Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 132 - Addressing Some IPF Hate

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

A funny meme caught Mark Bell's attention and he wanted to give more info as to why he invested over $250,000 to get all Sling Shot products IPF Approved starting in 2019. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: 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 Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

in the booth and shit. All right, peeps. We got some new stuff over at markbellslingshot.com. I'll get rid of this commercial as quick as we can, but I'm excited because we got new apparel. We've been working really hard. Shout out to my boy Smokey. Shout out to my girl Emma.

They've been working hard on it. And then also the entire team has really stepped up their game. Anyone involved in our social media and anybody involved in our media, which kind of starts to include our entire crew, our entire bunch. But a lot of work goes into the execution of having a product and then what the hell to do with it afterwards.

I can go into that in a lot of detail, but you guys might fall asleep. So I won't do that. But basically, in order for this stuff i won't do that but basically in order for this stuff to work everything has to be in order uh including like the gym has to be clean the stuff has to be put away because when we go out there to do a photo shoot if there's a bunch of garbage like literal literal garbage in the background of the shoot it takes away from the product shots that we're trying to get so everything has to be in place and everyone on the team has been doing an amazing job of uh making that happen shout out

to our boy smoky of course he is the general manager of slingshot and he is kicking ass and making sure things are in order around here so this is uh our bomber jacket it's got the uh st shield logo on it as you guys can see there, those of you watching on Instagram right now, and those of you watching on our YouTube feed. Again, if you're popping in on Instagram, which I just have a little phone set up over here, that's not the best way to watch us, but I just like to show you guys what we're up to and we'll be on here for a few minutes, but I'll probably take it down. Um, we've got a lot of other stuff so that's the bomber jacket we have um if you want to watch us full tilt go on uh powerproject.live that's you're going to want to

see us uh that's where we're on youtube uh obviously these um podcasts are also aired on itunes and stuff like that as well you can even see see us on Facebook. This is a hoodie that I really like a lot. It's kind of this shiny, like, wicking material almost, and it says power down the arm. This one's definitely one of my faves. Kind of a heavy, kind of a heavy hoodie, but perfect for, you know, starting to get cold outside. Andrew's always cold, so.

I'm in a lot better, though. Oh. Yeah. The temperature's starting to self-regulate. Yeah, it's starting to get cold outside. Andrew's always cold, so. I've been a lot better though. Oh. Yeah. The temperature's starting to self-regulate. Yeah, it is. Yeah. I think maybe like getting a lot more blood flow, so that way I'm not, you know, just all clogged up and freezing.

Yeah. Well, and just your diet too. I mean, your thyroid plays into it a lot and who knows, maybe your thyroid was just kind of puttering around for a while. Maybe it's kind of going on all cylinders now. You'll see a lot of bodybuilding guys will start to eat and they just start sweating. Yeah. Because their metabolism starts to speed up and they get hot every time they consume some food, you know?

Yeah. Well, like that guy, Lauren Lolo. Yeah. That guy sweats. Sweats a lot. Yeah, he does sweat a lot. We have another hoodie. this is just a power hoodie nice another nice thick one uh for the winter got the front pockets the whole nine yards

this is just a pullover pullover no it's cardigan killer boots man this is all available markbell slingshot.com. This one's nice. This is a Destroy shirt. We do this a lot with the ST logo, as we've done with the Strong before. And we'll do it with a lot of other things coming up. But you can see it says Destroy. Shout out to our artist, who I won't name, who drew this up for us. We've got to protect some stuff around here over at Super Training Gym, the strongest gym in the West.

You saw the bomber, and then this last one. I don't know what they're calling this one. That one's called the League Coach's Jacket. The League Coach's Jacket. This one's sick. The League Jacket, yeah. There we go, the League Jacket. This one's nice and thick,

just like your mom's thighs. Camo, like you're going to goddamn war right and it's also uh going to be pretty good against the rain it's kind of like a raincoat type feel you kind of hear it crinkling around that one's my favorite one stuff like this is great because it doesn't you put it on it doesn't make you hot you know you put on a sweatshirt sometimes it'll automatically kind of seal in all the heat. But, uh, a jacket like that's kind of nice because it will just, it will block out the wind and it'll just keep you from getting like, you know, super cold. Anyway, I just got back from

Seattle and I was going to go home and I decided, you know, if I go home, it's another 20 minutes to the house. I wanted to eat. I wanted to get more fuel in my body for today's workout. And then I wanted to come back. But the problem was, I was like, you know what? I'm going to be, I'm going to lose a lot of time. And I'm getting old, you know, I ain't got time. So I need to keep pushing and I need to keep things moving along. So I came right here to the gym.

I figured let's fire up the podcast machine. Andrew blew all the dust off it and uh he yanked on that thing until it finally turned over yeah so finally kicked over and she barely started up i had to throw igniter fluid all over the carburetor to actually get this thing fired up but once it did it was purring like a kitten yeah it wasn't easy no it wasn't easy but we got it fired up and uh looks like the podcast will at least last another day kind of hard to say hard hard to tell teeter-totters you know um so i got here and we're doing this and uh we're going to be lifting a little while we're

going to be doing some uh chest and i can't remember if it's chest and biceps or chest and triceps but uh i know i've been getting really sore from our workouts lately. I know that much. My arms were dead from the arm training. And I don't know about you, but my hammies are lit up. Right now, they started cramping up again. Because when we were podcasting with Jeremy Avila, which was an amazing podcast. Jeremy Avila!

Yeah, shout out to him. As he's talking, I had to just shoot my leg straight forward because it was cramping up so bad. I didn't know what I was going to do. I'm like, there's nowhere for me to go, so I guess that's fine. But I was worried about when I stood up, what was going to happen. And then right now, I kind of kicked my leg back just to, whatever, pop my knee a little bit. And I was like, oh, there it is again. Guys, this is just some deep, dark, private advice, guys.

guys this is just some like this is some deep dark private advice guys but you know like uh if every anything ever happens like prematurely or for some reason like you're like things are um uh things are pretty stiff and then they go to not being so stiff blame it on a cramp every time oh cr, cramp. Yep. Something cramped up. Yep. Whoops. That's really good. Yeah. Yeah. Whoops.

Up. Cramped up. You could sell it. You could sell that as much as you want. Cramped up. I need at least half an hour. Yeah. Hold on. Maybe, maybe I have to go look at some porn too for the cramp.

Yeah. You know, sometimes that happens, right? Sometimes we end up in a little bit of trouble something happens a little earlier than we uh wanted it to i just gotta say i appreciate the knowledge that you spit on this podcast and you're not gonna get that from anywhere else it's saving people's lives that could save someone's relationship well and speaking of saving people's lives um this next story i think going to have an impact on a lot of people. And it impacted a lot of people already. But today I was coming home from Seattle.

I've been all over the place, which I don't even know why. I don't know what I'm doing. But I just keep flying different places. So I'm coming back. And I've been sharing this a lot on the podcast. I'm a two-pooper. Like, I poop twice every morning. So I knew what was going to happen.

I knew the predicament I was going to be in. I knew the bind I was going to be in, so to speak. And so I woke up, things were normal, took a dump, took a shower. And I was like, well, I took a dump and then I waited. Cause I was like, all right, everything all cleared out. And then I took a shower, clean everything up as pristine as I can. And, uh, I brought baby wipes with me cause I'm, I ain't no fool. Another good move.

Yeah. Yeah. You gotta, you gotta stay out in front of it. Right. And so I'm, uh, on my way back from, uh, uh, I'm on my way back from Seattle. I'm on the plane and it's like noon but normally you know both poops are out a lot earlier than that but in this case uh you know it wasn't i i didn't have time to to get it all out my wife and i went and saw the original starbucks and we

went walking around like i think it's pike's place is the area and uh we had a good time we had a lot of fun but the ride home wasn't so fun i'm sitting there they have the fastened seat belt thing still on and i'm like oh my god i gotta unleash holy hell on that bathroom and so i get up and i uh you know they still have the thing on or whatever and i just i my move with that uh with the they still have the thing on or whatever. And I just, my move with that, when I have the seatbelt sign still on, I just go with my headphones and I just plow. I just plow forward and I go right for the bathroom. That's another good move. But this time they had it locked.

Because they're like trying to prevent people from going in there until it's like the right time or whatever. And so then the lady had to come and like open it for me. But before that happened, my wife saw me reach for my bag and pull out baby wipes. She just looked. She shook her head with her eyes closed and then just proceeded to roll like towards, she rolled towards the window.

Away from you. And curled up like as if like she's, you know, running for cover kind of thing. I thought it was a smart move because she knew it was going to running for cover kind of thing i thought it was smart move because she knew it was going to happen right but nobody else knew it was going to happen anyway i finally get the opportunity to go in there and it's like the second that my shorts come down the second that there's clearance it's just like bam and it wasn't uh wasn't liquid it was just normal you know it's just normal poop. And, uh, you know, I, uh, luckily I had the, uh, baby wipes in there, but it was so messy

that I had to start with the toilet paper first, because you can't just go and wipe a mess like that around those of you that have kids. I don't know what I mean. It's just going to spread. It's just going to smear it everywhere. So I had to, I had to like apply a lot of science to it. I'm like, I'll start with the dry first and then I'll move into the more moist. Yeah.

That's good. Towelette secondly, you know? Yeah. It's like when you have bird poop on the windshield, you can't just dry wipe with the windshield wipers. Yeah. Like you're just going to spread it around. It's not going to, it's not going to work the way that you think. And so I had to, uh, you know, I had to, you know, clean all that up and everything.

And I flushed quickly cause I was like, someone's going to die if they smell this giant turd. And thank God, thank God the plane, like the plane sucks that shit down. And then it has like a, like a, it's like a trap. It's like a little vent and the vent will like the poop will go down and get sucked out of there and go, and it'll just totally disappear. Like it never existed before. And then the thing shoots back across, like kind of cover the smell back up. It's amazing.

So I really like, I really cap the smell down into wherever, you know, whatever part of the plane that is. Does it just drop out of the bottom of the plane? That's what I was going to ask. Where does it go? Yeah, it just lands on somebody's house. Could you imagine that? I'm impressed by like your uh, your, your mobility to

actually wipe in that's such a small area. Oh man, it was tough. I was really, you know, what made it kind of rocket out of there was the, uh, the situation I was in, you know, and I, it made me think a lot about how I poop. Cause I was like, I could be folded up a lot better, even though we got to, got to squatty potty here, I was more in like a back attack position. Remember the back attack we did the other day? I was in like a good morning position. I was folded up, like leaning way forward. And yeah, just boom, it just rocketed out of there. So clean and smooth. Um, but you know, a little bit more came out that I bargained for. And so that's why I had to do all those to do all that wiping so i i pop out of there and i'm all sweaty and like for some reason my hat like my hat will be straight when i

go in but when i go out my hat will be cocked to the side it's actually part of the reason why when i do the power project videos i turn the hat because every time i come out of the bathroom my hat is now like sidewards on my head and like halfway off my head, you know, it's like, I was just in like a goddamn tornado or something. I'm glad he had the wipes though. Cause that's so crucial. That's huge. Oh, that, that was big. I would have just sat there all dirty the whole rest of the flight. It would have been awful for everybody. Not only that, but could you imagine how many times you'd have tried to wipe with that thin ass airplane toilet paper?

It wouldn't have worked out so well. It's like 0.75 ply. You can see through it. It's not good. It would have been absolutely awful. I just realized that I was on the wrong Instagram just now. Oh, no. I was like, there's not that many people on there.

And I think I might have been on the Strong Apparel Co., which is actually appropriate because I showed all the clothes in the beginning. So there you go. Who got it wrong now? How do I figure out how to get off of here? So go click on the profile on the bottom right. Oh, bottom right. I'm way off. Whoops.

Oh, whoops. Go to your home regular. Bottom right. Bottom right. Okay. And then where it has the name, it should be like a drop-down list. Oh. Oh.

Wham. Man, they're really changing things over there at Instagram. I know. Yeah, so anyway, I mean, you know, going to Seattle wasn't all, you know, all glory. There was a poop story thrown in there, in the mix. Yeah, you got to be careful with the second poop, especially on the road. But it's good that you did your due diligence. So some people can't poop in public at all. My cousin's like that.

My cousin Steven. Remember he told us. He's like, I can't do it. I was like, well, what about when you go on vacation? He's like, I have vacation ass. My ass goes on vacation too. And it closes up shop. I'm like, I can't do it. I was like, well, what about like when you go on vacation? He's like, I have vacation ass. My ass goes on vacation too. And it like closes up shop. I'm like for five days. Yeah. I'm like, I don't understand. He goes, no, I need to get to a house.

Or, or he, and I was like, a hotel's okay. He's like, yeah. He's like, if I'm staying at the hotel, I can handle that. But yeah, he said normally he can't, he can't normally do it. He can't normally pee. Yeah. No, just, just, just going on the road with the team and whatnot. Like I've gotten so much better.

Yeah. I remember at the, uh, we're all talking to each other in there now. Yeah. Yeah. Like, Hey bro,

what's up? We're all high fiving each other while we're pooping. Well at the, uh, usually cause like, it'll be like me and Griffin to one room and I'll be like, Hey, I gotta,

I gotta handle business right now. So I'm going to actually go to the lobby. Cause I don't want to destroy our room everyone destroys the lobby bathroom so like I've gotten so comfortable yeah fine I'm just gonna go hang out in the lobby and take a big old dump I'll be back I gotta tell you Andrew you are

extremely a polite person I mean you really are that shows you I mean you really care about Griffey I mean he should understand that by now. I mean, because like hotel bathrooms, there's no vents. No. I don't know how to build stuff, but I'd imagine like it can't be impossible to throw in a pipe with a vent that goes right out the building.

Give us something. Just right in the other person's room. And then like. Right over the other person's bed. And then what's bad is like, thankfully, like we're on opposite schedules. Like he'll do everything at night.

I'll do everything in the morning. So like, I'll take a dump in the morning and then shower. But I always think like, oh dude, it's going to be all steamy and muggy in here

and poopy. Yeah. So it's just swamp ass all over the walls. It's a deadly combination. Yeah. And there's no vents in these damn hotel rooms

yeah pooping in the uh bathroom uh the the plane bathroom the airplane bathroom was uh it was a little scary but like if i was any bigger i wouldn't have worked like if i was five pounds heavier what i was what i was envisioning because i was kind of holding onto the door to kind of like squat back, you know, the squat down to like sit back and get into the hammies a little bit more. I'm holding onto the door. I'm like,

something's going to shake and I'm going to come flying out of the door with my pants around my ankles. I was like, I know that that's going to happen. Head first, right into the wall. Yeah. Yeah.

Boom. Right, right behind like the stewardess or whatever, who's getting fucking crackers for people or whatever. Right. Boom. Right. Right behind like the stewardess or whatever, who's getting fucking crackers for people or whatever. Right. Oh my God. That's pretty good.

That'd be a great skit. Someone's got to do that. It was, you know, it, it wasn't great. Um, you know, I want to address, there was a, a meme made today and the guy kind of had this, uh, meme of somebody it's actually on my instagram it's somebody chucking a basketball and it looks and then the next shot is like a giant garbage dumpster or whatever and uh they made fun of our commercial and you know they made this kind of funny meme and people responded to it and what's weird is the the response in in the post uh that

people made to the original post the guy made like they don't really have a lot to do with with a guy um what the guy posted uh they start talking about like racist stuff and we i don't know let's talk about weird i don't know how i don't know how we got to this place in our society where things get so sideways all the time um i've said this before you know when you think about somebody's going to be the president or somebody's going to be hold a certain job or hold a certain position. A lot of times, even like OJ Simpson, for example, OJ Simpson killing somebody is,

is separate from him being a good football player. He was a great football player. He's one of the greatest running backs in NFL history. And there's, you can't, nothing really changes that. I'm not saying he's a great football player. He's one of the greatest running backs in NFL history. And there's, you can't, nothing really changes that. I'm not saying he's a good person. He's a piece of shit, I think. Right. Um, it looks like he's guilty of, of killing even more than one person.

Right. So, um, but the two things are, they don't, uh, they don't necessarily go together. And I find it interesting when people start to fight online, how inflammatory they get. So this guy made a post and I think he was trying to, you know, get some people riled up and they probably just also trying to be, he was also trying to be fun, you know, trying to be funny, but also maybe he was halfway serious because he's talking about how he doesn't feel the USAPL, uh, you know, pays out or cares about their athletes. Now I want to address that a little bit because, um, the USAPL is the most formidable powerlifting federation that there is. It's the most organized powerlifting federation that there, that there is. Um, and it's been that

way for a long time. Um, I also feel it's the federation that provides the most opportunity for lifters in terms of having a Super Bowl-esque type competition. You're not going to get that from the SPF. You're not going to get that from the USPA. You're not going to get that from the USPF or any other abbreviation of a bunch of letters that you throw together. They are, of course, they want to make money. And of course, that's why this has been put into place. The $250,000 sounds like a crazy amount of money. And it is a crazy amount of money in some sense.

But it's also over the course of four years. And it starts in 2019. There seemed to be some confusion about that as well. The actual process of these sleeves being regulated for IPF slash USAPL competition starts January 1, 2019, and it goes for four years after that. what we decide to do four years from now, I can't really say, but I would imagine that we would probably stick with them. Um, some other people were making some comments about, uh, me and Ed Cohn being buddies. And then like me being all about the USAPL and IPF. I want to address that too, because I've always been all about powerlifting regardless of the federation. Uh, just cause I've made choices in my career doesn't mean that I don't like the USAPL.

Um, are there certain aspects of that federation that maybe I don't love? Yeah, of course. There's aspects of all federations and all power lifting. I care about power thing a lot. So, um, you know, when I think about these certain things, yeah, sometimes you get frustrated. I've taken kids to USAPL meets before and the guys, you know, the judges were just so anal retentive about the rules that I just thought it was really unfortunate because they were giving the kids that I brought to this meet a really bad experience. And at the same time, look, you got to follow the rules. There's rules. There's a rule book, right? I just didn't like the way they were doing stuff though. Cause they would give, give, uh, give my guys a white light and they'd be like, oh, that was

borderline. And I'm like, well, he either like made it or he didn't, you know, like don't, don't give him something that he didn't get, you know? But, um, you know, I, I love powerlifting. you know, but, um, you know, I, I love power lifting. I have been, uh, guilty of loving it too much. I've taken a lot of time, um, and resources away from, uh, the people that love me, uh, because I have dove into it so hard for so many years and spent four or five, six hours in the gym. Um, I created this monster called super training gym. That is, uh, my, my second family and my second home in a lot of ways. Um, and, uh, you know, I'm obsessed with it and it's why it's why super training gym is free. I think people have this, uh, misconception of like what we're trying to do over here at Slingshot. Make no mistake

about it. We are here to make the world a better place to lift. And the $250,000 that was placed into the USAPL, uh, doesn't mean the following things. It doesn't mean that we're not going to put money into other federations. Um, it doesn't mean that that's the stop of our budget. $250,000 is not the stop of our budget for our plans in 2019 on what we want to do with USAPL contests, potentially the things that we might want to do with USAPL lifters. There's so much that can go into all this. Now, I'm responsible for the lives of about 20 people that work here at Slingshot. And so I can't just haphazardly make decisions, uh, maybe the way that I used to, I can still be strong and I could still be assertive and I could still go after, you know, the things that I want to go

after. But there's certain things that I don't do, uh, today that I may have done, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago. I'm responsible for Andrew's Christmas in some way. I'm responsible for Smokey's Christmas. I'm responsible for all these things in more ways than one. than one. And so because of that, I'm trying to provide the best possible scenario so that we all and everybody in this building can have the best opportunity to grow. And so the company can continue to expand. And so when I put money into something, I have to figure out how do we get money back out of that? How does that benefit Andrew? How does that benefit Jessica Smith? How does that benefit Rosemary? How does that benefit? I need to figure out how does it

benefit slingshot? That's just the way it is. It's business, right? Now, at the same time, I'm not an ROI guy. I'm not going to sit here and look at, you know, what are we getting a return, you know, on investment? Like what, what does that look like? What are those numbers? What are our margins? What is, I never look at anything like that. I've never once have ever looked at an expense report and compared it to, I don't even know what these things are called. I'm sure they have a name. I don't even know what they're called. I've never read one business book. I've never gone to business school. These are all, I just learned a lot of this stuff on the fly and I promote the company the way that I want to promote it.

And that's the reason why that commercial came out the way that it did. As a group, we thought it would be fun. We're like, wow, we have this, we have this large lump of money, large sum of money that we haven't invested into this process. And you know what? We should share that with our fans. We should tell our fans, Hey guys, here's what we're doing. You wanted stuff to be IPF approved and USA PL approved. Well, not only did we do it, but we did it at a great cost and we did it. We did it for you. Obviously there's a return for me, right? Uh, any, any, anyone who's in

business or anybody, I mean, look, it's not even business. It's, you're always going to kind of look at what's the most bang for your buck, right? Um, do I know that we'll make that money back? I have no idea, but I do know that I love the smell of fear. I know I like that a lot. And I know that I can smell the fear on the other companies because the other companies, um, they're the other companies. We don't know who the heads of these companies are. We don't know if they're power lifters. We don't know if they have, or actually I do know that they don't have a free gym. That's a 8,000 square feet. That's open to anybody to come to. I do know that they don't have a free gym. That's 8,000 square feet. That's open to anybody to come to. I also know that these companies have not taught you how to bench, squat, or deadlift.

I know that these companies haven't gone to great lengths to make sure that you guys have the most information that you're loaded up with the best content that you can possibly be loaded up with to be the best possible power lift that you can be. And that's what I've been putting together for the last 12 years since we've had super training gym. I also know that these other companies don't offer the different types of knee sleeves that we have, the different types of products that we have, the different types of wrist wraps and knee wraps and knee sleeves.

And the list goes on and on these other companies. I mean, it sounds ridiculous to say, but there was no other colors even involved in powerlifting until Slingshot came along. Think about how weird that is. There was blue from Ray-Ban and there was black. And that was about it until we came along. And we're just trying to offer more stuff. We're trying to give you more options. We're trying to give you better options. We created the X-sleeve, which is a denim knee sleeve, which is stronger and stiffer than any knee sleeve that you can get. The strong sleeve has properties in it too that make it stronger than any other knee sleeve on the market as well, except for the X-sleeve.

market as well, except for the X sleeve. So there's, you know, the reason why we dumped that money into the USAPL and IPF is because we want to start to put money back into powerlifting. We've done that for years. We invest in all kinds of meets. You can talk to meet directors. We've given away all kinds of different things. But the second thing I want to address is all kinds of different things. But the second thing I want to address is in this, in that same post, the guy talks about how the USAPL doesn't care about its lifters and there's no payout. That is a very, very short sighted and very incorrect way of looking at all this. Just because you get a cash prize from an event, it doesn't mean anything. It really means zero. And it's actually not a great scenario as a sponsor to pay out, just, uh, for their lifters and without the USAPL, you wouldn't even have some of these companies that have come into powerlifting that are paying athletes out. So it's not really up to, um, let's see if I can get some of this straight. Yeah. Like, okay. So take any other regular sport for for example um the the the nfl doesn't pay tom brady

the new england patriots pay tom brady right um it's the it's it's it's not the it's not the federation it's not the league uh that pays him it's who they're with that pays pays him and the same thing goes for like crossfit crossfit doesn't pay um see if i'm making sense making that correct i don't think crossfit pays anybody anything um except for the people that are employees of crossfit um i am unaware of crossfit paying any athlete they might pay like Rich Froning because he's like a legend or whatever. Um, but Reebok has been the company that has typically paid these athletes 250 K, uh, when they win. So, you know, for you to kind of judge on, on where we put our money, that's totally

a hundred percent up to you. It's a free country. I agree with your statement. It does kind of, in some ways seem like we're giving a good old heave ho into the, uh, into the dumpster. And so that's why I made that response back to you. But, uh, it's an, a ridiculous, ridiculous assumption, uh, to assume that there's, there's a lot better ways to spend that kind of money.

Um, because like, what is your solution, right? Like what, what, uh, what options do you have that you think would be better? Because if you think a cash prize meet for 250 K would be better, you're, you're, you're pretty much, you're pretty wrong. You're pretty dead wrong on that. And I, I just, I have, look, I, it's not like I haven't thought of these things before. I've said it earlier. I love powerlifting. I've been in love with powerlifting since I was 12 years old. I have combed over every possible scenario that you can think of in terms of what to do with powerlifting and what to do with powerlifting meets. I can figure out exactly what to do with the sport to really push it forward other than to do what I'm already doing, which is trying to share information with people, trying to explain to people, trying to lower the barrier of entry into the sport. That's why we make the products that we make. The products that we have here at Slingshot and Super Training, excuse me, I'm dying over here.

The products that we make over here lower the barrier of entry into the sport because this is a thankless sport that hurts really bad. And so therefore we created a slingshot that helps people that have torn their pecs like myself, that helps people that have torn their tricep like myself, that helps people that have torn their bicep like myself, that ends up helping people that have hurt their elbow. Like myself. We make knee sleeves. We make belts. We make wrist wraps.

I've hurt myself every which way you can think of. And I've created products, the wrist wraps that we have. The wrist wraps that we have can wrap around your wrist, your knee, your elbow. They all end up being a multi-purpose wrap. And the reason for that is because when I was competing and I was competing in the USPF, I did a squat. And, well, it ended up making like two products. But I had this tremendous amount of pain. I had, what do you call that, golfer's elbow. Golfer's elbow is on the inside of the arm.

Tennis elbow is on the outside of the arm. So I had this golfer's elbow deal that was just killing me. And so I wore a, uh, a wrap that I made myself around my elbow, uh, in a competition. And then I got red lights and they said, you can't have, uh, Velcro on your elbow when you're doing a squat, even though I just nailed the squat just right. So, uh, uh after that i actually made the compression cuff based off of that because i was like okay they won't allow me to have uh you know velcro on the platform on my elbow so i'll just do away with it i'll make like a circle you know and then kind of off of that you started ended up with other products like a hip circle and

um it was just it was just like i was on my way and none of these things were like, the only thing that was made specifically to like kind of quote unquote, make more money, but was still purposeful, uh, is the wrist wrap. Like the first, the first generation of wrist wraps that we sold. And even that had a certain spin to it. It was different. I was offering a different product. I was offering something better. But when I lined the two things up, when I said to myself, okay, I'm going to sell a slingshot, I was like, you know what? I can't sell people on the fact that you can bench more,

you can lift heavier weights with this product. Um, but you're, you know, you can wear whatever brand wrist wraps you want. So me selling wrist wraps was kind of a block. I was trying to block out the other companies from, uh, people wearing my slingshot and then wearing another brand's wrist wrap, but it was also very useful. It wasn't just a, it wasn't just a tack on you buying more crap from me. It was also useful because if you're going to handle more weight, you need to protect your wrist. You're going to handle more weight in your hands. That's 50, a hundred pounds heavier than what you're used to.

You better protect your wrists. And so that's where the, the, uh, the kind of wrist wrap kind of fell into all that. How much, um, does Velcro help your squat? Uh, it helped me a lot lot it launched me into the stratosphere i'd imagine probably like about half as much as like a squat briefs yeah you know sometimes you know the rules are just the rules and i don't you know i don't know you know i don't have any control over so i just try to follow them the best i can and try to cheat them the best i can to get the biggest lift that i can. But yeah, it was just, uh, you know, I've had a bunch of things happen to me

like that in my career. Sometimes you end up with a target on your back too. You know, he's, I just started becoming more popular. And so there was like, people were, uh, you know, Ed Cohn told me about all that. He's like, man, he's like, your lifts aren't going to be judged the same way the other ones are. And, you know, also too, like maybe that plays into your head a little bit and maybe it's just all like fabricated. Maybe it's not even real, but a lot of weird things did start to happen. I, you know, I mentioned before I put on a bench shirt one time and like four judges were surrounding me.

They were, uh, like, like right on top of me. They're right next to me. And, uh, they were like, yeah, we're right next to me and uh they were like yeah we're just uh checking out your bench shirt and i said oh i was like the shirt's already been checked you know there's equipment check and you can see like it literally has a sharpie check mark on it that was like orange or something and uh they're like oh yeah we know and they're just sitting there like staring at it i'm like hey look you know cause I lift a hundred pounds more than everybody in this federation doesn't, doesn't mean anything other than I'm just stronger than them. And, uh, you know, you get under the

scrutiny of, of things like that. And I think that's what kind of happened here too. Um, everyone has a heightened alert. I mentioned, uh, smelling fear and, and knowing and understanding that the other federations are scared. They don't know what we're going to do they don't know how much time and effort we're going to put into power lifting and so i think uh other companies are kind of like oh shit like they were slingshot was already hammering the shit out of us and well you know what are they gonna do now but that's um that's that's just part of it all. I love competition. It's great to have other companies out there. SBD in particular, they make a great product. What am I going to do?

Cry about it? Try to make better ones. Try to be innovative. Try to get out in front. Try to have that motivate you. They do a good job. There's other companies that do a good job too. And there's,

there's room for everyone to grow, I guess is the main, you know, is the main point. Um, but I want this company to continue to grow and continue to provide opportunities for the people that are here. So again, that 250 K that went in a direction that it went to could, uh, could we have said, you know know what it'd be really cool to give you know um everybody in the company a ten thousand dollar raise we could have spent the money that way like that would have been around 200 grand but look man 10 grand i think it's not gonna do anything it sounds like a lot of money it sounds like like, oh, oh shit, you know, 10 grand. But man, money is fleeting. Money comes and money goes. And, um, just a quick bonus like that is not gonna, not gonna be life changing. Now us setting the wheels in motion for what this company could

actually be in five years, that could be life changing for everybody in this building. And that's what I'm excited about. And that's why we make the moves that we make. That makes a lot of sense. How important is it to you that we, just because I was going through some of the comments just now on whoever that guy is, his post. Someone was saying like, oh, if Mark doesn't break even in four years, he's going to jump ship. And now we're stuck with a bunch of gear that we can't use. Yeah, I know. And all of that stuff is kind of weird.

I mean, um, some people like to think ahead a lot more than I do, I guess. Um, but, uh, yeah, we're not going anywhere like it, you know, we've always been supportive of powerlifting. We always will be, uh, you know, there was was there was a time period where the company was growing and our focus was um our our focus was spread and we didn't have as many employees so we couldn't get out to all these powerlifting meets um but you're going to see you know coming up we're going to start to get out to more powerlifting meets that's part of the reason why we took over uh reebok record breakers and made it slingshot record breakers um you know we're working right now closely with the usapl on doing some stuff for the arnold classic they have a big competition out there um every year that i'm excited to

support and be a part of and hopefully we can get involved in more but we just have to see things have to make sense um and uh you know somebody made a comment to online they said you know it's not mark bell's job to fix power lifting and i actually think that first of all i think two things on that number one i don't think power of things broken power of things awesome power of things a lot of fun go to a meet you know go to a competition sometime you're gonna hear a lot of people cheering you're gonna see a lot of smile you're gonna see a ton of people smiling like crazy you're gonna see some people that get mad you're to see a lot of smile. You're going to see a ton of people smiling like crazy. You're going to see some people that get mad.

You're going to see some people that cry, but there are a lot of emotion that comes from it. And it's a, it's a lot of fun. It's rewarding. Um, I don't think power thing is, is broken in any way. I think that it's thriving.

I think it's doing really well. It might be kind of at its peak or it may have already reached its peak. Um, but it's continuing to do better all the time uh by my estimation and by the stuff that we see secondly uh it is my job to fix power lifting uh that's that's what we're here for like that we're here to make the world a better place lift i want to i mentioned this many times before this is like a religion like uh andrew come with me my son you know like and you're and you're kind of like what like i don't andrew look man it's gonna be fine all

we're gonna do we're gonna train some arms we're gonna get a pump in our arms it's gonna be easy dude we're gonna do some biceps and some triceps and you're like like, okay, that sounds like fun. Yeah. And then we get in front of a mirror and we get a pump, but the next thing you know, we're doing stuff that's really hard, like dips and close grip bench. And you're kind of like, Hey man, like I thought you said, shut up. And then, you know, you think, Oh, maybe it's like two, three times a week. Hey man, see you tomorrow. You know? And just, that's what I want to do with people. I want to take them in and I want to show them, look, you can do all the same things

that I can do. You can do all the same things the strongest person at super training gym can do. You can do everything that Filipino thunder does, except for it's just going to look different because you're not as big

and you're not as strong. So you're not going to be able to lift the same weights. I'm not a manatee. You're not a manatee. You're not indestructible. You're not, you're not Filipino big and you're not as strong. So you're not going to be able to lift the same weights. I'm not a manatee. You're not a manatee. You're not indestructible. You're not Filipino thunder. Lightning bolts shooting right out of your arse.

But you're going to be able to squat. You're going to be able to bench. You're going to be able to deadlift. And maybe for you with a crappy back most of your life, maybe you're like, man, like I probably shouldn't be deadlifting. You know, maybe that was the thought process. But now that we took you into this church, this religion that we call super training gym, and we kind of said, Hey man, like it's going to be, it's going to be chill. It's going to be okay.

I mean, when you go to a church, they do the same thing. They're like, Hey, look, man, just, you know what? I know it'd be great for you. I know it'd be great for, you know, whoever you want to bring on Sunday with you. Just come in on Sunday. No, one's going to bother you. We promise. No, one's going to bother you. You're like, really? No, one's going to bother me. Like no, one's going to bother you. You're there. You have a good time. You're, you're into what they're saying for the day. And sure enough, you go to get up and leave and there's somebody hitting you up on the way out. Hey, you know what?

It's great having you here. Hey, have you met so, you know, there they are walking you over to so-and-so and, and they're like, did you try our cookies? We got cookies here. We got bagels. Why don't you sit down and relax? You should talk to Bill. And next thing you know, you're talking to fucking Bill. And then Bill's telling you how you got to bring your wife and your kids and everything else.

And you're like, shit, man. But that's what I want to do with fitness. I want to do that. And I want more and more people to be, to get involved with strength training, because who do we know that can't do strength training? Nobody. Exactly. We don't know anyone that can't do strength training.

This stuff is, this stuff is easy. It's, it's, um, it's simple it's easy it can be really difficult at times the difficulty level and the intensity of it can be through the damn roof where you're like oh man i don't know if i'm gonna get through this yeah it could be scary yeah get flat out flat out scary you're like man i don't like man why are they why'd they put so much weight on it is that for me yeah dude I hope that's not for me. And then you're like, okay, I'm going to go over to this music thing and I'm going to try to make different noises come out of here until the right song comes on so I can try to get hyped up to pretend that I think I can make the lift. But I know that I really can't, but I'm going to go try it anyway.

You've been in my head this whole time. I'm going to go roll the dice. We all feel the same way that's how i know all that stuff but this is a this is an obsession for us and this you know it is my i do feel it's part of my duty to try to fix powerlifting i do feel it's kind of um you know it's etched into uh my dna to try to share the message and try to get more people um try to get more people into um, try to get more people into it. It's part of the huge reason why we have a free gym. I sometimes I'll hear, um, many times

I've been in the, been in this gym and I'll hear the language that's, uh, kind of shared by other people that work here with somebody who's coming in for the day. And we love, we love our own spot so much that we're like, sometimes a little bit like resistant to letting somebody, letting somebody just kind of haphazardly come in. Um, but I always try to teach everybody here and talk to everybody here, say, look, man, not everyone's going to stay anyway. So don't, don't worry about it. Like just tell the guy it's cool to come in and he won't come in anyway. Just trust me on this.

I've been doing this for a long time. He ain't going to come back. Not that anybody's ever treated anybody rudely or anything. Everyone's always very polite, but they're like, Hey, can I come in train today? And someone would be like, no man, maybe come back on Saturday. Saturday? Yeah. Saturday you might be able to train.

Okay. Who do I talk to? I'm not sure. Alright, man. Catch you guys later. Yeah. I know. I always try to put people in contact with Marcus and then once they see who he is, they're like, oh, shit. So I'm like, well, if they're

willing to at least try to communicate with Marcus, then I know that they're down to actually, you know, they appreciate the gym enough to actually, you know, they're, they're, they appreciate the, the gym enough to actually go through the steps. And then the other reason is cause like, I don't know if like, uh, like there's a shit

ton of people that are visiting on a certain day. So I'm like, Hey, can you just check with him first? And then after that, you're good to go. I always try to tell, like, just, you know, hit us up on Instagram, go to the super training gym, I think is the IG.

Uh, if you're having trouble there you can try jessica smith or little smoky um you can try filipino thunder there you go but uh you'll get contact with somebody look man you know the best things that you make you know aren't made in the microwave they're made in the oven things take a long time and things are annoying and not convenient are always the best. And that's, that's why we kind of make it a little bit of a little bit of a rat race to try to figure out how to become part of this. Because once you do become part of it, it's the best damn thing that you can be part of. And so it's not going to be easy. And when I used to coach kids, I used to say, look, if you're not sweating, I'm not talking to you. You know, if you guys want to sit there and be like, oh, you know, the coaches, they like so-and-so and yeah, of course we do. We like the guys that are working

hard. We, we like the guys that are working hard better than you. Sorry. I got nothing else to say on that. You know, it's kind of, um, you know, where somebody will say, wow, did you look at that, man? It's so unfair. All the people that work really hard, get all the luck. Shit, man. You know, it's like, did you, do you understand what you just said? Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I mean, look, fortune, uh, being fortunate is, is a really valuable tool. You know, my wifey and I, we were just in Seattle, right? Um, oh boy, a bunch of stories popped up in my head from that. But, uh, you know, we went to the first Starbucks ever. If the guy didn't start, uh, a coffee shop in one of the most miserable states in the country. And I, I don't mean that in like i don't mean that as it's uh but look man depression and those kinds of things are heavy in states like

that that don't get a lot of sunshine yeah it's it's a dark place there's a lot of rain there and uh would his coffee shop have worked if he started it somewhere else like maybe it wouldn't not might not have the same magical powers that uh that ended up becoming a company that i mean how many years later 1971 i think starbucks started um and i want to say that starbucks had of cafe coffee which i don't know how they uh figure that out had like 59 or 53 percent of the market share or something think numbers like that are absolutely mind-boggling for that to happen this day and age with how much competition there is uh in this damn world um amazon you know like you know amazon amazon might need to um you know create their own competition because like they're they might run

into like being like a monopoly or whatever right um but then also too you know so that guy was fortunate that he was able to start his coffee company in that area where it's kind of cold it's always wet it's always kind of like down and people probably need coffee to hype themselves up. They don't have a normal circadian rhythm. Yeah. I mean, how weird is that to think about, but that's, that's, that all plays into it. And so, yeah, he's lucky, but man, what a pain in the dick it must've been to start up Starbucks. It must've been really hard. I mean, he did get a little help from number two. Who does number two work for? Well, he invested in Starbucks early on. Yeah.

So that's huge. I'm pretty sure that helped, you know, kind of boost everything and get it out to the masses. Hell yeah. But he wouldn't have been able to get help from number two if he didn't put in the work. You got to put in that, you got to put in that work. You got to have that grind. Yeah. Talking about Austin powers, um, you know, and then also another famous person from that area,

it's a guy by the name of Bill Gates. Um, I think Bill Gates grew up in Florida. I could be wrong. I could be pulling some of this out of my ass, but I know that the next statement is at least correct um bill gates happened to go to a school at a really young age 11 12 13 somewhere in that age category he happened to go to one of the few schools that had computers so you start to think about that it's like you know holy shit what would happen if bill, what would happen if Bill Gates didn't have a computer when he was 12? You know? Yeah. Then maybe all this great stuff that he created, uh, maybe it would have never happened or maybe it would have been prolonged or like, you know, who even knows?

Anyway, I've been playing around with some ideas, something I wanted to do. I took a picture today at the first Starbucks ever. I was thinking about maybe, maybe about weekly or maybe every other week or so posting something up about, you know, an entrepreneur that I look up to. Cause I do get people ask me like, well, who motivates you or who inspires you? Um, I'll look these people up. Sometimes I'll look up like Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein, or I'll hear some, somebody will say something. I'll hear it on TV or I'll hear it on another podcast and they'll say, oh yeah, that's like so-and-so's theory.

And, uh, I'll be like, oh, who's that? Who's that? Who's that? Who's, who's theory? Who's got a theory about something? Let me look this shit up, you know? And I'll look it up and, uh, cause I never went to school. So it's like, I now that's what I'm doing nowadays.

Like I'm taking myself to school, but I was went to school. So it's like, I now that's what I'm doing nowadays. It's like, I'm taking myself to school, but I was thinking about sharing that on my Instagram with people and saying like, uh, you know, you know, here's, uh, you know, this week it's, I was at the first Starbucks and it inspired me to look up information on, I forget the dude who started it, but it inspired me to, you know, investigate him. And I wanted to share, um, all this, I think it's Mike something investigate him, and I wanted to share all this. I think it's Mike something. I wanted to share all this information with you guys, and hopefully this sparks something in you

to get you hyped up. That'd be cool. Oh, man, I have a couple different names. Oh, I'm sure. Jerry Baldwin. No, no, no, wait. I think it's Eric Baldwin. Eric Baldwin? Somebody on here is probably answering already. I think it's Eric Baldwin. Eric Baldwin? Somebody on here is probably answering already for us because people are smart.

People are smart. Let's see if anybody answers on our chat over here. Bill Gates grew up in Seattle. I'm a dumbass. Anyway. Wait. No. Man, I'm going to a private school.

My Googling is not good today. My eyeballs are getting fat. I can't see anything. Mine are really bad today. So your eyesight is worse on some days versus others? Yep. Does it have a lot to do with light? Yep.

How much light maybe you've been exposed to for the day and how much... If I hang out with my glasses off for a long period of time or if i look at my phone without my glasses for again for like a long period of time i've always wondered do your eyes hurt when you don't have your glasses on no it's just uh like it takes a little little bit more effort to get stuff in focus but you don't actually notice it because your eyes just automatically adjust to whatever the hell your vision is. Are there a lot of good photographers I can't see for shit? I know the guy that I learn from the most.

He's definitely blind. And I'm on my way there. Another guy I've been a huge fan of, Joel Grimes. He's actually colorblind. And I always see colors way off compared to everyone else. So that guy was a huge inspiration for me as well. Because he's 100% colorblind, but all his photos are in color. So, yeah.

And he just sees stuff in different, like, shades and tones and whatnot. Somebody just said on here, they said, could you please eat a carolina reaper on your live no uh that's some sort of hot pepper or something yeah remember you got in trouble not in trouble but you were uh denied when we had the that hot chip challenge or whatever ever since uh andy galpin ripped muscle out of my body my wife won't let me make my own decisions anymore. She's like, I'm taking care of all that from now on. No one's touching me or making me do anything stupid.

I'm like, okay. She's like, you're too valuable. She's like, what if something happens? She's like, let other people act like idiots. She's like, don't do shit like that. It looks like our boy Russ Drake answered. He said it was Howard Schultz. He was the one that started Starbucks.

Shout out, Howard. Anyway, that was something I was just thinking about doing. I thought it'd be fun. And I am inspired. I do listen to a lot of other people's information. Somebody I've been listening to a ton lately has been Jordan Peterson. I'm still working on it. We're working on, you know, getting these people on the podcast.

These people are extremely busy. They have, you know, Jordan Peterson, he makes his living off of talking. So it's kind of, it almost seems rude in a way of saying, Hey, can you like do a bunch of free stuff for us, bro? You know, like, I don't know. It's weird, but, but uh i would just like to help uh get his message out more and maybe it would start to reach some people uh that maybe otherwise it wouldn't reach is the information that he's sharing is just killing me i'm like this guy's he's just on a roll um some people some you know and again i i it's so frustrating to me some people get all caught up with things that he's said politically.

And he's made a lot of statements about the, I'm going to probably mess this up because I don they're trying to, many people are trying to change, uh, the language that we use when we refer to certain people. And he's like, look, it's not right. Like here's, but here's why I think that. But again, people get caught up in stuff like that. And then they just dismiss everything else that he has to say. It's like, even if you don't agree with him on that, and even if you think his view is dumb or you, or you just think he's, he's an asshole for it. He's still saying a lot of really valuable things. There's still a lot of value in what he's saying.

And so I, I just, I always find that to be, uh, frustrating when somebody just, they, they flip out and it's like, man, first of all, it seems like you're not even actually listening to him. You're not even actually listening to him. I saw one person on one video where he was outside of one of his convention type things that he had going on. And this girl comes up. She's like, I can't believe that you support violence at your rallies and this and that. And he's like, I don't support violence in any way. He's like, I don't support violence in any way. And he's like, I, he's like, the people that were violent at my rally were, were opposing me and opposing the people that were there. That's why there was like a fight.

And, uh, he's like, they have opposite views of me. So he's like, my, my views are, he's like, I don't support violence at all. But the girl wasn't listening to him, you know, it's just getting all kind of bent out of shape. Yeah. I remember I was at a, like a comedy show a comedy show like i mean a handful of years back and uh the guy the i don't even know who it was but the comedian was like yeah you know shout out to because it was in fairfield he's like i know we have uh travis air force base right around the corner like so you know thank any any military man that are in the uh audience blah blah and then this was like during like the bush administration so there was a lot of shit going on

with sending people over. And this girl right up front was just getting so irate. And he's like, no, no, no, I'm on your side. She's like, no, you're not. He's like, no, we're for the troops, not the war, right? And she just got so pissed off. She couldn't understand what he was standing for, but because

she just wanted to be mad at something. And it's so funny, like you were just saying, like separating OJ Simpson, the football player from the murderer, you know, people catch on to one bad thing and like, that's all they want to attach the person to, you know, Mark Bell, the Trump supporter. Yeah, I know. Yeah. People get, they get all, uh, they get all bent out of shape about these different, uh, these different topics and, and then they can't, um, they can't decipher like what's wrong and what's right. And you've seen that a lot with diet, you know, it's to the detriment of your own health. Like, I don't mean for the moment with stress and you yelling at somebody and getting fired

up. I don't really mean in that sense. I mean it in a different way. I mean it like towards, you could be denying great information just because you think the carnivore diet is a wild, uh, a wild concept. You, you get so mad and so defensive that, that something else is better. It's like, you could be missing out on something.

Um, the other thing I find interesting is a lot of times the people that are kind of throwing these stones are the ones that have a problem. Like they have like an autoimmune disorder, like I can't lose weight. But then as soon as somebody says something about a carnivore diet, they're like, that's unhealthy. But then as soon as somebody says something about a carnivore diet, they're like, that's unhealthy. It's like, well, you know, okay. Um, it's, it's, it's insane that we've gotten to a point that somebody that eats real food

is the odd man out. Yeah. You know, um, it is, you know, it is in some ways debatable about, you know, how much meat a person should be consuming in a day. But I do think it's pretty clear that human beings are meant to eat meat. We're meant to eat vegetables and we're meant to eat fruit. Beyond that, I don't know what else we're meant to make. I mean, you can kind of think that, you know, God put us here with hands and a brain and the ability to think and to be rational.

with hands and a brain and the ability to think and to be rational and maybe he made us that way so we can survive and we can eat even grains you know like uh what would be the reason in making them if you can't eat them um normally our body kind of regulates what you absolutely can't have you know like you can't like just go out and drink uh gasoline right like your body just just spit it out and then you also get sick from it right yeah um so i i know that we can make things that are harmful uh to ourselves but it seems like the things that are kind of naturally here that we can naturally like kill and heat up and cook and uh eat in a way that um doesn't give us uh some weird disease or whatever doesn't harm our metabolism in a way that doesn't give us some weird disease or whatever. Doesn't harm our metabolism in a way to where it gives us diabetes or something like that.

Then everything should be fine. Yeah. The betas. The betas. Yeah. I still am curious when the human body will be able just to adapt. Or maybe it's already started with someone like Jeremy Avila with the gas station diet.

You know, he's able to thrive off of eating like shit. So actually you are a genius, Andrew, because you brought up something really interesting and it had me really thinking. I saw on the news the other day that, uh, diabetes is actually down, but obesity is up. So that does tell you that maybe we are adapting to it in some weird way now here's the here's the shitty part there might be um also too there's there's definitely a possibility that our markers for uh diabetes maybe they're not that correct

maybe there should be other things looked into to determine whether someone has, uh, basically rather than calling it diabetes, almost like a sugar insulin problem type thing. But, um, yeah, I think you're correct. I think that the human body, if you do stuff in the short term, it'll usually be pretty grumpy at you. You know, it'll usually like something will happen when you do things. And I'm talking short term. I'm still talking like a span of like five or 10 years, you know, you abuse your body for 10 years and it'll probably be some poor result of that 10 years, 15 years, uh, 20 years, depending on the person.

But if you abuse your body from the time you're really young, uh, we don't know, we don't always know exactly what that looks like, but we're starting to learn. So if you are consuming tons of sugar, I think, and you know, these stats, it's like, who knows, but the average child in this country consumes over 75 grams of fructose a day, 75 grams of fructose per day. And that's just fructose. That's not other carbohydrates, not other forms of sugar. It's just mainly coming from high fructose corn syrup. That is a crazy amount. Again, the numbers can say whatever, you know, you can kind of have numbers say whatever you want.

It's just, it's one thing I saw one time on the internet. So I'm not saying that that is a hundred percent, uh, the truth, but, um, even if it's half that still, it's still a lot, right? Maybe if you do it from the time you're really young, maybe your body does kind of adapt to it in some way. And maybe your body will regulate, uh, you know, your insulin, you not becoming insulin resistant and you later on not becoming a diabetic but you know being uh overweight is still going to result in something it's going to place a lot

of stress on your liver going to place a lot of stress on your um on your heart potentially your kidneys um but aside from that what i'm seeing around the country and what I'm seeing when I'm going to these different airports is people are just sick and they are in pain. People are, people are like, man, people are fucking dying. Like, I don't mean literally dying, like, you know, being hauled off in a Hertz or anything like that. But man, I'm watching people walk and people can't walk they're like you know they're really really they're really struggling to walk and i'm like you know okay by my estimation this guy's probably about 60 uh that guy's probably about 55 i'm like that girl over there is probably like 40 that person. And I'm just watching these people.

We will wobble their way around the airport. And it's like, what's an acceptable amount of body fat to have? Cause there should be an acceptable amount. Um, if, if you're, if,

and I think this is kind of funny, but like you hear like, this is a guy thing. Like men will, men will be like, oh man, you're not going to have a beer. Don't be a pussy. Right. But drinking too much beer makes you look like a bitch. It gives you, it gives you like wide hips.

It gives you a beer belly. It gives you tits. Yeah. I mean, uh, Maria Emrick, who we interviewed, she said, it's not a beer belly. It's an estrogen belly. Yeah. She's like, that's a by-product of you drinking too much and raising your cortisol levels that's crazy i know and now at the same time like a guy who does some construction and throws back a beer here and there yeah having a having a layer

of chub is totally fine and you don't want i would imagine a lot of these women out there too they don't want their guy you know um scraping a ranch dressing off a salad and being a little bitch about it right like i don't it's too many calories right um so there's got to be some leeway but like what are acceptable amounts of fat and i not uh fat calories but what are acceptable amounts of body fat that you could have on your body now it could probably look pretty different for each person because different people kind of distribute their fatness, uh, in different ways. But man, people are too fucking fat.

Yeah. They are way, they are way too. And it's not even about, it's not even about like looking like really fat. Cause there's a lot of people where if you and I got in conversation and be like, oh yeah, I know that person. Um, we wouldn't be like, oh yeah, yeah. yeah the fat guy like it's not definitely the fat guy it's just somebody who's so out of shape um their body fat like percentage or whatever it's just through the roof and i just i i see it time and time again and i i maybe i'm like a fitness freak or something i don't know but it's it just seems like you have to go so far out of your way to be that way

and i'm not talking about having an extra 10 pounds 20 pounds or maybe not having the body that you want because everyone's in that category like everyone everyone's always trying to make their body better right and everyone's trying to get leaner and more jacked and stronger. And it's hard. It's hard to manage all these things. There's probably like, uh, I don't know,

3% of the population. That's like, yep. I feel awesome about the way I'm built and my strength level. That's probably like Larry wheels and Larry wheels. Yeah. That's a good way to put it. I was going to say,

cause that guy's an asshole, but not, you said Larry wheels. So I was like, I better not say that. Cause he's big. big he's pretty you put a name on him i can't say that guy's an asshole now yeah he's pretty he's pretty he's pretty big and he's pretty jacked i saw him do 605 for a triple the other day that was pretty crazy he's and he just smoked i mean he's just it's great because it's not it's not not anything spectacular from him. It's just him just lifting,

you know, he's just, he's just getting after it, but he's a beast. But I think that people need to hold themselves to a higher standard, you know? Um, it's interesting to me that people get to a certain body weight too, and then it just kind of ceases. It just kind of stops. Somebody might weigh 300 pounds, but then the weight just stops. And so it's like whatever control mechanism you have to have stopped yourself. Now I realize there's people that are really big, but whatever control mechanism you have that stopped you at 300 pounds, how do we get you to use some of that towards weighing 270, you know, towards weighing a uh, 260 and trying to figure out ways of having a little bit of momentum, uh, to just be, just be a little healthier. I mean,

my mom and my dad are great examples of that. My mom has been in love with food forever. And my mom's got all this shit tied to her eating, you know, the way that she eats her, she didn't, she didn't grow up in a, in a very loving household. She, you know, way that she eats her she didn't she didn't grow up in a in a very loving household she you know her her her i think her mom and her dad and her brothers and stuff would call her fat and all this stuff and so she's got these it's hard you know but my mom and dad are great examples of people that have been carrying around excess body fat for a long time that decided to finally do something about it. And it, and it's, it's really just not that hard. It's what I'm trying to say.

It's hard to be shredded. It's hard to look like Michael Hearn. It's hard to, it's hard to, you know, get your body to, uh, the levels of the low level of body fat that it would take to do like a bodybuilding show. That shit is, that shit's intense. And for most people, it's not easy for some people. It might come easier than others, but, um, there has to be in your head. You have to decide how fat is too fat for me. And then just go from there. So even if you're, even if you're 70 pounds overweight, you're looking at

yourself in the mirror every morning going, man, I'm a useless piece of shit. You might feel that way. Um, and that's fine, but then make a decision on how do you become less useless than you were yesterday? Um, forget about trying to be good or trying to be great or anything. Follow the gut instinct that you have, the big gut instinct that you have in this situation. Follow the gut instinct that you have that's telling you that this is not good for you anymore. Start to focus in on the things that are good for you. Because when you reach for that thing that's not good for you, it, um, disabling you from doing the shit that you want to do. It's also encouraging you to continue to go in the wrong direction. So it's, um, it's almost like, you know, it's one thing to have the wrong directions when you're driving.

It's another thing to have the wrong directions when you're walking, right? When you're walking, you're like, God damn it. This is is getting to be and for every reason the gps doesn't really know where you are so frustrating it doesn't know exactly where you are and you walked four blocks the wrong way if you drove four blocks the wrong way you're like ah shit i gotta flip a bitch and you flip a bitch and and you're there you're fine but if you're walking in the wrong direction it really pulls from you so that's that's what you're doing you're self- you're fine. But if you're walking in the wrong direction, it really pulls from you. So that's, that's what you're doing. You're self-sabotaging yourself. Um, there's these little things that we could be doing that can make, make our lives easier. And you just have to start to adopt some sort of responsibility to your day. And now here's where, here's where

everything plays out really nice. There are a tremendous amount of different diets that you can try. There's a lot of them. And you've heard a lot of people say, you know, I don't know which one to do. But you can pick one. Pick somebody that you relate to. Investigate and look at Rob Wolf. Investigate, look at a book like The War on Carbs. Look at Stan Efferding and the stuff that he's preaching.

Find somebody. Dave Asprey, the bulletproof coffee guy. All these people, they have great information that can really be beneficial. And if you kind of break everything down, you kind of are like, okay, all these people are saying about the same thing in some way. I have to figure out to have some discipline, some control. I got to adopt a responsibility in my life to make a change. And then you make a change. And then once the change is made, you work on figuring out how can I develop consistency

with this change that I just made? Is the change that i just made is the change that i just made reasonable it's not reasonable and ain't gonna last um if every morning you're sucking down some disgusting uh fiber shake or something like that every day yeah you could you could do that for 10 days 20 days if you're really disciplined, maybe even stick with it for three months. But then what happens, you know, everything that you do, you need to really start to try to figure out as I'm going through this process, how am I going to get out of this process? How am I going to move and try something different with the diet that I've presented to you guys? Uh did the not-so-fat diet,

which was just basically gave you guys a lot of food options. Then we moved into the vertical diet, and that's where we are right now. And if you're following along on the Operation Get Less Fatterist, I'm sharing information there as much as I possibly can, trying to get you guys the latest and greatest so that you guys can understand, uh, what it is we're doing and what we're trying to do and what we're striving for. Um, but the diets that we're going to go through partly people are like, oh

man, you gave up on the war on carbs or the ketogenic diet is my, is my favorite diet. Um, and I, I, I want to just maybe even get away from saying ketogenic diet. I'll just say a low-carb lifestyle. A low-carb lifestyle, a diet that is absent of breads and sugar that might allow for a little bit of fruit, vegetables, occasional potato or something like that. That's my favorite style of diet. And even taking it further and even sometimes not having the potatoes in there and stuff. But I like to change things up because I like my performance to be high as well. So I've said this a billion times, but a low carb lifestyle the war on carbs all the information that's in my book it's that's the easiest way for me to eat in a uh with managing the amount of food that i

consume to be the body weight that i want to be that's it's my favorite way of eating and then also on top of that, when I'm not following the war on carbs specifically to a T and when I'm not really, uh, trying to have the fat be high and the, and the carbs being like really, really super low. Um, I like, I enjoy doing other things and I enjoy, uh, trying to pack on some muscle and I enjoy trying to get a little stronger. And so that's why we're going through these different diet phases. When we're done with the vertical diet, we're going to move into a ketogenic diet. And then from there, we're going to move into the

carnivore diet. These are all diets I've used in the past with tons and tons of success. But what diet are you going to pick and what diet are you going to utilize to help regulate your body weight, to help regulate how you feel? There's some things that aren't debatable when it comes to a ketogenic style diet. And I think that these things are getting missed. These things are getting missed greatly. A ketogenic diet does not have any magical powers, said a thousand times, where it might have some boost over the competition, a boost over just being in a caloric deficit.

Where it might have a boost somewhere is that a ketogenic style diet can change the pharmacology of your brain. This is something talked to talked about quite a bit by Dominic D'Agostino. So if, if it, if it possesses that ability, if it possesses the ability to potentially, um, kind of change some of the behaviors that you have and change just your overall mindset on whether you're frumpy and going to sit on the couch for the day, or whether you're going to get up and kick some ass. To me, that's not something that we can just dismiss. Like that's huge. And I've said it before. I say in the book, the diet will,

will promote itself because when you're on a ketogenic diet and you start to do it for a long time, you start to care a lot less about other junk and you get to a point where you don't i mean you really um you're just like you know what that is so sideways from what i want to do that i'm not going near any of that shit yeah i don't i don't want that you know it was the first diet because like i i tinkered with keto before i ever tinkered before um I ever got here but it was just to just see what what the hell it was all about it was kind of it was I would say it was about to blow up the way it has recently so you know like four maybe five years ago now and it was the first diet that I ever followed that made me it totally changed my like taste buds. Like I can eat like a,

like a, like a actual, like plain cacao chocolate bar and be like, this is good. I tried one the other day. I'm like, this is horrible. It just tasted so bad. But I,

was it like a hundred percent or 90%? Something like that. Yeah. I just, I looked at it and I don't know. We were at, um, what's that? Uh, sometimes you gotta get a little salt, that. I looked at it, and I don't know. We were at, what's that fancy?

Sometimes you got to get a little salt. That fancy store. Not fancy. That weird hipster. Trader Joe's. And I looked over, and I'm like, hey, let's try this. And I just got it because it said it had cacao nibs or whatever. And I'm like, this would probably be all right.

Yeah, those are kind of rough. And it was rough. Stephanie, as soon as she bit into it, she was like, bleh. And then I thought it was pretty good at first, but then it had a horrible aftertaste. But that's one thing that I don't think people don't understand is with like the ketogenic style diet is not only do you not want the bad things, but when you try the bad things, they taste horrible. And then when you try the things that you think are bland right now they taste really fucking good and you can actually sit back and enjoy like a like a quote cheat right that's not bad right it's kind of amazing it's and it's also it it it takes a lot to get tired of some of the different food set that we have opportunity to eat like um

i don't know like i don I don't, I don't like love eggs, but I can eat the hell out of eggs like all day long. I, I, I can, I can handle them. And there's so many different ways I can prepare them. Um, when it comes to, when it comes to like red meat or even chicken or fish, it's like, I can figure out enough different things to mess with to where I never get tired of it. But even with, even in terms of steak, if I have a nice, uh, chewy filet, um, I never get tired of that. I, I, you guys kind of seen me around here.

I pull the filet out of my, you know, prep thing and I just chew on it. Like it's a protein bar. Cause it's, I don't, I don't even feel like I need to, uh, if you cook it just right, it like it's a protein bar because it's i don't i don't even feel like i need to uh if you cook it just right it kind of all falls apart and it's really uh it's really pretty awesome but after a while you start to not care that much about some of the junk food that's out there and even when you have the opportunity to eat some of the junk food you're going to eat a lot less of it. You know, my wife and I went, we went to Seattle, her and I had a good time. We were celebrating some stuff and just, I mean, just, just each

other. We weren't, it wasn't anything in particular because sometimes it's fun just to do that. Right. Um, there's not an anniversary or birthday or anything like that. It's just, we're just hanging, just kicking it. And, um, so we went to this, uh, nice restaurant. We chowed down on some food, had a couple drinks. Alcohol is, I've said this before, alcohol is not part of any, you know, any part of any diet that's going to help you with your health or help you get lean or anything. So that's definitely part of the cheat. And we got done eating and the waitress brought us over a creme brulee. We didn't even ask for it, but they brought it to us and we crushed it.

Of course. We're like, well, we're not going to be at this nice, fancy restaurant and not crush this creme brulee. That'd be rude. So we did that. And then of course, you know, you get back to your hotel room and everyone's got the, you know, little mini bar and you're the mini bars talking to you. And so we had some M&Ms from the, uh, mini bar, right?

It's like sometimes like that's reasonable but like what's reasonable for you like is it it can't it can't be reasonable for you to not give a shit um there's two ways to live your life there's one way one way of saying you know what nothing's matters nothing's meaningful and i'm not responsible for anything you just put your hands up and you can be a bitch and not have to do anything. The advantage of that is you don't get hurt. You know, you don't get hurt by things. You don't get hurt by people because no one has any expectation of you.

And your reputation is never on the line because you don't put yourself out there. You're not trying to do anything. You're not trying to really ever advance yourself. And so you can stay very protected that way. And that's why a lot of people do that. But that's such a sad state to be in. Oh, it's sad. But I think a lot of people have been there.

I would say that like, I probably been like, I, I'm not somebody who really has run into a lot of like depression or anything like that, but I I've, I've been there. It's fair to say that I think everyone has kind of been in that situation. I mean, I definitely had some years in my life where I just didn't want to be like held accountable for stuff. Cause I was just like, I don't even know what, I don't really know what I'm doing. Like, I don't know how to do that. Like that was always my excuse.

I don't know how to do that. I was not, I can't do that. I was like, I don't know how to do that, which is basically the same thing. I just thought I wasn't like smart enough to figure it out or whatever. And I'm like, so I don't have to do that. It was just your version of, I'm know how to do that which is basically the same thing i just thought i wasn't like smart enough to figure it out or whatever and i'm like so i don't have to do that it was just your version of i'm not gonna do that yeah right i just want to grab people and shake them like just fucking try like whatever it is just go out just step out of your bedroom and try you never know what you might find well when you try things and then you learn that you can do it you're like holy shit okay this is pretty cool and then you learn that you can do it, you're like,

holy shit. Okay. This is pretty cool. And then you start to make a little bit of a, a little bit of progress and you're starting to feel, um, you're starting to, you're starting to feel really good about yourself, but people have a tendency to be self-destructive. Um, and I've, I do that often too. Um. You're going to do things that are a little bit off your diet. You're going to do things that are a little bit off your plan. But think about what your life would look like. Those of you that are listening right now, I want you to take this to the heart. Think about what your life would look like if you continually made the correct decision all the time, if you started to follow your consciousness and started to follow kind of that gut feeling that's telling you, hey, this is wrong and you stop doing that thing.

You know, this is this is unreasonable for me to spend two hours playing a video game. It's totally reasonable, totally acceptable. If you had a long day day you like playing video games in by my account i think it's totally not that that mind matters but but in my opinion 30 minutes of leisure bullshit just sitting there mindless is totally fine i think that i think that people sometimes need that for me it's usually like a walk or sometimes I'll, sometimes I'll sit in front of the TV. The TV's like half on and I'm messing around on my phone, texting or it's not healthy. I realize it's not a good habit, but it's unacceptable for me to sit there for two hours.

It's fine for me to sit there for 15 minutes and be like, okay, well, I got a bunch of emails and I got a bunch of texts. So I'm going to kind of sit over here and i'm gonna halfway work and halfway kind of just catch up and see what the hell's going on in the world and and then i'll get back to like hanging out my kids or some other responsibility that's way more important than what the hell i'm doing on my phone oh my god sorry i was reading some comments over here. Mm-hmm. Say, where was this guy from? I think Norway, and he took advantage of our free shipping the other day.

Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, he got some gear. Free shipping! Yeah. People love that shit. That shit was awesome. Mm-hmm. One thing you said, that it's actually kind of easy to kind of eat better.

I think a lot of people get hung up on actually just starting because to actually go from zero to moving is really hard. Because people have weird relationships with their food. Not weird, but they just have a relationship with food that's, I mean, it's unhealthy. But you know what I mean? Like they have to celebrate everything with dessert or something like that. And then when they say, or when they look at a diet, they have to say goodbye to those things. And that's really hard for them.

Right. You know, and if they just don't understand in time, it will be easy. Right. It's just that initial step is really fucking hard. You know, you just, you want to try do stuff uh long enough to where you can be successful at it you know i i think that i've i've just uh i feel so grateful that i have a healthy enough body to like lift weights because i feel like i owe so much to the iron uh teaching me these lessons over the years but it takes a really long time to acquire strength.

Yeah. It takes a long time and you can do everything right and still not get a pat on the back for it. You know, you can do everything right and still not, still not coming together. You could look at your body every day and go, Jesus Christ,

I'm eating really good. Like, man, my eating is at 90%. I feel like I'm at 90% with my sleep. I feel like I'm at 90% with my hydration. I feel like I'm working out basically as hard as I can. And then you go to do a lift and you miss it.

Yeah. And you're like, or you look at your body and you're like, this is not. All this work for that. Yeah. I've been working really hard and now it's the summertime. I don't even want to take my shirt off in front of everybody. Yeah. You know, you've been training your face off and you, you learn those lessons, but man, this stuff takes a really long time.

It's going to take you a long time to do anything. And so when you think about how hard the task is of, uh, getting started and, and getting momentum and having consistency behind you, you have to just keep trying. You know, when I don't see somebody for a while and I see them again, and we went over a diet many times and I see that they're the same body weight, it's very clear that they gave up on trying. They, they, they're not continuing to try. It's like, well, they, and there are some exceptions to the rule. Cause sometimes some of the people I know have lost 50 pounds and then you kind of get stuck, which is different.

Like if you've been doing something for a few months and you got, you plateaued for a little bit, that's, that's a different scenario than, uh, somebody just continuing to, to look the exact same as when they started, right? And so I see that a lot and you can't, you can't, you have to figure out a way to continue to push forward. And if you listen to the message of this podcast, part of, I'm trying to arm you guys with weapons that you can use in your day-to-day life so you can make decisions on your own. So you can, you can like, forget, forget what I'm promoting. Forget about, uh, you know, me promoting the vertical diet for a second. And, and maybe for some strange reason, that's not a great diet for you.

Maybe you have to investigate something else or try something, uh, try something slightly different. If you feel that you've really been trying it and it's not working, then you have to think, okay, um, a couple of things have to think okay um a couple things okay maybe my execution is off or maybe my interpretation of this diet is a little bit wrong maybe i should kind of like look up more information on this diet and then you know kind of double down and see if that works and if that doesn't work then you probably need to try something different but you can't you can't stop yeah i've been trying so like i don't know a couple weeks back i was

saying i was having a hard time eating steak so i tried to switch over to chicken having a hard time with chicken right now try the vertical diet i'm having a hard time with that too um i don't know if it's like the changing of the season or something but food is not it doesn't interest me at all right now and it's a it's it's, it's a real struggle. I don't know what the hell's going on. Yeah. You know, so like, I mean, again, you might want to try something, try something a little different. I want to try some like fasting or something. So you're hungry in that you, but the main thing on that is like, once you get away, once, once you, once you get off that gas pedal and you're like, oh, this is cool. Like I'm going to do, I'm just going to eat a couple of things off my plan.

A lot of times that right there will start to kind of, um, it'll start to send a lot of messages to your brain of like, ah, that last thing. Of course, the last thing you want to eat is steak when you, when you maybe have been eating something different, that's not part of the plan, you know? So there's definitely that factor in there. And that happens to me. If I, if I change something just a little bit, it will mess up my entire diet. Um, it will throw everything, it will throw everything out of whack.

Um, that's why it's like, for me, I can have this kind of short cheat window. And then that thing needs to be like. Shut right away. Yeah. It needs to, it needs to, it needs to be ditched. So like, for example,

if tonight after training, I was just like, you know what? I'm going to go smash a bunch of pizza. I'm going to just get after it. Um, that would take me like about five days, probably a good four or five days to totally recover from.

And I don't mean like body weight wise there would be no change really maybe i'd be a little bit more bloaty a little bit more farty but there wouldn't be any real change but the psychological thing to wake up the next day and have that first meal tomorrow morning to get in here and bang out some squats would be really hard yeah oatmeal and eggs fuck that yeah that makes a lot of sense and i know we talk about and we have people tell us about the uh the psychological like reaction that we get but i just i don't know like i feel like i didn't go too crazy far off the diet to really have that effect but and the other thing is i've experienced this before with or without any kind

of diet where i just like food is it's's like, uh, like if I could just try, try eating less meals, you know, just so just, you know, uh, right now you probably eat but four or five meals, five meals every day or so. I'm trying to hit four, but right now it's been a struggle just to get three. Like I'll eat once a year and then once for dinner, but I will have breakfast sometimes. So I guess technically three times. Right. Well, you know, you might want to just try to do, you know, you go through different periods of time where you're doing things a little differently. It's hard, though. Once you start to lose momentum, what I would do is I would try to eat on a schedule the best that you could. You know, if you can figure out at least the last two or three meals, if you can be on some sort of schedule at the last couple of meals, sometimes it's hard in here.

Cause like we train different times here and there, but, um, you know, I, I was doing something like that for a while where I would around uh like around three or four a.m or p.m and then i you know and it was just like every three or four hours basically yeah uh i would try to just kind of at least my alarm on my phone would would my phone would vibrate and i would be i wouldn't always get the meal in but i would try to be within half an hour of it just to kind of schedule something in. You know, maybe try to have some of the meals just, you know, have like, I don't know, less carbs or something. Or just try to switch it up so it's different, you know, or figure out a way to, you know, make some of the meals. Like Stan's whole thing with the bone broth is to try to make things more moist. So it's easy to get down, you know? So, um, there's, there's a lot of options

when it comes to things. I do weird stuff that other people probably wouldn't dig, but like, I'll take yogurt and I'll put yogurt on top of something. Cause plain yogurt to me tastes just like sour cream. So it really does. So I I'll eat, it's just sounds so disgusting to even say it out loud but i'll eat like um you know some potatoes and um some yogurt and and steak you know and i'll i'll kind of eat put them all in the same fork or spoon or whatever and knock that down it just gets it's a little easier for me to kind of consume that but But you might want to try some recipes. Like, you know, get with your lady friend there and say, hey, let's look up some recipes online.

You know, let's do something different. Let's make something fun. Like, it could still be nutritious and still be, you know, all stuff that follows the plan. You know, maybe there's some small deviation where you're using like a little extra oil here or there or whatever but for the most part you're just trying to make things taste delicious so you can you know crush those foods you know yeah she's been making like chicken with uh in in the slow

cooker and i'll smell it and it'll be like oh oh, I get so stoked. I get excited. And then like that day I'll tear it up and I'll be like, dude, I can't. Like I figured it out. Like we're good. We're back on. And then that night I was like, fuck, what do you want to eat for dinner? Like, man, I literally don't want anything. So it's like, it's really frustrating. But I think if I just stop, you know, cause like I had bread the other day, cause

like, I just didn't want to eat anything. So I'm like, I'm just going to have a slice of bread. And that's exactly kind of what we're talking about here, where you do, you do something where it's like, you're, you're kind of like even keel, right? And then you could potentially do something that's good for you, which is way over here to the right, or you could do something that's bad for you. And if you look at it, it's like, man, it really slams you back. And the other things that it causes, and that's why we start to run into more and more people

that come here and you're like, I haven't cheated in seven years. And you're like, what? Yeah. You're like, how is that possible? I don't think for myself I'll ever get there. I don't, I don't, um, but I don't, man, I don't, it's hard, hard for me to say, but I don't, I don't think I have any sort of like problem with eating, you know, like I, first of all, I digest stuff pretty well.

Um, there are certain things that can like, um, almonds and, uh, nuts basically. Like I just, if I eat them, like they cause a lot of gas and they hurt my stomach. So it's like, there's a couple of things that, that aren't great for me. Um, maybe I don't chew them all the way, the way I'm supposed to or whatever, but there's a couple of things that, that can do things like that to me. But in general, I feel like I can, I can eat something and then I can kind of switch over to something else. And I feel like I do a, a pretty good job of, of managing it it if i'm guilty of anything i probably do uh tend to overeat here and there i might eat a little uh a little too

often here and there too um but you guys seen me it's not like i'm crushing some crazy amount of food anyway no but um you got night at night i would say like i i load my calories probably you know later on later on the day um definitely guilty of like having a protein bar here and there and some things like that but it just kind of depends on where i'm at and i and i know for myself that i can switch to something different because i can usually figure out a why that oh that overwhelmingly pulls me towards kind of how I'm going to do something. So you have a, you have a reason that makes you figure out how to get it done. You know, um, you know, your reason, uh, you know, for a lot of times people's reason for, for being rich is because they were really

poor when they were young. And they're like, you know what, I'm doing the exact opposite of this shit. I'm going to work my ass off to make sure that my life's never like this again right and they and they figure it out they become really successful yeah i just yeah i just have to focus back in and i knew that like eating shitty is just gonna make everything worse you know just just frustrated i guess oh yeah no it gets to be it's it's it's easy it's easy to it's easy to fall off the plan you know it's easy to it's it's easier to kind of get get a little sideways with shit and um it happens to everybody i mean it's it happens to me a lot and it doesn't happen to me as much anymore because i don't allow myself to get over certain

body weight so i'm like that's you know that's my limit um somebody else uh i was talking to aaron the other day you know he was i was saying hey like you know maybe you want to get like your blood checked or maybe like if you do something a body fat check, if you do something that gives you like a, uh, a number, a result to work with, uh, then maybe it gives you an idea towards, um, you know, what, what's your next reason for doing something rather than, rather than you just kind of sitting there and staying the same, you can, you know, you can figure out something that, uh, is goal oriented. Yeah. This is what I want to kind of do, you know? Yeah. It's funny, like when we talk about some of the guests that haven't had a cheat meal in forever,

it's like, who are you competing against? I know some people are literally still competing, but at the same time, it's like, shit, man. Enjoy a little something here and there. Yeah, they just don't care. Yeah. Savages. I think, again, I think again i think they're um the reason why

they're doing something it just outweighs it just outweighs everything else so much and the more that you can kind of get on board with this concept of rather than thinking about doing things great all the time just just think about um stop doing shit that's not good for you, you know, rather than like, cause that's going to be the alternative. The alternative is going to be shit. That's good for you. Right. But you know, like, let's say for example, you're on a ketogenic diet and, um, you, uh, you know, like I, you don't feel like eating meat, but you eat an apple. It's like, it's, it's not, I realized the apple has nothing to do with your diet. It's like probably the, probably the one thing that's like, you shouldn't, you shouldn't

eat. Cause it's got sugars in it. Right. On a ketogenic diet, but at least it's still a nutritious chunk of food, you know? And so I think trying to keep with that is, is one of the, one of the main things. Um, and if, and if, and if people do that over a long period of time that's how you can become successful at anything did you get the uh the email that i forwarded to you just now no no it was uh earlier today oh yeah i think so yeah yeah about yeah the guy lost a shit ton of weight

right yeah so this guy's name's trey uh he's been doing keto for 20 months and he's lost over 100 pounds. He reached his goal weight, but he kind of wants to start doing some, he wants to start lifting again. So what should, so he just went going from low calorie keto and he wants to know what should he transition to next? You know, I think that he should follow along with what we're doing right now. You know, we're doing a vertical diet You know, we're, we're, we're doing a vertical diet. We're going to be going into like a ketogenic diet again, and we're going to be going into the carnivore diet and then into a bodybuilding diet. But that would be the easiest thing to do is for him to kind of follow along with what we're doing. And when we do the ketogenic diet specifically for him, um, he might want to, he may want to have, um,

yeah, it's hard. It's hard sometimes to give, it's hard sometimes to give fatties carbohydrates, but what he might want to do is, um, you know, uh, pre-workout, uh, on, uh, the days that he works out really hard, like twice a week, he might want to have, um, you know, about 30, about 30 grams of carbohydrates from either rice or potato. And just keep it really simple. You know, like some people would say, Oh, why isn't it after it should be after it should be taken advantage of the post-workout and stuff like that. But, you know, I'm trying to keep it simple for him. Just do it, uh, sometime before your workout could be anytime before you work out.

If, um, for some reason you work out in the morning and you want to, um, you don't eat before you train, then, uh, simply just have the carbs after. So pretty, pretty simple, but I think he should follow along with our story. And, you know, I really appreciate when people send us stuff and they, they, they tell us about their journey and they tell us about what's going on. Andrew, how can people kind of write in and let us know what's up? Like how this guy hit you up on Instagram, I think, right? Yeah, he actually just sent me an email. But yeah, some people have hit me up on Instagram. That works, too.

We have the Power Project IG. Yeah, yeah. Power Project IG. That's one way. PowerProject IG. Yeah, yeah. PowerProject IG. That's one way.

Yeah, just hitting me up is probably the, because the PowerProject gets flooded sometimes, so it's kind of hard to keep up. That way, coming on to PowerProject.live and asking a live question is, like, huge because we can just answer it right here on the spot. But, yeah, I think those are the two best ways, just hitting me up on Instagram and then right here on PowerPro spot. Um, but yeah, I think those are the two best ways just hitting me up on Instagram and then, um, right here on, uh, on powerproject.live, which is just YouTube live. But, um,

for you, Andrew, it might be a good idea to, you know, really think about, you know, you want to, you want to pull 300 pounds, you know, and you want to do, you have got some other goals. Yeah. Might be a good idea. Like, you know, I don't know, write that shit down, put it somewhere. Um, and, uh, you know, take a good hard look at it, put it away for a little bit, but like really try to think about it, maybe take a picture of it on your phone and it's just there like having this, you know, having a specific goal, like the way that it works is if, if you don't, if you don't have a certain amount of energy a certain body weight um or certain amount of nutrition in your body it's be very hard for

your body to work the way that you want it to um and uh the fastest way for you to get to some of these lifts and and to build some strength is uh to say look you know what unacceptable to eat only two or three times a day like it so that's's, you got to try to figure out, okay, there could be, there could be all kinds of, there's so many different tricks that you can employ. There's so many different things that you could do. You could say, okay, tomorrow, you know, tomorrow's a weird instance because of the early squat session or whatever, but you could say on Saturday, say I'm going to wake up at six and I'm going to go for a a freaking 30 minute walk boom you go hit up a big walk you come back and you eat

your first meal is done by seven o'clock 7 30 or whatever so it's like that's one way of kind of sneaking in uh an extra meal or whatever you know um yeah during the uh the bodybuilding show prep and all that a lot of my motivation was like I need to be really good for Mark right now, which was kind of weird because I've never done that before. But man, I didn't miss any meals. I was in bed early, woke up hella early because some of our sessions were stupid early. But yeah, that was my goal. That's all it was, was like, I need to be the best training partner I can be right now. I know you've been off Instagram a little bit, but you should check out my Instagram because I've been fucking hustling, man.

I've been, I've been doing all the stuff that I'm supposed to be doing. You know, there's been some small hiccups food wise, but nothing, nothing major. But yeah, I've been, I started doing a little bit of cardio. I've been doing, uh, doing my walks. I've been, um, yeah, everything's been pretty spot on. And I've been, I've been just trying to kill people with it because I, I realized that a lot of people were following that bodybuilding journey and they, they liked that kind of fire. And I do that kind of shit anyway. I just don't always fucking want to record it yeah you know so i've been i've been doing tons of walks i think a couple days ago i got in like six probably like 15 or 20 minute walks during the day i was like damn i've really got a lot

of walking in today world record yeah it was a world you and your dad setting world records every day my dad loves those prs has he mentioned any new PRs lately? No, I haven't seen them in a few days. I'll probably see them tonight. I'll get the scoop on his latest PRs. Somebody asked, were those biscuits bitchin'? I saw those on your IG story. What was that all about? It was a place that was near the original Starbucks.

It's. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's just called like Biscuit Bitch or something. Name of the place. And then it's like, bitch, get in line. Yeah.

And like had bitch this and bitch that in there. But I didn't eat anything from there. Bitch, we're closed. Yeah. I was like, bitch, I ain't eating your carbohydrates. Yeah.

We, we smashed some, just smashed some coffee and that was pretty much it and got the got the hell out of there yeah anything else on your mind nope uh it's time for us to uh you know i'm gonna i'm gonna give people a little treat right here let me see if i can find this real quick i'll give people our training split. People always ask me that question. And I got any programming, got any programming, bro programming. So, uh,

here's, here's the, uh, the lifting that we're doing right now. Every, um, I can't read my own hand. Right.

That's pretty bad. Every, uh, Monday we're doing, uh, triceps and shoulders. We changed it. We were doing biceps and triceps.

We're doing triceps and shoulders on Monday. it. We were doing biceps and triceps. We were doing triceps and shoulders on Monday. I think it was Tuesday. It was kind of a little bit more of a hamstring, lower back workout. We did a shit ton of stuff for the hammies. My hammies are still dying. You mentioned yours were cramping and stuff. We started out with some leg curls then we moved into some dead lifts and then we did some uh the uh back attack and we finished with some heavy uh bent over rows um wednesday is normally off and thursday which is today is going to be a chest workout.

It's just all chest. I actually don't have anything else listed there. Then Friday we do legs. Saturday we do back and biceps. And then Sunday is off. So it's a real ass kicker. We work hard over here. We're trying to train our faces off.

We kind of have saturday sunday we can kind of rotate those days we can lift on sunday or lift on saturday we've got it kind of floating right now because sometimes i'm not around or different scheduling things but that's basically the split right there kids and we're gonna go crush some chest right now so catch you guys later strength is never weakness weakness never strength peace