Mark Bell's Power Project - Tendon Strengthening Exercises You’ve NEVER Seen

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

In episode 1031, Brady Vomlmering, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about Brady's awesome approach to training and how he utilizes it with his athletes and why it strengthens tendons and ligaments. Follow Brady on IG: https://www.instagram.com/dacperformanceandhealth/   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below!   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      You Need Greens in your Life 🥦 ➢https://drinkag1.com/powerproject Receive a year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 Travel Packs!   ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Where'd you start to learn some of this unconventional type of training? They look at it and they're like, dude, what are you doing? The impact is faster, right? Something that's slower is going to be more muscular. Something that's faster is going to be more tendon-based. Even though you're going through like an isolation movement, your whole body is still being utilized. Is there an upper limit on anything?

For myself personally, it's like I want to figure out what the limit is if there's a limit. You lower in that lunge for three to five minutes for one rep. Yep. Moving very, very slowly. I don't want to ask my athlete to do something that I haven't done myself. One day I did one move for, it was 25 sets of 100 reps for like 2,500 reps. The thing that I got out of that is I was like, okay, this is too much. I was like, bro, three, two, one. Just because I got hurt in that movement, that doesn't mean that the movement's bad. It just means that my body wasn got hurt in that movement, that doesn't mean that the movement's bad. It just means that my body wasn't prepared for that movement in that one second.

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that this guy is all jacked and everything over here. Super jacked. Fucking A. A little warning would have been nice. Sorry. I'm sorry. Throwing around 315,

like dropping it like almost on his neck and then pressing it back up. Literally. Yeah. What's the most you've ever done on that exercise? 315 is actually the most I've ever done i tried 325 today that didn't go up yeah i think it's because the negative wavelengths that were being thrown your way from josh

settlegate he tends to be a hater i agree i need to handle that guy somebody needs to do something about him but yeah i know we can't figure it out he's up earlier than us he does more than us in a day so we can't figure it out it's okay where'd you start to learn uh some of this just unconventional type of training we've been following along we've been checking out your instagram for a while now for sure uh i mean it's just been a progression like obviously when i first started training i went into you know the old t-nation stuff all that stuff where you know i got a lot from you and other people as well and it was just where i'm at now has has basically like been a side effect of everything that i've gone through over the past 13 to 14 years so in terms of like recent i mean i was at a training facility with a couple other different guys and one of the guys that we

had there had brought in some movements where we were doing impulse type stuff so basically think about like a chain is around a pole and we had athletes like impulsing against that as hard as they could for a couple different exercises and we saw some really good results with that in terms like their resiliency and how they were feeling so then it just expanded from there where the concept of taking force accepting that force very quickly doing that for high volumes and then using that to prepare an athlete to be able to like go do whatever they want so it's just it's been a progression over the past two to three years for that yeah you're kind of like i wonder what would happen if i started to apply this to a hamstring or a hip or yeah yeah exactly because like

so the one that you saw me doing was the bench so you can do bench you can do squat pattern right then we can also take that same concept and put it into individual joints so let's say we do it for an elbow a shoulder a knee a hip like you said take that same concept and apply it into those specific tissues and then just take it from there and i personally work with a lot of baseball players so like that's where a lot of the upper body stuff that i do came from. It's just a necessity for baseball players to be able to handle their arms better because that's a huge issue there. Probably pretty receptive to it too, right? Because in baseball, conventional lifting I don't think was all that accepted for a long time and maybe still isn't. But the way that you're training is slightly different, so maybe it is more acceptable.

Yeah, I mean there's a progression, right? There's still a lot of people in baseball that would look at that. Or even if they're not in baseball, they look at it and they're like, dude, what are you doing? And what I think people sometimes don't understand is I'm not going to start someone off with something extremely intense that they're not prepared for. We always want to listen to what their body is saying and progress them through that. But when you see it the first time, you you don't really that's not what it looks like because i've been doing it for a while so it's going to look a little bit more extreme but that's not how i start someone out right um but yeah i mean in baseball it's starting to come around a

little bit um people are definitely more open it's just going to take a little bit more time to to get that i think yeah i wish we could pull some of your stuff up right now because like when if someone were to see some of the stuff you're doing, how would you suggest that they regress it? You know what I mean? Because like when I was doing it, I was like, wow, I really feel that in my tendon, my elbow, my, my shoulder. Um, but I feel like maybe I have enough resilience where I was able to progress it quickly, but I feel like someone who hasn't done this before, if they just start throwing shit around uh maybe they could tear something yeah maybe no for sure like so if yeah if you look at what's on there right now um literally

what you could do is you could start with just the the hyperarm that's hanging down there start with just that with no weight on it and the speed at which you impulse into it regress the speed to what your body feels like it's able to do because so when i'm working with a person that's always what i'm going to start with is how how much does this person how much does this individual understand how to listen to their own body like literally asking them when you feel pain or when you feel any type of sensation what goes through your head or how do you interpret that i'm imagining just to interrupt for a second that some people are going to intuitively move slow if they're injured anyway on some of these movements does that seem to be correct or could they still like totally fuck themselves up yeah i mean it's

you know you you get a whole spectrum right but if we can go through that conversation of look your body works in loops and the reason that you feel pain the reason that you feel sensation is your body has all these sensors taking in information right taking position your joint how much inflammation there is taking how fast you're moving taking all this information feeds that up to your brain your brain responds that's what determines how your body shows up so if there's tightness there's a reason that it's showing up that way right so if they start to understand how to listen to their body and interpret what it's saying, then they can regulate how they're doing the exercises themselves. In a sport like baseball, I think that people maybe,

you know, they might see what you're doing on Instagram. They might see some of these things that you're doing and somebody might think of them as being dangerous. But for some reason, when we think about the sport, we don't think about the sport being, obviously there's dangers to sport, but we don't think about the sport itself being that dangerous but every time someone throws a pitch and every time someone swings a bat i mean there's a lot of going on there there's

tons of force being produced and uh you could say that what they're doing is uh probably producing way less force than anything that you're doing in the gym or anything that you're trying to mimic in the gym so can you maybe explain some of that a little bit yeah for sure and that's exactly what you said is like when you're throwing a pitch there's a very high level of stress that goes into that right but people don't think about that because it it's created as a sport it's a game it's a game but then you look at training you get in the gym and it's so the environment itself is so regressed it's almost like you feel more right if you're if you're playing in front of 40,000 fans you're not going to feel what your arm is

doing necessarily if you're in a gym there's no one there and you don't have any music you're going to feel stuff a lot more but also but you so you have to understand like that's really interesting the word feel because with like a pitch you're right i mean of course you're going to you're going to feel it but it's going to feel way different than, you know, doing something for a set of 10 or something like that. Yes. Yeah, exactly. But so like if we can get that understanding of the athlete or of the coach or of the training, like whoever it is, right? How much force is actually going through your body, through your system in a baseball game or in a pitch? Then we look at what's actually happening in training session that can help them to start to understand like,

okay, this is actually regressed compared to what we do in a sport. And so with that, if it's regressed, the volume that we need to do here to prepare you for the sport needs to be higher. Cause that's something, the way that I think about it is like,

I literally want when someone goes and plays their sport, I actually want the sport to feel easier. Not just, not just as something where they're like oh yeah it feels easier but your your physical body is actually like oh this is less intense than what i've done to prepare myself so that's why you mentioned like sometimes with some of these movements you'll have an athlete do like a hundred repetitions yeah once uh-huh yeah because because it's like we want or i want the volume to be high enough that it prepares them for that because you're going to throw 100 pitches in the game

or 150 pitches game or 175 pitches including all the warm-up and everything damn and that's just in baseball right if you take football you take any other sport as well like there's a lot of repetitions that go into it and to actually make that feel easier like we want to do enough volume to actually prepare you for that something oh good i do want to say like if somebody does like start trying to do some of these or you call it impulse like these impulses yeah yeah like you will feel that immediately in the tentative area that you're working and it feels good at least for me it felt extremely good i'm like wow like if i can feel that there and I can just drive blood there, then I can strengthen that specific tendon in that area. It feels amazing. So it's something that can obviously with what you've done, you've progressed

it to a pretty awesome level, but it's worth it for, I mean, I think jujitsu athletes get a lot from this. Pretty much all sport athletes would get a lot from this. Yeah. Or even all sport athletes. Also anyone that doesn't play sport. Because we all have the same, we all have muscles, we all have tendons, we all have blood. We all have the same stuff that makes us up, right? And exactly like you said, I think about these as training more of that tendon end of things, that muscle-tendon junction, because the impact is faster, right? Something that's slower is going to be more muscular.

Something that's faster is going to be more tendon-based. So this is a good way to actually train the tendon end of those connections that we don't necessarily do as often. When you have athletes do some of these exercises, are they able to kind of snap into them pretty quickly versus maybe somebody who's maybe not as athletic? Yeah. I mean, and we were talking about this a little bit before, right? You'll, you'll definitely see there's an aspect of rhythm to them in and of itself which i think it's pretty cool because it can help that why'd you look at in simone you said that we were talking about it earlier you said rhythm i don't know it's weird yeah come on come on but i don't have any rhythm we know

that it's like yeah chop. There you go. Exactly. But someone that has more rhythm to start will go into them easier. Someone that doesn't, you'll see them struggle with it at the start, but then they'll actually be able to get into it and actually improve their ability to be rhythmic with it. So that's kind of another cool aspect of what they're able to do as you start getting into them. I like some of the stuff that I've seen from you because even though you're going through like an isolation movement,

because of the way that you're going through it, your whole body is still being utilized. And I think that's something that kind of gets lost sometimes, and I don't think that we need to throw out all isolation exercises. But when a pitcher goes to somebody and they do these kind of rotator cuff exercises where they're maybe lying on a bench or they're really just singling out that arm, they're seated or what have you, it's like, well, we're not really getting into

the hips at all. Like nothing else is firing. Again, I'm not saying that isolation is completely useless, but I think you're probably better off trying to get into the whole system. Is that some of what you're trying to do with some of the exercises? Yeah, because, well, I guess to back up a little bit, I want to train the whole system. So if we're going to do an isolation exercise, like let's say we do a shoulder exercise. I also want to do elbow. I want to do wrist. I want to do fingers. I want to do spine. I want to do hips, knee, ankle, toes, fingers, right? So not just isolating because that's also a big thing in rehab of isolating rehab, whether it's an elbow or a shoulder. If you have a surgery or you have a major injury, like they'll do shoulder rehab or they'll do elbow rehab.

It's like, okay, great. What about the rest of it? Because what I see that happens a lot is you'll rehab one specific area, but then it's just going to move to whatever the next weakest area is. So we want to bring that all up at the same time so I think there's different aspects of it where it can be beneficial to isolate areas but then also we want to be able to train the whole system at the same time so that's where like the bench that we did before that would be more like a full systemic type thing but we could also regress that to where we're doing something for the elbow specifically and it's like okay that's a little bit more elbow but like you said you still have to dig in're doing something for the elbow specifically. And it's like, okay, that's a little bit more elbow.

But like you said, you still have to dig in with your feet for the weight to not throw you back. And the impulse is specifically, right? Your stomach and everything. Yeah, exactly. Everything has to be engaged in that type of stuff. Yeah. By the way, what is that piece that you're using on the bench right there? Because a lot of people work at home.

That's something that you could put in there. What is that? Yeah, it's Hyperarm. Hyperarm? Yeah. We actually just started making it. It's manufactured out of texas oh okay yeah probably in the last six to eight months we started making it you have a website people can get this stuff out yeah it's in the link on my instagram okay yeah it'll be in the link tree there is there anything because again there's a lot of different stuff that you've done in your instagram but specifically with this stuff um has there anything that's happened to you that's been kind of like, oh, shit?

Like, you're like, oh, fuck. Like, it's kind of sketch. Like, how did you, how have you worked through some of that? Yeah, so there was, I think it was October or November on there, and I put up a post on it. But I was doing, I actually didn't do it doing the impulse. I didn't do it doing the impulse stuff. I did it doing Seated Good Mornings. I remember yeah

where I was going to the seated good morning felt something in my back kind of snap a little bit and just had to drop the weight we should find that and it took I don't have the how long it took me to get up far left bottom far left bottom yeah yeah right there

yeah so Right there. Yeah, so right there. Weight's got to come off. And I was in that position for a good four minutes. Got up and it took me another six or seven minutes to get back over to my phone to turn the camera off. Like, it is pretty rough. But then, like, three to four weeks after that, I think I have a video up on there, but I was back dead lifting like four or five,

which I think my best is like five 15. And then a couple of weeks after that, I was back to, I did deficit deadlift with like four 55 on four inch plates or something. But the, in the process of that was like for two or three days after it was feeling pretty, it's feeling pretty rough. Then it just kind of clicked for me.

It was like going back to what I was talking about with understanding what the sensation in your body is giving you i started to dig back into that and start to actively move it the way that i wanted to move it and then from there it just started to take off yeah and as it relates to the impulses too then i started doing because i wasn't doing any basically seated good morning impulses where it's like i'm in that seated good morning position drop and yeah i'm dropping i'm impulsing now in that position you started doing that after this after that i hadn't done i hadn't done it before you crazy fuck well i started doing them when my back was feeling pretty good yeah it's not like two days after i'm not like i can't move but here we go it wasn't that right but i started doing those after because i was like okay obviously

something needs to get stronger here. And so I, yeah. Dude, I honestly, I love the way you look at that because a lot of people would be like, okay, well, that means the seat of good mornings, the dangerous movements do, and this is probably something that people should avoid, et cetera. You more so were like, let's rehab this and then let's fucking increase the speed of this so I can be more resilient in this position and this is more unlikely to happen. Most people don't take that approach. Yeah, no, exactly. And, and that's where everything that I'm doing. And like I've said, some stuff on my Instagram might look like it's extreme, but that's just because I've been doing it for a while. Right. When I'm starting, when I'm working with somebody, I want them to regress it. So if it's an impulse, they might go at 50% speed, right. To where their body feels like they can do. if it's an impulse they might go at 50 speed right to where their body

feels like they can do if it's a depth drop where they're dropping off a height they might start at six inches right that's absolutely fine that's what we should do based on how your body is speaking to you but yeah exactly to your point just because i got hurt in that movement that doesn't mean that the movement's bad it just means that my body wasn't prepared for that movement in that one second right yeah and then something snapped what are some of your thoughts on a range of motion in terms of something like a squat i see you know i see you doing all kinds of different ranges of motion but sometimes when i see you do like a weighted squat it looks like you prefer uh maybe a partial range of motion yeah i like working both

of them in because i think there's benefit to the partials where you can load it more right so you're able to load it more but then there's also benefit to going full depth. So it's something where like I'll use both and it's just I'm going to – there's not really a specific reason for me to keep either one of them out. Like even the way that I think about programming is like if I have all these different ways that I can stimulate a body, whether that's through moving slowly, moving fast, high impact, more muscular end of things where we're moving slowly. All these different ways where we can stimulate a system, I want to include all of those over the course of a three to four week period and cycle through those so they all support each

other and they all get brought up at the same time versus trying to think this is bad, this is good, don't do this, only do this. it's like keep it all in there and then just progress it over time you have a similar viewpoint i i believe like why not take advantage of partial range of motion uh you know for for somebody especially like a newer athlete i think an athlete that's been been lifting for a while there's a lot of advantages too but for a newer athlete who really hasn't developed a good strength base yet um if they can get themselves to handle 275 pounds on a partial range of motion deadlift i think it's a huge win and maybe they do a couple sets of three or something like that as opposed to from the floor you know they can barely

handle 225 and their form is kind of shoddy and stuff like that so i think there's just tremendous benefit to it and then i also agree uh why not also just take that same movement and why not do like a four inch deficit deadlift but utilizing weights that are obviously a lot more manageable and maybe the goal is slightly different do you kind of view it that way when you're going for when you're when you are trying to express more range of motion do you have a different goal overall yeah so i look at as what's the priority in it and then what's like secondary priority so if we're going for more range the priority is going to be the range that you're able to display second priority is going to be like okay how much can you load it without losing the range right conversely if we're going through little like a partial range

priority is going to be how much can you load it? Second, secondary priority is the range that you're going through. So that's the way that I think about that is like, what is the with every exercise that I do? There's like one specific thing that we're trying to get out of that, that it does better than anything else. Like a barbell allows you to put load on better than anything else does. Impulse rope allows you to put in force into specific joints better than anything else does. Impulse rope allows you to put force into specific joints better than anything else does. That's the thing that we want to get out of it

versus going for like trying to use a barbell for like range of motion or something. You know, just like use a tool for what it's designed to be used for. You have like a main intent. Exactly. And then you kind of build everything else around that. Yep.

And the stimulus for the thing that we're doing would be great enough to cause some change or create some change. Yeah, I can tell you're a good coach because right before the podcast, I asked you a question and you said, for what? That's always a sign of a good coach because, yeah, what are we talking about?

What's the end result? What are you looking to do? For sure. There's got to be that context. Now, you mentioned the for what thing. I have a video, but I'll play it after. But I'm curious, are there any movements that you would say are bad movements generally? Yeah, I mean, if I'm going to walk like same leg, same arm, like if I'm walking my left leg forward with my left arm forward, I don't think that's a good movement.

Just even in terms of like you're not doing cross-crawl pattern, right? Or if you're trying to walk and you're just like hinged over and people are like, what are you doing? You know? So I think there's, there are movements that aren't efficient, but it's, again, if we go back to that question,

it's like, what is the goal? What is, what are we trying to do here? Maybe if you're trying to build up your back, maybe you actually want to lean forward because you're carrying something in your hands for a weighted carry for a searcher walk or some shit like that. Yeah.

Right. And then if you're trying to walk 100 miles through a canyon like what do you do what are you doing you know yeah not a great position to be in right so it just it depends yeah gotcha i got this video because i saw it yesterday and do you see any of functional pattern stuff at all uh i've seen a little bit a little bit not a whole lot what are your thoughts on the the ideology in general or the you know what they do yeah um i think there's a benefit in getting people to understand how their bodies are moving getting them to flow getting them to understand how to be rhythmic like i think about that as one training stress that we can have yeah so that could be a training stress that we could use

just like training heavy could be a train stress just like designing a game could be a train stress and having them play that game or a train stress could be like designing a game could be a training stress and having them play that game. Or a training stress could be like, hey, these are basic boundaries for you. You create your own game. So like, okay, get the athlete to think for themselves, especially for field sport athletes. They've been told by coaches their whole life what to do. Put them in a scenario where

they're asked to create. So I think all these different things, like the functional range patterns or whatever, that can be a training, a type of training stimulus that we use not that it would be the whole program power project family we talk about beef and meat all the time on the podcast that's why we partner with certified piedmontese beef but did you know this that 85 percent of all grass-fed grass-finished beef in the united states is imported from other countries, 85%. Damn. But certified Piedmontese is made in the U.S. of A. America.

America. Fuck yeah. So go ahead and get some of the best tasting, some of the leanest, some of the best beef from Piedmontese. Andrew, how can they get it? Absolutely. So you guys can head over to cpbeef.com and check out enter promo code power to save 25% off your entire order and if

your order is 150 or more you get free two-day shipping again cpbeef.com links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes fuck yeah so i was asking because like i saw this video the other day and i think we should just play it because it's interesting. I don't know if you can play sound too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Jefferson's curls lead to – let's start over. He has a problem with Jefferson curls. Research shows when you flex your spine fully, the erectors change their angle of pull

and are unable to optimally offset spine shear load. This means more load on the passive tissues like your ligaments and discs. All right, pause. That was Parashu. I tried to make an appearance. So I'm curious on your thoughts there, because it seems like with what you do, you apply a lot of things. But specifically on that, what do you think? So I think we have the ability to flex our spine and i actually don't look at force going into tissues as a bad thing like if one muscle turns off and force goes more into a different tissue i don't think about that as a bad thing because there's probably going to be some point in your

life where your body's asked to absorb or take that force or take that right yeah so i'm not thinking about that movement as being bad i'm looking at that as actually allowing us to train when that happens right and we then take that and we layer on the having the athlete or having the individual understand what your body means when it's talking to you if your body's like bro this is too much weight this is too much range like and it just wants to lock up then stop regress it. So as long as we keep that context in there and they know how to regulate, then I don't think that that's a bad movement.

I think we actually want to do that movement. Because also in sport, there are going to be times where you disinhibit certain areas and loosen up certain areas, and certain areas you're turning on. So it's not that always everything is working together. Sometimes you need to be able to have an area that's loose so you can maybe put more force through it. So it's like, that's why I find it odd when some people are saying these certain type of movements are just overall bad, and then these movements

are functional. It's weird. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to me. Like I don't, I mean I get it if you're trying to – I get it if you are stating what your end goal is like we talked about. If you're stating what your end goal is, there's stuff that's better and there's stuff that's not as good for sure. But for your body to not be able to do a movement, like if your body can do the movement, I don't understand how that's a bad thing or how it could be injurious as long as you know how to regress it or how to progress in it intelligently gotcha yeah something like a jefferson curl kind of what comes to my mind is seeing michael phelps like on the blocks years ago when he was winning all those gold medals he was like one of the only guys i was able to fold

his body his entire body like in half before he would uh get out of the gate for those all those gold medals that he won but part of i believe some of his ability to express that some of his ability to basically touch his uh shoulders to like his ankles yeah when he would like reach downward i think that helped him to be springy and be able to produce a lot of force coming out of the blocks and be able just to destroy people so bending down i mean which is a jefferson curl so like what when does a jeff when does like bending down uh towards the ground with your hands go from just bending down to turning into a jefferson curl like what's the difference jefferson curl maybe is like weighted and maybe you're trying to go like lower than your uh hands going past your toes or something i don't know but like some people would say don't even bend you must hip

hinge you got a hip hinge to pick that shit up it becomes that when it's written in your training program that's basically what it is right yeah yeah and there probably is better ways to pick stuff up but i mean i i guess i would say like uh, like why can't you do that? That would be the real issue is like maybe we should build a better capacity so you can do that safely because why can so many other people do that movement? And then you're in a lot of pain doing it or it's causing like a disc herniation. Yeah. And I also think too if you're having issues with a movement, it's very difficult to address that if you don't go into the movement itself. Because like this is the way that I think about injuries in rehab, right?

When you have an injury, your body and your system is going to remember that injury. It's going to remember everything associated with that injury, the weight, the position that your body was in, the environment that you were in. Anything that's associated with that, your body is going to remember that right and so in order to actually rehab that to me rehab isn't a rehab is not a set of exercises it's not a protocol if you're actually rehabbed that means that you don't have to have a consideration on the injury itself anymore like once you're through the rehab if you still have to think about the injury you're not rehabbed like by definition right so it's it's different because i think a lot of times in rehab it's like we're trying to get this person back to 80 get them through the protocol get them through the timeline and it's

just like okay you went through our rehab protocol you're done but they never asked the person do you actually feel like you're fully rehabbed and you can go better than when you first had the injury right and a lot of times that's no and so to get back to the original point like in order to get to that point you have to re-enter it because otherwise they're going to have doubt because your body remembers that so you have to take your body through and show your brain that it can take the inhibitors off in that movement again by going through it of course intelligently like someone has a major surgery we're not going to be going and doing that two days after. It's going to be very regressed. But over the course of that time period, we want to get to that point.

Something I observed in just like watching other people and just being a weird person in general with this whole like movement stuff. I agree. I was observing somebody at a bar one time. There was a guy serving my wife and I and there was an older guy there as well. And I was watching both of them work. And the younger guy, every time he went down to get a bottle of something, he would squat down. He would like open this refrigerator thing and he would squat down. The older gentleman would open the refrigerator and he would bend down.

And so I think that people are in way more pain than they can even imagine. People are in way more pain than they can even imagine. And the people that are untrained at the moment probably don't really realize these little corners that they're cutting. And over a period of time, stuff's going to start to wear away. You're going to start to get into pain. You're going to start to get into these compromised positions because you're no longer moving in these positions that are super, that are natural for you to get into. Not just when you're younger, they're natural for you to get into at any age, but you have to reinforce it over and over again. Yeah.

So that person that is skipping out on squatting down and reaching for something properly, they're going to tweak their back. And then they're going to go to somebody and somebody's going to work on them. And they're going to try to work on the back and they're going to have a hard time trying to figure it out. But the whole reason why the person's back got compromised in the first place is because they're not squatting anymore they're not going through these other movements so it gets to be kind of complicated on what to fix how to fix it where where to look exactly yeah but we have to just mainly just try to figure out a way to keep these tissues healthy and the way you're going to do it is to move and you're going to have to move in a lot of diverse ways. Let me add, oh, I'll add to that real quick. Because what he mentioned brought up something

super funny. For a while, I had something on like the right side of my back. But one thing I noticed is that whenever I would pick something up, I would always use my left arm. And this is because I was like, wait, how am I moving when I do things? So when I pick something up, I'd always pick up on this side. I'd move in a way where I'd always be bending on this side and picking up on this side, on my left side. So I was like, fuck, start using your right. Just make it a habit to bend and use your right side more. When I started doing that, I noticed that there was less inhibition on bending on the right side. There was less pain over time bending on the right side because I was less pain over time, bending on the right side. Because I was telling myself to use that side more because I built a pattern to preserve that side of my back

by not using it as much. And over time, that wasn't going to be good for me, right? So you need to pay attention to how you're moving because that could be one of the things, like you leaned into the thing that happened to your back. You leaned to it and you told yourself, I'm going to make this more resilient so this doesn't happen again.

Or so if it does happen again, the rehab's not going to be as bad, et cetera. So that's just – it's important. That mindset in terms of injury is super important. Yeah, and it's cool because what you mentioned was you became aware of it, that you're going to your left side only, not going to your right side. And that's something that you mentioned as well is like if people aren't training, they're not even aware of how much better they could feel. I've even noticed this with myself as I make different changes you know you might I might look back two years ago and I'm like I don't even know how bad I was

feeling at that point or how much better I could feel right so it starts with that awareness and the cool thing is as people start to get into it and as people start to move they start to grow that awareness right and so they're like okay what else is there you know like what else can I do what how how much better can i feel and that goes into everything whether it's movement and training or how they're eating or how they're living or how they're communicating the relationships that they have like all of that plays into it do you oh good do you um because like i see you're progressing so many different things in terms of your personal training is there an upper limit on anything are you just trying to look for the upper minute limit of progressions on what you're doing? You're

just trying to find where, okay, this is probably too much. I'm going to, I'm going to pause here. What is, what are you looking for? Yeah. So it's really for myself personally, it's like, I want to figure out what the limit is if there's, if there's a limit and what it's kind of transition into now is if i understand all the different stimuluses that i can use within my training and i'm going to use them all and not just try to only do one i think that plateau is much higher because what i found is like if i only do one thing where let's say all i were to do is to buy a strength and i completely stopped doing movement work my body's going to and i and i had that happen like the start of 2023 i did um

rebound rep bench rebound rep squat every single day for three months straight like it's just every day along with some other training but so the the numbers went up a ton during that time but also by the end of it like i had a shoulder thing that I had to stop back off in rehab. Right. But that happened because I was only isolating one specific thing. So what that kind of helped clicked in my mind for me was, okay, if I don't just isolate one thing and I keep everything in here, like heavy work, range work, the impulse work, all this different type of stuff that's going to hit different things, the plateau, I haven't really reached a plateau since that point. And so that's what I'm trying to do is like how can I best put together everything that I know how to do as well as bringing new things and keep progressing that over time.

And just like what is a human capable of doing? Like that's the fun part for me. Gotcha. Yeah. What are some of like the maybe five or six main things that you are trying to progress? So it would be ability to handle force quickly. So that would be like the depth drops the rebound reps the impulse stuff it'd be it'd be the capacity that i have to continue going even through fatigue so some of that would be um the joint moves i have

a thing that i call joint moves which is basically like you take fingers wrist elbow shoulder spine hip knee ankle toes moving through full range every direction that they can move and you do it for high capacity so let's say it's a set of 100 reps where you go 100 reps straight and you don't stop and your goal is to continue to pull through more and more range or as much range as you can right so those would be something to build capacity within the joint so like that's another thing that i'm trying to build and that helps to support the impact work right um and then also like ranges of motion. So getting into extreme ranges.

That's another thing that I'm trying to improve, constantly improve. Then outside of that, it's my ability to fully be in what I'm doing. And this isn't necessarily specifically training related, but it also is for me. Because like the base reason that I train is for me to be able to be fully in what I'm doing. So I can process whatever stimulus is in front of me as it presents. Whether it's a training stimulus in the sense of something that I'm doing in training or it's a conversation that I'm having or it's something that pops up with business

where it's like there's a problem that needs to be handled. If I'm fully aware and present in what I'm doing, I'm able to handle that when it comes up. So it's like training is an avenue for me to practice that and to be able to get better at that. Gotcha. Let me also ask you this because we haven't pulled it up, but sometimes I'll see you do something and then just hop into a sprint.

What's the intent? What are you doing there? Like the drops into sprints or what? What are you talking? Which one are you talking about? Let's see if I can. I saw you like you like we're doing a lift and then you just hopped into a sprint right afterwards unless I'm tripping on it.

No. How long ago was it? Maybe it was a long time ago. But I have done. So one thing this was maybe five or six months ago. OK. But so something that I was messing with was the concept of being able to recover as I work. So basically meaning another thing they'll do,

I call them slow lowers. Original guy that came out with them was Jay Schroeder. He calls them iso-extremes. So basic concept is that you're able to recover as you work, and the display of you being able to recover as you work is being able to do something immediately after you work as if you didn't just work. So let's make it simple, right?

Let's say you take a lunge. You start at the top of the lunge. You lower for three to five minutes into as deep of a lunge as you can. You said three to five minutes? Three to five minutes. One lunge, one rep. You lower in that lunge for three to five minutes

for one rep. Yep. Moving very, very slowly. Wow. Okay. And then immediately after that, be able to take off into a sprint as if you didn't just do that or be able to off into a sprint as if you didn't just do that.

Or be able to drop off a box as if you didn't just do that. Probably feel so stiff. Well, so what I've gotten best at in regards to this are deep push-ups. So like if I start at the top of a push-up and I'm going to lower for three to five minutes, I want to be able to press up out of that and my hands actually leave the ground or leave the box as if I didn't just do that. But when I'm like, that's a physical representation that I've learned how to recover as I work. Okay. Because I'm able to do the movement even after that amount of work.

It's a little bit like Chris Henshaw, Aerobic Capacity on Instagram. Chris does it way differently than what you're describing, but he likes for people to increase their work in between their sets. So maybe for example, you know, you're in between squats and you're just walking, but over time he wants you to, maybe you jog a little bit and then maybe you walk a little bit and then maybe, you know, in between your squats, you're not only jogging, but you're maybe like running like a 400 for time you know things things like that yeah yeah that's super interesting and the one of the maybe slightly different way that i think but i was like i also i want the work that's in between to be more towards the maximal end of things which is why i do like

the moving super slow because that is going to be almost like the same thing as moving super fast moving so slow because like your body has to go back and forth in terms of how it's firing and whatnot to move that slow. So it's like I want the work to be maximal enough to create some adaptation from that. But yeah, it's being able to work maximally and recover as I work maximally. It seems like some of the stuff you do in the gym also is kind of mimicking sprinting in a way.

So it's like let me figure out like a sprint for my shoulder because a sprint can be can like blow someone apart right like someone easily get hurt yeah it's going out and talking about the seed men like yeah yeah some of that kind of stuff and and even just like letting your arm you know yeah it's like a sprint for your shoulder i guess in, in some way. Yeah. Being able to use that at full speed and at full capacity. Because like we talked about earlier, using individual parts, right? Kind of the isolation. But then being able to then take it and put it together.

So it would be like sprint is your whole body is doing something. Something that you can do just at your shoulder joint isolated would be some of the stuff that I'm showing here. Yeah. One thing that's interesting is like what's your athletic background because you are extremely you're in extreme shape you're extremely strong but you're a coach and the thing is is um it's it's not common that you see a coach that's able to do the things that he's showing his athletes to do you know so why are you like why are you maintaining that and what was your athletic background yeah so i played all different sports growing up, anything from soccer to –

I mean, we had a Pons. I played hockey, played basketball, played football, played baseball. Yeah, played a lot of different stuff. Started getting more into baseball when I got into high school, then played that through college, and that's really where my interest in training first took place is probably eighth or ninth grade for me, which would be 13 to 14 years ago at this point.

And just started digging into it because I personally wanted to take my career as far as I could. And then what that transitioned into is me then becoming a coach as my career ended. And now, like you said, being able to do what I want my athletes to do, it's because I don't want to ask my athlete to do something that I haven't done myself.

So if we take the impulses, for example, one day I did one move for 25 sets of 100 reps, for like 2,500 reps for one move on both sides. You said 25 sets for 100 reps. 100 sets for 25 reps. Damn. 100 sets. But what's funny is the thing that I got out of that is I was like, okay, this is too much.

I was like, bro, there's no need to do this much. Right? It was like two and a half hours of one move. And I was like, this is just stupid. You know? But I want. Good thing you had to do that to understand. I had to do that.

At least I felt like I had to do that. Some people might be like, bro, you didn't have to do that. But I was like, I did because I want to figure out what that end limit is a good coach so that i know what i can put other people through and also know what they're going to feel and what they're going to experience because like as coaches are at you know we've all been training for a while you remember what it was like during your fourth year of training your fifth year of training like early on so if you know kind of how the athlete is going to respond then you can kind of progress where they're at in their training cycle as well as like where you're at in your cycle. So all that just helps me to actually be a better coach and help other people because I know where they're coming from.

Gotcha. What are some things that you think maybe some people listening could implement fairly easy into their training, some stuff that you're doing? Maybe they don't need to buy like a strap or buy anything in particular what do you think something they can start to incorporate almost right away so the joint moves in the slow the slow lowers neither one of those require any equipment and they're very very you're not going to get injured when you're doing those it's like think a joint move could be something like if you take a fingers like you're just doing this or an elbow you're doing this or a shoulder like you're doing this right very very simple moves and then the slow lowers is just like push up uh like overhead press lunge hinge

very basic movements where you're moving very slow and you're not going to injure yourself with the finger hand opening you're doing as fast as you can there's so in the thing that i have for it there's like five or six different ways you can do it you can move it as fast as you can you can move it like slowly let's say you take like 10 seconds this might be more for your shoulder let's say you take like 10 to 30 seconds to move one direction you're very very very specifically like pulling yourself into the position there's like five or six different ways that you can do each move within the joint moves right you can also do holds um but those as well as the slow lowers i think are very good for building a base level of capacity for the person for the individual for them to be able to start

building that base where they can then build other things on top of it. But I'll also say along with that, I don't think it's necessary for someone to start with that unless they're very, very regressed. I think those are something that is worked in with everything else that's in the program. Just the biggest thing is a person be able to understand how to listen to their body and listen to what their system is saying and know how to regress. At this point, nasal breathing while you're asleep is no longer something that just us bros do, but people are realizing that it can make a big difference in your sleep quality, your recovery, and all aspects of sleep. That's why hostage tape is so important because many people have their mouths drop open while they're asleep, they're snoring, and that really affects

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Yeah. You guys can head over to hostage tape.com slash power project, where you guys can receive mouth tape and no strips for an entire year for less than a dollar a night. Again, hostage tape.com slash power project links down in the description as well as the podcast show notes i like the idea of a coach hearing the 25 by 100 and then creating that program and selling it online the old 25 by 100 um but on some of these videos yeah on some of videos, and I guess it's kind of along the same lines of like doing like messing around and finding out.

When you land, again, it's kind of like a dumb question, but you are grimacing. And in my head, I'm like, if I do something that makes me land and kind of say, ouch, i'm like kind of out so like what what what are you experiencing and what is it that you're able to feel some form of discomfort i'm just going to say that we just based off of your reaction you can clarify if it's if that's not the right word but what is it that's allowing you to do that and be like i need to get better so that way that doesn't hurt as much because i just feel like like you're kind of like landing on something getting like bruised up a little bit and then you're still impacting that same spot over and over and you know you know like so what's going on there yeah so like with the depth drops that you're playing right

now specifically um also understand i've been doing those for like two to three years and something that i did this was probably like a year and a half ago, but there's two days, one day where I did like 667 of them. And then there's another, but it was off a lower, it was off a lower height. It was off three feet. And then another day where I did a thousand of them, like a little bit after that. From what? From three feet again. Okay.

But so what I'm saying is like that height wasn't as high. So I was able to more feel things during that. Of course. wasn't as high so i was able to more feel things during that of course and so that amount of reps like it gives you the ability to more to be better in touch with your body so like let's say i'm landing like on those where i'm grimacing right if i land a little bit more on my heel and my foot isn't quite as flexed to protect when i land i'm going to be able to feel that and it might hurt and it might sting but like five to ten seconds, I've just done enough of them to know, okay, this is going to go away. And this is information for me to use the next time that I go and land. Right? So it definitely

is for sure that not all of them feel great, but it's the level of volume allows a person to understand. Again, it goes back to listening to your body and knowing what your body is saying. That is the biggest thing for, because that then allows you to progress on top of that and actually push limits. Because I was doing these for a while where like I wasn't actually really pushing the height. And I didn't really see that many gains in terms of my actual ability to output like athletically. It wasn't until I actually started to push the height that I really saw that. But it's almost like I had to build the capacity and build the awareness before that to get to the point where i could do that safely i mean again i know that it doesn't look safe but it feels safe for me because i've done a lot of reps for it yeah and there's probably no

way to like quote program that right you have to just go by how you feel well so what i'll do is my the descriptions when i'm personally programming for people, the descriptions that I write out are going to be very like in depth where it's okay. Let's say we have, I don't know, four sets of 25 today is going to be like, do it at a height that you feel good with that your body is able to do. And let's say like the last five to 10 really try to push it,

but it's like, don't go too far. Don't go too little. So it's worked into the description to kind of give them specific intent for what they're trying to feel or get out of that got it yeah and what is your like what do you feel after doing 667 or a thousand reps like what do you feel the next day do you are do you have you just gotten to a point where your recovery is so good with this high volume or is it like ah a few days i got it no no at that point it definitely wasn't okay when i got done with the 667 and the thousand i guess like my i don't know if i should say this but like my urine was brown

and it just it wasn't a good situation i wonder how many times you've just had rhabdo oh my gosh but like three to four or five days after my body was feeling pretty good again like genuinely is feeling pretty good um but yeah i mean next day i felt wrecked but and i don't want to get taken the wrong way at all i don't but i don't necessarily see that as a a bad thing because it's it's a proper response to what i ask my body to do it's information for me to have and to use yeah that's true again but now taking into context if i'm working with somebody else i'm not going to put them in that situation that's me pushing it to figure out what i can do yeah so then i can use it for other people i think there's so much we don't know about reps and yeah sets and all this stuff really i think all we have is like the science that we've tested

and it seems like all we can come up with is like we do like bodybuilding testing. We do like powerlifting testing, strength training. We've come up with some decent hypertrophy like protocols and stuff. But it's just interesting because if I told someone to do 10,000 reps, they would think you're crazy. Yeah. But how many reps of neck work do you get when you go to do jujitsu? Like especially in a particular class or or even in wrestling you know someone just keeps pulling on your neck um even just thinking of uh dragging the sled you know if i said hey drag the sled backwards and and do so for 30

minutes it's like how many reps did you get in probably a fuck ton because you know if you're counting each leg as a rep um that would equate to being a lot of reps and then what if you're counting each leg as a rep, that would equate to being a lot of reps. And then what if you translate that into basketball, where somebody is backing somebody down in the paint, dribbling the ball. I mean, they're moving their legs and they're driving against an external resistance, and they're probably practicing that a lot for an hour and a half or two hours in a given day, and no one thinks that's crazy. But if you apply it to the gym then all of a sudden it

gets to be wild i mean how many times a basketball player jumping how many times a volleyball player jumping um how many times a baseball player throwing like not only do they not only do they pitch the ball but they field the ball and they throw the ball every time but then also amongst the infield they'll just chuck the ball around you played, they'll just chuck the ball around. You played baseball. They'll just chuck the ball around just because it's practice. So how many times are they flinging that ball around at high forces? And it's like we're not really writing the reps down for that. So I'd imagine it's just playing a game of baseball or football or some of these sports.

The repetitions are probably actually like how many lunges do you do in a wrestling match? Probably a lot. Right. You know, I guess it depends on who you're going against and how difficult it is and so on. But probably a lot of movement going on that if we try to count it as reps, there would be a ton of reps. And to add on to that too, there's the, when you actually get in a season,

there's all the other stress that adds on to the sport itself so like if if you're working with a minor league baseball player where they're getting every third night or every fourth night they're getting they're on a bus for 12 hours and then the food that they get is is terrible like that is a stress to your body it's not a it's not a training stress but it's still a stress to your body and stress entering your body's not a training stress but it's still a stress to your body and stress entering your body's body kind of interprets it the same way so when i think about preparation like okay yes we're preparing you for when you get on the field but we want we also want to prepare you for when there's three days in a row where you get four hours of sleep your girlfriend

broke up with you you're not happy and it's colder than you're used to playing in outside and you're just running on hookers and cocaine exactly but exactly in training too i haven't done that one but different stimulus yeah but like preparing a person to be able to handle more of that where they're able to be the way that they want to be even in scenarios that aren't perfect because like yeah we can put together a perfect training program like optimal sets and reps but what happens when you get out in actual life and you get into actual sport it just it doesn't work out like that is there

anything you do in terms of your athletes training to set them up to fail yeah yeah so like we'll do we'll do set and rep schemes where it's like you do one set until you fail or until you can't keep so like impulses are joint moves very simple moves right do one set as many as you can and so basically you just determine when you fail yeah because the move itself isn't difficult enough for it to for you to fail doing the move necessarily like there's no way added it's just you moving but do as as you can. And then when you can't or don't want to go anymore, then you're done. So then that starts to allow the athlete to ask themselves, like, how much do I actually want to do here? Or what level of intent can I put into this?

So it's a different, again, if we go back to those stimulus, it's like a different way to stimulate their system. Even if we think about being separate from whatever's happening physically, that's more of like a mental stimulus where it's like them starting to ask themselves, okay, what can I go into here for myself? Because all the coach said is like, hey, do one set until you can't anymore. Yeah, so they get better at auto-regulating. But I'm curious about this too. How do you handle those things so that, like,

I'm guessing you don't set them up to do something like that the day before a big practice or a big game or something so do you set that up away from other from from sport so they can recover or yeah so at the start for sure um and then from there it just depends on how the athlete specifically responds to it true because some will be like okay if we do if you've never done if you've never done moves, it's a little bit tough to understand the feel that you get from them. But if all you do is like, okay, you take your arm and you go up overhead and then you go back behind and you do that as many times as you can, your body actually feels really good when you're done. So that is an instance where we can maximally stimulate them, but they actually feel better, right? So something like that would be, okay, we're going to do this the day before a game or the morning before a game to where to set your body up to feel really good yeah so there's definitely an aspect of uh aligning the programming with what they have going on for their sport do you

gamify it a little bit and have the guys maybe compete against each other things like that yeah so it's setting up a structure to do that a lot of the guys that are trained everything that i do is online right now so most of them don't necessarily have training partners but we can still be like okay you're going to do like if we take the drops there ask yourself to move your body in a way that you never have so it could be like you have a tennis ball you're going behind your back or you're like kicking your legs up in the air or you're whatever it's just like giving them a chance to explore what it is that they're doing through the movement and making that a game for them versus laying it out specifically like this is what you're doing all the time it's very you'll try to get them wins and losses and stuff too right yeah yeah for sure like things that they can things that they can succeed at

and then also things where they don't because if if everything is just a loss they're gonna lose the want to train they're just like bro i want to train. They're just like, bro, I want it to fail for the past five days. I want to stop. I couldn't agree more. I think a lot of times people are like, you need to work on your weak points, you need to work on your weak points. But it's like, man, that's really disappointing. I go in there and only work on my weak points.

Let me work on my strengths a little bit too so I can kind of balance out how I feel about myself. Yeah, if you're good at benching, let's go bench, bro. That's right. Yeah. We had a jiu-jitsu coach on recently, Greg Souders, and what you're telling, what you're mentioning

in terms of like just trying to do something in a pattern that you haven't done it before is kind of similar to some of what he does, he has his athletes do. Like he'll set up games

and he'll have his athletes get out to a certain position, but they can figure out whatever way they want to get to the end position. They can do whatever they want. He doesn't give them like an example of this is what you have to do. It's just like figure out how to get to the end position they can do whatever they want he doesn't give them of like an example of this is what you have to do it's just like figure out how to get to

the end goal in a different way and that's like what had you why did you end up upon that idea um i think the biggest reason is because a lot of athletes now were brought up in situations where they were it was very strict where like they started playing whatever their sport was when they were like seven yeah and it was travel ball and they're going all over the place and it's just like everything is this is how you do it and so kids get to the point where i'm working with them where they're like college a pro and it's like they don't actually know how to create stuff on their own like they just they have no concept for what that means they're like you're not going to tell me what to do like what do i do you know so it's like okay the the weak the weak point the weakest point of this athlete isn't their ability to play their sport

it's the fact that they're in this like little box that they don't even know like how to think for themselves they're playing the sport like everybody else are comparing themselves to other people and so on yeah like they can't create their own solutions that are different from other people right so giving them that's really the reason that i started using that is starting to understand the difference in like they don't necessarily play as many different sports as what i did when i was growing up some do but like okay we want to take that and we want to put it into the training itself so that the train isn't just for their physical body it's like also taking these other factors into account like their ability to create yeah there's a book um i think it's called like the

art of playing tennis and the guy basically just explains like the key to like hitting the ball is to not really try to hit the ball like a tennis player like just just hit the damn ball just relax and just hit you know the ball's gonna bounce and you just hit it yeah and you don't have to sit there and if you're thinking about what i just you know someone described to you of this very particular way of hitting it, you're probably going to mess up. Yeah. And you need to just kind of relax and say, I'm just going to knock this ball over the net. And then probably it probably kind of magically does. And you're like, oh, I think I got it. Yeah. Obviously there's technique to it, right? There's more to it than

just that. But sometimes we need to get out of our own way and be more creative. Yeah. And there's actually, I mean, a really good book on that is How We Learn How To Move, I think is the name of it. It goes through, I think it might go a little bit too far on the ecological side where it's like everything is a game. I think there's benefit to both, like creating games, but then also having some structure where there is some given level of technique or whatever you want to call it that's beneficial. But then also this other game side is like, okay, this is how you set up games is even if you want specific outcomes like you

want to be you want a person to be able to if they're playing football you want to be able to evade evade defenders better just like set up a situation where you have two people and they're trying to evade them like it's super simple and it's fun for them but just understanding how to set up games i think is extremely beneficial yeah i guess the way we learn to move is by seeing other people move right yeah yeah for sure yeah what kind of games do you set up if that's if that's the side of things that you work on yeah so if i have someone that's in person i can do that more like i said what i do is online so it's a little bit tougher to do but like when i did have people

in person it would be like i mean for players, you just play med ball, volleyball, super simple one, right? Med ball, volleyball. Yeah, you have a volleyball net. You're playing volleyball, but with a med ball. So it's like rotational. You're throwing it over the net. You're deking. Like, you're doing all those different types of stuff.

Gotcha. Right? So something like that. That's how Ian Danny talked about that, yeah. Yeah. Danny ball. Yeah. So stuff like that.

Or doing tennis ball chases with different athletes where like let's say they both start in the ground they're rolling they start at the same time they're both trying to go get the same tennis ball i mean it's not it's not rolling towards the tennis ball like roll on the ground yeah let's say you start on your stomach you roll to your stomach get up and go okay you know what i'm saying yeah like different stuff like that um where it's just putting them in a position that they can create and explore a little bit. Gotcha. How about body work for yourself?

Do you get anything like any body work done at all? Do we want to go into this? I think so. I mean because in the gym you were talking about how like you really haven't sustained any like major injuries with the exception of that back thing. So I'm like really curious like how are you maintaining haven't sustained any like major injuries with the exception of that that back thing so i'm like really curious like yeah how are you you know maintaining this awesome body yeah well and that's why i said it because it's very different um i don't do any so i i used to do a lot of foam rolling i used to do a lot of stretching i did used to do a lot of that um i haven't done any in the past like three to four years and my body has felt better than ever um but

i'll go through the actual reason right okay so if you take something or this is my perspective if i take something like foam rolling if i have an area that's tight let's say my shoulder is tight when i put pressure on the area it's going to change the feedback that my brain is getting because you're desensitizing those sensors by pressing on them like putting physical pressure changes it right so when you're done with that your body is going to feel better it's going to feel loose you're going to have more range because you've shut off or you've changed the feedback that your brain is getting so the response from the brain is going to be different where it allows more range that's not necessarily

something that's going to create any change it's just a 20-30 minute short-term type thing so from my perspective if my shoulder is tight, I actually want to feel that. I don't think of that as a bad thing. I don't think as my body's breaking down. This is information that I'm getting. So what I want to be able to do is take and be able to actually fully use that area. Because a lot of times for me, when something is tight or when something isn't as accessible, it's because I can't actually fully contract and relax that area.

It's just like chronically on and it feels tight. So I want to actually maximally use the tissue of that area versus trying to put pressure into it because then that, what that's going to allow is it to fully relax as well when I'm not using it. So long story short, I don't do, I don't do any body work. Yeah. That's good. That's's awesome and that's the reason why yeah I think I'd say a lot of the things you're doing is probably probably addressing you know you know like some of the stuff that we do is like myofascial release but the activity that you're putting yourself through every day is probably addressing that anyway so that you don't have uh maybe the pains or the the tweaks maybe that some other people might get.

Yeah. And, you know, one of the ways that I look at it is in terms of efficiency. Like if I'm going to be trained, I want that to actually create an effect versus it being a routine that I do that has to be repeated every day. Because, again, I come from the world of baseball. And so in baseball, there's like arm care routines. But it's the same thing that you're doing every single day. It's like, okay, after the first two or three days, your body is so used to that stimulus, it's not doing anything. But then if you go on your form roll for 15 minutes before every training session, and it's the same thing. What is that actually changing with your body?

It's not a new stimulus. It's not stimulating any change. with your body, right? It's not a new stimulus. It's not stimulating any change. So if I have 60, 90 minutes to work on my body or however you want to say it, I want all that to be efficient and actually be creating some change

versus being something that I just have to repeat. The train session is a thing that I repeat. I want within the train session it to be stimulating some change. And some of the athletes you work with, they probably still get some of that work done here and there just because they probably have access yeah they they definitely will um there's definitely there's different levels of yeah so you're not you're not so against it i'm

not i'm not against it right right i'm not going to tell them not to do it i'll just explain basically what i went through like hey this is why that shows up and this is how we can address it um and then usually at that point they're like okay that makes up and this is how we can address it um and then usually at that point they're like okay that makes sense and then we'll go into what we're going to go into um but yeah even at some schools like you have to go into the trainer and get some stuff done it just just depends yeah i think um like we we probably would agree with everything you just said even though we do like we like to smash on our bodies and like kind of do some fascia release and stuff um for me i know when

i do that i kind of do gain that range of motion to where i can move a lot better um so what's your take on that like kind of like freeing up and and doing exactly what you said it would do which is like kind of like killing those um i guess that sensation and tricking my body into thinking it feels better but after i do it i feel like i can move a lot more do you think that you know if somebody were to do that you'd be fine and say like yeah i keep doing what feels right or would you recommend like hey maybe try doing the other one first like do the movement first and then smash or maybe you know take that smashing out completely yeah um i mean for me personally like i would want to use the movement to create that feeling

because I don't want the feeling of tightness to come back after I'm done with the training session. So I think that's what happens a lot. If it's attack through foam rolling or attack through that type of thing, is a lot of times when you're done with the session, it's going to feel just as tight because your body cools down. It kind of like backs off and then it just returns to where it was before. So what I want to be able to create is in your resting position for you to feel good enough that you're not getting that feedback from your body. Right.

And that kind of goes into the, I guess, a more global way that I look at training is if we go back to the recover as you're stimulating your body enough to recover as you work, I want to be stimulating myself at 100%, like almost as if I'm in a training session all the time. Like whether I'm in a training session or whether I'm having a conversation or I'm writing programming, like the level of intensity that it takes to be in a training session, I want to have that all the time. So that my body, because like the way that your body wires, like your body only has how you are right now in present time. So it's always going to be responding and building new loops based on how you are right now in present time. So if right now in present time, I'm 50% here in this podcast. And then my other 50% is thinking about like, okay, how does my knee feel?

Or how does my, what's my flight going to be like on the way home or whatever? I'm training my body to not be fully in where I'm at, right? And so if I'm not using everything that I have, I don't necessitate the recovery of everything that I have, right? Because that's all that – what dictates recovery is what you use. So the foam rolling thing and that goes into like I want to be fully invested all the time, and then that actually allows my body to recover and feel good. Because one of the things that I think about is like, when I was 10 or 12 years old, I would go shopping, I didn't want to go shopping,

my physical body is absolutely fine. But I just feel sore, like my knees hurt, my back hurts, like I'm 10 years old, there's nothing wrong with me. But my body still feels like that, because I don't want to be there. I'm not really invested in that. So I think that is underplayed in terms of its importance for how your body feels is like, how invested are you in what you're doing? And do you actually know what it takes to be fully invested in what you're doing? Like mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically, like all of that. So that's, it's kind of a fun rabbit hole that I've been going down. Yeah. And how have you kind of ventured through that with me? Have you ventured through that with athletes or is that something that you've just been thinking

about on your own? No, with athletes as well. And maybe the best way that I've found to describe it is, so if we take the slow lowers that I mentioned earlier, right? Just take the deep push-ups. Start at the top, lower three to five minutes, be able to press up out of that. For me, when it clicked, it was like, if I take the state of being that I have to be in to be able to do that,

to be able to actually physically do that, that is what it takes for me to recover as i work because i was like a physical representation of me recovering as it works and i was like okay i want to be in the slow lower all the time because before i'd be like i'm in the slow lower when i'm done i'd be like oh yeah i can rest i can take a break but where it clicked i was like no this is actually what it takes for me to recover as i work. So I want to have this level of intensity all the time. It doesn't mean that I'm like physically stressing myself necessarily that much, but that state of being that I'm in, the level of tension and focus, everything that I have being directed into what I'm doing, I want to be like that all the time because that's when my body recovers. like that all the time because that's when my body recovers with so many different disciplines that you're after in the gym i'm imagining that um maybe like just pure old school weight training

slash strength training i realize everything you're doing is strength training but yeah weight training um is probably representing like uh not a huge percentage of your training is probably representing not a huge percentage of your training. Do you think that a lot of athletes have their percentage wrong or a lot of strength coaches have their percentage wrong? Because the NFL strength coach of today is still a guy that wears a polo that looks a little bit more jacked than most of the players, but he's also very stiff and doesn't look like he would be able to play. So what are some of your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I do. I mean, I don't like speaking for other coaches because I know if someone's looking at my stuff and they don't actually know what it is, they're going to. Very good point. They might not know. So I don't like speaking for other coaches if I don't know what they're actually doing.

But what I can say from my experience, right, is in high school or early on in college, that was very much the way that I trained. Where it was like, okay, we have three to four weeks. We're doing the same thing. And we're just going to go from like a strength phase to a power phase. But we're going to be doing basically the same thing. Like 98% weightlifting. Yeah.

No, exactly. And I was like, I personally was much more stiff. Didn't move as well. Body didn't feel good. Like body hurt. So from that perspective, the reason that I'm doing what I am doing now is because i found that to be a better way and my body actually feels better and performs better um so yes for me i'm going to tend to bias that more because it's it's worked you've been getting great sleep you've been handling

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Links in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. Have you ever seen the way Christian McCaffrey trains? Have you seen some of that way uh christian mcafree trains you've seen some of that stuff not like in depth that you've seen him hop around yeah i've seen it i've seen a little bit of stuff yeah it's pretty cool he's just like really explosive and i find you know seeing some of that kind of training just inspiring pretty cool yeah for sure yeah it's a lot like uh what ben the bounce does yeah yeah they've actually communicated that's pretty cool yeah i'm not sure if you've heard of him. Ben the Bounce. I think I've heard his name.

I haven't really dug into much of his stuff, though. Yeah, he's dope, too. Okay. Cool. I want to say it was J.J. Watt. He said on a podcast that he thinks he kind of lifted himself out of the NFL because he loved lifting so much. Yeah. He was doing, like, 700-pound squats and shit like that.

I feel like that happens a lot. Yeah. much yeah he's doing like 700 pound squats and shit like that i mean i feel like that happens a lot yeah like athletes will athletes will go initially into it for their sport because they love their sport and then some days just like fall in love with the gym so much that that becomes their sport and then they don't really play that they don't really play the sport anymore this is ben i just love the stuff that he does because it just looks like he's floating he is man yeah so conceptually what do you think um some athletes need to think about so that you know because athletes do want to get big strong jacked for their sport but you can definitely take that too far which and it can get rid of some of your athleticism so what do athletes need to be thinking about when it comes to their training to be able to maintain their ability to move smoothly have good rhythm stay athletic for sport yeah so I think it

comes down to if you if you consider the level of stimulus that you put into your body for strength mm-hmm put that same level of stimulus into your body for rhythm or for movement right you're not not putting one as more important than the other unless there's areas that you need to bias, but even then, keep everything in at the same time. So if it's a new athlete and they're really good at their sport, their strength is just terrible, okay, let's bias that more. But don't stop playing your sport.

Don't stop creating in your sport. Or for someone that's been playing for 15 years and they're very, very, very trained, there might be something completely different that we need to try with that person right so it's just it's looking at was the situation or scenario that they're in keeping all of it in at some point to some level and then biasing what we need to bias for them what's some of the stuff that you learned uh from you mentioned jay schroeder i always found that training to be yeah really interesting and

marinovich and all those guys from back then. Yeah. So Schroeder, the biggest thing was the concept of recover as you work. And so, like I said, he called them iso-extremes. I call them slow lowers. I'm not going to speak for Jay at all. I can't. But that's the way that I think about them.

But what I really took from him and what I've understood now that I didn't before is he would be like, in his words, he'd be like, you have to do everything perfectly all the time in order to be able to recover as you work. So it's like from how you get in your car to how you drive to how you bend down to pick something up

to how you stand there when you're doing dishes. How you breathe. How you breathe. He's like, everything has to be perfect. I don't like to think about it like that i like to think about it as more like fun and hey i want to do this like not like it has to be perfect you know but it's it's a similar thing so that's a big thing that i've taken from him is understanding um a human has much more capacity than we think we have or than most humans think that they have but what it takes to reach that level of capacity is work engagement and investment not like having rest and everything

be perfect like that that was kind of the flip for me more work can actually be better if you're fatiguing from more work it's because there's some level of you that like isn't balanced i guess like let's say let's say you go into a training session and you're just so used to running your training sessions off of anger all the time like that's just something that you go into all the time right if you're not able to tap into other things as well that's going to burn you out like it just is at some point so if you're not like literally what burns you out is the thing that is in the way of you being able to continue to recover as you work and so that was a cool concept that i took from him and have been able to run with is like put a person myself other

athletes in situations where they have the opportunity to go enough to far enough to fail the thing that causes them to fail is what we need to address the most like that is their weakest link and then continuing to do that allows us to get better and better not only in their sport and training but like in their life as well in baseball the elbow is really vulnerable you see a lot of even young kids i've heard of teenagers having like tommy john surgery and things like that um what are some ways that people can I guess help protect their elbow a little bit more in a sport like baseball yeah and there's there's so much that goes into it but I think the biggest thing is probably starting to understand

that your body you're not glass and that stress in your body if if you're doing it in a in an intelligent way stressing your body is the way to prepare you for it right because I think the reason that a lot of that happens in baseball and just i mean me being in baseball and being in the rehab space a lot um anytime that someone gets an mri where something is off the only thing the doctor is going to recommend is surgery yeah and i think that's a big part of the reason that we're seeing so many more surgeries is just because we're getting so much better at seeing the fact that something is torn there. Whereas in the past, someone might be like, hey, my arm hurts.

I'm going to take a couple weeks off. I'm going to train. I'm going to rehab this, and then I'm going to come back. That doesn't happen anymore because if you're in a school or with a team and you can't play because you have injury or you have some type of pain, they basically have to send you to get an MRI. It's bad news in a lot of ways because they're like when you go to a doctor and you're in that position they are looking for the

symptoms that you're describing yep so i would even say you could probably lie and say yeah it's this arm that hurts and they could do the wrong arm and they'd probably find just as much damage going on in that other arm because they're they're they're seeing what you're describing you know like you you did mention that you're up and they're trying to they're trying to help you yeah and that's the only lens that they have to look through well again i don't want to speak for all doctors at all but for a lot of them that's just with education that's the only thing they're very good at being a doctor they're very good at being a surgeon but they don't have like the other aspects that go into it. Um, so just in terms of being able to

prepare yourself, yeah. Starting to understand that your body isn't glass and that training is actually a good thing for you. Right. And if something hurts, understand that all that is, is it's feedback. It's not something that you need to freak out about. Obviously, if your bone's sticking out of your arm, like go, go get that shit checked out. Right. But starting to understand that um and then and then that kind of allowing the person to be like okay what is there that i can do to to kind of train and prepare and that's where like the impulses the slow lowers the joint moves that type of stuff comes in um i mean the reason that i use that isn't just to use them

it's because that's what i found to work best and if something else presents that works better i'm gonna go ahead and use that i know it's good i know it's because that's what I found to work best. And if something else presents that works better, I'm going to go ahead and use that. I know it's good. I know it's probably unlikely that one of your athletes would get injured in training, but if that does, if that has ever happened, um, uh, how do you work that athlete through rehab and then attacking that same stimulus like you have? Because many athletes, if they entered something in training, there's a fear around doing that again. Yeah. So I'll give a real example where that did happen like i'm not i try to be as transparent as possible like with everything that i'm doing so i was doing a uh he just got a screw put in his elbow and we were doing rehab um and we were doing a max iso for

his lower half where it's basically like you're in a lunge position at that point i did max isos where it's like you squeeze as hard as you can and i was like keep your upper half relaxed like i put in the description keep your upper half relaxed and just see your lower half yeah but like through that he contracted his upper half and like he felt a little bit of a twinge in his elbow so like okay great that doesn't mean that anything is off or wrong or whatever we just need to regress what we're doing and so that's what we we did. It was like regress it to like joint moves. We're not going to do any intense lower half stuff for a little while. And then we build back up.

So it's the same way. The same way that I attack myself is the same way that I'm going to attack anybody else. Because really all I'm doing, if an athlete has an injury or some type of pain or inhibition that they're telling me about, when I'm talking to them, all I'm trying to do is get the information that allows me to feel what they're feeling because i always know how i'm going to rehab myself so if i want to know how to rehab them i need to feel what they're feeling and then i can give them what i would give myself based on where they're at so it's the same process that i'm going to go through with anybody in terms of just give me the information and then we can put together a plan

and go is there anything specific that you do to kind of prep your knees for, or are there things that you've done over the years, or is it simply just the regression and progression to get yourself to be able to jump down? And I guess I would even think ankle. I'm just thinking of like when people see the videos of him jumping down from stuff, they're like, oh, my God, my knee. They're just automatically thinking about like their knee, maybe their back or their ankle. Was there a lot of work, a lot of progressions that led to a lot of that?

Yes. So I will say, like, don't go try to jump off a five-foot and land on one leg or six-foot and land on one leg right away. Like, definitely don't do that because there was a lot of work that went into that. Like, I've been doing this for 13 or 14 years now pretty seriously. And if we think specifically about the depth drops, just to give you an example, like I want to say a year before that, I started doing – so exercise would be a single leg stand.

You just stand on one leg, right? But then I started like loading it with a bar and then with weight on top of that. And so I would do a lot of those where like, okay, we're going 500 pounds for like 30 60 seconds on each leg but we're going empty barbell and you go 15 minutes straight and like you don't put your other foot down the whole time so it's just like a lot of stuff like that where the exercise itself is much much simpler but that is going to then prepare me to

to have the capacity to start taking on that load um so what i would tell people is i mean really just what i did is like everything that's in your training program or that you want to include in your training program just start it start it at a level that you're good with if you're afraid that your back is going to break then don't go that high or if you're afraid that your knee is going to break start with literally an inch and just drop off your eyes and your body will kind of tell you you'll look and you'll go, that's not for me. I'm not ready for that.

It's interesting. Your body kind of knows. It's like, that's not a good idea. No, for sure. When I get up on a five or six foot, I'm like, I don't think that's good right now. Yeah, and if it was two feet, you would have already jumped. Yeah, exactly.

So use that because your body is a is a system of information for you yeah well it's nice to know that you look at a five foot drop and also have some reservations because even just like a box in the gym like i would have to totally regress that and probably regress that again just because of like my body and stuff and i'm just not sure of it um this is kind of like a different like off-topic question, but you're very well spoken and you might just have like a super high IQ, but how do you learn like period because you're bringing up a lot of references and you know your shit and like it's really awesome to hear and learn from you,

but I'm curious like how do you gain and retain information? That's a really good question and I don't know if I'm the best. I mean, I've always been pretty good in terms of taking in information and being able to, I don't know, understand what I'm taking in. What I have, I think, gotten a lot better at over the past couple years is actually being able to communicate that. And I think what that comes through is just, for me, what it's come through is like reps and practice.

Because when I started training seriously in like eighth or ninth grade, I was also putting out, it was on an online form at that time because that's what we had at that time. But I would like keep a training log and I would just write out everything that I was doing and there's other people that I could communicate with on there. So I've been going through that for 13 or 14 years. And basically what happens is you ask, I ask myself every day, what is it that I actually want to say? Not what is it that I saw someone else say that I want to like try to take or use, but it's like, what do I actually want to say? Right.

And through that process of you do that every single day, some days, like I'll sit there for like 30 minutes. I'm like, I don't know, man, I'm just, I'm just sitting there like, what do I actually want to say? Right. But through that process, it's literally like a training rep where you learn how to communicate who you actually are, what you actually think and what you actually want to do. But without those reps, like you don't get that practice. I think that's a huge part. It's really hard to figure out what you want to say when you're new yes all you can really do is like regurgitate kind of copy emulate which is which is a great place to start actually um you know you just want to give credit and say you know

hey i learned that here or those kinds of things but it is really tough and then even even as you mature and as you get uh more smarterist as i would say as you learn more yeah as even as you mature and as you get more smarterist, as I would say, as you learn more, as you learn more, you go through growth spurts. And in those growth spurts, you're like, I don't feel that confident saying anything right now because I'm not even really sure about this. So let me do the work first. And then you do the work, and then you're excited about it, and then you can share it. It makes it easier. So you get stuck along the way a bunch of times you're like i'm gonna kind of sound like an idiot if i present this yeah and it's uh you know because there's

like a honeymoon period with stuff right like you try something new it starts to work really good but then maybe you know maybe you do it for three weeks and it turns out that you like totally hurt yourself doing it yeah that wouldn't have been a good thing to share. Yeah, no, for sure. And also, I guess for me personally, I'm not necessarily worried about sharing something that at some point wouldn't work. I'd be like, hey, that didn't work. Because it's like real time.

It's like, hey, this is actually what I'm doing. And I'm just like, when I hurt my back, I'm going to be like, okay, yeah, I hurt my shit. Now let's go through it, you know? And that's where I actually think there's a lot of bad things about social media, right? For sure. But I think if you use it well, there's a lot of good things that can come out of it. And I think the, if you're willing to actually be transparent with what you're doing, it

makes it more real for people to be like, okay, someone that looks, someone that looks like that are very high or extreme level. Like there are, there's still things that that person does that they're like, Oh, that was the stupidest thing I've ever done. Right. And so it just makes it more real for people and like encourages them to also do that themselves as well. Do you train your neck or your traps or are they just jacked? I mean, once in a while, not really specifically. Oh, it's so disappointing for people listening. They're like, fuck. I was always told I had a secret.

He's like hoping like, oh, you know, he does like six sets a week or something. He's got some protocol. I was always told I had a bull neck, so I was like, I'll take it. Fuck, there you go. Yeah. Sick. It's the same thing that happens with calves all the time. Someone's like, man, what did you do for those calves? I was like, nothing. For me, I was 330 pounds. Yeah. Sick. It's the same thing that happens with calves all the time. Someone's like, man, what did you do for those calves?

I was like, nothing. For me, I was 330 pounds. Yeah. So weigh 330 pounds for a while. That's your prescription for a big calf. I was born like this. Yeah. Yeah, that's always discouraging to people.

Then you just jump off a cliff. Yeah. I know I'm coming back to this, but have you always been the type of person to kind of just like go through things? Because going back to your seated good morning thing and that idea, that's a lot of kind of what we do with things. Like if there's an injury that happens, we don't just totally avoid it. We try to figure out a way to build resilience with that area, whereas some people will just totally just avoid that. So have you always been that way with this? Or was there someone who encouraged you or was there something you were doing that like you realize that that's the way you want to be going about things i mean i think

to some degree i've always done that and it's probably just because of my upbringing like i grew up working on a farm oh it's like okay but that makes more sense yeah everything makes more sense i'm gonna go throw straw bales in 100 degree heat for five days straight for 12 hours a day like yeah everything's not going to feel perfect so i think it's a lot of it is where i came from um but then also i will say uh i did get when i started getting a little bit more educated i would do things that were probably weren't as beneficial where i was like okay it has to be more rest or avoid this position it's almost like the all information or all knowledge isn't necessarily uh best for your scenario like if you're getting

knowledge or information that isn't correct like then it's not good right so i think at some point there was there was a point time where like i'd rest more um i'd be afraid to go into more ranges of motion but that just to me intuitively never really made sense yeah so i always went back to like okay if this is actually going to get better i'm gonna have to use i'm gonna have to train because even if you think about like how if we actually understand how adaptation happens and like stimulus adaptation happens during training it just makes sense that when something doesn't feel good we still need to use that same basic process of stimulus and adapt it doesn't mean that that stops your body still works the same way right so that would be like like not train something when you have injury would be like hey you want to get better at your your bench or your squat like don't train it it's like it doesn't make

any sense like what are we doing here so it's just understanding that the actual the actual basic processes that our body uses i think is very beneficial to know and understand because then that can those principles can allow you to then build training on top of that as well as build rehab on top of that. Understand that rehab and training are basically the same thing. It's just a progressed or regressed version of it. It's some of the like farming chores that they kind of turn into like almost you viewing as, as training to some extent sometimes.

Yeah. I mean, yeah yeah definitely like the straw i don't know if you guys have ever done straw or hay in a mile yeah man that stuff was it's lit once you've done it once yeah there's things are really fucking heavy yeah what is it you're doing so basically like you have a you have a wagon right or this is how i did we had a wagon and then you have a elevator that takes the straw bales up into a barn, right? And so one or two people load the bales onto the elevator and then the rest of the people are up in the barn. So you grab the bales off of it and you're throwing them to people that can then stack them in the barn. So this is done in like July or August and you're

up top and there's just like straw and shit like all over the place and you're breathing that in and it's like a hundred degrees. And so degrees and so i mean yeah that was definitely like okay this is training i guess you know yeah that for sure um but then the rest of it like i fed cows for a while i'm just like i want to i was i literally run around for seven or eight hours because i was like i just i want to go train to like run from this to that to that to that because i want to get out of here and go train yeah get it all over with yeah exactly get it done i'm not trying to work nine hours and say instead of eight hours for that extra hour of uh you know that 10 bucks an hour of whatever whatever i was making yeah yeah that's cool though i think uh everyone kind of wishes they had that background in some way

even though it's probably just fantasy and you wish you didn't have that background because uh you're also maybe halfway stuck in it right yeah i mean but i am i am very happy for it because like i mean with that comes you know you learn how to work like you learn how to do things that you don't necessarily want to do like getting up to do your chores first yeah you know like getting up at 4 30 or 5 or whatever it is you just yeah like i don't want to do that but now i have the the ability to do that so i'm i'm very happy for what it gave me and then also like okay now i know what i don't want to do that, but now I have the ability to do that. So I'm very happy for what it gave me. And then also like, okay, now I know what I don't want to do, which is fine. Like some people want to farm.

That's great. I just, I understand that that's not necessarily what I want to do. So it gave me a lot of benefit for sure. What did you learn through hanging? Because we were talking about like hanging is something that I've been just trying to microdose and implement and get better at. But you said like two years ago, you hung, you just hung by both arms for six minutes. So why did you start that? What did it help with?

And what should people think about if they want to implement some hanging into what they do? So the reason that I started is it was something that I wanted to use in rehab. And honestly, I just started hearing it was good for rehab for overhead athletes. So I was like, as usual, I'm going to test it on myself first. Do you believe that's true? yeah yeah it's it's very similar along like other lines of okay that is something that that is something that we can do right so it makes sense that we should do that right and it's like good range of motion it's going to train your fingers going to train train your grip like it's a great exercise right um so yeah i started doing that

probably got to like three to four minutes and the reason that i wanted to go to six is because someone told me there's a rogue cliffhanger challenge and they're like hey you should do that so that's the reason that i ended up pushing it for like three or four weeks and got to six minutes yeah um but i still use that consistently now a lot of like hanging a lot of one-arm hanging and just being able to load those up and like we were talking a little bit before like if you can start to load up one arm hangs or even if you're you know i think you said you're 250 like you're right you're built really well if even if you can do your just body weight with one arm like your ability to connect that hand down all the way in through the scap yeah and your ability to control that there's it's just it's very beneficial for that i think yeah okay

how important is the grip for baseball yeah i mean it's it's extremely important even a lot of guys have jacked forearms you see them at bat and you can see the muscles of the forearms especially like mcguire back in the day and bond that might have been a you know little roids to help a little bit yeah or maybe a lot rolling some pizza dough or something yeah but it's a lot of pizza it's definitely important for that and even in terms of like throwers being able to support your like your medial elbow your your pinking your ring finger gonna be very important for that so like some things that'll have people do if they're throwers is just like take fingers and do individual overcoming isos

against a rope or against a squat rack or something to be able to help support that whole medial side because that's where like if someone someone gets Tommy John, it's going to be on, you know, their medial elbow here. So being able to have that support all the way from the fingers up and all the way through is going to be very beneficial. It's just like your toes and your feet. Like you want to be able to connect your toes,

your foot to your knee, to your hip, be able to kind of connect all that together versus having a weak link there. Mess around with the extensors and stuff too. Um, yeah. I mean,

like all four positions adduct abduct extend and flex yeah yeah so you actually a lot you mentioned the feet quite a bit um when did you start like thinking the feet were an important thing for athletes to work on is that something you've just known for a while i mean i think i first started hearing about it when i was in like is is when I was in high school. So this would have been probably 10 years ago, maybe a little bit longer than that. So I started messing around with barefoot stuff. I wasn't really doing any foot training at that point.

It was more like I'm just going to go barefoot when I can. The foot-specific stuff has probably started more in the last four or five years, whereas the joint moves that I have for the feet, where it's okay, we're going to move your toes every direction that you can move them, flexion, extension, adduct, abduct. And then also like the single leg stands with the barbell that I talked about as well as like the single leg death drops. I mean, the foot is probably the biggest limiter for those, for most people.

And even if you're feeling it in your knee, it might be because like your foot doesn't actually know how to contract and how to hit the ground and how to handle that force. Cause if you really think about it, your foot is really the only thing that's in contact with the ground most of the time. Right. Yeah.

So like that thing has got to be strong and prepared and ready to go. Yeah. Gotcha. Got anything else over there, Andrew? I'm all good over here. Awesome, man.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. I watch a lot of baseball stuff just because I just find the mechanics of the whole thing super interesting. Do you have some of the guys sometimes throw with the opposite arm? Do you have guys swing with the opposite way that they normally swing? Is there any reason or benefit of doing any of that, you think? Yeah. I personally don't do skill work anymore on the baseball side of things but i i used to do that and we would do a lot of opposite side stuff um but i will say too what i've noticed

with with the high rep stuff if we go back in the train thing a little bit like with that with my non-dominant arm even if it's like left arm impulses or left arm joint moves it's like you get to a point where it starts to feel like you can use that opposite side just as well as you can use your dominant side so i think there's huge benefit for that in terms of making your dominant side feel easier is like using the opposite side whether it's you're doing it in skill work or you're doing something in training doing something in the gym because something that i'm doing right now personally is um on the depth drops for single leg my left leg isn't as good as my right leg i can stick probably like six feet off my right and like 61 inches off my left right now.

So I've been doing like double or triple the amount of reps on my left as my right. Try it with your right eye closed. The drops on the left? Yeah, you'll be shocked. It will happen. Worse or better? I don't know. I made that up.

I was like, do you know something right now? I'm like, all right, let's go. I don't know. Left side controls right side or whatever go I don't know left side controls right side or whatever I don't know it'd probably bring a different stimulus

look at a different color or something sure close your eyes and try to imagine where the ground's going to be when you find it

yeah hey that's a really good one I might go a little lower for that I'm going to regress it for myself hey

smart awesome man thank you so much yeah appreciate you guys having me on strength is never weakness weakness is never strength

catch you guys later bye