the sleep was precious. And it was one of my secret attributes that I just got as much sleep as I could.

And I'm also thinking there's some genetics here too, where some people can sleep less than others. And did someone like share that with you at some point with someone like, dude, like you just need to sleep more. You'll feel better. Oh no, I figured that one out on my own, man. Props right here. Figured that one out. Yeah. Yeah. So there was always that opportunity to rest and sleep, and you have to take it if you're a professional. And the guys that were trying to juggle, let's say, young families or they had a side job or something, those were strikes against them.

And it was pretty much, again, trying to go for that time at the top of the heap. There was no margin of error where you're skimping on sleep or doing things that were not contributing to recovery? There's more people talking about it now. Guys like Matthew Walker and stuff have written books about sleep, and there's more people talking about it. And I think it's great because I think we're in such a world where things are so damn distracting. I think that people are sleeping a lot less, especially a lot of, well, not even just the younger kids,

but I think a lot of younger people are on their phones a lot. They're distracted by Instagram and things like that. So, you know, getting that sleep in is crucial for all of us. And, you know, what are some things that, that you learned? Like, what are some things that changed when you started, you know, to sleep more with your running and your triathlons? Well, I'll also add to this, uh to this discussion downtime. So there's sleep. Good night. I'm going to sleep. I'm turning the light off. That's great. Get your butt to sleep at a proper time and get enough sleep. But now we're compelled to take downtime too, which in the old days, downtime was like you got home from work and I guess you know, I guess you watch TV or maybe you sat on the

porch and talked to your neighbors or you were taking the dog for a walk around the block and things that were part of, you know, the fabric of society for decades. And now they're getting trashed because your Netflix queue is waiting for you there and you can fritter away time with digital stimulation day and night. And so your entire day you have a mobile device and you're connected all day long. So your brain doesn't have any downtime. And we were talking in the other room about the writing process and the influences. And I was complaining about how this hyper-connectivity is, you know, I'm strongly sensitive to the negative effects of it. I hate it. So I want to take downtime from digital stimulation and putting that in the same mix as, yes, getting enough hours of sleep,

obviously. And we've paid lip service to that for years. Everybody knows it's important to get enough hours of sleep, but that other element. And I feel like exercise and time in the gym can count toward that downtime where you're away from the office, away from your mobile device, and don't be sending text messages in between sets because you're polluting the experience of the physical workout. Now, when I'm running, it would be nice if I just listened to the birds and meditated or whatever, working on my breathing. But a lot of times I'm listening to podcasts and I enjoy that precious time to do it. But I do make sure, for example, when I'm out on the golf course playing

my favorite sport of speed golf, it's just me in the golf course or, you know, experiencing nature or having time with my dogs where I'm out running with them and just talking in my silly voice to my dogs rather than, you know, carrying on a phone conversation or trying to multitask and hyper-stimulate myself. So we have to have a great awareness of that. And as the athlete, it's pretty easy because, you know, I'm taking a nap every single day. I'm getting in that habit. And then if I don't have it, I'm like, wow, I missed my nap. Something was wrong with my training day today.

So it's really easy to get locked in. But when we have busy, hectic life and kids are waking us up at night and all those kind of things, then we can have that ideal and then do the best thing we can subject to all the influences. That said, man, put your freaking phone away and leave it. Kelly Starrett said, you guys know who Kelly Starrett is,

one of the leading strength instructors. You know what stuff we got into on my podcast with him? It wasn't flexibility, mobility, optimization. He kept talking about sleep. He kept talking about, plug your phone in in the hall. He was hitting these hot talking points like, walk your kid to school. He walks his kid to school a mile every day, he and Juliet.

And like, this is what's on his mind more so than the incredible wealth of knowledge and deep research he's done into physical performance. Drink clean water. Yeah, but just like plugging your phone in in the hallway, that's pure genius, man, because then you're setting yourself up in an environment to succeed like he described it. And we need to do that now. It's not enough to just have all this knowledge. Like, yeah, sleep's important.

I heard about the decline in hormone levels if you don't sleep enough. Let me go look on another article here at 10 o'clock at night on my phone. No, no, no, no. Get rid of that thing. Turn that crap off. It might be a good rule for people

just don't allow your phone to be in your room. Unless you're my sister, she's listening. I'll make her listen now. She's on call. She's a family doctor in the Central Valley down the road here. You can still keep it outside the room.

Just have the volume cranked up. But if you're on call to deliver a baby, you have an excuse. The rest of you fools, let me see if you can get an excuse as good as that. My sister needs her phone. She can't miss that phone call. Everyone else, come on.

When did you start realizing that it was such an issue for you? Because we've been using smartphones for what, eight, nine years now? And I think people are really getting on this resurgence of, okay, I got to get it away from me. When did you realize it was an issue? Oh, man. I think just the escalation of it is the thing that's really disturbing to me.

And I think as one of my main contributions to the planet is I write books. So I've written around 20 books in my life dating back 25 years. And so each successive book, I get better at writing the book because I'm more skilled and I'm better at the first draft. It's not as bad as the old times,

but I'm more and more distracted writing these books. And so I know what it's like to sit down and write a book in the old days when if you wanted to go online, you had to go. Some listeners have no idea what I'm talking about, but that was the sound effects of dial-up internet back in the old day. So it was this like methodical process

just to go on the internet. You had to push the button and tie up your phone line to go on the internet, check your email, hang up and then carry on. And so in the old days, you're very focused on what you're doing. And now there's a constant ability to just redirect. And so I've noticed it more and more with each book project because that's the most focused thing that I do. And it's all my fault. It's all on me. It's all on all of us to optimize our use of technology. I love it. I think the iPhone's the greatest invention of our lifetime, probably.

And now we're superhuman robots because I have every fact known in the history of mankind at my fingertips. And that's kind of cool, but not if we use it to a disadvantage and let it compromise our health. So try it, man. We're fighting the battle. But I like talking about it. The more I talk about it, maybe I'll be better this afternoon than I would otherwise have been if I was, you know, you've got to have tremendous discipline and structure. Same with an athlete, getting your workouts done

and making sure you prioritize the right things in life. It all goes hand in hand. So hopefully, hopefully like our discipline and getting into the gym and putting up the numbers can also contribute to getting off the damn phone and putting, you know, putting to work, whatever your, your top goal is there. You mentioned, um, you know, uh, Mark Sisson a few times, and I know that you've, uh, written some books with him. Um, did you have any knowledge of this kind of ketogenic diet when you were doing your triathlons? Knowledge, you know, the knowledge was at times we could go without

food for a long time and we were probably kicking into ketosis crazily. Even regardless of how you ate. Had no idea what was going on. Like, you know, you run out of food and you still got 48 miles to go to get home and you're starting to feel goofy and dizzy and all that, but you got to fight through it. So that was like, you know, the accelerated crash course to ketosis, but we had no idea what was going on. And we had no idea that there was a different paradigm than the carbohydrate paradigm where, you know where carbs were the fuel for working muscles. That was our programming. And you had to stuff your face before and after all workouts for 10 years. That's all our programming was, was where can I get enough food? And we purposely

eat more food at night because we knew the next day was coming up and it was going to be big training and you didn't want to bonk out there. Bonk is running out of blood sugar and feeling tired and goofy. So boy, that's pretty exciting to see now this evolution and thinking and knowing from the science, things like the FASTER study, F-A-S-T-E-R study, where athletes have an alternative mode of burning energy for hours and hours, and also replenishing that energy after a long depleting training run. That's the insight they did at this three, they did a three hour treadmill run, the faster study. And these are these high fat adapted athletes. They came back the next day and their glycogen was restocked. They did without

eating carbohydrate or eating, you know, minimal carbohydrate. So this fat-burning machine that we can now create through devoted dietary practice, fat and ketone-burning machine, will have tremendous application to athletic performance. Some of the idea behind it, too, is that, I guess, theoretically, you wouldn't even bonk if you were fat-adapted, correct? Because you would have enough, I guess if you do anything too hard, you you were fat adapted, correct? Because you would have enough, I guess if you do anything too hard, you can run into issues, right? But if you're fat adapted, the idea is that you can have enough in storage to be able to put out whatever is necessary

for extended periods of time because fat just carries more calories per gram than carbohydrates, right? Well, extended periods of time, how about two and a half million years of evolution? I mean, our ancestors did not have three meals a day. They didn't have power bars in their pack. What? And, you know, when times were tough— No Clif Bars? The chocolate chip peanut butter one?

It was predated the Clif Bar. But, you know, when times were tough and it was life or death survival, they probably had to output more energy to get the food. And so what were they doing? They were burning fat and they were making ketones to fuel the brain. The brain can't burn fat, but it still needs to function. And it's a highly glucose-dependent organism. It's like 20% to 25% of all our calories are burned by the brain.

And it can burn only glucose or ketones, a little bit of lactate they're now finding out. But like our human organism can function very well without food for long, long periods of time, not to mention without carbs. So it's not so easy in daily life. And we have different circumstances. Dr. Tommy Wood, Nourish Balance Thrive, I don't know if you know him, but he makes some great insights. Today, our training methods that we're doing now have nothing to do with these hunter-gatherer ancestors. And you guys have lifted more weight than most every human in the history of the human race for two and a half million years. You perform more physical work, same with a triathlete who trained for hours and hours a day for years and years. No human in ancient times did anywhere near that amount of work. So we might have a different free

path to consume more regular meals or more carbs or whatever. But the idea remains that it's not as a necessity as we always have thought. We have other ways of nourishing ourselves for performance. So you started hearing about these diets after you were done training? I mean, when you were retired, basically? Yes, yes. And how did this kind of relationship evolve between you and Mark Sisson of you getting on board with writing some of these books? And what did you think of some of his concepts and ideas when he was pitching them to you? Were you kind like what do you like dude no you need carbohydrates this is dumb yeah it was funny um you know mark started that mark's daily apple blog in 2006 it's now uh the

highest ranking blog in the ancestral health space for health advice and um we we got together to help start this lifestyle movement, the Primal Blueprint books and series of books after that. So he presented me in June 2008 with the 10 Primal Blueprint lifestyle laws of eating the ancestral diet. And that meant no grains and sugars. And so I pretty much cold turkey immersed into this project to learn about and write about these concepts. And I'd had much cold turkey immersed into this project to learn about

and write about these concepts. And I'd had a grain-based diet my entire life. So it was just, you know, June 10th, 2008, I'm like, no grains? He's like, no grains. I'm like, well, why not? You know, those are healthy. He's like, no, these are civilization foods that only started when the dawn of civilization occurred in Egypt and in the Americas and in Asia, where they're eating corn and rice and grains and harvesting the grains. And so we left hunter-gatherer past and became civilized humans. And that destroyed our health as a consequence in many ways, because we started eating nutritionally inferior food to the optimal hunter-gatherer diet. So it was a big awakening. I was like, so what about oatmeal? Is that a grain? Yeah, man,

that's a grain. What about this? What about that? And so moving over from, I'm sure the bodybuilders can reference this, like every morning was this massive bowl of cereal. That was my morning trough. People would tease me because it'd be four different kinds of cereal, fruit, yogurt, bananas, berries. And I would just chow this thing and then go about my day of endurance training. So I had to switch from that to a giant omelet with six eggs and vegetables and avocado slices. And so it was a graceful transition just with a new concept saying, this is going to be better for my health. It's not going to stimulate insulin. It's going to allow me to kind of leverage the nutritious meal and get better

burning body fat in between meals. So I'm not so reliant upon these energy bars that I'm selling on my website and pushing sugar out to the athletes like I did for many years in my career. I used to work for Cytosport, the makers of muscle milk and Cytomax, and everybody thought you absolutely need this stuff. You better have muscle milk. You're not going to recover from your workout. That muscle milk when it first came out, oh my God, it was so good. Yeah. The original formula was unreal.

And so, you know, now to sit back and go, wow, so there's possibly a better way. How are you still alive after eating that much cereal? Yeah, really. Yeah, I'm just trying to undo all that damage, you know, just like getting out of those years of making bad lifestyle decisions. You're just working back to, you know, get more nutritious foods and cut out all those sugars and grains. Do you still eat keto-ish nowadays? Oh, sure.

Yeah, I'm experimenting with the carnivore scene lately. Thanks to Dr. Paul Saladino, your guest here last week. What a lunatic. Yeah. No, the guy is in my head nonstop. He's freaking me out. So you're avoiding vegetables too? I mean, I'm not an aggressive experimental phase here

because I don't have those inflammatory or autoimmune conditions that I'm desperate to heal. I feel like I'm a healthy person, but I have in the last three months now, just as sort of an experiment and processing this new information, which is extremely compelling and makes a lot of sense that you don't really need this stuff and it might in some ways be bad for you. It's mind-blowing to think my salad and all the things I'm putting on it don't really need it. And to favor those, you know, the most nutrient dense foods we know are things from animals, liver, eggs, salmon eggs, the sushi platter of sashimi.

All these things have, you know, tremendous nutritional value, even in comparison to kale and broccoli and things like that. So it's pretty wild. And I'm, you know, I'm one for being open-minded and thinking critically. I think this is an exercise in thinking critically to say, oh, so I've formed fixed and rigid beliefs around my dietary and lifestyle patterns, and I feel like I'm right and the vegan freaks are wrong, but who am I to say until you continue to load in more life experience and understand the science and get deep into it? I've never tried a vegan diet, so I don't know. Neither has any human in the history of humanity for a sustained period except for today's modern vegan. No population has ever existed on a vegan diet since the dawn of our ancestors.

Besides that, it sounds like a great idea. Do you think that maybe in both cases, whether it's a carnivore, keto, even just like a standard bodybuilding diet, do you think that some of the results are just what we're avoiding? So maybe in the case of a carnivore diet versus a vegan diet, you know, maybe it's just, it's just the stuff that we're avoiding. Maybe because you've said that you're on a diet and you're like more nutritionally conscious. Like, you know, there's a lot of research that says, you know, you know, you take any type of being on the earth and as long as it's, it eats as it's a little calorie deprived,

it lives longer, has a longer lifespan. So maybe just by eating vegetables, maybe that keeps you from eating too many calories and therefore maybe it does line you up with having a longer life. I don't know. Oh my gosh, you nailed it. I mean, this is the big thing that,

speaking of thinking critically. Just like not eating shit, right? Right. I mean, it's the big thing that, speaking of thinking critically- Just like not eating shit, right? Right. I mean, it's the not eating shit diet. A new book by Mark Bell coming soon. But when we depart from that starting point of nasty ass standard American diet, 7-Eleven fueled fast food, junk food thing,

and we go vegan and we start eating cleanly and we get lentil soup, and chew on a piece of lettuce, and have carrots for snack, you're going to have a massive improvement in your health. And this is the foundational premise of some great work that's been done by respected leaders, Dean Ornish, leading author of Codwell and Rip Esselstyn. I'm very old friends with Rip Esselstyn. I respect him a lot. He's done great for humanity with his plant-based diet, but we have to remember that that's a departure from something. And so it could be more about what you're not eating

than the actual vegan food lineup having these wonderful health benefits. Possibly carnivore could fall in there too, although we're going to argue that those foods that you're emphasizing, that gives you a better chance to have a more nutrient-dense diet because you're clearing space away than where you might otherwise get filled up on a white rice below your piece of sushi simple example i like that one i'm going to use that right so uh keep that in mind and try not to make those intuitive leaps that don't make sense. Yeah. Same with training.

Like you do something that works for a week three years ago and then you kind of keep repeating that because it worked three years ago. It doesn't make sense and you got to continually refine and update and especially with diet. continually refine and update and especially with diet. Have you been noticing big benefits as you switched from carnivore because carnivore doesn't seem like a massive departure from what you've already been doing like you've you've been doing high fat very minimal carb whole foods and carnivore is just pretty much taking out carbs right so have you been feeling better with it have you noticed a big difference? I like your question because it opens up to the idea that like it's very possible that we're overemphasizing the importance of this stuff. And my good friend, Dr. Kate Shanahan, author of Deep Nutrition,

one of the leading authors and experts in ancestral health field, you know, I'll get into it with her about my particulars and my blood work and all that. And she's like, you know, it's just, it's just your diet. It's probably, there's so many other factors, including your personal disposition and your level of uh happiness and functionality in your relationships and all those things that are going to affect your energy levels and your performance so i think dr peter attia said this too once we kind of grab the low-hanging fruit we're 80 of the way there to our longevity potential

and in the case of diet, the low-hanging fruit would be low-hanging fruit, among other things, including getting rid of all the crap and having strict rules and guidelines to say, I am not putting that shit in my body. And I think that's where I like to come on strong here on this topic, because we hear a lot of people saying, hey, everything in moderation, and weekends I have my cheat days. And so I go have pizza and ice cream and then I get back on. It's like, no, no, no, no. Look, this is the most precious asset we have to take our way through life. So put some rules in place and say, I don't eat industrial seed oils. I will never consume one the rest of my life, I hope. The sugar's not so good for me either. And the payoff of having a few bites of

something good does not stack up with the health consequences of eating sugar. Same with refined grains. So I live by these strict rules and guidelines that are very, very important to me and I think benefit me greatly. And now you can ask me, do I feel better on Converter? Yeah, maybe so, but I was so far ahead of the game and so far past that 80%. Now I'm playing around in the 20% optimization world and that's probably how a lot of your listeners, viewers are already at and thinking about these things with great precision

and that's fun, but I want to set that big picture view of like, I don't eat shit food, so I'm doing really, really well. And from there, yeah, thumbs up and eating, fasting more. We're now seeing this rise to the forefront. I didn't want to offend any vegans if they're still tuning in, but you can get to this point of metabolic flexibility. That's Mark's favorite term.

metabolic flexibility, that's Mark's favorite term, any way you want, even a vegan, vegetarian type diet, where you're spending long periods of time in a fasted state, where we know this is the body functions at its most optimal when we're in a fasted state. We have optimal cell repair, it's called autophagy. We have optimal immune function. We have optimal anti-inflammatory effects. So fasting is better than going to Jamba Juice and getting their fresh squeezed super antioxidant bomb. You're making more antioxidants internally when you're fasting. So as that emphasis increases where we're not reliant upon food as our main source of energy, but we're really good at burning body fat, making ketones. And then finally, I'll throw this in from Dr. Tommy Wood. If you're a metabolically healthy person and you do want to go get some gourmet handmade vegan ice cream from the place in Seattle, they have these gourmet ice

cream shops. It's a big scene there. I'm going there tonight. We're going to have some ice cream this weekend. Your body should be able to handle an assault of maybe not the perfect food. So if you do want to have a celebration and cut into some wedding cake, enjoy the heck out of it. Get back on the horse the next day, pump some iron, and your body's going to be fine. But I'm not giving you an inch so you can take a mile, okay? Arnold Schwarzenegger, I just saw today, he kind of dropped a bomb on the internet with him and I think it's James Cameron. They teamed up to do a vegan movie. So we have to all get put through that. Yeah, it's called The Game Changers.

Oh, my God. That's why I'm going to get a hidden camera and film Arnold chowing down those eggs and meat and the things that he fuels his life with. Yeah, I'm interested to kind of see the direction that the movie goes. You know, it appears that it's very pro-vegan. Again, I've never tried the diet, so I don't really have an idea what it would feel like to only eat vegetables. But, yeah, I did find it weird, yeah,

that he built his body, you know, through. But they do show him in this video. And Jackie Chan, too. Oh, Jackie. They show him in this video. They do show him eating, like, steak and eggs and stuff like that, you know, through, but they do show him in this, you know, Jackie Chan too. Oh, Jackie. They show him in this video. They do show him eating like steak and eggs and stuff like that, you know? So I don't, you know, I don't know what direction they're coming from, but we're in a weird world. Yeah. And if you're Alison Felix and, you know, training that hard,

maybe that wasn't Alison Felix. Sorry, Alison, you probably have a better diet, but. Was that Mike Rashid, by the way? No. I thought it was him. Some cameos. We're watching the trailer if you're listening on audio. But if you're working that hard in the gym, you are building metabolic flexibility in a different way than, let's say, dietary restriction. So you're starving your cells of energy and you're prompting mitochondrial biogenesis through your ambitious training program. So that means you can get away with consuming more calories.

You can probably sustain good health as a vegan because you're doing all these other good things for your health and fitness. So it's- That guy doesn't look anything like Mike Rashid. I didn't realize that. There's Ripper, my friend I just mentioned. That was his cameo.

Yeah, so these plant-based athletes, congratulations to them. I will say, let's check on them in five years' time to make sure they don't have some extreme nutrient deficiencies going on, which is a possible risk when you have that exclusive of a diet. And I don't think anyone is going to dispute that strongly, but we'll check in again. And then again, know, I don't think anyone is going to dispute that strongly, but we'll, you know, we'll check in again. And then again, the genetic factor might come in where 23% of the population might really thrive on a vegan diet. And those 23% might be all the people listed in the credits there because they've come into this world, you know, Rich Roll podcast,

popular podcast says, yeah, my life changed and it turned around. I did magnificent endurance feeds when I went vegan plant-based. Congratulations. One, you got your life together and quit eating shit junk food. And two, maybe this diet is optimal for your physiology and boy, be careful, you know, pigeonholing and sticking everybody, just like you asked me off the camera and seeing that, you know, is carnivore good for me carnivore good for you what about you i don't know and i'm not going to take huge stock in that i'm going to try it myself kind of thing you know i'm wondering also because like you know there's a clip of arnold eating tons of meat when he was younger and now he's an advocate for the vegan diet but you're also going to wonder with a lot of these athletes a lot of them didn't come up eating vegan diets a lot of them came up eating a lot of meat, probably a lot of carbs. They got,

they gained a lot of muscle. They got pretty big. And then they transferred to being, being vegan and taking out the shit like we were talking about. Now they feel better, but they've already built up such a high level of athletic ability prior to that. So how can you say, Oh, it's because of the vegan diet that I performed this way. Right. Right. Oh man. That reminds me of that reminds me of Bowflex, of course. I was the first sponsored athlete by Bowflex, the very first. Wow. They wanted an endurance athlete and then they wanted to- Like Chuck Morrison shit. Yeah, 1987. And so I was at the trade shows promoting the first invented Bowflex and there was me, the skinny endurance geek, and then there was a really

well-built guy that was another spokesperson for the product. And so I was talking to him, you know, offline, like, so man, you know, you use this thing a lot. Like, what's your favorite workouts? How many rods do you use? He goes, oh man, I'm in the gym. You know, he got his physique not on this new exciting home gym machine, but with hard work pumping real iron. Not to say you couldn't get there on the Bowflex, but it was like, it was funny because I'm like, oh, of course, you know, you didn't just show up here because of the Bowflex. Right. And yeah, it's the, you know, the cause and effect

and attributing the cause to the, you know, making these flawed conclusions and then getting too narrow in your thinking is very dangerous. Yeah. Something that does feel very good and maybe just something to be cautious of whenever you hear any of us, whether it's me or whether it's anybody else talking about feeling good, being on any diet is just understand this, that being in control of any aspect of your life feels fucking great. So if you gain a little bit of control somewhere, you control some of the environment at work and clean some of that up, or you control some of the environment at home and make everything better for you and your spouse or the relationship you are. Anytime you're able to clean something up or gain a little bit of control on something, you get a little better control on your food and like, man, I've been doing pretty good with my diet.

Of course it makes it feel great. It's not even necessarily the nutrition, uh, take it or leave it either way food wise. But, um, I think it's the fact that you like set out to do something and now you're doing it makes you feel awesome. Wow. Yeah. You know, that's, um, the, the hidden benefit. It's fantastic. I love that. Yeah. And as you were saying, you know, moderation, you know, um, when people say, when people say moderation, I think they have this really cluttered idea of moderation. They're like, you know, one minute they're on a carnivore diet. The next minute they're they're on a they're on a binge.

You know, they're eating pizza or something. And it's like, that's not what anyone's talking about with moderation. Again, let's go back to the word control. You're going to have to figure out some way of controlling and managing your diet and getting some sort of overall management of the stuff that you consume. And once you're able to do that, then you can be flexible and you can stick and move and you can go from keto to bringing in some carbs to trying the keto reset. There's a lot of different options that become available once you can kind of learn how do I get control,

like if it fits your macros or those kinds of diets. If it helps someone gain control because they're weighing their food and they're getting better understanding of the calories, then that's probably a great place to start. Great place to start. Don't get carried away. We have this condition of orthorexia now that's pervading the keto scale, especially. Right. Orthorexia is an unnatural fixation on overly correct. And so you increase your stress level in your life due to your high food standards, and you can't go with the flow. And so

that's not what we're talking about here, but you know, the same token, like if I can't find nutritious food around, that's a great opportunity to fast. So then I'm not like giving these back doors everywhere I go to, uh, depart from my high dietary standards. Mark Twain said everything in moderation, including moderation. You know, I'm really curious before we move off of this topic, because you were talking about how you use fat as your main energy source at this point. For a lot of power athletes that are carbohydrate dependent, maybe athletes like sprinters, people that lift, bodybuilders, would you see an advantage of utilizing carbohydrates? Or would you see that it would still be advantageous to become fat adapted and use fat and fat as your main energy

source for those types of exercises? Yeah, there's some people doing great work in this area. Luis Velasenor comes to mind with ketogains.com, And he's been in strict nutritional ketosis for 18 years straight. And you can look him up. Oh, we're going to get him. He's in good shape. He is jacked, man. He's jacked and tan. That's right. Oh, like Mark. And so he's kind of hacked this process where he doesn't need to consume carbs. He has an extremely ambitious strength training, bodybuilding, powerlifting program. And it's a long way to get there. It takes a lot of work and it's pretty tough when you're doing glycolytic workouts. And I can still reference times where I do my high intensity sprint workouts. I'm an old

guy, 54 years old, trying to do these crazy sprint workouts and break 60 in the quarter on the high school track and break the speed golf world record for, you know, running really fast and doing things that are pretty taxing to my body. And then kicking back into a lot of fasting, a lot of ketogenic meals. And sometimes those stress factors, because fasting is a stressor, right? Just like a workout is when you put those two together and you also throw my age into the recipe pot, it could be a suboptimal. And I noticed occasions where my recovery was challenged because I'm going to blame it on, um, doing the kick-ass workout, not stuffing my face after having that fasting period go on, having the ketogenic meals come on, and then I'm testing my blood glucose and it's 120 pre-diabetic, right? And I look at my chart and I'm like, well, let's see, I haven't eaten anything in 18 hours. And the previous meal was a steak and

vegetables. And before that I had some dark chocolate and a salad, right? So why is my glucose through the roof? Because I'm making it to sustain my energy while I'm writing a book or whatever. But that implies that I'm in the fight or flight mode if I'm making that much glucose. So there's some nuances here where I'm trying to answer the question eventually, but the targeted use of carbohydrates

in a foundation of fat adapted could be the way to go, especially for high performing athletes. And of course, so much more leeway and flexibility, especially if we're, you know, I'm talking to a large group of people. I'm like, look, do you have excess body fat you want to get rid of or not? Yes or no? Straight up, yes or no? If you say, no, I am good. I'm at my competitive weight. Then you have a whole different set of decision-making parameters than someone who's struggling and frustrated trying to drop excess body fat. If you're trying to drop excess body fat, quit eating those nasty processed carbs and kick on the fat-burning genes. Work out hard. Get the job done. Let's

get this matter handled, and then we can start talking about performance optimization. But I mean, you know, the room full of triathletes, the starting line of triathletes, even in the highest level races like the Ironman, a third of the field has 5, 10, or 20 pounds of excess body fat because of adverse dietary practices. So we don't even go into the entry gate to talk about this or that until you get the fat off your body. So I like to start there with everyone reasoning and thinking about how am I going to deal with these different influences. That's a great point. And as you're saying that, it just occurred to me, like I see cyclists all over the place and a lot of times they're not in very good shape, you know? And you're like, what the hell, man? This guy's on their, you know, this guy or girl's on their bike a lot, but they don't have a physique that I would

ever want to desire. What are some of the – obviously, your nutrition is a huge part of it. But is it because they're just probably overdoing it so much? Not even just a recreational person on the streets. They probably have a shit diet. But even some of the competitors that you would face probably are like that as well, right? Some of the competitors that you would face probably are like that as well, right? Well, I mean, when you're getting to elite level, you're talking about no one's got a drop of excess body fat.

Otherwise, they're not going fast. But in the endurance community, the recreational athletes, the amateur athletes, it's a big problem. make any sense that you're training 10, 15, 17 hours a week, working hard, pumping that heart out, burning calories and carrying excess body fat. So there's a problem with the picture here. And we don't see that problem in, uh, uh, power lifting, uh, sprinting. Have you ever seen a fat sprinter quick? Anybody from, from, you know,caa olympics there's no one in the 100 meters or 200 meters or 400 meters that has extra body fat because the penalty is so severe to be carrying around fat when you're trying to do an explosive performance but when you're sitting on a bike seat you can pedal out to the pie shop and sit down and have a cherry pie and pedal home and you're going to have like a net you're going to have a net uh a net home, and you're going to have a net zero

or you're going to have a net calorie increase to what you burned that day because your appetite is stimulated when you're out there burning calories for so long and you're burning calories at a higher heart rate than you should, so you're into the glucose-burning zone. You're going to get depleted. You're going to finish the ride,

and you're going to want Ben & Jerry's, one of the people we just lost sponsorship from. So that's the problem is they're sugar burning machines in the workout and sugar burning in their dietary patterns. And yes, they go hand in hand. You train at too high of a heart rate. You know that feeling of feeling depleted when you came home from even if it's a hike or something, you just need that sugar and your brain is going to go straight for it. No matter how disciplined you are, it's going to happen that way. So to get out of that spiral is slow down your pace of your exercise so you can be good at fat burning. And I would say in the case of a strength athlete or a person in the gym working with their personal

trainer, take those things down a little bit, man. I mean, I love CrossFit, but I love the first two thirds of the workout. And then I find a side door and say, Hey, I got a bounce. I got, I'm getting a text. I'm not supposed to use my text during CrossFit if you've been listening, but I think there's a point of diminishing returns where you can output a lot of peak performance, high intensity. And then if that workout lingers on for too long, you start to get cumulative fatigue during the workout. There's a guy named Dr. Craig Marker. I don't know if you've heard of him. He's worked with Pavel in the past at Strong First and he has this article that was life-changing for me and it was titled Hit Versus Hurt. So hit high intensity interval training and his concept that's

kind of a breakthrough is called high intensityintensity repeat training. And this is where maybe the workout is not that long in duration and your explosive efforts are not that long. So you're 10 to 20 seconds maximum. So you're not doing kettlebell swings for a minute on, minute off. You're going to this point, you're not doing sprints for more than 20 seconds or bicycle sprints. And that way you protect against the cellular damage and you protect against this accumulated fatigue during the workout that leaves you feeling exhausted and depleted at the end. Cause that's going to trigger you to overeating, especially over consuming carbohydrates. So it's like get in the gym, get it done and get out. I don't know how that lines

up with a competitive power lifter or someone, but like, you know, putting up good numbers and keeping them up there. Jacques D'Avore, Maximum Sustained Power has got that concept down in LA where you keep lifting the same weight. You don't take plates off because you're getting tired as the workout goes on. It seems makes sense to me. I don't know what you guys think about that kind of thing. No, it makes a lot of sense. And I think a lot of people are guilty of that, you know, just kind of doing the, all this extra stuff. Cause you feel like you really need to, you know,

you feel like you have to, and you could certainly come back the next day and do more stuff, but it probably makes sense to have some sort of end to your workout, whether it be that you make it through three or four exercises or whether it be that your workout only goes this duration and then you just stop. It's not going to, it's only going to benefit you probably just to go home at some point. Oh my goodness. And I've talked to a lot of CrossFit enthusiasts because they're in the paleo, the primal world a lot. And they'll come up to me and they'll say, yeah, I'm done. I love it. I'm going five days a week and I do this. I'm like, so you're going to what's designed to be a strenuous and challenging and broad fitness competency workout five days a week. It's too much. So you are by definition,

even though I've never seen you work out, you're doing five mediocre workouts because there's no such thing as a kick-ass peak performance session when you're in this pattern of going back the next day and the next day, all of them are going to kind of regress down to average because you're in this pattern of going back the next day and the next day, all of them are going to kind of regress down to average because you're never fully rested and recovered. So like you want to go get the social experience, take two of those and go in the WIMP group and do half of what you normally do and bail and then have one that's better than any of the other ones

once a week, let's say for argument's sake, where you're really pushing it and you're really going for it and you're setting new records on the timed measured workouts. And then the other one's medium. So instead of five mediums, you have two super easy, maybe you drop one of those days and you have one kick-ass one. And your performance, your body composition, all these things that people are stuck at, I mean, we hear over and over, people, they're looking good, man, they're 12%. You shouldn't be complaining. Or the woman's, you know, her figure would turn heads in normal everyday life, but she

wants more and she can't get there and she's so frustrated. Or the guy that wants to bring the six pack out instead of the almost six pack kind of thing, or six pack with jacuzzi only, that kind of thing, right? You got to do something to shock the body. And that is, you know, perform more extremely at those times when you're really going for it. With what you were mentioning when you mentioned HIIT, like doing 10 seconds, and then I don't think you mentioned a rest period. But in those 10 seconds, wouldn't that get anaerobic? Or is it not long enough? Oh, sure.

This is a totally different discussion than the aerobic foundation, where we want an aerobic workout to be aerobic. So that's jogging, pedaling your bike over to the farmer's market, pedaling home, that kind of thing. But when you're doing a hard workout, and we're so accustomed to doing interval workouts, high intensity interval training is the fitness thing. And the articles all over the internet saying it's the most efficient way to train. It's better than jogging, which what they mean is you get a better fitness response and that's all fine and well. But any workout that has this element of cumulative fatigue during the workout where you're more sorry ass at the end than when you were at the start, that is a potential flaw and a potential compromising recovery. Dr. Marker's article talks about the cellular destruction

that occurs when you ask your body to perform maximum intensity for longer than 20 seconds. This is mainly more relevant to me in my sprints where I'm running and I'm going full speed. Once you get to 10 seconds, you start to- It's still very relevant to strength training because you shouldn't be like, yes, you're gonna be fatigued and you'll be tired from your workout. But yeah, you should be able to still have some force output at the end of a workout.

Force output, well said. I mean, for sprinting, my force output is my time across the football field, let's say. So let's say I bust one out at first. I used to do 100 meters. Now I only do 60 after talking to Dr. Marker and saying, okay, there's diminishing returns. Once you get up into the 10, 15, 20-second mark, you have an exponential increase in cellular destruction if you keep asking your body for more and more.

It's called disassembling and deamination of the cellular energy to pump out more ATP because you're going maximum. And it doesn't matter how fit you are. You can be as fit as you want. Sprinting for 15 seconds is almost physiologically impossible. Like your body, it's going to slow down. And that's what a lot of sprinters, even the 100-meter sprinters,

even the top-level 100-meter sprinters, it's a fight for who can decelerate the least. Exactly, yeah. Usain Bolt hits maximum speed at 60 meters. He's going 28 miles an hour, and then he's just trying to hang on. Yeah. And, oh, by the way, talking about the elites, it is known in science that they have way less cellular destruction

than the average Joe. So Wade Van Niekerk, South Africa, you can pull that up. It's one of the greatest performances by a human in the history of our lives. He won the quarter in the Rio Olympics from the outside lane, lane eight. So he never saw another athlete because of the stagger. And he literally sprinted the entire track and destroyed the world record, one of the greatest world records from Michael Johnson. He ran a quarter mile of 400 meters in 43 seconds flat. And it was,

you know, it was amazing to see a guy sprint for that long. So his cellular destruction that took place during that 400 meters was way less than Joe Blow, Brad Kearns, who's also on YouTube running a 60 second quarter with 700 views by now. But I was trashed at the end and I couldn't catch my breath to speak for a minute or two. And he's crossing the line, raising his hand and then soon off on a victory lap. So his body can run a sprint a quarter mile with, with less trauma than average Joe. So we have to respect that like our limitations are, we got to err on the cautious side and i'm taking my sprints down to around 10 seconds now and so i was the point i was wanting to finish was like the first sprint is i feel great let's

say i did nine seconds to get to the 40 yard line from the end zone uh and um oh there it goes we should pause for 43 seconds this is such a beautiful so if you're if you're watching on youtube look at the guy in the outside lane how he takes off like a freak going way too fast look at his form too the drive in his legs he's sprinting his split there is under 21 seconds for halfway so that's like a a great you know winning the ncaa title at halfway and then still going. And this is where everybody ties up and their form changes. You can see the stride and the tension in the neck and the shoulders.

And here he goes just unleashing complete preservation of form and explosiveness all the way down the home stretch. World record's 43-1 and he's 43-0. Wow.

Yeah, that was crazy. I thought he'd peter out when he left. I mean, these guys that are catching him are like, dude, what just happened? Because they had one of the greatest races of their lives, and he destroyed them. Yeah, just like Usain's done to one of the, you of their lives and he destroyed them yeah just like usain's done to the one of the you know 400 meters that's that's yeah that's no messing around 40 you know 400 meters

um the 200 meter i mean it's pain and suffering right there man much respect out to i saw recently on tv they had uh 200 meters and it was just straight straight away oh yeah yeah like in boston they were doing a meet. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. They're mixing up track and making it more fun and exciting. It looked cool.

And there's a running show coming on TV, coming up with Chad Johnson, Ocho Cinco. Oh yeah. Yeah. I saw that. Yeah. It looks cool. That's great. Love it.

Yeah. It's fun to watch. Yeah. So my first sprint of the workout is a nice little nine second. And I'm going to say on perceived exertion, I gave it a 90 out of a hundred, right? Yeah, so my first sprint of the workout is a nice little nine second. And I'm going to say on perceived exertion, I gave it a 90 out of 100, right? So I want that eighth one to be nine seconds at a 90 out of 100 perceived exertion. And so I'm not going to do the ninth one because I might notice, you know,

sometimes I'll notice a tiny, tiny lower back or hamstring grabbing on my seventh or eighth sprint. That is the designated end of the workout. Just like that last set where your form breaks a little bit. See you guys, I'm out of here. longer recovery time, potential for injury damage, cravings, and sleeping the afternoon away rather than keeping it real and keeping it explosive at all times. This is all stuff I've been talking about for like the last 10 years. You know, when it comes to strength training, your last rep of your last set should look like the first rep of your first set. Oh, that's pure.

Is that in your book? I mean, that's pure genius. Yeah, it's everywhere. I say it all the time. No one ever listens. I've been saying it for years. If you did a five sets of five, which is a very standard power lifting protocol, five sets of five reps, or if you were to do eight sets of three reps, or however you break it

down, normally people are in this 24, 25, maybe 30 rep range, 10 sets of three, all these different protocols. four, 25, maybe 30 rep range, 10 sets of three, all these different protocols, whatever the case is, yeah, the form should look similar on all the reps and all the sets. And, um, it's, it's hard to like stay in your lane with it. Cause you don't, you just don't want to, you want to go, you want to go heavier. Again, you're excited cause you're in a group and somebody has that extra weight on there and you're like, ah, screw it. I'll just do that. And you just kind of, you know, but it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way. I mean, for fun, for fun it does. Yeah, you could have fun that way, but you're not going to really make the progress that you're looking for. Yeah. I mean, just like we were talking about earlier,

you can make progress getting off the couch, doing anything, just show up and get your keypad punched at, well, yours is free, so you don't have to do that here. That's right. They don't turn you away like when my thing expired and I couldn't get in. No, no. It's good. You just show up, lift some weight. But then when we want to improve and especially avoid the injuries and the breakdown, that's when we start listening, people. That's why he's doing a podcast in the first place. Come on. You know, real quick. There's another viral video teed up.

Yeah. If you're not watching on video, you're missing a little bit, but we'll try to keep you. I did the color commentary on the 400 pretty well. Okay. All right. Okay. So before this video plays, I have two questions to ask you about what you were talking about. Now, you were mentioning that you want to have every single set of that HIIT workout be the same.

We'll call it H.E.R.T. workout. H.E.R.T. workout. So the distinction, it would be high-intensity repeat training, just like Mark's been talking about 10 years, is you want to repeat that explosive effort rather than seeing it decline. Perfect. And like the spin class at the gym, okay, we're going to sprint 30 seconds off for 10 minutes. And then at the end, the teacher's going, keep going. You can do it one more.

And the people are just trashed. But they're going to put out another 30-second sprint and disassemble and deaminate their cellular structure accordingly and get ammonia toxicity because that's what happens in the bloodstream when this is going on. And what's going to happen after that? Compromise fat metabolism. So instead of burning fat, they're going to burn lean muscle tissue. And their whole game, the whole reason they're going to the gym is screwed up because they did too many sprints. If you're an instructor, I'm sorry. I know you're

doing a good job trying, but don't push people too hard or they won't burn fat. They'll burn skeletal muscle. Other than that, great class. Thanks, teacher. It might be as bad or worse as not getting enough sleep. You throw that on there too because the spin class was at 6 a.m. so we didn't get enough sleep. Oh, man. Okay, sorry, Antima.

No, it's totally okay. Now, your rest periods, I'm guessing, are just however long you need to be able to do the next repeated bout for that same intensity, correct? So it could be one minute or a minute and a half. You know what Dr. Marker calls them? What does he call them? Luxurious rest intervals. And that to me, this was life-changing for me

because I'm doing these sprints. I've been doing them for 13 years since Mark Sisson got me, understanding the importance of not just being able to still jog and do bike riding, but sprint, really sprint. But I was so conditioned with my endurance mindset and my ability to suffer and be tough

and also recover so quickly, because I'm not explosive, I'm mostly endurance, that I'd do my sprints and then I'd throw down another, rest for 15 seconds, I'd go hit another one, rest for very short time, go hit another one. And I could do it. I did fine. I still put up good times and everything, but the cumulative effect of that over the next 48 hours, I'd feel like crap maybe 24 to 36 hours later because I didn't recover enough. So I did, what was your term for like continuing that explosive output or what was the?

Just, yeah, being able to- Force production or something? Have the same force production. Yeah, same force. I had the same force production, but the eighth one was so much more challenging than the first one because of that lack of rest. So we put together, we're trying to finish this whole picture is

tone those timeframe down to 10 to 20 seconds is the sweet spot. Over 20 seconds is highly questionable. Luxurious rest intervals. And then a sufficient number of sprints, uh, somewhere between four and 10 is plenty. You can't say you're going more than 10 and doing sprints. If so go fricking faster. You know, what are you doing out there? You're going to do 20 sprints. You don't need to do 20 sprints. What about someone who's, uh, not able to produce much force? Like I I've trained a lot of clients over the years and sometimes,

sometimes females, female athletes would have a harder time like being explosive with a certain weight. And I found that like neurologically, they're not super efficient, you know? So what if you had somebody that maybe can't, you know, and SEMA would be able to go crazy on, on some of the machines out there. If we were sprinting on a bike or something like that, it'd be able to blow the whole thing to pieces probably. But whereas someone who isn't as strong, you know, would the 10 second kind of thing still apply? Yeah, that's a good question. If you're less explosive and more, let's say, endurance oriented or just don't have that nervous system yet, you could extend that time out. Yeah. And you arguably could do more reps than a truly explosive

athlete. And the real explosive people can take it up to seven seconds. That's all they need. Yeah. And so that's really interesting. This guy, Dave Dolay in Switzerland, he's a top trainer there. We got to pull up his Dave Dolay one-minute workout or something like that. But he was a former elite-level sprinter in the Swiss national record holder in 100 meters, 10.16. So he was a top, top athlete,

and now he's a top trainer in Switzerland. And he's done a lot of research into neurotransmitter makeup as applied to the type of workout and training program you should organize. And there's people with different neurotransmitter dominance and deficiencies, and thereby when you ask one person, let's say it's Nsema, to give me an all-out effort for one minute on the box jumps, ready, go, and you're going to slam that assignment and collapse on the floor at the end because of your explosive nature. But there's going to be

another person that comes into the gym the first day and they're getting their assessment and go, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to go all out over and over for one minute. I'm going to tell you, I want to see you give it all you got. And they go, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. And you say, stop. And they go, uh, okay, what's next? You know, they don't have the neurotransmitter profile to be explosive. And that was all out for them. It just looks differently.

And some of that's the- Maybe they don't even have the same mentality either. Well, that's what the mentality is, is the neurotransmitter makeup. And where it's like, they weren't sandbagging you. That is all out. And they're like, whew, that was tough. Okay.

You know what I mean? The difference between like, and he was describing like he and his training partner in the 100 meters had a similar time. They're both world-class guys. This guy had to warm up for an hour before his hundred meter race with jogging, stretching, explosive, you know, starts for 12 meters, 20 meters, another set of starts, more stretching. And Dave would be asleep in the stands waiting

till the 20 minute call came for his race. He'd wake up, shake off the cobwebs, get in the blocks and blast a 10-second 100 meters. And he said his neurotransmitter profile was different than this guy that needed a long ramp up. I'm sure you can reference this for strength athletes too, where some guys need four warm-up sets before they're going to go for their PR, and the other guy needs two swigs of coffee. But it was cool.

You can take this neurotransmitter questionnaire. I'll send you by email, but you can go online, and it's called the Braverman Neurotransmitter Test. And you will get a spit out reading of your neurotransmitter, dominant neurotransmitter and deficient neurotransmitter. There's GABA, dopamine, serotonin, and acetylcholine. So those are the four. And you're going to be dominant in one and deficient in another one. And that can help inform not only your diet, according to the edge effect is the name of the book, but also your training patterns. But like the basic insight for the show here is like some people, you're a crash and burn guy like me, where I can throw down for one day, one workout, and I'll hang right with you, and I'll go home in a body bag, and I'll need to rest for three days. Or other people are like,

okay, what's next? That was fun. And it's really cool to figure that out because your example of the female who didn't have, she may, in three years of hard training, she may still be that person that just can't put out that much explosiveness. Also the genetic testing, I don't know if you guys have done that yourself, like dnafit.com. I got my muscle fiber composition and it was the shock of my life. It was 56% strength power and 44% endurance. My whole life, I've been endurance athlete

fighting against my genetics, which were more adapted to strength and power. And so if I'd known, this is the one thing thing I wish I'd known the diet stuff 25 years ago, but if I had known this one thing from this one test, it would have just transformed my approach to athletic training because I would have known I'm not that mule with the packs in the Grand Canyon where you load that animal up and it walks in the 100 degree heat with 80 pound pack and goes the next day and does another mule trip and another mule trip. I'm the thoroughbred racehorse that needs to be washed and scrubbed with nice soap and then given out a workout, you know, once in a while, and then having tremendous amount of rest and lower intensity,

lower stress training because the anaerobic muscle fibers don't recover as well as the aerobic muscle fibers. So recover as well as the aerobic muscle fibers. So those reference I was talking about, Mike Pig, Andrew McNaughton, these guys I trained with, they could get up and go every single day for six to eight hours of training, no complaints. And I just like, how come I'm not that good? It was because I had different genetics. So gosh, I mean, it would be a cool thing to test for if some guy comes in at 80% endurance and he's trying to set goals and strength and power lifting sports. Jeez, you're going to have to have some modifications to the training plan. Do you think with the tests you did, do you think that because you're training differently now than you did back then, you know how fiber types at a certain point can change for individuals?

Like a certain amount of them can change. Was that the case for you now? Or do you think back then that was the same 56, 44 you were mentioning? Yeah, the percentage is there and that's genetics. So when I was training, I was deadening my oxidative fast twitch muscle fibers. Is that type 2A or 2B or 2A? So I was deadening those with extreme endurance training and not in a lot of sprinting. And it would have benefited me greatly to keep those guys sharp because I had so many of them and I would have had more explosiveness on the hills and less, you know, it would have been a nice package to work those genetic attributes that I had. Whereas if you don't have them in the first place, you're mostly slow twitch, you're slow twitch.

You're not, you know, there's nothing you can do about that. But those ones that transfer from oxidative to non-oxidative, that's from training. And so a lot of the people in the gym with, you know, big numbers have trained those muscle twitch fibers to do what they're asking them to do. Yeah. And so there's certain parameters or limitations where, um, you know, you're going to pick your favorite event and it doesn't mean I should have gone and done strength or power cause it just wasn't my thing. Probably. I probably wouldn't have been that good. I would have been better at endurance, but just work within that genetic profile.

And, uh, with the hurt training stuff, are you usually doing that on some sort of machine or you're actually physically like going outside and sprinting? Yeah, I'm sprinting. I love sprinting. I think it's for everybody to have that weight-bearing explosive impact and the bone density that it develops. It helps with brain function and BDNF, brain-derived neurotropic factor, and all these amazing benefits. But it's sort of like the use it or lose it principle. I'm going for longevity. So I'm going to be a sprinter the rest of my life because that explosiveness is the thing that you really lose more quickly than anything else.

As you age as an athlete, a high jumping, I have a great passion for that. And it's like, if I can get over that bar as, you know, raising the bar in my life or having the standard to clear it's, it's me defying the aging process in that sense. Well, to have enough power to move your body that way, you know, fast through space, which is sprinting, or to be able to jump like that is really a great thing. I remember Paul Cech wrote an article years ago talking about, you know, how he was able to sprint about the same, like maybe 40-yard dash.

I can't remember if it was 100 or 40, but it was the same as like what he did in high school. And as a young guy reading it, you know, I was probably like 25. I was like, that sounds stupid. Like he should be faster, you know. But then now I kind of understand, okay, he was like 50 when he wrote the article, you know, so I get it. But I thought that that was actually, you know, as I thought about it more over the years, I think that that's really cool. That's a great thing. And it's like, well, why aren't people sprinting? Well, cause sprinting hurts. It's hard. You know, it's tough. It's, uh, when you think

about like, you know, what's like the most calorically, you know, what's something you can do to really like wipe out a lot of calories and you could do something like a burpee, like who the fuck wants to do a burpee? Unless a coach makes you do a burpee, no one's doing them, right? People aren't really doing burpees on their own unless you're a crazy CrossFitter. But normally it's prescribed by some coach, right? And sprinting is kind of a tough thing for a lot of people. You see a lot of people running. I see a lot of people running. I see a lot of people cycling. I see a lot of people out like recreationally doing a lot of stuff. But like you said, how many fat sprinters do you see? It's pretty rare.

So I think sprinting is great, and it's great as a bigger guy. You might want to just, from working with a lot of people over the years, if you go outside and sprint randomly, you're probably going to hurt something, especially if you haven't run in a long time. So that's something to think about, something to consider. Maybe start out on a bike in a gym, like airdyne or something like that. Start out with something that you know is going to be a little easier until you work your way up to have enough fitness to be able to go outside and sprint.

But the point is you should be able to do that. You shouldn't be restricted. outside and sprint. But the point is, you should be able to do that. You shouldn't be restricted. What's that famous old-time author, like Walt Whitman or something, said a man should be able to skin an animal, swim a mile across a lake, build a house, bake a pie, like these male checkpoints to be the everyman. But yeah, weight-bearing activities where you get that extra benefit, especially for dropping body fat. You need that stimulation of the weight-bearing activity. You'll have much more impact than, let's say, pedaling on the bicycle because you're sitting your butt on a bike. So something that puts your body under load. And it could be uphill

sprinting if you're concerned about your weight or your joint. You can do sprinting up the stadium stairs. But the key, like anything sprinting, it can be done with just maximum output for a short period of time. Yeah. And what do your rest intervals look like when you do those? So now it's like at least a minute. And then at a certain point, I'm okay. But I'm deliberately taking more time. I know ATP regenerates in like two or three minutes, correct? Yeah. Bodybuilders know that. Yeah, powerlifting.

Powerlifting. Yeah, in some cases you might need, the shorter the duration, the more intense something is, the longer you need. So sometimes it's a multiplier of 10, sometimes a multiplier of 20, depending on how long the thing took you to do. So if something takes you four seconds, it could even be multiplied even further than that because you might need – it also depends on the fitness level of the person.

But if you were to try to sprint – I mean, think about even the preparation or the warm-up that it requires to sprint 40 yards. You're going to need some sort of warm-up. I realize some people might not need much, but you're going to need something. The intensity of that is very high to try to sprint as fast as you possibly can. The intensity of, like, a walk, like, what do you need? You might need to be, like, halfway awake, and you can go walk,

and you don't need any sort of warm-up for it. The intensity is super low. If we're going're going to try like a maximum effort bench press um it's you're going to need some time to warm up you need some time to get your body ready get your nervous system ready you're kind of mentioning these like neurotransmitters you have to have your uh your central nervous system needs to be like awake and on board with what you're about to do. I've seen people in the gym will work them up to like, let's say a 300 pound like deadlift. They'll flat out miss it. They can't even budge the damn thing off the ground. Right. And I'll go over to them. I'll say, well, what was the weight that you just did before? And how did that look? Cause I may have turned around and worked with somebody else on something for a

second. And they'll say, well, I just, you know, I went right from 225 to this. And I'll go, oh, damn, okay, well, you know, why'd you do that? They're like, I don't know, I was excited. I felt good. Like, no, we can't do that. We can't just jump from 225 to 300. It doesn't work that way. So we'll take a few in-between lifts.

I'll say, let's kind of start over. Let's do 225 for one. Let's do 245. Let's do 270. Let's, you know, let's get, pick out some of these middle weights. I'll see what that looks like. And then maybe we have another chance and we'll try 300 again, depending on how 285 moved or something like that. They do 285 and sure enough, they get to 300 and bam, they nail it. And it's like their central nervous system is now on board with what they're about to do. They could have warmed up, you know, they could have simply just warmed up correctly the first time, but a lot of times they may not have the knowledge,

but you have to kind of figure out a way to get yourself there. Your body needs to feel like the weight. It's called optimally excited and uninhibited, right? It's the prime central nervous system. But I'm wondering, like, how many of those do you have in you if you're hitting 270, 275, 280? Yeah. So for training purposes, it's training, you know, and training should be harder than the fight itself, you know? So I always say like, look, it's not going to kill you if we get an extra set in here, but let's keep track of this. Let's pay attention to this. Do we need to be like effing around with all the smaller weights or is it more important for you to be messing around with all the heavier weights? Like what works well for you? Does it make, do you need to spend a bunch of time moving the bar around? Cause you like your body to be

warm and you want to move the bar and a plate around a bunch. Um, each person seems to be a little bit different when it comes to some of that. Some people mentally just don't care. They're like, I'm ready now. You know, they feel good, but we still need to figure out a way to kind of heighten that central nervous system. So normally with most people, I have them take a lot more sets, but the stronger the athlete, the less sets they usually need. Right. Or the different, different makeup. Yeah. Yeah. Might need just a quick warmup set and then go set a PR. Yeah. Uh, I squatted, uh, I think it was, I think it was a thousand 30 and my warmup for a thousand 30 was I started with 500 pounds. The next lift was 700 pounds. The next lift was 900 pounds. And then I went and did my opening attempt on the platform.

So I like, I got my body warm just by like walking. I put 500 pounds in the bar, threw a belt on, smashed that for a rep, did some like Kelly Sturette stretches in between, went to 700 and went to 900 and went to my opening attempt on the platform. And it worked great. That was like one of the better meets I've ever had. Don't try this at home. No, no, don't try it at home. But we also, a lot of times we use... Try the philosophy at home, but not the weights involved.

We also will utilize a lot of really low reps, you know, in our warmup. That's really important too. So if you, again, if someone's trying to do 300 pounds and they do 225 for 15 reps. That's going to tire them out. Yeah. They might be done, you know, and they might think in their head, like, I need all this stuff because I need to be warmed up. It's like, well, let's, you know, we can do the lighter stuff or you could figure out a way to get your heart rate up and to be warm, but we don't need to be doing all the reps. I think a big thing there too is like when you were warming up, you did your 500, 700, 900, 1,030. A big thing is that you were treating that 500 like you did that 1,030 in terms of the way you went towards the movement. When you think of someone that's deadlifting 225 up to 300, they were probably deadlifting. They knew that 225 was light, so they weren't using the same type of mechanics that they

did. And when they touch 300 pounds, when they touch 300, now they're a little bit out of whack and it doesn't come off the ground because they're not, they're not executing that lift the same way. So that's why like, if you treat lighter loads, like your heavier loads, you could get away with warming up less because it's the same thing. It's the same way you execute that force. Yeah. That's a great point. Yeah. Your hamstrings were stimulated the same way. Your lower back was stimulated the same way. And in your head, you're like, that's 400 pounds and you rip it off the ground. Maybe you even have, you know, maybe because of how fast it moved, maybe you applied more force to it even who knows. Huh?'m gonna try that man we got to run some

tests work up my my hex bar deadlift numbers yeah i was gonna say it's probably a lot in the head too because yeah you know like uh the 295 the other day it's like it worked and then 300 didn't work for me for some reason i'm not sure what happened oh psyched out yeah yeah definitely Yeah, definitely. Andrew did a 265 paused bench press this morning. Yeah. 265? 255. Thank you for that.

I added 10. Yeah, threw a little extra on there. 255 this morning. Paused bench. I think three months ago, he did 205. Well, as far as like a pause, like I haven't attempted a pause bench since the competition in February.

Right. But, I mean, yeah, pretty much like a couple weeks ago I wouldn't have even thought I could have touched that amount of weight. So, yeah. But a lot of it with him has just been picking the right weight. I mean, literally that's been so It's just to pick the correct weight. And we do a lot of like assistance stuff. We do a lot of other work.

But when it comes to the strength movement, we're not like, we work hard, we're not killing ourselves. You know, we work hard, we're not killing ourselves. If we're going to kill ourselves, you know, I will admit, we probably do overtrain here and there just because like from a mental standpoint,

I love it and I'm done with my competitive years so uh i'm still guilty of probably taking too long but you know training takes a long time i have fun with it so fuck it yeah well just like today i you know i did 250 and he's like man that moved fast do you want more yeah definitely all right fine wow yeah so it was a good day. Yeah, we got to kind of judge it by how it looks, how it feels for them, and all that kind of stuff. So what the hell is going on with speed golf? Speed golf.

So this incredible sport of speed golf. Did you invent it? Are you one of these guys who invented something so you could have a world record? Is that what's going on here? No, but that's funny because there's – well, we can watch this first, and then I can talk about speed golf. Or no, put it on pause for a sec because, I mean, everyone knows what golf is, and there's this great underground sports, not too popular,

not a lot of people are playing it, but we're trying, grassroots, but it's called speed golf. And so you actually have a golf tournament where you go, and they keep your score, just like you watch on TV. So you're trying to shoot a good score, but they're also counting your time. They're timing you around the course. Move your ass. It's a slow sport. So they add the strokes and the minutes together to get a speed golf score for a tournament conditions. So for example, the best tournament I ever had, I shot a 78, which is a pretty good golf score. And I ran the course in 47 minutes. So I add 78 plus 47 is 125 was my speed golf score. The winner got a 119. He shot even par on a golf course, a championship course running around and taking,

we take five or six clubs. So you can't be goofing around like happy Gilmore and hockey pucking into the hole. You got to try to go for pars and hit straight. So you can't be goofing around like Happy Gilmore and hockey pucking into the hole. You got to try to go for pars and hit straight shots so you don't waste time. But you're also moving quickly. So I'm doing kind of a tempo run through the course. It's a hell of a metaphor for life. I mean, you're sprinting around from one thing to the next,

but you have to still be accurate, right? Calm down, hit the shot. Just like skiing a biathlon in the Olympics with this cross-country skier. Ski, ski, ski. They shoot the target. They ski, hit the shot. Just like, you know, skiing biathlon in the Olympics where the cross country skiers ski, ski, ski, they shoot the target, they ski, ski, ski. Not many people know, like if you miss a target, you ski a 200 meter penalty lap. So there's no guys just rushing and shooting a gun off. They are taking their time and they need to get those things if they want to win. So same with speed golf. If you hit some crappy shots or even if you miss a short little putt,

realize that a minute of running is a point, just like a stroke, and I can run an entire hole in a minute. So you don't want to miss anything. But I'm describing this before the video because we have the tournament competition and you play the whole course, 18 holes like you're familiar with.

And then I discovered on Guinness website, there was this offshoot world record for the fastest single hole of golf ever played. So it's totally different than our tournament experience where we're going and playing the whole course. But here's this dude, and I saw his viral YouTube video of just racing his ass down a hole and setting the fastest time for one hole. Now the rule for Guinness is it has to be 500 yards hole. So you can't just hit a little par three and run you can't just hit a little par three and run and get it or hit a hole in one, you know, that didn't only take three seconds. So it has to be this lengthy hole. If you don't play golf, a par five is a long way, 500 yards,

more than a quarter mile. So, you know, I saw the video and this became my obsession because I love sprinting like we talk about, and now I can put the sprint together. I only took one club, as you'll see, and I'm just going after this record. So I broke it twice, and this is a video of me down in L.A., and I guess I can give color commentary if you're listening. So once the ball is struck, you see the clock starts, and because my form is perfect, you can't tell I'm sprinting so hard. It looks like I'm just cruising along, but I'm full gas all the way,

just like Van Niekerk in lane eight. Dang. This is in Los Angeles, you said? Yeah, this is down in LA. I broke it once at Bing Maloney here in Sacramento. Have you ever gone to Bodega Bay with all the hills? Yeah, they got nice golf out there. Yeah, we have some tournaments in speed golf

that are on steep hills and that adds a whole nother element. Yeah, we have some tournaments in speed golf that are on steep hills, and that adds a whole other element. Yeah, Bodega. I like going to Bodega a lot. Yeah, where the golf course is, there's tons of hills there. Yeah, yeah. That'd be brutal. So there's my first shot.

I run up. You see I only pause for about one or two seconds. So I'm breathing, heaving. I can barely catch my breath. I can barely see the ball. I can barely see the ball. The sweat's dripping. I'm just, and then whack that thing. The first time you tried this, did you suck at it? You sucked at it. Yeah. Yeah. I'll even say. I would imagine. I mean, this seems. Yeah, I'll answer that one. We're almost done. That's what's good about speed

golf. It doesn't take forever. So if you're listening, Brad is running to his second shot now near the green. So I hit two pretty good shots there. And now this is the clutch part because I only have one club. So really I should be using a chipping club and a putter to finish this hole, but I decided to save the time and just keep my three wood going.

So I hit three wood, three wood. Here's my third shot was a three wood. And that was a tricky little touch shot that I had to get up three wood. Here's my third shot was a three wood. And that was a tricky little touch shot that I had to get up on the green. And my friends were screaming because I hit it really close. And now I have a chance to take this record down. And this is for Birdie. Nice. So that was pretty much of a perfect setup where I hit four perfect shots and was running fast. Now, if you missed it and then had to hit it again, would you still have gotten a world record because of the time or no?

Yeah, sure. That's another second, right? So it wouldn't have killed me. Right. But when I first- It's nice to have done it that way. Yeah. So when I first tried it, I saw this guy, Steve Jeffs in Great Britain, he hit a minute 50 for playing a par five. I'm like, wow, that's incredible. But wait a second, I can sprint with the best of them. I'm going to go out there and just take this record down for fun tomorrow night. So I went out to the course and I timed myself and I ran

pretty darn fast, but it wasn't sprinting. I was moving good and I hit some good shots and I stopped the watch and it was 212. I was 22 seconds behind the record. So that kicked off like this five month odyssey of like really focusing in and going for this and practicing and practicing those crazy in-between shots. I put my putter away and I just putted with a three wood for five months because I wanted to just have that be my putter in my mind and not get confused. So it's fun to talk about because it was like a methodical approach to doing something that to me was of great importance and a real big challenge. I'm an old guy and now I'm in the record book, even though I was 53 when I broke the record.

Seems like a lot of fun too. And super fun. I mean, I know it was competitive and it was hard, but it seemed like you're having fun with it. So much fun every single day that I practice. And I realized, you know, this is now 20 something years removed from my days on the pro circuit. Just like you referenced, you're not doing this stuff at competition level anymore, but you have to keep that charge going in some way for your entire life. Otherwise we're just going to be fat asses watching the NFL on TV on Sunday and eating chips and beer and pizza. And it sounds great. I mean, it's much greater

if you've had a few good workouts that week, right? That's true. And for me, like, talking about back in the day and how fast I used to race triathlons and all that stuff, you know what? We can really easily get stuck

in that back in the day pattern with our stories and our reminiscing rather than going for it in today's life. So to me, like, that just a fun, silly thing. And your, your comment, like, did you make up a record? It's like, you know, sort of, I mean, some guy made it up before me. My wife is always really brutal. She said, tell this speed golf guy that I just set a world record getting mail from my mailbox. I was like, I'll let him know. I was like, be nice, play nice. Yeah. But like the thing for me right there that you watched on video was like, I'll let him know. I was like, be nice, play nice. Yeah, but like the thing for me right there that you watched on video was like perfect execution, right?

I got a freaking birdie. I don't get a ton of birdies when I'm playing in four hours with 14 clubs in my bag. A birdie is a nice score. And I did it while I was in full, full sprint. I'm like, I don't know if I'll ever match that again. It was like a miracle. But to me, like the sensation of hitting that putt in,

it was just as strong as crossing the finish line winning the national championships and espn's there and i'm getting interviewed and i'm all excited i'm a young guy and this is my dream come true and so now even though that was unimportant i got no giant prize check you didn't see that there i just got some back slaps from my son and my friends but it was like probably almost better in some way it was really because you thought those years were behind you. That's right. Yeah. And so even if it's the goofiest thing, like running to the mailbox and setting up a new time, it's something and it really does matter. And so we want to be in the proper mindset and not be a jerk about your athletic goals and snapping at your

significant other on your way into the power lifting me because you're all tense. And she says, sorry, I thought you wanted to park closer. No, I didn't say this kind of bullshit where you see these athletes that are out of the proper mindset. I used to play adult league basketball in town here. And these guys would get in my face. Basketball's a tough one. There's always going to be battles going on. Oh, my God. I mean, this dude, he was, I'm 5'10", 165. This guy was 6'2", 230 probably. And he's in his 30s, a fit guy, you know, big. And he kept hitting me with his elbow in the back.

And so finally, I'm like, I got to try harder on this guy. So I really tried hard to box him out. But we got our feet smashed on top of each other. And he went slap flat on his back because of my boxing out effort and he jumps up and he gets six inches from my face and he says man i'm gonna kick your effing ass and i go no you're not because i'm 53 years old you weigh 60 pounds more than me and we're just trying to play basketball and i'm not that good as you can tell so i'm sorry i knocked you down but you're not gonna kick kick my ass, get it?

He's like, all right, well, don't do it again. I'm like, I'll try not to, but I'm not that good. I'm just trying to have fun. But I succeeded in taking him out of the intensity mindset. We shook hands, and I'm like, I'm sorry, dude. I was just trying to box you out. But once we get everything— I think everyone just wants to score all the time

and not have people halfway play defense when you play a pickup game. Everyone wants to just have it be an all-star game at a pickup game. It's an all-star game. I know. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, if we can keep it fun, like you said,

but also you've got to have that little charge in there. So I want to have fun, but I've got to have that little charge in there so it means something to me to show up and like with this Guinness thing, the rules are so complex. You have to apply. It takes 12 weeks to get approved to go try for the record. And then it gets 20 weeks to get ratified after you send in all this paperwork. But I had to have 10 people there to watch. Two timers, two filmmakers, a backup cameraman, two independent witnesses that i hadn't met before

that i had to corral because they didn't have a vested interest and so all this stuff had to happen so for me like i'm leaning on all these people to pull my dream team together so i felt that pressure of like it's not just me out there with my stopwatch it's like this is my one chance only to go for it you can't waste it yeah. Yeah. And so, um, like being, being that, uh, having that significance is fun, man. And that was your second, because you mentioned breaking that record. Yeah, I did it up here in Sacramento. So my fiance, Elizabeth has the distinction of being my, my timer on both events. My, the only person that's witnessed two world records, uh, and she's my scorekeeper and all the speed golf tournaments. So we have a great time and

it's, you know, it's something fun to do, but like I wrote a blog article about it at my website. I said, you know, it was fun, but it was something a little bit more than fun because fun is throwing water balloons with your kids at the family picnic. And this was like, I tried hard at this. I practice hard. I give much respect to the guy, Steve Jeffs in England. And I sent him an email after that first attempt where I, I, I'm like, dude, are you an Olympic sprinter or something? Cause I watched your video and I don't know how you did it that fast. And he says, let me tell you something. I practiced that hole a thousand times to try to get it right and know Zach exactly where to hit the shot. And I said, all right, thanks, man. I'm going to go off and practice a hole a thousand times and respect this more than if I just gone out there and said, I right, thanks, man. I'm going to go off and practice the whole 1,000 times and respect this more than if I'd just gone out there and said,

I beat this dude's record. Look at this. So the whole process was a lot of life experience and personal growth from it, and I'm going to go take another shot at it. And if I miss it, I don't care, man, because being in the game is the big thing. Yeah. Are you going to try to do a whole course? Well, I mean, they have a record for the fastest around the course,

but that's years ago with Steve Scott, the great American miler, played a golf course in 27 minutes. So he's credited with, like, kick-starting the speed golf concept. But the beauty of the – you've got to pull up another video. I've got one that's going to blow your mind. But the beauty of the speed golf tournament is it has that golf excellence as well as just running around and hockey, pucking the ball in who cares. It's like the fastest runner is going to win it, but the speed golfers putting together the ability to shoot par golf

and run through the course. So if you go Christopher Smith, speed golf, band and dunes, you will see what I consider to be the greatest golf round of all time of any kind, because he shot a four under par 68 on a championship golf course, Bandon Dunes, one of the greatest courses in the world. Uh, and it's, you know, there's, there's nothing compares to this in terms of, uh, you know, Tiger Woods go shooting 61 on a course is pretty fantastic, but they ain't running around with only a handful of clubs. And so this cool drone high-speed video, he plays his entire round at three minutes. So we could probably run it in the background, but if you're just listening,

go to YouTube and watch this guy's round of just flawless golf while rushing through the course. So we talk about practice swings and analyzing your shot and reading the green break. This guy is a top golf teacher, one of the top golf teachers in the world. And he uses these speed golf principles to tell people to realize, and this could apply to all different athletic endeavors. It's like, get out of your head and get out of that over analytical mindset and just feel it and, you know, go with the flow and like kind of bring out your natural athletic ability in whatever you're doing. And that's when you can, you know, perhaps surpass that, you know, methodical approach where you're too deliberate and too stressed about every little

variable. Do you think Tiger Woods has the greatest comeback story of all time? Oh my gosh, yes, for an athlete, not even close. I mean, there's's nothing he fell so far and i agree i actually was kind of shocked that it um i guess because like there's so much personal stuff tied in there but i was kind of disappointed it just wasn't talked about more i know it's weird i mean it's like man he really fell hard and so much stuff got exposed about him and um you know some people might like oh if you know who's people might like, oh, you know, who's going to feel sorry for him because, you know, he overcame his own whatever. Right. But we all fuck up. We all mess up. You know, this guy, this guy messed up.

And it seemed like, you know, he he yeah, he caused a lot of his own problems. Right. But we've seen this happen a lot with celebrities and we've seen this a lot with people that are in positions of power. And I just thought it was like, man, I've never seen anything like it before. I thought it was really, really awesome to see him come back and win. And who knows what he'll do now. He'll probably come back and win a few more, you know? Well, I mean, what did he come back and win at? He won at this sport, this monster that he created. Because when he stepped into golf, remember, he was hitting the ball 25 yards past these lazy, soft,

quote-unquote athletes where they're challenged of being an athlete or not. Yeah, none of them were lifting or anything, right? Yeah, they're very wealthy guys who hit the ball around the golf course. It's a country club sport. We know the demographics are very narrow, and these privileged kids grew up to be great golfers, and they made all this money. But the athleticism and the competitive intensity,

I mean, yeah, lifting weights and all that's great, but I identify this guy came in with a killer competitive intensity and said, I'm going to turn this sport upside-ass down and start dominating like no one's ever dominated and forcing all these new generation of people, including guys like Brooks Koepka. That dude might've been a minor league baseball player for all we know, or what's his name? Gary Woodland that just won the U.S. Open. He played division two basketball and now he's out there winning the U.S. Open. There wasn't not too many,

you know, athletes of that caliber merging into golf in the previous generations. And that's why, you know, this major count, is he going to catch Jack Nicklaus? Who cares, man? That's like comparing. Wilt Chamberlain once scored 100 points in a basketball game. Yeah, you know who showed up for the opposing team? It was like two guys from the laundry that were delivering the uniform. So, I mean, it was a great achievement by Will, but Kobe Bryant in the modern NBA scoring 81 points in a single game where his team was behind and playing competitively in December, you know, where every game counts, that is by far the greatest basketball achievement of a single game scoring record.

So I don't like going back and comparing this, you know, lifetime record. I think Tiger's the greatest athlete of all time, and that was the greatest comeback. And I say he's the greatest athlete of all time. And that was the greatest comeback. And I say, I say he's the greatest athlete because, um, you know, the U S open is truly an open and there's 9,000 people that sign up for the U S open. Did you know that? Like they have qualifying, anyone who's a good player can get in and there's a qualifying tournament in Sacramento. And if you, if you get first or second out of 140 guys in Sacramento, you go to regionals. And if you get the first 20 out of those 140 guys, you go to sectional and all that. So the field is extremely competitive and you know, he's dominated the sport, like no other

individual sport we've ever seen. And so like the team sport guys, I know Tom Brady has many Super Bowls, but there's only 30 starting quarterbacks in the NFL. So I kind of put it on a different level of like, he's part of a system that's been very successful. But as far as individual athlete, Tiger Woods, and then Usain Bolt dominating the most competitive athletic event on the planet by far is the 100 meter sprint. Like every kid on this planet

has raced the 100 meter sprint at some point. So I guarantee you, he is the fastest guy that's ever lived. Every kid on this planet has raced a 100-meter sprint at some point. So I guarantee you he is the fastest guy that's ever lived. We found him. Somebody like Michael Phelps is obviously on another level too, but swimming is an interesting sport where you could rack up a lot of gold medals a bunch of different ways. It's not to discredit anything, but he got 22 gold medals. You can't even really do anything

remotely close to that in any other sport. The only sport you can do, the only sport you get like a lot of gold medals like that would be something like swimming. Yeah, so who cares? Like why compare his medal count to, you know, Carl Lewis had nine gold medals, but he did it over 20, 12 years in the long jump and the 100 and the 200 and the relay.

I mean, you know, just mastery is fantastic. Yeah. There's a ridiculous amount of gold medals. I think it's over 20. Carl Lewis. I mean, Michael Phelps. Michael Phelps, yeah. He's got endless gold medals.

Yeah. Yeah. What kind of, because you wrote that book about Tiger. What was it called again? How Tiger does it, how tiger does it. So you pretty much said he changed the athletic landscape of golfers. Now we have more athletic golfers, um, training, but is it also the strength training aspect of it? Uh, I think everybody, especially mainstream media overplays that tremendously. And it's a big help that these guys are fit now and they're working out in the gym and they're hitting the ball farther.

But I turn on the TV, I still see fat guys winning big checks. And in Tiger's case, I contend that he over-trained severely because his unregulated competitive intensity sort of got the better of him. So what made him great and made him the most insatiable competitor

and victor we've ever seen in sports where you know he wasn't satisfied with just winning four tournaments in a row he wanted that fifth one with with with deathly competitive intensity but you know if you read the books about him these kind of tell-all books that his former teacher hank haney wrote the guy's up every single day supposedly running three miles in 19 minutes like like every day, which is fast. And then getting in the gym and then going to the range and hitting hundreds of balls and then having lunch and then going out and playing and then going back in the gym again, it was too much. It was totally unnecessary for a golfer.

And look how much time of his career he lost. So if you look at like his longevity achievement, it sucked. He got operated on every other year and he's had 20 surgeries and he's pieced together by tape. And he arguably could have been a lot better if he'd just toned things down and been smarter about his training. It's just totally unnecessary. So that's kind of an unusual view, but I strongly think that he overdid it. He started at a really young age too. Two.

Yeah, two. I didn't realize it was that young. He was on Michael Douglas' show, the variety show, hitting a putt in. But it's like you take that mindset and that quest to achieve the highest level and he broke down his swing a few times.

Golfers know that he changed his swing while he was the best player in the world and he did it for the future improvement even though he was the best player in the world why are you changing your swing what are you talking about is steph curry gonna alter his release of his shot to change his wrist flex when he's making more shots than anyone ever no but tiger did it three separate times but it was having that like some some compelling challenge all the time to keep him juiced up was really super important. So that happened to be overtraining and that's too bad,

but you can't turn off some of those knobs and keep the other ones on full blast. So we have to just take it as it came. Same with Jordan and Kobe Bryant. They were apparently assholes to some of their teammates at times. Well, too bad about that, but they're going for, they're trying to win the title,

and so some of that stuff falls by the wayside. And guess what? I think Kobe, if he had been nicer and more supportive to certain teammates with certain personalities, he would have got more titles. But you can't turn it off. Yeah, he's the Black Mamba, right?

He's tough to deal with. I've heard that from a bunch of different people and then you know i know he had these like things with shack all the time and they always seem to be at each other's throat that's got to cause a lot of uh stress you also wrote a book about uh lance armstrong as well right um and then you uh with in the case of lance armstrong you uh you're friends with him you hung out with him quite a bit, right? So what are some things you learned from somebody like Lance Armstrong, who is one of the greatest endurance athletes of all time?

Yeah, thanks. We predate his cycling career and his emergence as one of the great leaders. So Lance actually started in triathlon. That was his first prominent sport where he rose onto the professional circuit at the age of 15 years old. He was running, racing against the top guys in the world. That's crazy. I mean, I first read newspaper article, magazine articles about him. I'm like, this has got to be fake. This kid must've jumped in on the course. How can a 15 year old race with these top pros? But when he was 15, 16, 17 years old, he was a pro racer on the circuit, making money and then going to high

school in Plano, Texas in his off time. And then he went into opportunities in cycling, became world champion in cycling at the young age of 21, which is historic, and then had his cancer and all that thing. And then he came into his sort of reemergence as a Tour de France rider rather than a one day rider. But just spending time around him, what I appreciated was that focus and that ability to compartmentalize his life where rough things were going on, but he was still out there putting in time on the bike and competing.

And so to pull some of these insights, which is what I did in the book, How Lance Does It, just like How Dagger Does It, I pulled insights in about what we can use to better our lives. And one of the things Lance was really good at was saying no. And most of the outside world thought he was a jerk because he didn't want to sign this many more autographs, or he refused to come to this public appearance that we were trying to get him to because the agenda seemed too

stressful to him. And so he was like, quote unquote, difficult person to deal with. But I realized after dealing with him as part of my job, my company sponsored him. So I would organize these events and try to negotiate the agenda. And his agent, Billy Stapleton, good friend of mine, he'd say, no, two hours is it. We're not hanging around any longer than that. But we're paying you a ton of money and we want a glad hand with some more top customers. No. a ton of money and we want a glad hand with some more top customers. No. And if he didn't say no a thousand times, he wouldn't have got to that yes, which was, you got to win the tour, man. The postal service operation was 50 employees, 25 riders, 25 full-time employees, giant buses, $7 million a year budget. And all that would have vaporized if he didn't win the tour every year,

because US people don't care who wins the tour unless it's an American dude. So he had this tremendous pressure on him, but it didn't seem like it. And I'd ask him questions. I was interviewing him for this book and I'm like, how do you deal with the pressure? And he's like, well, I don't really feel pressure because I get all the hard work done that I'm supposed to do. And we're very focused and everyone has their role on the team. So why should I feel pressure? He goes, I think the guys who feel pressure are the backup guys that are supposed to do the job for him and give him the water.

Because if they screw up, their heads are rolling. They're gone. And so like he feels less pressure than the up and coming rider who's just trying to hand him the water on time. And I'm like, that's a really refreshing perspective. I like that. And another thing I asked, these things have changed my life, these interactions with him. Oh yeah, one of them was, we were down in Austin and I was having him sign a bunch of autographs and crap. I was always packing stuff for him to sign as part of my job. I was like mooching his time and energy, you know, and he had the sneezing attack. This is May in Austin, Texas. If you're from there, you know,

it's like allergy capital of the world. It's pretty brutal. And he starts sneezing like nonstop. So I'm like protecting my posters so he doesn't get sneeze on it. And I said, man, how do you deal with this, this allergy scene down here? It is terrible. I mean, this morning I tried to run around the lake and I thought I had asthma. It was just, it was so gnarly. And he's returning the sign, sign, sign. And while I'm talking about the allergies and the bad weather, he looks up at me and he just goes, quit bitching. And then I start, he starts signing again. And I chuckled just like you guys just did that, you know? And then later, like I was by myself that night after this whirlwind day,

and I'm just reflecting on everything. And I'm like, you know where we were? We were at the gathering of cancer survivors that his Live Strong Foundation puts on. So he was there to motivate and inspire and speak to the cancer community and the top fundraisers and all. That was what the event was all about, that I was here complaining about the weather outside in Austin, Texas. And I thought, and his comment was... Too many flowers are blowing around. That's what you're complaining about, right? I mean, but his comment was, it was straight up.

He looked me right in the eye and goes, quit bitching. Very, very serious. And of course I laughed it off and all that, but I thought, how dare I come to a cancer event and complain about the weather to a cancer survivor himself who's been through so much hell and doing such good work for the cancer community and all that. And so from that point on, I resolved

that I would never, ever again complain about the outside weather, no matter what. If it's 106 degrees, guess what? A lot of people in the hospital beds, it's not 106, it's 72 all the time every single day. So let's go out in the 106 and soak it up and get a little sweat going maybe. Then you can go jump in my chest freezer cold plunge.

You're invited anytime, you guys. Come on, it's just a few minutes down the highway. That'll take care of the 106 and the refreshing jump in a cold river and you're freezing cold and you're shivering when you get out. It's a wonderful experience. It's all wonderful. It's wonderful to go running in the rain.

I'm not going to complain about running in the rain. I want to get pounded by the rain. My dog doesn't care about the rain. They love going out. Rain, shine, snow, whatever. So just that little example about the weather, which we can all relate to because we like to commiserate and complain. Never again. You catch me complaining about the weather,

I'll give you a crisp $100 bill because there's no complaints here. And thinking about that kind of stuff when you do end up complaining, something you might want to think about if you can think before you speak is, how is this going to really help anybody? Is this going to help me? Sometimes you've got shit to talk about. So maybe something happened, and maybe you do need to communicate with someone about it cuz you get something off your chest but you know is it gonna

really help that you complain to somebody that you got a iced coffee instead of a hot coffee or something or I mean I'm not gonna you know yeah I'm not gonna be beneficial to anybody? Yeah, the great relationship experts. I love talking about this topic on my Get Over Yourself podcast. I forced my fiance to come on there and we do shows together. It's called The Mia Moore Show. That's her nickname. But these great relationship experts that I like to reference and live by.

You can dispense any feedback with loving kindness. As a leader of a team here at work. Someone can really badly screw up, and you can still tell them with loving kindness, hey, you threw me under the bus there. Whatever you need to say, he can't be beaten around the bush. But those are kind of things that are so easy to live by and make the world a better place. Are you lifting nowadays? Yeah, I got my Hexbar deadlift,

which has been my favorite thing ever. And I'm really big on this concept of micro workouts, some people are calling them, or Dr. Phil Maffetone calls them slow weights. And the idea is like, just I pass by that thing in my side yard and I go do one set and I go about my business. So it's not a five by five day,

which I'll do once in a while. I'm not doing that many long duration workouts because they kind of get me tired. And I also do my sprinting and I'm just, you know, I'm trying to keep in shape, but like to raise up from this baseline where, oh, I didn't work out today or yeah, I jog for 20 minutes and that's it. Now, every single day I do my morning flexibility, mobility routine. It takes 12 minutes. It's really tough. It's like a core workout and leg swings and things like that. And I'll do a few or, you know, three or four sets total, let's say on a bad day, I'll do, I'll do a couple sets of deadlift and I'll do a couple sets of pull-ups. It doesn't

count as a workout. Who cares? I'm just walking under the closet door and I'm like, all right, count as a workout. Who cares? I'm just walking under the closet door and I'm like, all right, I'll just knock one out. And so if you can get like, I feel like a more active life, forget about, we're not talking about workouts or gym or anything else, just more active life and breaking up periods of writing, for example, with a set of pull-ups. To me, I think it's really helped because then when it's time to go do a workout, even if she's last week, I went to the gym one time. I went there once, had a good workout. I did some stuff that I do every day in a workout nature. But if I hadn't done this many sets and this many deadlifts, I'd be a sorry ass and I'd get more sore and all these things that I've struggled with over time because I'm sitting around writing a book and then trying

to go do deadlifts. It's not the same. So I like putting that plug in for anybody, especially if we're intimidated by an all-or-nothing mindset about working out, which so many people are. Like, yeah, I haven't worked out because my gym moved. What? What are you talking about? Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I like that.

I think that's great. Why not just make it easy for yourself? I went and spent some time with Kyle Kingsbury about a year ago. I went to his house and, you know, he had like some yoga mats that were just in front of the TV, but they, you know, it wasn't, they weren't like rolled out mats. They were just, they were like almost like wrestling mats. They were just there all the time. I was like, oh yeah,, it's where we stretch. That's their style of watching TV.

They didn't have cable. They just had a TV, and it had a DVD playing of animals and stuff. Because they love nature and all this stuff. So it was really cool to see they take their lifestyle, and they bring it inside their house house and it's sitting right there. And they're like, oh, there's a kettlebell over there. There's some bands for stretches. And they're not, of course, they're like, they're fitness people, you know, but you don't have to be a fitness person to set something up like that yourself.

Why not make it easier? You know, why not make the arrangement so, oh, yeah, I could just, every time I walk by that or, you know, I can be reminded that I need to do that later today. Maybe let's just lower that bar all the way down. And can you make a commitment to go one minute? One minute a day. I preach a lot about a 10-minute walk. Nice, yeah. It doesn't have to necessarily be 10 minutes, but at least 10 minutes is a good start. And why not do a couple of them every day? You got 10 minutes to go for a walk.

If you got a dog, you should be arrested if you don't. Right., really, you owe it to the dog and then you owe it to yourself too. So, I mean, these are things that I think are rising in importance like never before. And it's great to see that. So then you mix the, I mean, I got to mix the more serious workouts in, I think, because I'm doing good on my fitness lifestyle, but I want to get in there. I'm going to try your 4.30 a.m. workout, I guess. I guess I'm compelled to if that's when it's happening here. We'll get that done. What are some things Mark Sisson is somebody I look up to quite a bit,

and he executes at a really high level when it comes to business, when it comes to staying in shape, and when it comes to spreading the good word of nutrition and health and all these different things. What are some things that you learned from him and speaking to him for the last 30 years? Yeah, I don't know. Mark, do you watch the show? If you do, I'm going to give away some of your secrets, man. Probably only when he's on it, I bet. Because I love you. So I'm going to tell everybody what the privilege that I've experienced hanging out and given some life-changing insights. And what I see with him is his brand, his motto is to live awesome. That's what's on the label of the mayonnaise and the salad dressing. And his public persona is the same as who he really is. And I'm telling the truth. I've hung around with him for a long time

and I've seen him in private. And he's the same guy that is at the trade show running late and someone comes up to him and says, hey, Mark, I gotta tell you something. You changed my life. I was unhealthy and thank you so much. And he's looking them in the eye and he's sincerely appreciative of that connection.

We did our first Primal Con retreat, the weekend festivities where we have experts coming in and doing presentations, and we feed them the primal food. And we had these great events that we did like nine of them across North America over a several-year period. We don't do them anymore, but they were really great. And the first one, we ended up at the end having 100, 150 people at these things. The first one, there was 33 people that signed up to come hang out with Mark Sisson on a weekend up in Oxnard, and he got up to address the people at the end, and he started tearing up. And he said, you know, I wrote this blog, and he's sitting at his computer all day writing this blog for several years, but never really connected in the level

of actual humans coming and interacting because it was all a blog. It was all the internet. And he had plenty of accolades and people on the forum love this, love that, but it was different. And he like cracked seeing the power and the beauty of coming together as a group from disparate areas all over. So he's got that sensitivity and that authenticity, which I mean, guys in his position, it's maybe sort of rare. Like I think some people are not really walking their talk, but they're really good at talking. And that kind of annoys me and you guys too, because we come from the athletic world where you're like, all right, you're shaved down, you're pretty big. And are you full of shit,

or are you actually an athlete? You want to show me something, or you just want to parade around with your tight clothes? And boy, we would scoff in the endurance scene. We used to go try out for commercials. We were training in LA, and my friend had an agent, and we'd get a call for a triathlete commercial that could be a lucrative national opportunity. So of course you're going to go waste your afternoon sitting in a room and we'd just ride our bikes over there to the call in Hollywood. And then, you know, we'd be these, these skinny professional triathlete guys are showing up for this commercial and you go in there and everybody's just perfectly built, jacked up, but they're not really triathletes because triathletes are skinny freaks, a real triathlete. But for the commercial, of course, you're going to give it to the actor polished person wearing the fake bike shorts and

the fake bike top and all that thing. And that was kind of funny because they always beat us out for the jobs. They're like, don't you want a real athlete? Excuse me. Can any of you here ride more than 20 miles without getting tired? Yeah. Yeah. So as an aside, but what Mark does really well is he's super competitive and tight with his game. And in that entrepreneurial scene, it's cutthroat and it's difficult. And there's a lot of stress and a lot of complexity, but at the same time, he knows how to enjoy his life. So when he unplugs and we're out socializing at lunch or dinner or whatever, it's coming back down to a different level. And I think that's really difficult for a lot of people, especially the higher the stakes get,

where you're ruminating and those thoughts are eating at you while you're down there at your kid's soccer game, supposed to be cheering for your kid, watching him play soccer. But instead, you're thinking about the spreadsheet that was off. And we need to be able to just unplug and let go. But at the same time, give it all you got when it's time to give it all you got. I mean, there's some live awesome dudes that have credit cards maxed out and they're surfing in Baja right now. So props to you. But if that's not really most appealing, we want to win on different levels so you can really enjoy your life while you succeed. Very cool. Thanks for sharing that. Anything else? Guys all good? Hey, thanks so much for coming on the show.

We'll have to have you in the gym one of these days, get some training in. You're just, you're not too far away. You're in Auburn? Sacramento. Oh, you're in Sacramento. Beautiful Sacramento, the river city. You're right here in Sacramento. I know, man. I'm glad we finally met. I've heard about the free gym

forever and ever, and now I'm here. It's the real deal. Come to Sacramento. Do a pilgrimage, people. It's freaking free. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.