Mark Bell's Power Project - The Aerobic Fitness Test That Exposes Your Real Conditioning | Ft. Brian MacKenzie

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

Brian MacKenzie joins Mark Bell to break down aerobic fitness, nasal breathing, HRV, walking for recovery, and the 2.3 watts/kg test that reveals whether you're truly metabolically fit. They also discuss nervous system regulation, breathwork, endurance training, and why aerobic capacity might be the missing piece for strength athletes.Follow Brian MacKenzie:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_brianmackenzieInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/shiftadaptWebsite: https://shiftadapt.comSpecial perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK/TRT/PEPTIDES! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com and use code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off Self-Service Labs and Guided Optimization®.🧠 Methylene Blue: Better Focus, Sleep and Mood 🧠 Use Code POWER10 for 10% off!➢https://troscriptions.com?utm_source=affiliate&ut-m_medium=podcast&ut-m_campaign=MarkBel-I_podcastBest 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎➢https://emr-tek.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!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/markbellspowerprojectFOLLOW Mark Bell➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybellFollow Nsima Inyang➢ Ropes and equipment : https://thestrongerhuman.store➢ Community & Courses: https://www.skool.com/thestrongerhuman➢ YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=e#PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Walking has become fundamental. I can literally see with clients where their steps fall off. There are consequential changes that are happening from a physiological perspective, from HRV, sleep patterns, etc. If you're not in the long game, you're going to hit a brick wall. It turns out aerobic function is a pretty important thing, even for strength athletes. Guys who are lifting weights need to go out and run. Go get on a f***ing a salt bike.

You can maintain 2.3 watts per kilogram while comfortably breathing through your nose at a rate under 20 breaths per minute, you are pretty aerobically functional. I don't see anything changing the nervous system more than getting appropriately fit. All right, man. So Brian McKenzie, what is up? Great to have you here today. You know, I have a long past. We've done a bunch of content together.

But what's new with you? What do you got going on? You told me you're training a lot more these days. And you were somebody that was training a lot anyway. Well, I was. And then I wasn't. And then I was. and that I wasn't, but the, you know, the,

the, wasn't had a lot to do with, like, uh, kind of catastrophic injury type of stuff. Um, your freaking neck. Well, I, I, I compressed my spinal cord, um, like eight years ago. That's when we do the good mornings. Yeah, yes. It was the day after we did the good mornings.

I remember your hamstrings. Yes. For like a month. Yeah, for a month. Um, that, that always comes up with us. This is my attempt to come train with Mark Bell. Legendary day. Yeah.

It was a legend. legendary day. I think we did 80 sets of good mornings. But there was that warm up component that we've been talking about. If you just warm up a lot, you know, you can actually get in a lot of volume. Yeah, a lot of good training effect can happen. Yes. Yes. And apparently you were getting warmed up where I was hitting maximal effort. I should have been able to see in the shimmy and shaking that yeah. I hung in there. At any rate, yeah, I mean, I'm doing a lot of training. A lot of it's walking. Walking's become kind of the, what I've understood is really this fundamental thing that we've really been missing. And there's a lot out there that people have been talking about it for quite some time.

And I'm not reinventing or attempting to reinvent anything. But I do know that it has created, I would say a buffer for everything else, giving me the ability. to A, either still recover from something, which you can do with walking, especially if you've been off the couch for some time. Well, we know, you know, you have a really hard training session and you go to sit down or just kind of take a nap or doze off for a minute and you go to get up and you're like, you got to use a lot of your strength just to get out of a chair because your body feels super stiff.

And if you can kind of keep the body in motion, a body in motion might stay in motion, right? Yeah, well, I think that's the biggest difference that we see. when we look at people who, you know, our modern way of life versus what, when you look at more hunter-gatherer type populations, right, they're, they don't have to do mobility. They don't have to do a lot of these things because they're constantly, A, in positions that are challenging all the time, and B, they're moving all the time. They're moving so much that the tissue and everything adapts to this.

Baked into their environment, not a lot of chairs, not a lot of couches. Yeah. And to, you know, just to capitalize on that from a physiological standpoint, you know, you look at from a, you know, taking in food, their calories are basically going through their physical activity. Modern livings calories are not. Yeah. How many calories do we need? You know, with modern living, with maybe only getting like three or four thousand steps in and maybe not challenging your brain or your body, mind, spirit, all that much in a day.

Right? Might not need that many calories. You really, you really wouldn't. Although, you know, based, you know, just the food choices that we've got, if you're not actually cooking your own food all the time, you're going to probably be having to either restrict or you're going to be put in front of processed, highly chloral. darkly dense choices. You're 100% correct.

I mean, if you go to a restaurant, we went to an Italian restaurant last night because I was like, you know what, going to a restaurant is going to a restaurant. It's really not that big a difference. So last night we went to Italian restaurant, I might have ate an additional maybe 300 calories than I would have had if I ate something, you know, healthier just because of the seed oils and all the other stuff. And when you go to a restaurant, it's tempting to get, you know, appetizers and different things.

And even for myself, who knows how to protein leverage, I know how to look at the menu and kind of find the right foods. Still tough to navigate. It is. I think you and I are fortunate with where we're at in our physical activity because you can get away with stuff like that quite easily if it's not something that's routine. Right. You know, like eating out once or twice a week for us for my wife and I is just not a big deal. However, every other meal is basically cooked from scratch. Like, I mean, we make pasta, like, I eat pasta, but we make pasta from scratch.

I'll make bread if we have bread. Like, we, obviously, we cook some sourdough bread. Yeah, yeah. I've had a sourdough starter for like a long time. My son just told me this. I don't know if it's true, but he said that sourdough bread can taste different at different altitudes. You ever heard that before? Yes.

Yeah. And what, what is that? It's the fermentation, the way it's fermenting, I would say. That's just off the top of my head. That's super interesting. like, you know, you, I know that things cook and bake and stuff at different temperatures. Very much so. Yeah.

Very much so. I mean, a lot, a lot changes with altitude, which, you know, I'm very into altitude training. Right. But let's dive a little bit more into the walking and the specifics of walking, like a weighted vest. Like, are you wearing weighted vest? Are you walking with, you know, 20 pound dumbbells? Like, what are some of the things you're doing with your walking? I'll walk with a weighted vest once or twice a week.

I found like look I was doing weighted vest stuff like preparing for ultramarathons 20 something years ago where I wasn't actually going and running with weighted vests necessarily but I would wear weighted vests leading into like prior to a week out from like a run just like trying to load the system up a bit more to get a similar training effect maybe to get the heart rate up a little higher and correct the heart rate staying high I mean it's a stressor and it's not just about the heart rate staying up the heart rate's staying up the heart rate's up because there's more load on the system. The system has to organize differently. The system has to do something differently. You're going to have to utilize energy differently. You know, everything changes, right? But getting used to that is part of the consequence of things.

So if I'm constantly wearing a vest, then I am adapted to that. And then it's, okay, well, what next? We see that with cold therapy and a bunch of other things. If you just do it all the time, you're not really getting the training effect anymore because your body gets adapted to it. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Like doing cold plunge every single day, day and day out is probably something you could remove. You just get too used to it. Yeah. And then start to interspers that into days where it would be of more beneficial, not to get rid of it totally. But, you know, I look at things from a perspective of like, what's the process? and where is it getting me and how's it how's it challenging my mind like and keeping me away from

or not keeping me away from but really exposing the nuance of how mine you know nervous systems are operating from a comfort standpoint like in my daily life and a lot of the um i would say negative impacts that are still part of my life and we all have that right like like you know um you know specifically like neurosis towards things like do I have to train like no you don't have to train but I could get caught in that loop of oh train train train train train train train train you know and that's not that that's that's getting back into the same cycle that got me to the to the poor behavior in the first place like let's let's address the behavior and how is training exposing that for me

and I think with the walking thing it's provided this buffer like I said to things to where it's like my head my mind is different after a walk than it is after say a run or after say lifting weights right of which i do all of that still like you know walking so do you feel because you work with a lot of people you've worked with a lot of people over the years do you feel that for yourself and the people that you worked with that walking is even improving their top end stuff 100% 100 because i think people think like i was walking like it's a waste of time now why am i not at all Brian told me to walk for, you know, 40 minutes or he told me to walk an hour once a week. The data I see would say otherwise on the clients that I have.

That's great. I can literally see with clients where their steps fall off where they start dropping below like kind of like that, like that. I would say 10,000, but really it's like, you know, somewhere in that 10 to 8,000 steps range. When they start going below that, there are consequential changes that are happening from a physiological. perspective from HRV, sleep patterns, et cetera, that I see that are changing, not necessarily the other training. And what a wonderful benefit too for people that are able to walk outside certain times a year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where is someone's heart rate? What are you kind of looking at with like heart rate? Is somebody walking fast? Are they walking hills? You know, what kind of

it? It varies. Or you just not think about it too much. You just go out and at first, it's quite literally just hey where are you at right now like where is somebody at if i'm at 3,000 steps then it's okay let's look at 5,000 for the next month 30 days of 5,000 can you do that it's a big change that that is a big change but it's an actual quite quite an easy one at first the the hard part is is oh i can get 30 days of this and that's what's but what's interesting is what happens after 30 days is it's by the time 30 days hits, you're so bored with 5,000 steps. You're like, I could do more than this.

So it's, okay, now we're going to move up to 7,000 or 7,500. Do you think that's the key to being able to reach a lot of your goals is to set them to where they're, they almost seem a little bit like a joke? Yes. Like I always, if you, like I think, I think, and I mean, look, you and I are close in age. And, you know,

I would, if I went back 20 years, I wouldn't exactly say the exact what I would agree with what you were saying right now. But now it's quite literally like the long game. If you're not in the long game, you will hit walls. You're going to hit a brick wall and it's not going to be good. But it'll be quite the learning experience if you have any intelligence. And that's really, you know, when you're just banging hard all the time, there is no end game with that one. You've got to have some sort of long game approach to that. And that's where something like walking comes in is because it kind of teaches that.

And the physiology that comes with that, it doesn't cost money. So if you do lift weights, like let's just say you're a strength athlete, just adding in walking, we'll only enhance that. strength side of things. There is no way around that. And I agree with that 100% because we've had a lot of people come into powerlifting over the last couple years that have been in tremendous shape. And they have destroyed all-time world records. Just destroyed them. Made it look easy. Stan Efforting probably stands out the most. Oh, I mean, stands quite the pinnacle of what I'm talking He came from a bodybuilding background. He was doing 10 sets of 10 German volume training, but times two, because it was 10 sets

of 10 in the morning and 10 sets of 10 in the evening. They would do quads in the morning, hamstrings in the evening. And later on, you know, Stan started learning more about like walking and so forth. And that came after some of his powerlifting stuff. But when he came to me and wanted to learn how to power lift, he was so easy to coach and easy to train because he could already handle. all the volume that we were talking about earlier. He could handle that easily.

And in between sets, he recovered faster. So he was not only recovering from one workout to the next or from one week to the next or from one day of the next and so on, he was literally recovering much faster in between the set. And so therefore, he's able to put more force. He's able to have better output. Yeah, it turns out aerobic function is a pretty important thing, even for strength athletes.

that doesn't mean huge for sleep too I think oh my God I just think back there is so I mean just look it from an HRV perspective you know like because I've been around the can tell us what HRV is a little bit

so heart rate variability it's the beats between the beats and there's a lot in it I'm not an expert on it however I do track it and and you know we look at it but one of the the key indicators of a lot of the things that I've seen, especially with, you know, your professionals, meaning like executives, et cetera, who exercise a lot, but like work, you know,

they crush it in business. Right. Like, right? They've got fairly low HRV. And you don't want low HRV. Like, you want higher HRV. The higher the HRV, the better. Take an elite endurance athlete.

You take like the greatest cyclist there is right now. Todd A. Pogacher, who has an HRV somewhere in the range of 120 to 130. That's his baseline. You look at the general population, and that's probably at 20 or 30, right? You look at a lot of these successful execs. They're probably in that range as well or even lower. You could probably kind of just by looking at somebody. Yes.

You could probably tell HRV. You just, you just, yeah, behavioral, some of my surprise behavioral patterns. Yeah.

Actually tell, I mean, it's a nervous system thing. So like, look, everything's told by the nervous system. Like how we're, how we're,

our lights dimmed out every once in a while. Everyone, got romantic. Yeah. I mean, this is fine, though, too. Um,

you know, it, the nervous system tells the story behaviorally of what's going on. And we're, we're constantly, you know living through a lot of what we grew up with in childhood and how we learned how to make it through childhood and there's no that ain't that's a true well i mean even it doesn't matter

how successfully i mean look i just watched an interview with a guy who's um in one of the biggest bands ever like ever and was literally like look man i don't know how to take a compliment from people and this and that because like you know i like i don't look at what i'm doing is good Like, I'm still like he can't recognize you know and these are normal things and I get that. I understand that and if you that's part of what this nervous system thing is and that ties up into HRV because HRV is a snapshot of your cardiovascular system, your nervous system and what's going on and there fundamentally isn't anything. And so for somebody who's been in this kind of like I've been studying breathing and ventilation for over a decade at this point. I've been in a very deep rabbit hole with it. Um, you know, breathing affects HRV and the nervous system community at large uses breathing and downregulation and meditation to help with things like HRV. And yet the biggest change I've ever seen in HRV with not only clients, myself, across the boards and what I've been able to research and see with other people who are very well-versed

in HRV is aerobic function. aerobic function is the greatest wave to change your HRV. You don't see very many hardcore strength athletes and this isn't a poke at strength athletes. Maybe Stan Efforting is an anomaly out of this and there are several who are anomaly out of this but they won't have very high

HRV because of the system not being able to regulate itself. A lot of energy going to the muscles. Yeah. I mean there's a lot of I mean, I know it doesn't directly have a lot to do with HRV, but it sort of does because you're resting heart rate and things like that. Yeah. This muscle has a cost. And when you have, you know, a lot of muscle, especially someone that does performance enhancing drugs to hold more skeletal muscle, it can potentially have negative impacts on your VO2 max, on your HRV, on some of these markers that we're talking about just because you're literally just lugging around more weight. I'm not saying it's bad. And I know that you can you can have better strength to weight. weight ratio for some people and I'm not talking about a guy that gets to be 190 or 200. I'm talking about dudes that are like 250, 260 and stacked.

They're going to have, it's going to be easier for them to have more issues with the resting heart rate and some of what we're talking about. Oh yeah. Yeah. And we're about, I'm about to, we've kind of been rebranding, but we're re-approaching a lot of what we do with our assessment process because I do a pretty, a fairly in-depth assessment process with clients. we're all put them on a metabolic cart, test them.

They run through a series of other assessments that, you know, we check outside of the metabolic cart. And we correlate these things. But with what you're talking about, you know, and a lot of athletes that have a lot of, a lot of this muscle is that that muscle, when you develop muscle like that, it is anaerobic in nature, if I can, just to say, right? And that's not all true. However, that's where you're going to get a lot of the mitochondrial.

where you're going to create the mitochondria if you're doing this high-intensity work. However, if that tissue does not become functional aerobically, anything for any period of time outside of lifting is going to cause that nervous system to elevate, right? It's going to jack that nervous system up because we're changing energy systems. And it doesn't have the ability to aerobically do that stuff. So what we've been able to kind of look at is that if you really, and we're putting out, we're about to put out a test that we've been utilizing that is just 20 minutes on an assault bike. And it's anybody from a general perspective could get on an assault bike. And if you can maintain 2.3 watts per kilogram, so whatever you weigh, so if you're 250, right, take your

weight in kilograms. So 100 kilogram athlete is 220, right? And if you can maintain, 200 and about 30 watts plus or minus while comfortably breathing through your nose at a rate under 20 breaths per minute you're pretty you you are pretty aerobically functional and that shouldn't it would not inhibit any lifting side to you however if you cannot do that right and the reason and the reason we're using breathing, the reason I dove back into the breathing is this is below ventilatory threshold one, what we're suggesting, because above ventilatory threshold one, you're starting to switch energy systems. You're starting to move towards a 1.0 RER. So you're starting to dominate with carbohydrates at this point. So this would be below that, which would

indicate CO2 levels aren't as high and it should be fairly easy to breathe. It's almost like fat burnings. Correct. If you could comfortably breathe out of your nose in and out, at under 20 breaths per minute, which is basically three to four seconds per breath cycle, which is a fairly easy breath cycle without forcing that and maintaining your 2.3 watts per kilogram, you're aerobically functional. You meet the standard for being metabolically well. If you cannot do that, you're not meeting that standard for being metabolically well, and you could benefit from getting yourself to that. So then you've already gotten an opportunity for what you jumped in with earlier when we were walking is,

now you got a warm up. So there's your warm up. Like use your breathing as an indicator for warming up for 20 minutes, get that aerobic system really turned on, then go into your lifting. And it will not affect it. It should not affect it in the slightest. Something I became interested in more recently as I'm starting to work on some sprinting

and stuff like that is this idea of like, even when people go real intense, and I'm not talking about distance runners and stuff because I know that I know that for some runners, they really kind of push the higher heart rate stuff and they maybe get in a trap

of like doing it too much and stuff like that. But what I'm noticing is that in terms of like the zone two stuff, I'm noticing that whether an athlete does stuff explosively or whether they go on like a legit zone two run or they're doing some nasal breathing, like you're talking about, you end up with a similar average heart rate, which I find to be

really fascinating. What are some of your thoughts there? Yeah. You know, because your heart rate might jump, you know, quite a bit if we're doing, you know, ball slams or something like that. So you're talking about doing interval work versus going out and just doing a steady state and the average heart rate tends to be right around the same. Yeah, if the workout's 40 minutes, the heart rate might be a little similar. Yeah. Getting to. That's a sense, I mean, without using heart rate, but using heart rate, yeah, that's essentially what you're looking at is like, hey, what, what, like, what am I going out and doing and how am I, like, moving that needle or what am I, um, stimulating? How am I stimulating that, right? Like, so you're going to get a very different stimulus out of going and doing some hard intervals, but then going, like, this morning, I was doing one minute at seven minute mile pace and then I was doing three minutes at like 10 to a 11 minute mile pace. But the one minute was definitely not nose breathing.

And then it was how quickly am I getting back to easy breathing on that? And that's the goal with the easy running. And that's why it varies like 10 to 11 minute mile pace is I'm trying to get back to that recovery point, right? A cool way to challenge yourself in a different way where I immediately think like, again, you can hurt yourself doing anything. I always say that. but it sounds like the risk of injury is fairly low with something like that.

Yeah, I could run a lot faster than that if I wanted. When you're prepared for it. But then it would require me to walk or stop, right? And there are days for that. However, that wasn't today's day because I was coming here and I know I was going to get in a car and sit in a car for an hour. Like, and that's a very, like, dude, if I do interval work, hard interval work, my hamstrings are smoke. And then I'm in a car sitting, you know, the shortening of that stuff. It's just, it's paying attention.

And that's really what I think training is really about. What's the process, man? What are you doing? Is it just to train or is it to learn what you're doing in training and like, where's that getting you? And it's, although I don't have a goal of going out and running marathons or anything like that anymore, it's really, you know, my goal is really exposing how much I can learn and then how much I can apply that into what it is I'm doing with clients, right? and how I can solve their problem, right, with the stuff I'm solving for myself and learning from my own behavior and what it is I'm doing. You must have seen this guy going up the hill on his skis. Yes.

That's all over Instagram. That guy, like, I guess built his own treadmill and stuff like that. He trains at home. Got a mirror in front of them. About right. Sounds like a savage. Yeah. There's a guy.

There was, I think he was Norwegian. He's a cross-country guy. He was 6-6, I think. This is like in the 50s or 60s. He was like 6-6 and he was like 250-2-60. And the dude, like he's one of the freakyest athletes that's ever existed. I forget his name. But I mean, the V-O-2 max on something like that, like a bear that can move like that.

That's pretty wild. That's insane. That's insane. And he was an Olympian, right? Like this guy was gnarly. And there's freak athletes like that all over the place. But I think, you know, for a lot of us, we see something and then we go after that one thing versus looking at the long game of it and not understanding that a lot of these athletes,

like that dude, you know, is 6-6. You know, that didn't just happen overnight, right? These are progressions over long periods of time that people make. And they go about it in a way. that most of us don't understand a lot of. We just like the sexy novelty type thing that's sold on it or pushed out. And I mean, hell, I've done that stuff. And I pushed that stuff at times.

But I still utilize a lot of that stuff. And I mean, make no mistake, I like to go hard. I like to go fast. But I do know that this kind of this lower, this low intensity, steady state stuff really has made a massive change. allowed me to get to a place where it's like on average, I'm probably around 20 hours a week of training. Now, that'll include walking, right? Which isn't necessarily really training, but that's me actively going out and just walking, not just steps I've accumulated in the day. It's, it's walking, going out and walking. And then, you know, I'm getting like an hour a day of walking

on most days. And then it's like I'll get two hours of training in off of that. And so, Some things to think about are anaerobic activities are awesome. They're great. You know, sprints and interval stuff that you're pointing out. They just can be a little harder to be repeatable because of the intensity level. And we know from like lifting, we know from track and field athletes, we know that something's got to give. You know, your volume, your intensity, your frequency, like all these things can't be high all the time. You have to kind of toggle them.

And there might be occasions where, like, you're actually throttling everything up quite a bit just for specific training effect or impact. Maybe it's an athlete that is responsible for running a 100, a 200, and a 400 at a track event or something. And that person needs to, they need to be kind of probably put through the ringer a little bit. But it is interesting that sprinters, they seem to be incredibly fit. But at least to my understanding, it doesn't seem like they spent a lot of time doing some of what you're talking about. However, something that probably also keep in mind is we're talking about young people. It's not that there's not any people that are older that are, there are people killing it on track in 400 meter and 200 meter and so forth that are older. But a lot of times we're looking at when I think about some of these anaerobic monsters that probably have great capacity overall.

all, these usually are younger people, maybe they're even at the professional athlete level. What are some of your thoughts there? Yeah, I mean, I'm not like, I, a track athlete, a sprinter is an insanely specialized beast. A tour de France cyclist is a insanely specialized beast, right? there's very different aspects to that. If I'm asked to come in and work with an athlete, and I've, I mean,

I'm in probably a dozen different sports at this point. Like, that I work, I have to consider where, where and what, right? Like, I'm not going to have necessarily a track athlete

walking an hour a day. But, I might ask, like, look, I've got an NFL guy. one of the best defensive guys in the league and he is doing some walking.

He's not doing 10,000 steps a day because he's on a field and he's actually practiced collecting that, but he will literally go out and walk for 20 minutes a couple times a day, 20, 30 minutes. And that has been a part of the process that we, and we've seen change with that. Like some minor change with that now.

Is that the biggest change we see? No, but we're implementing other things and training that revolve around, you know, what he can do and where his limitors are at. And some of these guys are already getting after it quite a bit. And they sometimes, as nuts as it sounds, sometimes I need a coach like you to say, hey, man, let's talk about walking. Let's talk about water. Let's talk about sleep.

And let's just talk about maybe backing off your training. Like you do 10, 100 meters sprints twice a week. If you're not a tour to France, if you're not in this highly specialized, professional area, I would, I would, my, my suggestion has become the greatest generalist you can. Lift weights. Do it explosively. Do it, do some volume, do some low volume, mix it up, vary that stuff. I do very much believe in the, in the concept of what CrossFit is. I still CrossFit. However, I look at it very differently now. You know, I look at things in this very state, but I, I, I, I, us to like endurance because like you know I mean look there were so many I watched so many changes

happen with CrossFit when I was involved with it for a decade and then as I was kind of leaving that world and going into more of the the the coaching a lot of the concierge service stuff that I do um the biggest change that happened in CrossFit was when a guy by the name of Chris Henshaw came in and introduced aerobic capacity. Every one of these elite athletes started investing in endurance and being able to sustain aerobic function for longer periods of time. It was like a notch up that happened.

His workouts are not easy. No. No, no. But it was like literally that was where that notch came. He pushed that level of what happened within CrossFit at that point. So you look at things like that and go, oh, that's interesting. Like, like, huh. And I mean, one of my business partners was an ex-games athlete.

And he's 43 now. He still Crossfits, but he doesn't do it to the degree that he used to do it. But like, you know, that test I was talking about at 2.3 watts per kilogram. He's 100 kilograms. I was very interested to see at 220 what Homeboy was capable of doing. You know, he, when he was competing, he was more like 205, right? So he's put on 20, you know, 15 pounds, right? Like that's a lot of, now, he could squat over 400 pounds.

He benches, like he stopped, he was doing some workout the other day where it was like they were benching. And he he stopped. It was for 10 reps. You just went up 10 reps every few minutes or you went up weight every few minutes, but you were still doing 10 reps. Right. He got to, I think, 275 or 285 for 10. And I was like, what? So I'm like, oh, dude, you're going to get crushed on this, this test that I threw out of.

Right. He held 240 watts, no problem at roughly 17 breaths per minute. And his zone one for his heart rate goes up. He has like a 42 resting heart rate still. And he has a 200 max heart rate still. Damn. So his zone one is under 141 heart rate. So he is his average heart rate, I think, was like in the 120s for the 240 watts at 20 minutes breathing out of his nose comfortably, no problem.

And I was like, holy shit. That's awesome. Like that is fit, dude. That is fit. And he's not crushing himself a lot of these, the CrossFit stuff. He's doing it at pace and it weights and things that are sustainable and not necessarily just nose breathing, but easy breathing. And that's one of the things that I think a lot of the people that hear this nose breathing thing get a little too tied into is they think everything becomes nose breathing when that is not the case. You go look at somebody like a Tade Prakotcha and he nose breathes, nose breathes for a lot of what he's doing.

However, when he's climbing and breaking records at like seven watts per kilogram for fucking like 20 minutes almost, no. joke like that like you just go hit seven watts per kilogram and see how long you can hold that you'll maybe get a minute and a half right um he held that for like 17 minutes at one point he was breathing out of his mouth but you couldn't tell he was breathing it was just very easy breathing and that's the big differentiator we see with people who are incredibly fit who are at an elite level especially in endurance sports is their ventilation is low versus people who are kind of below that, but kind of can get away with looking fit

or kind of might show that they've got a high VO2 max, but they're not necessarily capable of sustaining things at high rates for long periods of time. Their ventilation is higher. So we tend to see a lot of over-breathing at the high end. So you're seeing a lot of that hyperventilation that occurs where it's, right, versus... Right.

Right. You know, when you're at higher levels, which their mouth breathing happens. And, and, and, um, that was one of the things that, you know, I really, um, wasn't aware of in the beginning when I got into this breathing thing. And now, you know, in testing and looking at it under a metabolic cart and looking at under underneath the microscope, yeah, it happened. You, you, there is a crossover point. You will be limiting yourself and I've seen it. I've done it. I've seen other clients do it. I've seen athletes do it. Um, it happens. But, you know, At any rate, it's one of the telltale signs that if you're breathing is not overdone, that if it's controlled in an easy manner, you're in a very good spot, especially if you can put out a lot of work. I think you're telling me 11 minute mile pace, for me, my body weight, 11 minute mile pace for like 20 minutes, nasal breathing. And I've done that a couple times. The first time I did it, I was going way too fast.

Like I was trying to do an 11 minimum I'll pace But I kept looking and I was going like Not I'm not fast runner by any means But you just get excited Somebody Anybody who's run knows this You'll always go out easy

Faster like Yeah you just start going And I was going a little bit too fast And then I was able to nasal breathe The first time that I did it But I was over breathing I was clearly still over breathing And I was like I just missed the whole point of what he

Because we talked about it And I'm like Why did I do that? So the next time I tried to slow myself down, actually pay attention to the breathing. And actually while I was going, I made an agreement with myself, like, there might be a point where you might need to walk a little bit. Yeah.

But who cares? This is like this is attempt number one. You know what I mean? And so I did. I walked for maybe about 30 seconds, like two different times. And that kept me in a better zone. And then over time, I was able to do it. And it's been pretty efficient in terms of the running.

And then on the bike, my best. on the bike so far as I did. And I got a little overzealous on that one too. I got up to 250 watts and I was like, I still, I didn't measure the, measure the breathing. I didn't measure the heart rate, but I was like, I was probably a little over. So do you kind of recommend the people to like maybe just

extend the time a little bit rather than the intensity or do you kind of If you're gonna use it as training. So the, the. I know it's a great. Well, yeah, just to back up kind of where the 11 minute mile stuff came from that, you know, the great Alan. So there's a great exercise. physiologist.

His name's Alan Cousins. Works with a lot of endurance athletes. He's the one that kind of really made my mind start to think about this 2.3 watts per kilogram, but he came up with that 11-minute mile is the bare minimum. You should be able to handle without your heart rate actually exceeding, you know, like 180 minus your age. Oh, yeah.

I would use max. I would use heart rate reserve, but roughly it's 63%. Like, you know, it's really like 63% of max heart rate. Pretty low. It's pretty low, man. And you shouldn't have to exceed that or you are in a place where you're not exactly metabolically well. And that just means that you're not aerobically efficient quite yet.

And that is the foundation to metabolic health, just to be clear. And again, I go back to sleep. Yeah. And that doesn't mean, you know, guys who are lifting weights need to go out and run. Go get on a fucking assault bike. Like, it's like, just do some work. Yeah. And so now to go back, now go to your question where it's like, you know, using your

breathing, doing what I'm suggesting a few times a week or even as a warm up, if you're doing it as a warm up, use the 20 minutes and let your breathing be the indicator of intensity. That's it. the moment you move out of comfortable nose breathing into that's not comfortable nose breathing got to make a face to breathe yeah correct it shouldn't have to really yeah it's comfortable nose breathe the moment you move out of that we know you're moving into more carbohydrate oxidation okay we just know that that metric's going up because CO2's building and again none of that's bad it's just not bad your intent has changed this is just the indication

that's giving you an opportunity to work on something that's not going to take away from anything and only going to build the function of that aerobic system. Okay? It's not turning you into an adirts athlete. So going and doing 20-minute warm-up will not turn you into an endurance athlete. If that's your fear. But it gives you a nice benefit that over time is going to be really helpful. Yeah.

Or you could use it as a training and then I would extend that time out. If you're going to use it as training, then I would extend that time out to like a time out to like, 30, 40 minutes and then sit there for a few weeks. Get bored with that 30 minutes before you make it 40. Because once you get bored with 30 minutes and not becoming easy, 40 minutes is going to be quite easy. And then you're going to start to see that your wattage or your work is actually increasing. And so that's how the training can get implemented, but it also could just be the warm up. And you will see that that wattage will start to go up with the ease of breathing because you're still doing your other training. And so that should be complimenting things at that point, which is exactly what the walking is also doing as well.

And walking has just become kind of the easy entry point for that whole thing is that, you know, oh, I'm not actually burning myself out. And I'm actually like in this highly beta oxidative state where I'm strictly fat burning. So I'm moving my fat max up while simultaneously being able to still train. And now I'm going anaerobic again where I'm, oh, I'm. I'm just creating this buffer zone. Like, I've created a buffer. And so sleep at night, the nervous system responds to this by increasing heart rate variability. That gives you the opportunity to downregulate a lot more, shift down, which only adds to,

oh, now I'm sleeping better. So I really have seen nothing that complements sleep and or HRV, the nervous system, more than creating that aerobic buffer. There's obviously tremendous benefit to nasal breathing. The for for what you're talking about here, you're mainly just talking about utilizing it as a governor on the heart rate and having a slow, easy, efficient breathing. But what else does it do for our body? It seems like there's a cascade of of health benefits. There is, my understanding is there's enough. oxygen inside the body, there's enough oxygen in the muscles.

And a lot of times we don't get the opportunity to tap into it because we just start hyperventilating because we're not in very good shape. Yeah. And that there's the thing is it's like most people don't realize they're not in actually that good of shape. People who are going and working out and doing. How interesting. They're not, dude, I can't tell you.

You're not in good shape. Oh look, man. Look. Here, post my hip replacement that I had. You know, I couldn't do a whole lot. It was a slow progress in. However, after about six months, seven months, I got myself back up to like where I could I could push pretty hard.

And I have metabolic hearts. So I would test myself and I would look at, oh, what's my V02 max debt? Dude, I was, I was hit in 59 to 61 V02 max. I was like, oh, shit. Here's the problem. I couldn't sustain half that V-O-2 functionally. Oh, I see. Interesting.

Right. I was, so I look at a lot of things, right? Like, so I'm using a lot of technologies. I don't think these technologies are necessary for the mass. I haven't thought about that before. You're talking about VO2 max, but then being able to sustain. Buddy. Like, you should.

Well, this is where this test that I've been like, I'm like, how do I deliver this to the masses. How do I help this problem I'm seeing? It's a massive hole for people. All right, Mark, you're getting leaner and leaner, but you always enjoy the food you're eating. So how are you doing it? I got a secret, man. It's called good life protein. Okay. Tell me about that. I've been doing some good life protein. You know, we've been talking on the show for a really long time of certified Pete Montese beef. And you can get that under the umbrella of good life proteins, which also has chicken breast, chicken thighs, sausage, shrimp, scallops, all kinds of different fish, salmon, tilapia.

The website has nearly any kind of meat that you can think of lamb. There's another one that comes in mind. And so I've been utilizing and kind of using some different strategy, kind of depending on the way that I'm eating. So if I'm doing a keto diet, I'll eat more fat. And that's where I might get the sausage and I might get their 80, 20, grass fed, grass finish, ground beef. I might get bacon.

And there's other days where I kind of do a little bit more bodybuilder style, where the fat is, you know, might be like 40 grams or something like that. And then I'll have some of the leaner cuts of the certified Piedmontese beef. This is one of the reasons why, like, neither of us find it hard to stay in shape because we're always enjoying the food we're eating. And protein, you talk about protein leverage it all the time. It's satiating and helps you feel full. I look forward to every meal. And I can surf and turf, you know?

Yeah. I could cook up some, you know, chicken thighs or something like that and have some shrimp with it or I could have some steak. I would say, you know, the steak, it keeps going back and forth for me on my favorite. So it's hard for me to lock one down. But I really love the bovette steaks. Yeah. And then I also love the rib-eyes as well. You can't go wrong with the rib-eyes.

So, guys, if you guys want to get your hands on some really good meat, you can have to Good Life Proteins.com and use code power for 20% off any purchases made on the website. Or you can use code Power Project to get an extra 5% off if you subscribe and save. to any meats that are a recurring purchase. This is the best meat in the world. Is going on. And then there's the other side of this where people who are just runners or just cyclists, right,

that have this real big hole with like, oh, you're not actually that strong. Like, you're not actually gonna hold up that well. Or you're, you know, there's other, there's other aspects of that, right? Like grip strength gone. Like, you know, anyway. So coming back to this, it's like,

how do I help solve this problem? And it was that problem I saw, not just with myself, it's like, I mean, look, man, I was looking at near infrared spectroscopy where we're looking at muscle oxygen, like what's going on there? And when I was going through a lot of this stuff from like hip replacement or even just even taking it back even further because I was looking at this stuff when I was, when I had the neck injury with what I went through, my muscle tissue would, like my oxygen levels in my tissue were not very high. And I was very metabolically challenged at that point,

meaning like any sort of effort depleted my muscle oxygen levels to where I was like in this anaerobic state or I was at this low state of ability to use oxygen. So there was definitely stuff going on that I was like, wait a second, but I don't feel like I'm working that hard. But the technology is not lying because I couldn't sustain that. that stuff for long periods of time without burning out. And that was where this like, hey, if I'm operating at 50% of VO2 max, and I have this much muscle tissue on me, what's the functional level for that? Well, 2.3 watts per kilogram for men and 1.9 for women is roughly that standard to understand

that. And so that was where we kind of really came up with understanding, well, what's that tissue capable of. And by the way, you should still be able to lift your way, you know, you'd still be able to hit your lifts if you're doing that. Like this shouldn't replace any of that stuff. It's just an add-in bolt-on to this stuff. And we've seen across the boards that getting people to that gets them into such a fitter space that a lot of the people out there who aren't doing a lot of this stuff are getting hosed because they think they're fit when they're actually not very fit. But You know, you take somebody like, you know, like my business partner who's insanely fit from a general perspective.

He's not specialized in any sense. And what we're seeing people are capable of is a lot. I mean, you look at a tour to France cyclist. They could probably hold around five, right around that five watts per kilogram for what I'm asking to be done. Comfortably. If you think about, you know, what people are actually after, I think people are almost a little bit confused on. their actual goal, which sounds kind of weird to say

because people are like, no, I'm not confused about my goal. What are you talking about? But I think, you know, the era of the magazines and stuff, like that's over, but the bodybuilding magazines and stuff

that, you know, I grew up with and seeing a lot of that, seeing, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sessor-Soulone and Hulk Hogan and wrestling and all the stuff and seeing these guys that are massive

and wanting to get muscle like that and even today seeing some influencers and stuff being influenced to kind of go in that direction. But I actually think that while maybe it's not some people's goal to necessarily look like a rock climber because maybe some people think like, oh, that's a little bit, maybe more on the thin side. I want to, you know, maybe have a little more muscle than that to each their own on what you select and what you pick. But when you think about just certain sports, even when someone becomes a specialist at it, there are certain sports that people can be well-rounded almost from the nature of the one sport.

Yeah. And I would say, like, obviously, a high-level rock climber, they're going to spend some time in the gym, too. Like, they're going to have, or they're going to spend time doing, like, you know, pull-ups and various movements that they believe are going to help them scale, whatever it is they're trying to scale. And I think their weight to their strength to weight ratio has got to be high. their V-O-2 max, they need to be in good shape. It's going to be very difficult to do an activity like that. Something like surfing comes to mind, which is maybe, you know, maybe not.

There's probably way different aspects to rock climbing, but surfing just requiring so many different aspects of your balance, your coordination, just strength like through swimming and getting out there and even the effort that it takes to do some of these activities. So you kind of get a lot of bang for your buck, I think maybe sometimes what we're forgetting is that there is a certain skill to lifting, there's certain skill to strength, but it's not a skill that's really related to other things in general all that well. And that's something you might want to just consider.

Like instead of just deadlifting a bar all the time, maybe you pick up a sandbag. Or maybe, you know, you find different activities. Maybe you do farmers carries. Maybe you do things that are quote unquote more functional. Maybe there's skill sets that you can learn and bring out into. you know, whatever it is you're doing in your day to day. Yeah, we can pigeonhole ourselves pretty quickly, but I would just with what you just said, it's make what you're doing complement your life in the aspect that it's not limiting you

from other things. So if you're lifting so much that you can't walk around, like, you know what I mean? I did that for many years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I know. I remember when I met you. Like, you know, going up a flight of stairs, like, you know, that, that cooks you out. Like, you know, and, you know, it's, everything has costs and, and, you know, it's, you weigh it out.

You know, you try to see, like, what is your actual goal. But again, I took back to be people being a little confused. I think that maybe people don't know about a lot of the stuff that you're sharing here today. No. I think that's the problem. Most people don't. They don't know, like, they would love to have the ability to go play. a pickup game of basketball, but they haven't thought about it in a long time because the last

time they did it, they tore up their ankle. Yeah, and I mean, I realize that they tore up their ankle because they're not in good shape. Yeah. You know, I mean, I don't, I love to train. Like, I love the whole process of it. However, I'm doing it so that like when I do go out in the water and I'm surfing or I'm foiling or I'm doing the activities that I actually love, that those aren't burdened at all. And that, you know, I mean, that's something that like, you know.

That's well said. Well, somebody like Laird, you know, like I grew up, like Laird and I have spent a lot of time together. That is the, that is his existence. That is what his existence is about. And everything revolves around his and Gabby's life. Both of them are like this. It's like the training, everything complements his ability,

their ability to do what it is they do and how they live their life. And it's an incredibly functional way of doing things. You know, and that's why he created the pool training that he did was he wanted to be able to, you know, show up at 80 foot waves and not be compromised. Yeah, what is that about? Like, you're training at the bottom of pool and like doing exercise. It's not just the bottom of the pool.

It's really like, hey, it's a, I think, you know, XPT is extreme. you know, basically pool training, but it's a way of challenging you in the water that forces you to make some real fast changes to become efficient for where you're at. So you either meet yourself where you're at or you will be brought upon what it's going to feel like to be to drown quickly. I've seen big wave surfers, free divers, boxers, you name it, come into that pool thinking they were good in the water or going to be okay and quite literally throw dumbbells and come up like they were going to drown. And they were nowhere near drowning.

It's just that's where the fear mechanism kind of gets involved when you stress somebody in a new environment. And that's essentially what Laird was trying to create for himself was an environment that would stress him in a way that he could. show up in big surf and it wasn't as necessarily as stressful per se that's pretty it's pretty crazy because you know you think about like what we've been talking about we've been talking about you know nasal breathing and it's nice when you're not in the water you're not submerged yeah you have the option to pick how you want to breathe but in this case we're talking about like holding your breath yeah well it's

think about it like you know you're doing repeated efforts or doing efforts with you know largely you know most of the time you've got a dumbbell or dumbbells in your hand and you're you're you're needing to repeat something and find a breath cycle that's going to work with that. You know, if you're bouncing off at the bottom of a pool with dumbbells and you're going up and down and up and down, well, you've got weights in your hands. So you're counterweighting yourself in a pool where you're almost, you know, weight less to a large degree, but now you've got weight. So now you're jumping.

So now you're exerting energy. So now your rate, your rate of energy demand goes up. So energy systems change. So now you're getting one break. breath going down, getting one breath going down. So how much can you handle? How much weight can you handle? How can you know?

And it's like you're doing that for repeated efforts, 20, 30, 40 reps, 50 reps. So it gets you into this place where you have to learn how to calm down in a place that's telling you not to calm down. And this must be some CO2 tolerance training as well, right? Yeah. And I, and I, you know, I mean, CO2 tolerance is, is, is, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I'm not necessarily convinced that CO2 tolerance is actually the thing. I think it's really a nervous system thing.

You know, when the nervous system calms down, our relationship to CO2 changes immediately, right? So if I've got low HRV, I'm going to have a pretty fast, high response to CO2. If I've got a really high HRV, I'm going to have a much more non-reactive response to that CO2. And that's what we see with breathing, especially where I'm going to be. respiration rates when we when we monitor clients who have lower HRV versus higher HRV like you see the respiration rates that are higher and lower and although this stuff isn't exactly spot on accurate the inaccuracies of it are consistent across the board so that we can

see the changes that are happening and so we see these things with people and then you know and we have breath assessments things like breath holds or exhale assessments that tell us where people can't hide you know like can tell me like we'll do an emotional self-assessed questionnaire where people I've got a lot of people who really think they score high on an emotional assessment and then quite literally we'll do one of these assessments and they score physiologically like stressed out of their fucking mind and it's like yeah I'm low stress man I was yeah I'm not you know I'm not stressed out and it's like so we see this disconnect and I'm not saying that people are lying I think people have largely convinced themselves that they live

in a world that, you know. So you have a survey that's like a question, a bunch of questions basically, right? And then you actually physically test somebody and you're saying that those two things can be quite different. Very. Yeah. So I've got, we've got a Harvard, you know, backed emotion, self assessment, emotional assessment. Somebody will take.

We have that scoring system that people score on. And then we have a breathing assessment. where we know how the nervous system is responding to CO2. And we've seen not just through our own data, but research and people who've gone through things that the more reactive we are, the more anxious we get, the less of a,

the higher our responses to CO2. So you panic soon, right? So think just the easiest way to think of this is like, if you think of a free diver, you think of somebody who can hold their breath for a long time, they're pretty calm people. They're pretty chill, right? Because they can, and that's part of that aspect.

And people who can't hold their breath very long are pretty reactive to things. That's how the nervous system is responding to things. So we've got this screen, then we've got a metabolic screen where we run them through a stepped-up test that's kind of like the 20-minute assessment. It's a little bit different. I look at varying levels from absolutely nothing in terms of work, like really low-level level. of work to, hey, can you push your V-O-2 max? Can we see that? And this takes place over like a 30-minute period. It's a real long, slow process, but it tells me a significant amount about how people are functioning from a stress perspective globally, right? Have you seen the breath hold type of work

and some of the nasal breathing stuff? Have you seen that change people's personality? I don't think that that necessarily changes people's personality. What I think that does is it gives people an opportunity to change their person. It gives them the opportunity to look at their personality and see how to. Look, you aren't going to hold your breath longer by being more of an asshole. Just in a very simple way to put that. You're going to learn to calm down and chill out and not be as reactive, which is going to, you have to do that work. right i don't i i think breath hold work is probably the easiest way to get into more of the

meditative state type stuff um that was done like do you recommend someone start like some let's just say someone's fairly fit fairly healthy they can pass some of the tests that we've already talked about um do you think a good place for people to start with some breath holds would just be while they're sitting or yeah or walking yeah i think i think spending some time each day. Any individual who's not done something like this could, my suggestion is breath hold work to start with. An easy way of doing that is just doing breath hold tables. So you could start with something as easy as just doing one minute of easy breathing and then holding your breath until you get your first strong urge to breathe and repeating that for seven

different breath holds right getting used to something like that and there's way more advanced stuff like erwan lecora does some really cool stuff with this stuff yeah he's yeah he's really gotten like and i and i to be honest like i think he's really in that like he's figured that space out like and that and he's got some good stuff with that um he's got a lot of different tools for that um But that is quite literally going to teach you more about your nervous system than anything. But I don't see anything changing the nervous system more in allowing it to change than getting appropriately fit, not just kind of I can go really hard fit or I can just go really long fit. It's like that really in between.

Can I push real work and can I remain aerobically efficient at that? And you will see that there is a very dynamic crossover with some of that breath hold work and that ability to do that. Do you have a preference on the style of training that you like the best for yourself? Like what you're like kind of pumped because most of the day is just going to be kind of walking or you get excited by, you know, certain interval training or weight training? Everything. Everything really like, I mean, it'll probably be overwhelming. and maybe not overwhelming, but it'll probably bother. It'll seem like a lot to people, but this was never my goal, was just to do as much as I possibly could.

But I mean, my day starts basically with like some mobility and some breathing exercises that I'm doing. And then it quite literally is an hour or more walking. And then I am working for a little bit, a little stint, and then I train. And based on how I feel after that walking. And then the days I run, I typically won't walk in that, I'll run that morning.

Because it just... Covered a lot of ground. You're good, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I will then get back to work after I do that first real training session. Eat obviously and train. And then I will do another training session in the afternoon. And then it's get back to work, work for a while.

And then in the evening, I'm typically doing breath hold work, where I'm quite, literally getting back into that downreg state and testing where my nervous system is at. I know exactly where I'm at based on where my breath holds are at. And people will learn that if they spend enough time with stuff like that. Where can people find it? Where can they learn more about you? They could go to shiftadap.com or shift adapt on Instagram. I'm not really on the social media much at all.

I just post for the couple black and white videos here and there. Yeah, just a few black and whites. We're just, I'm not interested really in social media anymore. I'm just, it's not my world. I'm really invested in what I'm learning and experiencing and helping people that way, although we're using it and helping, you know, through the business, we're driving a lot of that stuff. And then my accounts still pump that or recycle it.

So they could go there too. Strength is never a weakness. This week does never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.