Mark Bell's Power Project - The Minimum Effective Dose of Training (w/Dr. Pat Davidson)

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

Dr. Pat Davidson joins Mark Bell to break down the real science behind volume, load management, genetics, movement, and what it actually takes to build muscle for life. From sprinting and plyometrics to bodybuilding and injury prevention, Pat explains how to train forever without breaking down.Follow Pat Davidson:@dr.patdavidsonhttps://www.drpatdavidson.net/CHAPTERS:00:00 - Intro00:40 - Interview Begins06:39 - Maximize Performance10:55 - Individual Training Outcomes15:58 - Contextual Fitness Concepts20:49 - Training Specificity24:50 - Injury Rates in Sports28:48 - Foot Strike and Biomechanics32:25 - Kind vs Wicked Training Environments38:41 - Principles of a Good Life40:40 - Movement and Functional Training45:53 - Resistance Training and Skeletal Structure52:15 - Ground Continuum Explained56:30 - Understanding Gravity in Fitness59:11 - Exercise Continuum Overview1:05:48 - Blood Work and Health Insights1:08:18 - Flaws in Exercise Classification1:10:24 - Matt's New Fitness Goals1:17:12 - Increasing Range of Motion1:26:00 - Preparing for Bodybuilding Competition1:28:35 - Learning to Flex Lats1:29:50 - Eccentric Overload Techniques1:36:21 - Methylene Blue & Cognitive Benefits1:38:31 - Understanding Hypertrophy1:44:01 - Where to Find Cody1:47:14 - Neck Health and Concerns1:52:54 - Conclusion and Wrap-UpSpecial 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 Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!🧠 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!

If you're old, previously injured, weak, and out of shape, forget it. Actual science, the meta-analyses on volume, tend to show that more volume if there's more growth. The thing that gets everybody in trouble is too much, too soon, too fast. I tell people that are really looking for more range of motion, if you really want to maximize this, throw out your furniture. You could do everything right, and you can still get hurt, because the world isn't perfect. People's exercise selection is far more arbitrary than they would like to admit. They just pick things because they like things. I'm all in on bodybuilding because I want to compete in it.

I need to compete in something or I'll go crazy. Hey, great to have you on the show today. Really appreciate you coming out. And we were just talking a little bit before the show about how sometimes how hard it can be to manage what we're doing just because it's so much fun. You tend to overdo it a little bit. I've been overdoing it for decades here. So I almost don't know any other way. Bodybuilding, strong man.

MMA, doesn't matter what it is. You know, I mean, look, I'm not, I'm not clueless about load management. I'm, you know, I've studied all the stuff from Australia and Tim Gabbitt. I, I have learned from smart people. I have a coach that kind of guides me so I can get out of my own way. That being said, it's still, you know, there's things that are ingrained and I'm a big believer in hard work and, you know, consistent daily effort and things like that. And the answer is always like the opposite of typically what you're currently.

Yeah, or in the middle, right? Somewhere in the middle. I think with all the research and all the information out there would be interesting to learn like what is the minimum effective dose. Like does anybody really know? Because does anyone do so minimal that they would actually know with a minimal effective dose? I mean, maybe sprinting fairly hard once a month is like plenty.

But like who's going to really test that out? I mean, what we have, I think, is in hypertrophy, we have some semblance of a framework on, you know, minimum dose to maximum recoverable volume, stuff like that. But the other qualities of fitness, there's not much in the way of a framework built around those things. Maybe with endurance running, I've never really gotten into that world.

I think they probably have a pretty good idea about mileage and intensities and things like that. But, you know, those are also the two areas where you see people that have had PhDs do a lot of research in the past as well. You know, exercise physiology kind of started off as a bunch of endurance runners that started measuring themselves.

And then we have a bunch of really smart people that have PhDs that also sort of have focused on bodybuilding and hypertrophy. So those kind of like mathematical frameworks for volume and intensity live pretty well in those two worlds. We have nothing like that for sprinting as far as I know.

other than like, you know, kind of things that have been presented by coaches. Charlie Francis and so forth. And there's, I mean, there's a lot of good research in each field, but I think there's always someone that comes along and shows us a different way. You know, how do we know, like, 50 sets of 50 reps is not like superior to 10 sets of 10? Or, you know, it's, I'm not saying that no one's ever done it. I'm not saying that no one's ever done the studies on it, but it's just kind of hard to study. You know, and who wants to do 50 sets of 50 reps?

I mean, that sounds like complete. That's too many reps. It sounds like complete insanity, you know, or even 10 sets of 50 reps or five sets of 50 reps. Well, we kind of know that 50 sets of 50 is probably not a good idea. Right. Probably going to cause rabdo. But also, like, we have some idea that around 30 reps is that upper end for growth.

And, but the 50 sets from a research perspective might not be far off. Right. Like the crazy, like we have all the science-based people now on social media that are, like, terrified of volume and fatigue. Uh-huh. But the actual science, the meta analyses on volume, tend to show that more volume equals more growth. Like, I think the research is showing all the way up to 43 sets a week for muscles

leads to more growth. Now, everyone speculates that there's like this, you know, inverse U-shaped concept. But we haven't seen the downside of that U in the research. So it's kind of a tricky one. but with when it comes to something along the lines of like plyometrics or sprinting like we have some things like in a n SCA textbook on foot contacts and but it's definitely not as clear cut or has measured in a controlled scientific setting some things come down to like the prillipins chart type of thing where it seems like 20 reps or between 20 maybe between 18

and like 30ish reps of something fairly difficult box jump box step uh definitely jumps, a squat bench deadlift. It seems like we have a decent understanding. But what's the understanding of when someone's capable of doing way more than that? Does that bring way more benefit if the person's prepared for it? You always see it on the actual scatter plots of data where you've got like the one dot that's like up and away to the right corner. You're like, who is that guy that like handled, you know, 85 sets a week or whatever it was and made this sort of linear progress on that. So I think, though, when we're talking about that, there is some semblance of other

variables that we could probably point to and say, like, hey, if, like, if you talk gender, age, strength levels, things of that nature, previous training history, I would say, like, from a muscle growth perspective, let's say, like, you're an older male that's very strong that's been training for a long time. your volume is probably on the low end of what you can recover from in comparison to a young female that's not strong that has not been training for a while. So there's probably some sort of a, you know, algorithm that we could point to and say this is predictive of your characteristics, your demographic being in this sort of a shoot for most likely volume. but then having some sort of an auto-regulated feedback system of, hey, how's your training going this week? How's your body doing? Your feedback then goes into a score sheet, and then

that modifies your volume. So it becomes more individualized for you based on how it's going for you. I'm happy that you mentioned the auto-regulation and the feedback, because what I was about to actually ask you and get your thoughts on was even the idea of maximizing anything. Because, you know, when we think of athletes or, you know, I think anyone, whenever they take on a new physical endeavor and they're amped up and they're excited, they want to figure out, okay, how can I maximize the flexibility gains from the stretching program I'm going to be doing? How can I maximize hypertrophy from this lifting program I'm going to be doing? And then they get into trying to do as much volume of that thing as they can possibly recover from. Their body sends them these signals of slow the fuck down. Your knees aren't working right. Your shoulders are and kind of iffy. No, I can keep lifting more. Boom, something happens because they were trying to maximize. And it makes me wonder, like, because it's, it's, it's, it's, whenever people talk about training programs or they put these things out, it's like maximize hyperch view with this 12 week hypertrophy program or whatever. And it's like, if we are going to be doing this for a long

time anyway, you're not going to be lifting for the next few weeks only. You're going to be lifting probably an assemblance for the rest of your life. How about we figure out a way and a thought process to gain muscle forever. Not even gain muscle forever, but just make some type of progress forever while not breaking down. Yeah. I mean, look, like if you've been in this and done it,

that's kind of the name of the game is the long game. And the thing that gets everybody in trouble is too much, too soon, too fast. You know, so you're always trying to save yourself from that combo. And so, but then it's also too much, too soon, too fast, and if you're old, even worse. okay, if you have a previous injury history for the tissues that are primarily involved in this

activity, even worse. So now also if you are unfit aerobically and unfit from a muscular strength perspective, even worse. So there's bad, but bad, like I always try to remind people when things aren't going well for them, hey, things can get a lot worse, okay? You know, and if you consider all of the factors you kind of find the things like hey what can help you if because the tendency for people as they get excited they're probably going to do too much too soon too fast for things they're excited about if you are young if you are healthy if you are coming into it sort of either genetically or pre-trained strong and aerobically fit you have a bigger buffer for getting away with too much too soon too fast but if you're old previously injured weak and out of

a shape, forget it. Sometimes hard to tell how to manage some of these things because like, let's say an MMA athlete, let's say they get knocked out in like the third round and you could think, okay, well, their hands were down. Well, were their hands down because they typically have bad technique or they typically have bad technique when they're fatigued or was a guy just completely exhausted. Right. You know, and then you're like, okay, well, you know, what are we going to work?

Maybe we need to work on a little bit of all those things. But it sometimes gets to be hard. And even if we're talking about like back to this 50 reps, not that I'm a proponent of 50 reps, I'm just throwing out weird stuff. But I think it would just depend on like what you wanted to work for. You know, we would say that like it's uncommon for 50 reps to be something that you hear larger people say like,

oh, I did I did sets of 50. Like that's what really worked for me. It seems like the load is not enough maybe for that particular person to maybe make the exact gains that they want. However, we do see on the flip side, sometimes people do in calisthenics, and they develop quite a bit of muscle mass, but maybe not to the hypertrophy of like a bodybuilder. So I think it depends on, you know, what's someone's goal? What do they want to look like? Do they want to look like an MMA athlete that's like a heavyweight that has like long limbs and just is sort of muscular?

Or do they want to look completely jacked and shredded and compact like a pro bodybuilder? you know it's it's i feel almost like i completely answered your question with in terms of like timelines and you know trying to rush the process and because they're involved that was an involved question and this is an involved question as well in terms of like you know uh training style repetition range what you're going to look like how you could perform and and also we we talked a little bit about like a data set and a scatter plot and seeing people hey, here's your trend line, here's what the study is going to publish, which is the mean, the middle response of the average conglomeration of data put together, but then you have these

individuals that are either, you know, low end, high end, whatever. So when I think about the idea of different athletes, different aesthetic outcomes from different training styles, we talked about this a little bit before. So much of the aesthetic is going to be, like your genetic setup and you can have athletes in different sports that look amazing or sometimes you get a guy that's like strong as a bull but just doesn't look that impressive and it could simply be just the ratios of the skeleton underneath the tissue you know where you see this in you know offensive linemen or heavyweight wrestlers where it's just like the dude kind of looks like a grizzly bear but like you don't look they don't look like mr olympia but then it's like

scariest one. That's the guy that literally can rip your arms off and beat you with them or something like that. And it doesn't matter how that guy trains. I always think like if I zoomed out from humans and I made the conversation about like dogs, okay? If I trained a bunch of St. Bernard's

and I was like, hey, we're going to just do calisthenics with them only. Calisthenic only St. Bernard's. And then over here we're going to have the pit bulls and they're going to do I don't know, like power lifting style training. And we think that the St. Bernard's are going to have this lean, ripped look because of the calisthenics only.

And the pit bulls are going to look more like... It's a great comparison, by the way. Yeah, but they're just going to look like pit bulls. And the St. Bernard's are still going to look like St. Bernard's. I could have a leaner St. Bernard. It's still not going to ever be like, wow, that thing is crazy, muscular, nasty looking. So I think... Instead of somebody saying, that's a St. Bernard, they'll say, is that a St. Bernard?

Possibly. But they'll still identify it as the same. Yeah, it's like, where's that thing's barrel and give it a cheeseburger? It's looking a little under, under fed, yeah. But it's easier to point those things out when it's not as personal, you know, but when it comes to people, it's so personal in the way that you look because we're so visual, you know, like our brain is so dominated by the visual cortex. It's 70% of all cortical into connection is visual. so our appraisal system is so biased in the direction of what things look like and then it's also like dealing with other people is such a dominant part of our brain you know we've got so many neurons

that are just devoted to assessing someone's face and making judgments about like what that face means is this a friendly face is this a dangerous face like what is it indicating to me so if we take that out of the picture and we talk about other things. To me, that's where like the silliness of training outcomes from an aesthetic standpoint becomes easier to kind of appreciate or laugh at where, you know, for me growing up, the guy that had the best physique of anybody in my hometown, never lifted away. You know what I mean? Really? Yeah. Yeah, I'm old too. Sorry to take you back to that time, but did that guy do anything physically? Was he, you work with his hands? His, his family did farming, you know, and we had cranberry bogs where I grew up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, but it

so, but this dude looked like he was carved out of stone. And, and see if you can find, um, there's like this, I've been getting this, uh, in my feed, this oil field guy. You guys ever see this guy? No. Uh, it's on Instagram. Maybe you can, maybe you'll be able to find it on YouTube. I'm not sure. But this guy just picks up like weird stuff that you know is like completely ridiculously heavy. Oh, you know the test that people do where they, uh, they flip the water jug upside down. Oh, and they like hold it. Yeah. So he did it with two of them and he took two of them and just like held them like this and they just drained out. It's pretty wild. But yeah, he's got like that kind of farm boy strength that you're talking about there. Yeah. Which I feel like

we always kind of like the conversation spin back to these things like, you know, does the weight room beat, you know, farm strength or old man strength or whatever it is. But, a lot of it I think is just like it's so genetic. I think about the kids when I grew up that were really strong for no reason. I remember, you know, we played mercy a lot, you know, locked hands and that whole thing. Arm wrestle. Yeah. And it was like you knew who was going to beat you. And it wasn't like we were lifting weights when we were seven. Yeah. You know, I agree. I get what you're saying there. But, you know, there's also something where I think aspects of that, that strength can like can be built like you did you've done strong man and you've worked with sandbags right and that's

something like when I started working with sandbags and I lifted weights since I was 13 so it's 20 years now right but when I started lifting sandbags last year I was oddly weak with them because of the position that I had to get my body in to try to lift those things like and it wasn't that I couldn't like even the 150 I found it really difficult I pulled my back once when I was lifting it and I was like getting to this position to lift this tool I've deadlifted it. it's 700-something pounds, but this is difficult. And learning to build that, I felt the transfer to how it is when I grapple with people.

Like I felt the direct difference in core strength, difference in strength in those positions. And that's one thing that makes me kind of think that someone, for example, who is, let's say they've been working as a laborer their whole life and they've become very efficient moving those types of things for long durations, even though, like that, that's,

That's not all genetic, you know what I mean? Like there is a genetic factor, I'm gonna be wrong, but there's a factor in what they're doing on a daily basis. Yeah, you said your friend worked on the farm. Yeah, like even think of like the France and Ghanu who did, I don't know what, I think he was like digging sand. Coal, I think.

It was something wild, but he did that since he was young. And yes, he's genetic freak, but like that labor over years has something to do with like his punching power. You know what I mean? So it makes me think like aspects of these things can be trained. Yeah, look, I think activity and exposure and just stress is good overall. Yeah. You know, a lot of the conversations that pop up, you know, for whatever reason, I follow a lot

of Instagram pages that are like basketball or baseball related and it's always like saying that the guys from the 60s in the NBA were trash and playing against electricians and plumbers and, you know, I'm old enough where, you know, I watched in the 80s and I, you know, shake a fist and I'm like demanding people get off my lawn when I hear that like, you know bird and magic were playing against plumbers but i'm like i think about living way back then you know like growing up a long time ago and no tv no screens you would have had to have lived a life that was probably a lot more physical labor intensive and i'm thinking like will chamberlain must have been an absolute demon to try to deal with yeah like i mean i know his

decathlon numbers were very impressive you know know the guy had like a state high jump record which doesn't surprise me he probably could step over it or something but like his hundred meters was like sub 11 seconds or something like it meant like a 7 3 dude running a sub 11 second 100 that's crazy high jumping super super high and like throwing the shot farther than everybody but all these guys would have been outside live in life doing stuff way more than people nowadays and just that complete sort of gp exposure of life that's being lost now and because you don't have to do those things no they say some similar things about the NFL but they're like oh you know all these guys you know they had

to have a job and they were coming back for World War II I'm like I'd rather face someone that tries to train all day than somebody that went to World War II personally if I could choose I mean they're and they're hitting a lot they're playing like yeah they were just living more rugged lives. Right. And, you know, with... Might have been slower, but I'm sure they're pretty damn resilient. I felt the effects of, like, getting into bodybuilding and having to build up a step count.

Like, that's made a big difference in my body, my ability to move and do things. Like, I never did much aerobic training coming up. Even back when I was doing MMA, like, it wasn't... It was kind of pre-thinking that. It was more, like, train slow, be slow thought process. And so it was like lift, be explode. like everything explosive and I would get fatigued that was really a big problem for me but just for me I I purposely try to be as active as I possibly can like I

have a heavy backpack when I go to work in New York City I have to bike all over the damn city you know it's literally I'm getting like 20,000 steps a day from the combo of being on a bike parking that thing walking places going a lift at different gyms etc but I'm like a nomad out there in a lot of ways and it's made a huge difference with like resiliency ability to just be strong in different ways so I think that's probably a shred of what it was like to live 70 years ago and there I'm still sitting on my phone sometimes scrolling away you know and that wasn't a thing back then I've seen some coaches talking about you know there's

There's like these optimal ways to do things, right? Like I guess if you're to say, like, hey, I'm going to go do a sprint workout. Like if there's no context to the sprint workout, you might say, hey, I want you to do four sprints. It'd be good if, you know, you're warmed up and got yourself ready and do four sprints at about 80 percent, see how you feel and maybe do one or two more at like 85 percent. And that's the workout. You do like six sprints.

And I say, all right, well, how much rest? And you say, just rest as long as you need, you know, just until you feel ready. You can run again. but I didn't share with you that I want to play football, you know, and in football you have to sprint often with like very little breaks or soccer or something like that, right? So now the context changes. And now I need to do something slightly different because I'm not talking about maximal force output and not talking about trying to run as fast as I possibly can. I'm talking about being conditioned to be able to run 20 yards at a pop, 40 yards, 30 yards and so on.

a tight end or something. Well, I think that, you know, you were talking about sandbags being exposed, and this is talking about kind of similar, which is all just contextual fitness. And how fit are you in a point where you're fatigued in a fight? And is it a tactical issue? Is it a technical issue? Or is it a contextual fitness issue? And I think that that is, you know, I love Joel Jameson.

Like, he's done such an amazing job with, like, the aerobics. side of things and I've seen him present a number of times and you know heard him really get into the value of contextual stamina where it's like you have to get like number one you got to build just a basic physiological base and we need these people to have a good VO2 we have to build the you know the chemical buffering side of things et cetera in the different zones of conditioning but then if you're working with a specific athlete that is going to face very specific demands you have to improve their fitness in those specific domains. Like the ability to shoot free throws in the fourth quarter of an NBA game

where you've been in a track meet up and down the court the entire time and now it's pressure and you're fatigued and you're supposed to have fine motor skill displayed right now. If you aren't practicing free throws under that level of fatigue, you're not prepared to shoot free throws under that level of fatigue. If you're not practicing keeping your hands up and the technique involved with being in an MMA fight, 20 minutes in, that many rounds in,

you need to prepare the athlete for exactly what they're going to face. I'm almost reminded of like the old stories of the Bulgarian weightlifting team where they would build the Olympic competition weight room or, you know, the facility in their training hall. Yeah. You know, that way the athlete comes in every morning. They sign the paperwork that you're going to sign the morning the locker room looks like what it's going to look like

so that when the day comes there's nothing that hasn't been done a million times before that is specificity to me like a true coach understand specificity on that level it's not just about like sets and reps it's also about like what is going to be the logistical setup of the day

the order of events the time that you're going to have to sit around and wait and to perform the noise of the venue. You know, NFL teams are smart. They pump in crowd noise. Like, you have to consider these things. Because if you get hit with a stressor that's never been presented to you before, well, we just found a weak link.

There's a bottleneck that has not been dealt with before that is going to limit you right now. Is there, um, are there more injuries than ever right now? Or are we just like hyper focused on injuries in sports? and are there more non-contact injuries than we've ever seen before? Well, I mean, a good friend of mine, Derek Hansen, who's Charlie Francis disciple. He was, you know, assistant coach with Charlie Francis. He's been doing this for a long time,

and he works with the NFL and NBA and NHL and a number of other professional organizations. He, in his spare time, loves to kind of chronicle the number of non-contact soft tissue injuries that are taking place at these major sports. And for sure, there has been like an uptick in things like Achilles, ACL, these traumatic, immediate onset kind of injuries that are taking place. Boom, gone for a year.

Yep. And the reasoning for it is multivariate, like all other complex things. But one of the things that he really tries to point out is lack of consistency and training of the athletes coming into the season. You know, you look at the NFL, the collective bargaining stuff has limited the number of hours that the players can be with coaches leading up to the season. They're kind of with their own, you know, fitness coaches doing who knows what.

You know, you look at the 90s or something like that where those athletes are with their team in the offseason a lot more. They're running more football-specific drills. a lot more. I just saw the Cowboys Netflix documentary and those dudes were partying their asses off. But like you still have Michael Irvin

out there on the training field running consistently every day getting the exposure of those high speed training runs in on the playing surface they're going to be on. Because people pointed everything. They pointed it's the footwear that's changed.

It's the playing surface with the turf that's changed. But I think that the one thing that's not being considered is the exposure of the athlete to the demands that they're going to face on the surface that they're going to play consistently. It's also just really hard and these are big athletes. So like can we really can we can we actually prevent it all? You know, not going to prevent all of it, but maybe we can prevent more of it. It's real tough. I mean, the NBA faced an

onslaught of Achilles things in the playoffs last year. Okay. Like major dudes going down left and right. it's not like these guys are untrained it's not like they're weak it's not like they're aerobically unfit but the the pace of the game has changed you know the speed of every play is accelerated it's similar to baseball okay every pitch is now maxed out every inning every pitch every play it's max speed NBA very similar like you have to have more substitutions now because the pace of the game has increased every play is faster. So when that occurs, you're probably going to see things you've never seen before. Even, you know, NFL, the coverage is tighter than it's ever been. The little details of

every route are more specific and have to be faster with every cut. So it's possible that it's just the elements of the game that have changed over time with evolution that are now a little bit faster, a little bit more forceful, combined with decreased preparatory time in practice. practice and training with coaches that are on the same page with every athlete because you got different athletes coming in with different preparedness from training with different styles. So it's a very hard question to really get to the root of. And then, of course, we're just, we're just biological organisms on a planet and shit happens. You know, I'm not sure if you want to add. Do you want to go more to that stuff? A little bit more on that. You know, you may have

heard of some of the stuff from the guys over at goda you know they talk about you know kind of having that heel out the foot straight um even functional patterns like what are some of your thoughts about some of these training modalities and do you think do you think that these guys have decent conjecture and that some of what they're sharing could be helpful i'm going to first say that i've had bad dealings with people from those camps and i've found them to be fairly abusive and the way that they try to communicate. And so I'm a little biased from the perspective of just like, why are you guys so attacking in nature?

But that being said, I come from an extensive biomechanics background of studying and have learned from very similar kinds of systems of analyzing center of mass of the organism from different planes and having a desire of seeing the organism be able to lateralize. shift and put its center of mass over each foot during foot strike and wanting to see a very clean aligned, you know, lumbot pelvic femoral, tibial calcaneal foot strike hit the ground and like a perfect sort of a super specific especially when someone's running like a hundred meters or something. Yeah. Maybe good luck trying to do that on a football field when it's the fourth

quarter or something. I mean it might be yeah it might be just hard to ask an athlete to do that on a field with cleats and pads and so forth. You know, I mean, I wrote a whole book. My book is called A Coach's Guide to Optimizing Movement, and I go into the weeds on the biomechanics stuff. And if you read it and look through it, you're going to be like, oh, there's a lot of similarities to Gota. There's a lot of similarities to functional patterns

in terms of talking about spiraling movement and the ability to lateralize and coil and all these things. All that being said, like I think that that is a variable in a huge puzzle like a matrix of all of these things and that you can have perfect mechanics flawless you can still get hurt you know load management

huge piece in the puzzle you can have perfect load management you can still get hurt you could hurt yourself because of coordination sometimes you do something that's just kind of goofy and you trip and kind of like mess just you just sort of mess up and you're like well I got myself hurt because I put myself at a bad

position yep I mean you could do everything right and you can still get hurt because the world isn't perfect like things are not simple like we are dealing with complex phenomena that have many influences that are changing like I just picture like this Venn diagram that's constantly overlapping in different ways that's constantly moving and shifting around and different things matter more or less at different times and the context determines all of this stuff and it's changing throughout your lifespan. It's changing throughout your training history.

It's changing on a daily basis, mesocycle basis, annual basis, Olympics. Like, it is not an easy conversation. And the conversation becomes very difficult for me when people try to simplify it and become myopic and aren't considerate of how many things are affecting an organism trying to produce maximal output in a given task at a given time.

Have you heard of, I forgot who coined the term. I read it in a book probably five or six years ago, years ago, but the kind versus wicked training environments. It's like a kind environment is predictable. A gym is a kind environment. You know the movements you're going to do, the loads you're going to do. Everything is predictable and you understand. But a wicked training environment is going to be something like a football game,

an MMA match. Life to an extent when you're moving through different places, et cetera, because there are variables all around you that are totally out of your control that ideally your body is prepared to handle fluidly. You know what I mean? And it's one of those things where an NFL football game or a basketball game is a very wicked training environment. And the goal is to ideally have things that you've set up in these environments where you understand everything to ideally prepare you for that. You know what I mean? But not every variable is understood there. I'm going to go a little off the deep end into one of the areas I love to talk about which is like the micro mimicking the macro and like the fractal nature of all things and from this topic of like

I look at everything as like a million bell curves that exist on different topics that are interacting at different points in time and most of the time things are safe when you're in the middle of the bell curve okay so it's almost like I hear what you're talking about

And the bell curve I'm thinking of is like predictability to chaos. Yeah. Okay. And that's a very common bell curve that I think about is like rigidity to chaos. And in the middle is variability. So I think of you want to exist in the middle of the bell curve because then you can shift in either direction. And if your baseline existence is on one tail of the bell curve, like I'm too. rigid of a human. I live over here and it's very hard for me to be able to get over to deal

with a chaotic state. Okay. Like you can think of this as like, you know, someone that's lived a very rigid existence and then they get thrown into like war chaos and like they cannot cope with it. Okay. On the other hand, if I've got someone that's lived a completely chaotic life, flower child, hippie, dippy, something like that. And they, like, you just got signed up for the military, and it's going to be super rigid, they're not going to be able to deal with that, but someone that somewhere in the middle is able to shift in either direction and can most likely handle one or the other. But you can't live in the middle unless you get exposed to both tails. So to me, it's all about volume, like anything else, like training volume, and how much

volume do I want to have throughout this spectrum? And typically, what I do is there's something in finance called the barbell approach, which is fitting for a bunch of meatheads to talk about. But they say to balance your financial portfolio by having a lot of really high risk, high return things, and then also very low risk, low return things. And don't bother with the middle because if you stack the two ends, it'll make you live in the middle. And if you actually try to live in the middle, it'll probably fail in one direction of the other. So I think it's very hard to pin that middle part down. It's like you need the perfect product and perfect margins and perfect everything for that. Yeah. So I try to deal with this by making training as strict

and apples to apples as I possibly can, knowing that competition is the complete opposite. And so I hope to land the buoy somewhere in the middle. But I want the weight room to be like organized, standardized, every rep very much the same. Like the squat pattern is the perfect squat pattern. And that's what my goal is. And I'll have, I just have to concede to sports being chaos.

and I think the product ends in the middle. What about lifting making somebody on athletic? I think that there's just allocation of time across life. And if you allocate a lot of time to lifting, then you cannot allocate as much time to doing the athletic things. I think that if you just simply maintain and hold on to the athletic things and give them enough volume, you'll probably hold them

but then you don't have as much time to be able to lift and drive that variable super far because if you do take the strength side or the Olympic explosive tendencies and you push those to the genetic ceiling of that organism then you've reduced the time

that could be spent on the other things and just like from a reality perspective if you're training that hard on the muscular output side, you're too fatigued to be able to do the other things. So it's not so much that it completely robs, like just, but it robs from your time and your recovery and your ability

that you could spread out to those other things. And by not doing those things, they go away. What about maybe some of the compression of it, you know, just like lifting heavy and so forth? Well, now we're getting into another like real deep rabbit hole that I've gone into.

I've learned a tremendous, from Bill Hartman and he's been a very strong mentor of mine and his his model is largely based on movement taking place as a result of like compressing one side and it creates expansion in the other direction so you know if I love one of those very simple demos he does where he'll take of like a rubber medical glove he'll fill it with water and hang a little like object off the thumb and he'll say like hey how would I make this thing do a kettlebell swing okay like you have to squeeze it on this end to make the other side come up so he's like you have to squeeze the back compress the back to make movement go in the other direction all right mark you're getting leaner and

leaner but you always enjoy the food you're eating so how you're 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 uh 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, 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, pot, you can have to Good Life Proteins.com and use code power for 20% off any purchases, 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. So it's all kind of like we're going to create movement in a specific direction by compressing

the system on the other side. Okay, even like all movement is ultimately kind of turning based. Contralateral. Yes. And there's a stereotype of how I can compress one side to turn to the other direction. So if I take the structures on my left side and I internally rotate them, I'm going to turn to the right. And if I'm able to externally rotate the structures on the right, I'll be able to accept and receive the turn more. And motions that we call like extension and adduction and pronation are all kind of in this internal rotation family.

So when I see a baseball player and they do something like that, they're internally rotating their left body and externally rotating their right body and then they flip to be able to create the opposite turn. You know, so a lot of the way that I think about movement is what way are you trying to turn? And do you have access to the full compression of this side

and the full expansion of the other side? And if you can do that, well, then you can crush a 300-yard drive and go. golf because that's a full turn or you know time it appropriately so that you can throw a jab cross and a hook so when we talk about lifting and like big barbell lifting you know the way that I've heard Bill explain it is you're trying to not rotate as the primary thing okay the way that you're going to get in trouble and miss a lift is turning so you have to do the same thing on both sides of the body at the same time.

And what that typically does to be able to create big sagittal movements is it compresses the back side, the whole front and the whole back at the same time. And the big muscles that do that squeeze the skeleton front to back. And over time, like all things, it's like timing and sequence of adaptation, neurologically, you'll learn how to do this first. so you know you see a new person get on a bench and they're you know doing all kinds of weird stuff and they have to neurologically learn how to not turn first so that boom but then structurally you can make adaptations and so the main adaptation he's talking about is literally kind of the

big picture compression of the axial skeleton front to back and back to front and squeezing it and pushing it wider laterally like if I was to take a rib like that really Simmons talked about a lot and he would talk about, and he'd take like a broom. He just like would do the wack wackiest things, but he'd take a broom and he'd stick it like in his oblique and he'd like shoot it across the room by like flexing his stomach. And he was basically saying that that's kind of how you want to flex and hold your position when you're doing like a squat. I mean, it's you're not going to turn. Like if you take a rib cage, it's normally going to be shaped kind of like a barrel. Okay. And if I keep squeezing it front to back, it's going to be

shape more and more like a two by four and a barrel can roll and turn like a rocking horse bottom if i keep flattening that out it's not going to be able to turn very well and so you watch bodybuilders or powerlifters or wrestlers go to run and it usually looks like that right and they might be flexible like hey this guy can do the splits he can do what we saw with juji mufu i put him on treadmill and he you know he had a difficult time uh he had a difficult time running fairly fast But he doesn't ever sprint, so it's no surprise. He's not used to it. Right.

But it's that fluidity of turning that kind of gets lost. And he's really mobile in a lot of different areas doing splits and all kinds of stuff. Yep. So I think that it's the difference between just range of motion and then motor pattern expression of throwing, running, cutting, you know, just the ability to try to turn. and if your goals are turning related and all you do is really heavy strength training in the saginal plane, I think that the adaptations over time are going to change the overall skeletal shape and reduce the turning capability. And to me, that's like the real critical conversation that I would like to see get measured by scientists. Because we're,

We're really accepting of the idea that resistance training is going to change the shape of your muscles, but we're not having the conversation on what happens to the shape of your skeleton as much. That's a big part of functional patterns is that's what they believe through their system. That's what they believe through their system that they can change some of the structure of the bones, shifting of the bones. You know, it's a, I think it's a difficult conversation because I'm a very skeptical person. very science oriented, empirical. I respect how difficult it is for science to come to conclusions. Do you think for, let's just say you and I, right?

Like we got some muscle tissue in the chest and stuff. And obviously, you know, you spent a lot of time lifting, right? Do you think that our skeletal structure would show that we're pulled forward that be more of our muscular structure? I think that's a very skeletal-based thing. Okay. Like if you push someone's skeleton, like if you, you Leonitis Persian kick

somebody, what happens is he's compressing their anterior thorax and when that happens you internally orient the structures if you turn that guy around and kick them into the well in the back you'd push them like this

okay if you double Leonitis kicked them at the same time he'd have invisible lat syndrome is what would happen you would and had just widen out this way but for bodybuilding that's a good shape for powerlifting i mean if you look at lifting you do think you can kind of move those structures around a bit i think it's an adaptation that takes place over time but there's not a lot of not a lot of research in that area you think there's none there's none

in terms of the uh the change in axial skeleton shape over time with chronic high intensity resistance training. Now my my question based in reality is this. It's research would be great because that that's it's good for us to have papers that say this happens. But the thing is my curiosity is like being rational and seeing as much as we have with athletes who have taken that to be their focus and the way these athletes move. If somebody has a goal of trying to build muscle and trying to move, they should probably take an approach that does have a level of resistance training but includes things that will keep their movement integrity, right? Because I mean, I think all of us three here, like, we see it with people. And it's good to have papers that prove it, but when

you see it, it just shows that you kind of want to adjust the approach if your goal is to maintain a level of good movement integrity. So I feel like people don't really know what my shtick is. You know what I mean? And you're getting into the meat and potatoes of it. I love meat and potatoes. I mean, if they don't, like, this is a big meat and potatoes table.

You know what I mean? There's no impossible burgers flying around here. But that's the question that's driven me crazy. Because I have always wanted you know, I grew up in a time like you know, as a kid I didn't really watch that many cartoons, but

I watched like old NFL films videos and wait what I love I love all that shit like grown like you know what the Jim Marshall and the purple people it has come out on this freezing Minnesota John Vesenda I think it is right

that was like grew up with yeah okay okay John Madden leads his grizzled bunch of pirates out for their clash against the Kansas City Chief yeah like the guy was like an epic writer and he had an epic voice yeah and like they were you know

breakthrough cinematography, the whole thing. But, like, you know, I grew up, my grandparents raised me and, like, I didn't get to pick the channels, you know what I mean? Like, I was watching what my grandfather was watching, and he wanted to watch NFL films when, you know, and that's, so that's what we're watching here. But I loved it. And anyways, like, I, you know, seeing those athletes of that time period, you know, the Bo Jackson's where it's like, this is a muscular monster who's also, like, just freakishly

athletic. Like, how do I- He's right here. Rookie card right here. Wow. I don't know if I noticed that in it primed me or what. But, you know, I grew up with the Bash Brothers. Like, I wanted to be a professional baseball player.

And I grew up in Cape Cod in Massachusetts, the Cape Cod League. So as a kid working summer jobs. And the players, they, like, part of their, they have to live with the host family. Bash Brothers, by the way, Jose Canseco and Mark McGuire. Yep. They have to work a summer job. So I would always, you know, I worked at these kind of jobs.

Like it was a tourist place. So we had like, you know, a bumper boat place with batting cages. I worked there. And there'd be Cape leaguers that work there as well. So I'm like a, you know, 14 year old kid with this future major leaguer and we're hanging out at the bumper boats all day. And like this is like a god to me. Okay. And these guys are jacked. And, uh, because you just got to, this is mid 90s stuff. And, um, a couple mullets maybe. Oh, there's Oakley's chewing tobacco. The maybe like bum equipment, uh, like the, the boat neck shirts and fanny packs and just clown pants yep all all the way around like just meathead you stuff and um but these are also like these are the guys that are going to be in the show pretty soon and so my whole like life was and also I grew up watching those ESPN fitness shows too all right like Corey Everson and that kind of thing yeah Keanu was a big influence on me as well as a you know a teenager yeah those girls were hot it's unbelievable hot yeah I don't know why anybody wouldn't have been watching them. How do they not still have those shows on now?

Big fail, you know. I guess Instagram has replaced it. Yeah. But, you know, my whole thing was like, all right, I'm going to, I want to be a pro baseball player. I got to get jacked. You know, I don't want to live in Massachusetts. I want to live in Hawaii with Keanu. So I'm going to do those kinds of workouts.

And it all kind of tracked me towards like get jacked, be. athletic but for me as a kid like having no concept on how to manage these things etc but it's my obsession you know what i mean absolute obsession and then running into these bottlenecks of losing athleticism with trying to peak strength and muscular output and things like that and then trying to learn from like really smart physical therapist really smart movement systems and then i i just have one of these brains where i want to make everything into a spreadsheet and put it into a box and make it make sense for a strength and conditioning system. And so where I arrived at was I created this continuum that I refer to as the ground continuum.

And everything to me is based on this concept. And I define ground as the external world that you interact with and that it comes in two forms. One is the neurological feedback that you get from touching things. And the other one is the external support of the objects that you're interacting with. So the neurological feedback one, I always say, if you've ever been to New York City and you have to ride the subway, like you can spot a tourist real fast. They get in, they try to look at the map of where they're going. The map is useless.

Don't ever bother with that thing. And then the train doors close and it lurches forward and they get thrown around, okay? Because they're not holding on to anything. If you even have one finger on that pole, you're going to be able to balance and deal with it pretty well. Because the neurological feedback of touch and having an appropriate perceptive sense around that. Then just external support is fairly obvious.

So sports exist on this continuum for me. And there's extremely low ground sports, extremely high ground sports. The most extremely low ground sports are like Olympic diving, figure skating, half-pipe skateboarding. Those are three classic. examples. The other side would be powerlifting, interior line play and football. Really classic examples. High ground, low ground. So, wait, question. Maybe I'm just not getting this. What makes it

high ground and low ground? Because I was trying to understand the similarities between those and these is, is it, yeah, what makes a high ground and low ground? Well, diving is the least amount of matter that you're interacting with while you're performing the sport. I see. Okay. And power lifting is probably the most amount of matter that you can interact with the least amount of movement you can do almost now you can have professional athletes on both ends of these spectrums and they couldn't be more opposite from each other

people get into these arguments over what's athletic and I'm like for what for what for what and so that which makes you a great low ground athlete is the ability to turn and tumble through space and that which makes you a great high ground athlete is your ability to prevent yourself from being turned and tumbled by external forces. Quick question, would gymnastics be low ground?

Most sports have times where they are high ground and times where they are low ground and the ratios determine where it fares. But you're not doing well in gymnastics unless you can turn and tumble. So I would put it at the low ground end but you have to be able to produce enough force off of a you know a vault or other things to be able to set yourself up so there's moments

of ground okay okay and then removal of ground but the differences are what I find interesting at the extremes what an interesting concept because now I'm thinking about it you got my head about ready to explode because I'm thinking of all the different surfaces yeah versus gymnastics versus basketball versus football versus hockey versus tennis and then tennis they even play on different Sports like it's fucking crazy. I've never heard anybody explain it that way. And the surfaces, I actually categorize the surfaces on degree of deformability. So the less deformable beach volleyball or something. Yes, it's the more deformable the matter that you're interacting with, the lower the ground. And vice versa if it's not deformable at all. So if I take the best high ground athletes and I ask them to do the low ground activity, he'd probably die, okay, and vice versa. If I take Tony Hawk in his prime, and I ask him to play one play in the NFL at left guard,

it's not going to go well for him. It's going to be in the hospital at the very least. If I ask a left guard in the NFL to enter the half pipe in the X games, probably going to die. He's going to go to the hospital at the very least, okay? So the demands and the differences are extreme. I've heard James Smith explain something somewhere. You know James Smith.

thinker. Yeah. And he explained this as far as like mental toughness goes. And I thought it was a really amazing thing that he mentioned. He basically said, you know, take someone like Bones Jones, right, put him in the octagon. He's comfortable there, right? Yep. Take a Navy seal that's used to special operations and they go out in the middle of the night and they have night vision and they drop them out of the helicopter and they're used to that. I'm not scared. Switch those two guys around. Right. Yeah. You have the Navy SEAL guy. Now, each guy might be more comfortable, because they're used to combat period than your average person,

but they're still probably to be scared of shit because they don't have this. It may not have the skill set for that. And these are the conversations that drive me crazy and like where I have had problems with like some of the Gota guys in the past

is I'm like, you're only looking at a sliver of athleticism. Okay, you're looking at what allows like the athletes that you like and watch to be able to turn and tumble and express these motions in open space. But that doesn't mean that the best power lifters in the world

aren't athletes. Okay. And they're prepared for their sport through the methods that have been found there. Or an Olympic lifter. I mean, powerlifting, you know, it can be restrictive. There are power lifters that are that can extend beyond just powerlifting and do other things. But a lot of times power lifters are good at bench squat and deadlift and they're not usually amazing at a lot of other things. An Olympic lifter is a little bit different of an animal because sometimes they are crazy with like box jumps or. someone like a shot putter comes to mind. They're great at Olympic lifts. They're crazy strong in the gym.

And then I've seen, I've seen personally, I've seen Olympic level shot putters jump up onto a reverse hyper machine. Yeah, I mean. Which is pretty high, you know, and they weigh 330 pounds. You're like, what the hell? What is this guy? I mean, I want to finish the ground thing, but I think that it's the main variable of all variables is gravity.

Okay, and your ability to deal with the constant and ever-present pull of that force. Okay. And now what are we trying to do against it? Okay. Am I trying to move through space in open space? Or am I trying to not be manipulated in closed confines with other forces pushing on me in various ways? And to me, that is the zoomed out big picture of space. is how much of that is relevant to what's happening for you right now.

And I try to classify exercise along the same continuum. So if I just take the squat pattern, as a for instance, the squat lives on a full spectrum of ground. And on one extreme end of the highest ground squats, I've got hack squat, pendulum squat, leg press. They're completely supported, and there's a tremendous amount of feedback from touching things. with your whole body.

I can shift down that spectrum to a Smith machine. It's less feedback in terms of touching things with your body, but it's still on a track. I can shift it down and I can go to a free weight squat. Or I could split squat in a machine, okay? I can continue to go down and I can make it a squat, a free weight squat with shifting my body mass into the frontal plane, where now all of a sudden,

now all of a sudden I take the axial skeleton and I lateralize it so I've got nose over sternum over belly button over zipper over one foot there's much less ground the other foot is really not part of the anti-gravity process as much at that point even just a two-footed squat versus a split squat like I literally take some of my foot and bring it off the ground it's less ground there's so I go all the way to the extreme end of like a lateral stance frontal plane squat with free weights as the lowest ground

squat motor pattern that I can do. Similar to that. I have very specific mechanical considerations and like if we have time I bring you through it and you'd be like

that's not a Cossack. This is a different thing and like my adductor feels like it's going to rip off the bone but it's the thought process is that. Yeah it lives over here. It's still the same motor pattern.

But the characteristics that would allow you to do that well are not the same characteristics that would allow you to hack squat eight plates per side. Okay? And the adaptations are going to be different. So the adaptations to the highest ground squats will improve your ability to grow tissue and reduce your ability to turn and tumble.

And the adaptations that take place on the extreme low ground end are probably ideal for being able to, allow you to manipulate your own body through space with motor control and be able to spin really fast in one direction or the other. And I have that same exact paradigm for every motor pattern that's trainable. So pushing, pulling, hinging, squatting, uh, plyometric activities, triple extension, throwing med balls, changing directions, et cetera. And the sequence of introduction is if you're a new person coming to train, we always start with the high ground version of everything because it's the easiest one to execute and then depending upon your

needs like I'm still old school like I still think of program design step one needs analysis and now I just superimposed this ground concept what level of ground do you need to reach from a motor coordination competency standpoint and I would just strategically strip away ground to land you into the exercise that matches with your sport slash your goals for ground needs. And then I would allocate training volume to different, you know, shoots of this for different sports. So soccer athletes would get some percentage that matches their exact needs, but then they would also receive kind of a barbell approach as well on the other extremes. So if you want it all kind of, you want to be strong and be able to move,

with proficiency than you do a lot of what you're mentioning and you do a lot of what you're mentioning you practice a lot of it you sprint and so forth and I know like more recently you got in a bodybuilding you said you you have discontinued doing some of those things because of body weight and so forth but I would say that is kind of how you can have the best of all the world is to brush up against all these different concepts you're talking about I don't personally have the motor coordination and competency to do a lot of the lower ground variations of motor patterns. I can't competently squat

in those areas and they're probably not conducive towards pushing me towards the goals that I have so I could... So you're not covering all of it. I mean, it's impossible for most athletes to really cover all the ground that we're talking about.

Also, what we're looking at here is that's just a straight ahead run. Right. That's not like a real... That's not as low ground as other drills can get. We could say fairly, we could say anyone could do what you're doing.

You're moving fast and it looks good, but anyone can basically hit an 80% sprint. Right. Yeah, and that doesn't mean that I'm going to be any good at some sort of a unilateral lower body exercise, which I can tell you right now I'm bad at. You know, it's like, but I'm also trying to compete in bodybuilding. Yeah. And the drills that are going to help me best to grow tissue are probably going to be

the high ground, you know, I want to be in a hack squat. Like, I don't even want to have a barbell squat right now. It's probably not as exactly conducive to just growing quadriceps, you know. You're being real specific with it, I see. Exactly. So I could take all of these other motor patterns. And I do believe in some level of exposure to the different levels, like a sandbag, for instance, when I think about it. Because I don't, I don't, my brain just works on this whole classification system now.

And I think of it as, okay, that is a hinge with a deformable object. So it is lower ground as compared to a barbell by a substantial margin. And your motor competency with that level of ground in the hinge just wasn't there. You just needed exposure to that so that you could adapt in that shoot. Because it's a different, it's specificity. It's just preparedness for a certain type of specificity, and I just want to have a more clear-cut lens for identifying specificity. Because otherwise we're just, see, my thing is I try to point out that people's exercise selection is far more arbitrary than they would like to admit. They just pick things because they like things or somebody that they know like the thing.

I will never go to a doctor ever again about my general health. All they want to do is put you on pills. Really well said there by Dana White. Couldn't agree with them more. A lot of us are trying to get jacked and tan. A lot of us just want to look good, feel good. And a lot of the symptoms that we might acquire as we get older, some of the things that we might have, high cholesterol or these various things,

it's amazing to have somebody looking at your blood work as you're going through the process, as you're trying to become a better athlete, somebody that knows what they're doing, they can look at your cholesterol, they can look at the various markers that you have, and they can kind of see where you're at, and they can help guide you through that. And there's a few aspects too where it's like, yes, I mean, no, no shade to doctors, but a lot of times they do want to just stick you on medication. A lot of times there is supplementation that can help with this. Merrick Health, these patient care coronators are going to also look at the way you're living your lifestyle, because there's a lot of things

you might be doing that if you just adjust that, boom, you could be at the right levels, including working with your testosterone. And there's so many people that I know that are looking for, they're like, hey, should I do that? They're very curious. And they think that testosterone is going to all of a sudden kind of turn them into the Hulk. But that's not really what happens. It can be something that can be really great for your health

because you can just basically live your life a little stronger, just like you were maybe in your 20s and 30s. And this is the last thing to keep in mind, guys. When you get your blood work done at a hospital, they're just looking at like these minimum levels. At Merrick Health, they try to bring you up to ideal levels for everything you're working with. Whereas if you go into a hospital

and you have 300 nanograms per deciliter of test, you're good, bro, even though you're probably feeling like shit. At Merrick Health, they're going to try to figure out what's like things you can do in terms of your lifestyle. And if you're a candidate, potentially TRT. So these are things to pay attention to get you to your best self. And what I love about it is a little bit of the back and forth

that you get with the patient care coordinator. They're dissecting your blood work. It's not like if you just get this email back and it's just like, hey, try these five things. Somebody's actually on the phone with you going over every step and what you should do. Sometimes it's supplementation, sometimes it's TRT,

and sometimes it's simply just some lifestyle habit changes. All right, guys, if you want to get your blood work checked and also get professional help from people who are going to be able to get you towards your best levels, heads Americhhealth.com and use code power project for 10% off

any panel of your choice. And we don't actually have a good classification system for helping with exercise selection, you know? And that's actually what I'm trying to provide for the industry is almost like a drug classification of like, hey, this is a barbiturate, okay, this is anphetamine. You know, what is the actual category that this activity belongs in? And are you prepared for it or not?

based upon previous exposures of classifying exercises. That's an interesting way of wording it too, because like if you think about like alcohol, hey, you want to grab a beer? Sure. Hey, want to go do some shots? Hey, you know, no. Right.

Or maybe like one shot, but like even one shot, if you're not used to it, you're like, I think I'm good. Having a beer, you know, isn't really that big of a deal, right? It's like a lower percentage of alcohol. You drink one glass and you take your time with it and you're good. To me, exercise selection and progression has been the most under the radar poorly executed upon topic in the entire industry.

And it's the literal tool that you're choosing to get the job done. And we actually don't have a good nomenclature or categorical understanding of the tools. And that's been the thing that I think is the problem and the thing that leads to all the arguing is it's an emotional nomenclature that is used operationally by the industry as opposed to more of an objective, clearly defined set of parameters. And there's probably something a little bit wrong with my brain in some ways where I want to, like, I believe very strong. very strongly in documenting things and accurately assessing and categorizing things for more efficient work processes to take place almost like I was building a factory assembly line.

Okay, so I have a question for you. I know you and your new goals specifically come to bodybuilding. So I don't know how long you want to focus on it, how far you want to take it. You've done many athletic things. You've done MMA fights. You've done a lot of sprinting and stuff. So for you, are you doing anything to maintain some of your other capacities that you've had?

Do you care about that right now? Or are you more so I'm diving into this? Later on in the future, when I'm not focused on this, I may try to get some of that back. How are you handling that? I'm all in on bodybuilding because I want to compete in it. Because I need to compete in something. or I'll go crazy. Got you know.

It's like Ahab needs a whale to chase. Like I need something training-wise to compete in. Otherwise, I feel a little bit lost like something's missing. Yeah. And so I'm just trying to execute the full suite of bodybuilding behaviors as I understand them, which is basically diet resistance training. Aerobics, step count, drugs. Okay?

Like, that's kind of it. All right. And that is. Is your goal to be an IFBBPB pro? Yes. I want to be an IFBB pro. And I don't want to just hit being a pro. I want to compete as a pro.

I see. Because I feel like I can do this sport for a while. You know, it doesn't require first step quickness, which is decades lost at this point. You know, like I, all it takes is just training,

dieting, drugs. And I can do that. I can do that at 45. I can probably continue to do that 55. Like, it's, it's straightforward. It's not easy, but nothing's that hard. It's just the consistency of doing it on a regular basis. And you got into this because somebody was like bitching about how hard bodybuilding is, right?

They weren't bitching about it, but I just felt a level of an air coming off of them of like, none of you pee on. A hell of a reason to do bodybuilding, right? I mean. Such a commitment. I'm not ever going to defend my mental health My motivation for things Is probably very twisted When I really kind of dig down

You know this guy doesn't even remember Saying any of this to you Or it doesn't even No no no there's nothing Yeah absolutely You got this thing going I remember shit that people have said from back of the day It still plays up

Yeah they have it next to your mirror Or whatever every morning I've never found anything To be a stronger motivator than spite I haven't I really haven't. Quote. And I think coming from a long stock of Irish genetics,

it's probably a lot of people for a long time motivated by just like a whole fuck you kind of a vibe. You know, I can even see it with my son immediately. It's like he can tell I don't want him to do something. And he literally can't help himself. He's going to do the exact thing. It's great when they look at you and then they do it. You just told them not to do it. And they do a double look at you.

And then they do it. You're like, take a look. But I can literally, I can see the parts of my brain working in his brain in his face while he's about to do a complete fuck you move to me. And it's just like, listen, dude, I know that you're going to do this thing. Like, I know that you can't even help him. You get him with a single leg or double leg? Yeah. I mean, they can, they really, kids will make you all of the things that you were like, I can't imagine somebody doing this.

How could a human ever? No, you quickly get to the place. Oh, I totally get it. But it's, it's, I know from myself, he's not lying. He's not lying. It's like being like, what's the need? What's the drive? Like I want to prove people wrong about me.

You know, that's a big one. Oh, you think you know me. You think you know my limits. You think you know what I'm capable of. You think you can do more than me. You're just another human. I'm, I'm a lot like you. And I know that I have the ability.

psychologically to dig into some ugly places for a long time. I will go in a damn foxhole for years just to show you I can do what you've done and more. And so why? I don't know. I don't know. Like that's like I look at life and life has a lot of fuck you to it. It really does.

Like in New York, I see it every day. Yes. You know? New York. And I accept it. And I'm like, Hey, anything that's going to help me kind of push something. I'm fine with it.

New York City is crazy. It really is. Like it shouldn't work. It doesn't make any sense how it works, but it works. And people are flying around. It's, you can't even imagine how crowded and how packed it can be at times. And there's people like literally like running down.

Like a lot of people are, a lot of people are walking pretty fast, but a lot of people are like literally running to get to different places. And I don't know how it works. I don't know how you get like, don't get knocked down and knocked over more. Like it's just. you know i ride a garbage you didn't they put the garbage like out in the street they just they

tie it up in a bag and they just put it on the street there's no garbage cans there's just bags and you're like all this is going to be gone tomorrow and then it's gone and it's spotless and they start over the next day and you're like how did it get done yeah i don't understand you know i ride a bike around the city to get pretty much everywhere i go and the the the e-bikes that you can get out of the racks they're like 45 pounds and then like i'm anywhere between like 225 and 245 on a regular basis and then I've got a backpack that's about 25 pounds it's like a 300 pound collective thing me on this bike going like 25 miles an hour down like a little alleyway with this much clearance of the mirrors on the trucks next to me and then like someone will just

step out like looking on their phone it's like you're about to get hit by like a modern day night on a horse like and but it somehow doesn't happen or but anyways it's all a whole day full of like fuck you no fuck you and like you still get through your day and uh but it's yeah I got into a sport purely to just be spiteful yeah and then I learned to enjoy the process and I've come to appreciate the behaviors that need to be in place and also the to not do list which is like trying to prevent myself from doing unnecessary things that are going to sap energy and not let me recover to just grow muscle tissue or just lose body fat at a given time.

For people that want to maybe work on their movement or not end up overly stiff from just lifting from having like a hyper focus on bodybuilding or powerlifting, what are some general things that you would recommend for people to kind of stay away from that? Like it's a med ball tosses. Like what are your thoughts? Well, I mean, I coach various people and athletes in different disciplines. And, like, I feel very capable of coaching people that need high-end range of motion and motor coordination and fluidity.

And I'm going to bring them to low ground versions of motor patterns. Okay, so it's not like don't squat. It's what kind of squat are we doing? It's not don't hinge. It's what kind of hinge are we doing? And we're going to sequentially get you to the low ground hinge. And so same thing with throwing. With, hey, a high ground throw with a medicine ball is,

having your back up against the wall and doing a chest throw. Okay? And no one's going to screw that up. Day one, I've seen plenty of people screw up rotational med ball. And sometimes hurt themselves. I'm going to get you there. I'm just going to do it with a very specific process

that is all spelled out. And so I've got the training side covered of where I know what terminal exercises or group of terminal exercises I want to get you to for all of your because it's the same menu for everybody. Okay? It's push, pull, squat, hinge, triple extension, change direction, locomotion, throwing, breathing, core exercises for the pelvis, core exercise for the thorax. It's just where do you need to be groundwise for those things? And the other piece is what we're kind of doing right here, which is relaxing into the ground. So I tell people that are really looking for more range of motion. If you really want to maximize this, throw out. your furniture.

Okay? Like Philip Beach is I think he's either from New Zealand or Australia but he has an amazing system. He's got a PhD and he's I think I've heard the name before. Maybe he's done some stuff

with J.L. Holdsworth, maybe. I don't know if you know J.L. from West Side Barlow. Yeah. I don't know if they have or not but you know, I created this whole taxonomy of exercise and it was largely based off

seeing Philip Beach's work and him creating a taxonomy of positions of rest for humans and other species. So, like, he went and, like, researched kangaroos, for instance and saw their stereotypical or what he calls their archetypical positions of rest. And in the wild, you'll see they all rest in, like, seven different ways. And he created a grading system

of how well each animal can get into its position of rest. And so for humans, he's got, all of these archetypical positions of rest as well. There's like reclining, kneeling, squatting, et cetera. Yeah. And then how well do you rest in those positions? And so, like, Hadi Chupin, for instance, you watch him and he can get into these positions of rest very effectively.

And, you know, Philip Beach talks about like loss of ancient customs as well, like praying, for instance, which really helps you get into positions of kneeling, rest, and like having to drink water out of like ground-based sources like a river or you know taking a shit you know in a hole rather than yeah toilet right yep or like what do you sleep on you know yeah uh the softer the objects that you rest on the less you have to relax the structures of your body to be able to sink into the ground and uh like he was a major influence on me because he his the whole thing is the ground and how much you can let your body relax into the ground. And my whole thing was how much can you prevent your body from relaxing into the ground in different ways? Are you

allowing gravity to inhibit your nervous system in a certain way? Or are you facilitating your nervous system to be able to resist this ever-present drag in different manners? Yeah. I mean, that's one of the reasons why, like, it's like, you can get rid of your furniture or you can just have a practice of, like, doing something on the ground each day. You know what I mean? And building that into, because, like, that will, you'll go between different positions naturally or you'll try to. And over time, you'll be able to get yourself to breathe and not hold your breath while being in those positions. Because a lot of people find that they'll get down there and they'll hold their breath and they, you know what I mean? But gradually, you can get yourself there.

I have a hard time playing hungry, hungry hippos on the ground in Candyland. Like I'm like, oh, I can't find a position. I can't kneel. Like my whole body falls forward. You know? Try to rest on your elbows. Elbows kind of hurt. Like everything sort of, yeah, because the grounds.

But yeah, you do get used to it. And if you just let yourself, you get a tremendous amount of benefit. But it sucks. I'll get in the ground. I'm pouring sweat because I can't relax. You know? And it's so uncomfortable that I'm like, I just want to sit in the recliner again. even though I know that's not going to help me in terms of, you know, mobility, flexibility, et cetera.

And there's your five-year-old, like, sitting on his knees and then his foot's underneath, you know, it's like, it looks like they're going to, like, break their leg somehow. They're, like, doing a puzzle or coloring something. You're like, oh, my God, their foot shouldn't probably be like that. It's also like the exposure time. Right. To doing something. Like, if your whole deal is like, I'm going to do 15 minutes of mobility work a day. You're trying to put out a five-alarm fire with a thimble full of water.

It's just not ever going to get the job done. But if you're just hanging out on the ground and you're spending a couple of hours down there, you know, playing board games or whatever it is, that's enough time of exposure to that concept where it might actually make an impact. Ryan, can you bring up, it's called Autumn Wind. I can look it up on YouTube.

Autumn Wind, may you have to type of in Raider or something. like that but that's some of the stuff that you're talking about the the old NFL films oh yeah there we go you can see the right away that's that profile of John Madden I'm not sure which one it is

but just it's got like the music and the and the voiceover there we go this is stuff he's talking about watching as a kid to this song. The autumn wind is a pirate,

blustering in from sea with a rollicking song he sweeps along, swaggering boisterously. This guy's a damn poet. His face is weather-beaten. He wears a hooded sash with a silver hat about his head and a bristling black mustache.

He growls as he storms the country, a villain big and bold, and the trees all shake and quiver and quake as he robs them of their gold. The autumn win is a raider, pillaging just for fun. He'll knock you round and upside down and laugh when he's conquered and won.

there you have the hairs that's really cool so so what was this a show no it's what it's really weird actually the um there's the sable brothers steve sable uh being one of them the sable brothers basically made the nfl i think i think they made the nfl because they made stuff like this and uh this high level production you know the highest level of cameras that you can imagine at the time and they created NFL films and they just documented all the games and they try to get the they try to do sideline stuff where you know like or not sideline but they try to microphone the players and like all that stuff and having people like that you know just I guess basically making the NFL theatrical got it you know what I mean like making it like that's like pretty dramatic with the music

and showing John Madden coaching and all that stuff it's and again that was kind of my childhood like coming home from school and watching that with my grandfather and he was just a tough old bastard too he like kind of personified i feel like that that whole thing and so yeah i just like growing up with that thought process and just wanting to be an animal at the highest level right for as long as i can remember um you know it sets a tone for your life what do you have to do bodybuilding wise do you know do you know what your like mission is like has in have you competed recently has anyone said hey you got to you know get your waist smaller your legs bigger

yeah I you know I think that I started it at 43 so it's kind of like you know there's limited time here with this whole thing and the feedback I got immediately was like it was kind of like you got an athlete's back okay

I was like what does that even mean it just is like lacking that big lat sweep that you see at the high level where these guys' lats are just like hanging like curtains off the side yeah and so for me it's it's like lat width and arms because it's like the leg development's been there for decades yeah the thickness in terms of like mid back spinal erectors all that stuff it's like that box is checked

so it's it's literally just the most beach meatheady kind of a program that I have to follow now because I followed such a like athletic go muscle program for so long that it's now like all the stuff that everybody trained initially that I didn't. It's very much the opposite of, of, like now I just have like multiple arm days a week. Is your back training like a meme? You know, the modern meme of like guy doing like single arm versus Dorian Yates doing the bent over row with the, you know, the blood and gut style. Like, are you doing like more isolation to try to get the last to grow? I mean, I do both because like in reality, the big muscle that really gives you that width is the Terry's major.

And just anatomically, that thing is going to work better with this sort of like frontal plane pathway, like the Snow Angel pathway. And there's not a lot of machines that are great with that pathway. So I do a lot of cable stuff that's going to be coming this way. And, you know, I feel like that whole world of the single arm stuff, it's just gotten a bad rap because of people that are like trying to be so specific with the, you know, you can. crank the weight up there you know what I mean so I you know I plan on training here too like I'll train hard like I don't know any other way like I'm gonna push it as heavy as I can go and so I mean if I'm doing single arm stuff it's a lot of times it'll be 150 to 200 pounds in a hand and just trying to rip that thing and it can it can look pretty psychotic you know like is it something

you have a hard time connecting or do you not have an issue connecting it's just a matter of like building the size took me a long time to find the connection with training back. Like, really, I feel like almost every couple of weeks, I'm like, oh, I finally figured out how to train back. The thing that's been a big... It takes a long time to even teach someone how to flex their lats. And it's a weird thing because, like, I don't know, like, I think you usually think

of lats being involved in like a row, right? And they are involved in a row, but like if you put your hands on like a table and you just basically just sort of shove your chest up and articulate your elbows kind of down or drive your shoulders away from your ears, then your lats, like, kind of turn on, but it takes a long time to, like, know that, I guess. I, you know, I've always been strong with pulling exercises, you know, I mean, like, years ago doing bent over rows with, you know, three, four plates. And it's like, how could I not have a well-developed back?

Like, you know, if I do a seated cable row, it's the whole stack for, you know, 10, 20 reps or maybe some of that's hitting your erectors, forearms, biceps. I think it was just spread out. exactly like I didn't really know how to just like nail that and I feel like it's it's very recent where I like really can hit it and I will say like I recently started training with the the Voltra I don't know if you've seen that thing the it's a it's like a cable electromagnetic cable yeah and it's cool as hell because you can program it to make the eccentric heavier you can program it to make the stretched part of the movement heavier

So, I mean, I really do shoot for the exercises featuring more load and torque in the stretch. Yeah, so there it is. I've got that thing set so that it is... Oh, that's cool. It's 200 pounds of torque at the bottom of that hack squat. So it's different than a band because a band is usually heavier at the top

and lighter to the bottom. This is adding weight to the actual eccentric. So the two features I've got using in that video is eccentric overload. So I think I was making the eccentric 50 pounds heavier than the concentric. And then it's also set on something called inverse chains.

So it's literally the opposite of chains. So as I'm lowering it, it's getting heavier and heavier and heavier until the bottom is the heaviest and then it starts getting lighter on the way up. That's great that somebody created something like that because, you know, if you think about lifting, you're kind of just wearing out the concentric

and the concentric is like the weakest thing. You got the isometric and the eccentric where the body is a little stronger. Yeah, you know, I think for me, like hamstrings and back have been the two hardest ones. And that thing's really helped me with both of those because, you know, I really like the 45 degree hip extension for train and hamstrings because it's a high ground hinge to me. It's supported. And if I use the Voltra on it, I can make the bottom of the movement heavier. and so it's it's the research on muscle growth is kind of like the stretch position is key but you also want to combine stretch with torque and it's sort of I think exposed why squatting

hinging what's torque torque is load times horizontal distance from the rotation point so uh you know when I'm looking at a bicep exercise for instance I'm always going to pick a preacher curl over a standing bicep curl because as I'm lowering a preacher curl, the weight is horizontally moving away from the elbow as I'm stretching the muscle more. So, you know, as Joe Bennett, hypertrophy coach on Instagram, what he says all the time is muscles don't respond to load, they respond to torque. And so I'm always looking to hit drills that put torque at length. So a squat does that kind of naturally. As you're lowering the weight, the load is over the midfoot and the knees move horizontally

forward and the hips move horizontally backwards relative to midfoot. So as I'm stretching and going down, the torque is increasing because the moving joint is horizontally moving away from the load. A preacher curl does it, but in the opposite thing where the load is moving horizontally away from the rotating joint. And so I'm always like, you know, how do I take a hack squat, which does it naturally, but like create the nuclear version of that, which is like basically what the Voltre does because it's 50 pounds heavier at the bottom than it is at the top. And then the eccentric is 50 pounds heavier the whole way compared to the concentric the whole way. Have you found that to make you like more sore and stuff like that or get away with less sense maybe?

The soreness was crazy. The soreness was crazy. I'd imagine, yeah, the eccentric being heavier. And are you intentionally resisting the eccentric a bit? A bit, but not like, I'm not going crazy with it. I'm not trying to be like five second. Yeah, control. Okay.

As long as it's, and I'll tell you what, it feels like a mastiff trying to pull you on a leash. You know, so if you're not controlled, it points it out immediately, which I love for training clients and athletes, because most of the time they're clueless about it. Yeah. And then all of a sudden they get this dog ripping them off the ground with the trying to hold on the leash. And they're like, whoa, what is that? And it's like, that's your lack of control.

And what are your thoughts on tempo? Like I know there's, it seemed like years ago, people were like, oh, you know, go a little slower on the eccentric and you'll build more muscle mass. But it seems like people have shifted away from some of that. Yeah. And the research has been pretty conclusive where as long as there's any semblance of control, it doesn't really matter. I think, but longer than three seconds in either direction reduces the load or the volume load that would actually accomplish the job. So probably between one second, let's just call one second the fastest that you could control an eccentric and three seconds would be the slowest you'd want to control it. There's no differences in the growth response between those places.

There may be a reason to do an eccentric to maybe build other tissue, maybe connective tissue, maybe from an injury or something like that. I would say that the worse you are in an exercise, the slower you automatically will go in the eccentric. where you're like, ooh, I don't know about this one. Especially if it's like too heavy, like in a squat, right? You're trying to resist because you're like, I don't know if I'm going to make this. So I think it's more just like your subconscious being really smart and like, let's not go too fast on this.

Like, you know, danger blinking red light kind of a thing. But, you know, the exercise is where I'm most confident and most capable. I can usually actually go faster on the eccentric. As long as it's somewhat controlled, it's fine. I think that you could skew towards a little slower, eccentric overall because it's probably going to make you have to use less weight and you'll still get the same results.

So all things being equal, I think load will ultimately increase likelihood of injury or problems over time. And if I can get the same results with less load, I'm probably going to go in that direction. But I think psychologically, it can be so boring and monotonous to like control the

eccentric all the time. I hate doing it personally. Really? It's just boring. You want to just kind of get after it and move the weight around? yeah, I want to let the dogs run. You know, like, and like when I'm hurt, I'm like, oh, I've got to control the E Sunder. Here we go. It's like, and I get great results and I'm like,

why don't I do this all the time? But then I feel good and I'm like, yeah, let's go. So it's, you know, it's trying to control the ego and all those factors is a big part of that conversation. The way that I use methylene blue is very similar to the way that you're using it. I don't use it every day. I think things that push that button to change your mood, you might want to be a little cautious with it.

But in my opinion, and the feelings that I get from Methylene Blue, it does change my mood a little bit. It's a mood enhancer. When I go out and run, I feel like I do have a little bit more endurance. I do feel like I can breathe a little bit better. But that could also be, I've been training very hard as well. So it could be an adaptation to that as well. But as we've had, you know, David Herrera and many other people have come on the show before, they basically just say methylene blue is a electron donor. And it allows the body to utilize energy just more efficiently.

And I don't know if I can feel that per se, but I know that I feel better when I'm running when I'm using methyling blue. Yeah, post sessions of grappling. That's when I usually use. I use it two or three times a week. Post sessions, Jiu-Jitsu, I always feel like I have more energy,

like much more energy than I typically have. Which makes me understand that, you know, if I did want to go for longer sessions, I could. But it also helps me understand that I'm going to be recovering better for my next session the next day, which is a big deal. But yeah, I think that if you guys,

first off, this stuff is great because it's third-party tested. Methylene blue in other sources like the stuff that you'll see on Amazon or like random websites, there's no regulation. So a lot of people have levels of toxicity from the supplement because it's not dosed correctly. And there are other things in that methylene blue.

Again, this is something that is lab made. It's not, you know what I mean? So you got to be careful. And this is why we like using this stuff because we know it's not going to mess us up. You can go on their website. You can go on the transcriptions website. and you can get a report of the third-party tested methylene blue

and double-triple-check it for yourself. In addition to that, they have the canotene, which I have not used that much, but when I have used it pre-workout, I did notice I get a zip from it. It has, I think it has nicotine in it, along with a couple other things to go along with the methylene blue. So do yourselves a favor.

Check out transcriptions. Check out what they got. Strength is never weak this week, this never strength. Catch you guys later. kind of maybe in closing unless you have a few more questions um we did mention hypertrophy in the in the beginning and how you know what are some of the rules of hypertrophy like what are the what are the five or six main rules of hypertrophy if someone uh really wants to focus in on building up a maybe a weak body part or just get jacked in general right so i mean i i think

again i'm gonna i'm gonna reference joe bennett because he's he's such a smart guy like i really think people should pay attention to what that dude's talking about. He talks about like a blender and you're, it's, it's full of ingredients to make a shake. And most people get too worried about one of those variables. And it's like, you know, if you get so caught up in one, it's not going to be that good of the outcome, you know, like you need all of them to really lead to the end result. So I think most of the ingredients that go in there, if we're talking about growing, muscle tissue, we need stimulus, training stimulus. We need calories. We need a macro breakdown that is

helpful within the calories. We need recovery agents like sleep and lifestyle stress. And then, you know, the whole topic of pharmacology can come into that. But if you're trying to grow muscle tissue and you have the most perfect profile of exercises with perfect execution and effort, but your calories are insufficient, no shake, you know, like you have to hit all of these things working together, and they only need to be so good, you know, like, I'm glad you started there because that's, that is a huge, that's like one of the biggest factors. Yeah. You could have the most perfect, like, I, like, I, I would just say you don't need to have perfection of exercise selection or execution for

growth. I mean, just look at what's happened over the time of bodybuilding. There's guys that have perfect technique. There's other guys not so great. There's guys that have done free weights. Other guys that have done. There's a huge swath of potential training avenues. I look at the training side of things as many roads to Rome situation.

So you're just trying to get to Rome. That's the outcome that you're looking for from a training perspective. You could take this one. You could take the Menser Road. You could take the Arnold Road. You could take some other road, the Yates Road. Like there's a million of them to take. I would say that there's probably some easier roads to take.

Okay? Like the nice part is you could always switch it up and go with another one. But you've got to find one that makes sense for you, for your psychology, for your physiology, for your physiology, for your life. There's a lot of factors, but you can rest assured that you can get there

through effort, through load, through sets, through a lot of things training-wise. But best bet is probably some moderate road that works for more people than others. Like there's less obstacles on certain roads. Like three to four sets of

maybe two to three exercises, per body part, something like... Yeah, I think like Mike Isertel does a great job of laying out a framework of like, you know, minimum effective volume up to MRV and like in between things and having a, you know, time for maintenance and a time for, you know, escalating volume. And I think that he's probably going to be a very effective guide for managing connective tissue because to me it's like there's a lot of roads that lead to Rome, but can you get there over and over and over again?

from a training perspective and not destroy your connective tissue and joints in the process. And so that's where, for me, I recommend doing things with more of a high ground exercise perspective. I want more support. I want more neurological feedback. I think that's going to be very helpful orthopedically. I want people to be able to hit their calories as effectively as they possibly can. I think there's a lot of ways to get there. But I think if you're trying to do it with two meals a day and grow, that's going to be really hard. There's a reason most people are going to go at least four meals, but usually five or six meals a day when they're trying to grow. It just, the logistics of getting in that much food is hard to do with smaller numbers of

meals. Sleep, you know, if that's an issue, you've got to address that. For a lot of guys, it's going to be a sleep apnea thing. And if you can help yourself on that front, you're probably going to unlock this thing. So it's like a different factor for different people as the primary roadblock that's preventing you from being able to accomplish the thing. But it's, I think aerobic fitness is another big one.

Like, again, the full suite of bodybuilding behaviors to me, resistance training, step count, aerobic training, lifestyle factors and pharmacology and diet and if you have a clear one of those variables that is an absolute disaster it's going to unravel the whole thing thank you so much for your time they really appreciate it where can people find you well my my instagram's a good spot you know it's kind of got everything linked through there if you go to the the link tree and the bio. It'll take you to all my stuff. I got a bunch of things. Like if we, if we click on that blue link there, you know, you can see I'm about to start a hybrid course with Derek Hansen,

who's, you know, so it's kind of like, I want a Charlie Francis guy to be able to talk about how do we actually do real deal hybrid training. Like if you really want to be someone that runs, jumps, throws, cuts, and is jacked, like let's talk about it and let's give you a really clear cut way to do that. Turn you into a real mutant. Yes. And I'll tell you what, Derek's awesome. Like, he's a great guy to talk to. Then, you know, I've got a bunch of other things I teach seminars. That's like probably my favorite thing. I love, I love getting there in person and really teaching the system, the methodology, the hands-on exercises themselves. So, you know, please people like, contact me. Let's set something up for bringing me to a different place and getting a

chance to teach the seminars that I do. I teach resistance training seminar, resistance patterns, athletic patterns, which is running, jumping, throwing, changing directions. And I teach control patterns, which is assessing people on a table, getting a sense of their body, their skeleton, what is preventing them from moving in a certain way? And what's the exact strategic pathway to unlocking their skeleton? You look at them on a table going back to the relaxing on the ground type of thing? It's a whole two-day seminar. You know what I mean? I really get into. You can assess someone probably pretty good just by watching them like if they lay down and they relax, right? If their feet turn in, the feet turn out, so on, right? You know, I don't, I try to take the subjective

out of it. I see. And I really measure the joints. And I also measure the shape of the rib cage because it's going to give me an idea of the overall bias of your organism. Is that where you start with the rib cage? I will look at your joints. And if you are shifted one way or the other from normal, I want to see why you're shifted. From left to right? No, I mean like hypermobile or hypo mobile. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Cool. You know, because I would say that like structurally people are either, we're all going to be biased towards compression. And then you're more supermodel types that have a rib cage that's the size of like the cardboard on the inside of a paper towel roll, they're going to be biased in the complete opposite direction. And it's two different trajectories of working with skeletons. Because to me, movement is the skeleton. And being able to change the shape and orientation of the skeleton is what changes your menu of available movements. And once you kind of see it and work within that

framework. It's like, why was I doing all the other stuff? But I, you know, I've got a lot of stuff. Like I've taught online semesters that I call exercise science university. So I basically wanted to be able to give people like a complete undergraduate education through just Zoom classes. You know, I've written a few books. I've wrote a couple of like cult classic training books, mass and mass two. And then the biggest work of my life, was a coach's guide to optimizing movement, which is the kind of textbook that goes along with the seminars that I teach.

And you have a podcast? I'm on the men's health strong talk podcast. So Eb and I, we just kind of started up with that, and we're about six or seven episodes deep. But we've got, we've interviewed some. Yeah, Arnold is our last guest. And, you know, we're going to be talking with Sean T. on Monday. and you know we've got a number of other uh pretty cool people that that are lined up and

you know their men's health is supporting it pretty well the frank grillo episode was awesome too like frank grillo he was open about uh you know hollyoo d sounds cool he was i'll tell you what just hanging out with him too that he's the he is the dude very cool he looks shredded too he's in unbelievable shape that's cool yeah i thought it was great how he's like i'm not trying to like playing the NFL and like i'm not trying to lie about what i do yeah thought that was cool but uh yeah you know i i i've got i've got some good good professional things going on and um you know i i personally know that i don't do a great job of of marketing generally you know i i don't really have a good system of that and it's it's more about trying to meet people and um and have

good conversations and you know that's what i was looking for to do here today you know I did a podcast with Gabrielle Lyon a while back. And I remember her being like, you got to get on with Mark Bell. And so when you popped up, and I've learned to speak up for myself, too, like, what do I actually want? And I was like, I want to be on your podcast. And so I got to the point of it. And I said, what's up with your neck? Why is your neck so jacked?

What's going on with that? Yeah. Is there any story of your neck or your neck's just always been big? It's kind of always been like this. Like, uh, but. I think that a lot of it is actually airway based and you know when I teach the control pattern seminars, skeletons and airways go hand in hand and, you know, your jaw and the position of your jaw and the size of it and the orientation of it impacts the airway tremendously. And my mandible

is like not a not a good situation mandible in terms of orientation with the maxilla. It's retract too much and it impedes on the airway and it sets up for breathing restriction i remember going to see a dentist that specializes in airway stuff and he was like you know i got some bad news for you you got an airway about the size of a three-month-old infant and he's like you know compounding that with already large neck like you're going to have to use your neck so much to try to pull air into your body. So I think it's it's not a good situation. You know, I think that it's largely driven through that. Did you end up getting a mouthpiece or something? I do sleep with a mouthpiece and I use mouth tape to try to force nasal breathing. Do you use a CPAP on your nose or no? The CPAP

felt like I was like drowning in my sleep. So it was like just a, it probably need a better CPAP or some kind of more well setups. I just bought one on. I just bought one on. line and like plugged it in and tried to go with it was it the mouth one or was it the nose one i got the mouth one so because like there's there's a nasal seepaps for people um we had a we had someone come on to the show and talk about it but like if you're mouth taping already you can actually connect there be more comfortable and be more comfortable i might i'll give that a shot because you know sleep is just it's huge it's unbelievable like so um i have a mouthpiece but it does a little bit what you're saying like it almost like because it's like it's so strange I don't even know how

this damn thing works but it creates a like suction and then it just like sticks my tongue to the roof of my mouth but then it also will make my teeth kind of pull back at the bottom and I'm like I don't think that's great I do have another I have another mouthpiece that I wear in the morning to try to you know correct that but it's only I wear that for like 10 minutes versus you know wearing this mouthpiece for like eight hours or whatever. tree side of biomechanics, I think, is an area that is poorly understood, but unbelievably powerful in terms of... It's getting better, yeah.

You know, hey, you know, some people move better than others and they can survive different training styles better. And a lot of it could very well be due to their facial structure, jaw structure, airway management situation. And, you know, I get some hard gum and start training the face. I bought that rock gum for my son because I was like, yeah, at a young age,

yeah, he could work on it. You know, I saw, he's like a carbon copy of me. I'm like, I know what your problems are going to be, buddy. So,

you know, let's get you chewing and developing that mandible. Yeah. Thanks again, man. Appreciate it. Thank you guys. I appreciate it. Strength is never weakness.

Weakness never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.