Mark Bell's Power Project - Traditional Strength Training is Broken | Naudi Aguilar vs the Industry

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Naudi Aguilar joins Mark Bell to challenge some of the biggest ideas in the fitness world. From squats and deadlifts to bodybuilding, CrossFit, and modern strength programs, Naudi explains why he believes traditional strength training may be missing the bigger picture.The conversation dives into gait, posture, movement mechanics, and why Naudi thinks improving the way you move can dramatically impact health, performance, and longevity. Mark and Naudi also discuss whether lifting heavy is truly beneficial long-term, the role of addiction in training culture, and how athletes can balance strength with movement quality.They also explore Functional Patterns training, biomechanics, athletic performance, and what it really means to build a body that performs well for life.Follow Naudi AguilarIG: @functionalpatternsIG: @theleverking perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK/TRT/PEPTIDES! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com and use code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off Self-Service Labs and Guided Optimization®.🧠 Methylene Blue: Better Focus, Sleep and Mood 🧠 Use Code POWER10 for 10% off!➢https://troscriptions.com?utm_source=affiliate&ut-m_medium=podcast&ut-m_campaign=MarkBel-I_podcastBest 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎➢https://emr-tek.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast➢ https://www.PowerProject.live➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject

The human brain's development corresponded directly with learning how to walk. I've often asked if atrophy of the brain is the byproduct of the lacking of this force production, this longitudinal lift. I've never seen a single case where I've actually really been able to fix somebody's gate and make it better and it not substantially improve their life. I'll break anybody. I'll break Olympians like nothing. And with very little weight.

Somebody wants to look good. Somebody wants wide shoulders. How much of this stuff can you do? If we enjoy doing some of these things. If I'm going to be completely honest, I just think you're coping. If you say that like me doing dead lifts or doing back squats, that I'm getting something out of it because it's fun, but then you're herniating a disc that I'm just like, objectively speaking, what are you getting? Let's kick it off with this topic right here with, I think some of what you observed over the years is that some people end up or maybe, I don't want to put words in your mouth. You'll be able to say it better than me.

But basically, I think that you observed that some people. end up in compromised position and the beginning of disease is maybe this lack of being able to move well, being able to walk with a good gate. Like we see a lot of people that have diabetes, heart disease, these different things. And usually there's almost like a decay or decline in their ability to be able to like move themselves through space. And I think that's something that you've mentioned before. I've never really heard, I don't think I've heard really anybody else talk about that sort of time. Yeah, you know, like for me, I've found it interesting that the human brain's development corresponded directly with like learning how to walk.

Like the distinguishing factor between humans and upright walking hominids was that before that we were arboreal and we kind of would swing from trees or whatever. I mean, you'd have like some like lemurs and baboons that would stick to the ground or whatever. But I've always often wondered like if human brain function as a general principle, that walking and like sprinting and doing like ballistic motions are what have enabled to keep it uh keep it like functional like i like i think about um like the pressure waves that are associated like what keeps the body upright obviously there's like postural things that you have like you have like uh your transverse

abdominis your diaphragm you have like uh different stabilizers like your pelvic floor that kind of keep you upright in space but really what i've found is it like the quality of leg drive that you maintain obviously keeping all the other aspects of of your body integrated are what actually help you create the lift to then keep your brain kind of in function. I've often asked if like if atrophy of the brain is the byproduct of the lacking of this force production, this longitudinal lift. Like when the body begins to sag and droop with gravity, that the brain now has to work harder

to recruit whatever it has left over to fight against that loss against gravity. Whereas if you can create more lift and you have more propulsion, now the brain doesn't have to work so hard and you get to rely more on your on your mechanical potential and that that enables like you know the process of animalism to take place more more rest and digest physiology to take place so i've i've i've often wondered that and i've from experience i've never i've never seen a single case where i've actually really been able to fix somebody's gate and make it better and it not substantially improve their life it's just uh anytime that functional patterns i'll say that my method doesn't work is when it's not working to actually fix the person's gate

because I'm not getting deep enough into understanding that person's problem. But like recently, it's rare that I ever find somebody that I'm not able to help substantially with their gait. And then that doesn't end up like having multiple types of benefits. Never mind like just a mental, like the physical, but the mental comes along for the ride for sure. With regards to with regards to gate, is this how you kind of came to some of your conclusions on loading the body more horizontally and using cables rather than actually? axial loading from things like a squat or deadlift? You know, it was a pretty intuitive process. I think I watched the video.

I think it was like, it must have been around 20, oh, 2, 20,03. You know who Fader Emilienenko is? Of course. Yeah, so the last emperor, I think is what they call them. So he's a fighter from Ukraine. And I remember watching him like swing kettlebells and like slamming sledgehammers. And there was this one time I saw him like, he's one of the few athletes that I've ever seen use a resistance band correctly when he, when he generated.

force with it. Like you do, I don't know if you ever saw it, but it was doing kind of like a hip toss maneuver and he was grabbing it and like yanking it from the side. And I was like, man, the amount of torque that this guy would get, I was like, it was just unbelievable to watch. And so I had like an epiphany before I even became a trainer. This probably had to have been like around, I'm guessing around 20.03, maybe 20,02 when I watched it. And it stuck with me. And then eventually I became a trainer in about 2005, 2006. And, and I just, I just, I watched it and then finally I started like training. I was around 2007 where I started getting pretty good as a trainer.

And I was like, hey, like, if Fador's moving stuff horizontally, I asked that question. I'm like, if he's moving stuff horizontally, like kettlebells kind of a horizontal motion, even when he would do like kip-ups and whatnot, it's like he would set himself in a horizontal position. And I was like, well, maybe we're training ourselves too much vertically. Maybe there is too much of a vertical orientation to how we train because I still did the same thing. I was like, maybe I do need to start incorporating more like horizontal dynamics. And then after that, I just started like, I used resistance bands a lot at that time because I was more of an in-home trainer. But if I would go to a gym, I spent a good chunk of my time trying to navigate, like, loading the transverse plane because I saw Fador do it.

I spent like functional patterns was really birth from the martial arts, but a lot of it was from like boxing, watching guys like Floyd Mayweather, Juan Manuel Marquez, Julio Cesar Chavez, watching guys like that really, me inform like my worldview on like directional force. So by the time it was around like 20, oh, wait, 2009, I had kind of gotten pretty good with cables. And so to me, like, I just kept following that intuition and I just kept finding that people were getting a lot of benefit. And I've always kept in mind that it's like, you're like you never want to train one thing.

Like I've always understood that it's like if there's three planes of motion, you have to account for the three planes of motion. And that's just what it is. If there's transverse, sagittal and frontal, that they're all. in play when it comes to movement. It's just a matter of like, I was trying to, when you look at a body, it's trying to figure out, okay, which planes, everybody does something fairly well? Even people that are, unless somebody has like cerebral palsy,

they probably don't do too many motions very well. But most people, if they can walk, what I found is that if they can initiate the function of walking, they're doing something correct. And so it just comes down to like filling in the gaps. Do they need more transverse plane in this area? Do they need more frontal plane? Do they need more sagittal plane? Trying to figure that out.

is what becomes a little bit complex. But the idea of training horizontally was just something people didn't like. I remember way back in the day when I would like work with clients. Like when I'd be at the gym, I just noticed that everybody wanted to stay in the sagittal plane with their training. Everything was just sagittal. You do pull-ups. You do like, let's say like the, like the, what do you call it when you're like you're leaning back, like rec declined pull-ups on like the Smith rack.

You see like push-ups taking place there with clients. Like good trainers would do that. They would do planks. Everything was always sagittal. And I just recalled when I was, when I would be a trainer that nobody wanted to traverse the transverse plane. So to me, I was kind of like, well, that happens in reality. So why am I not going to load it? I need to load this.

And I need to find out what the hell is there. And I got lucky. It was a lucky guess. And it worked out pretty well for me. And I kind of just, I've been writing with that ever since. What about things like, I know you kind of get asked, like what's good and bad, you know, almost like, almost like a nutrition person, right? Hey, can I eat apples?

Can I eat grapes? Can I eat chocolate? You could ask a lot of these questions. But what about something like a sled, you know, dragging a sled, something that's, you know, it's behind you and you are pulling it horizontally. Like, do you think that a movement like that has much place in some of the things that you're trying to achieve? You know what's funny, Mark? I remember this is back.

I was working at a corporate gym. and they, I got, what I used to do, the, the guy that was there wound up having like a giant rope. And what I used to do with clients is I would tie that rope. I remember just scuffing up the floor, just ruining the gym. Like, just ruined the carpet in it, but I was like, I don't give a shit. I'm just trying to get more clients here. So what I used to do is I would take the rope and have them, I would be doing like drags. And like, I would do the things that people do on these sleds, but they were like, be grabbing like these rope.

I'd have them grabbing these ropes and then like just drag. a sled and whatnot. So absolutely. I think it's a good form of training. It's just my whole thing is this, that people inherently are operating from a state of imbalance. And anything they do that's not correcting for the imbalance is going to exacerbate whatever is happening with their body. So I'm extremely open-minded about the different types of training that you can do. I'm very open-minded. It's just, when do you do it? And if it's going to cause more imbalance, then it is function, then to me, it's just not worth it. And so I'm an extremist, as you know, Mark.

I go all in with this. And in many instances with the people that we train, because a big part of our demographic is people that come in that are dealing with pain. And if they do anything at all, like even if they go out for a walk, they will feel pain. So they'll be coming to as crippled, like with crutches and whatnot. So when you have somebody coming in like that, you're not left with too many opportunities to have them vary their exercise in those same way that people in the fitness industry would. So just to get a little idea of what I'm talking about with the sled is and what you're mentioning here is a really great point because I've seen people get hurt on the sled before and you're like how can you get hurt on the sled?

Like you're just walking. What were the injuries? Like what are they end of getting hurt with? Well, sometimes they end up like a calf injury or something like that. And they're not even trying to sprint with the sled. But what I wanted to mention is to your point is like some people don't walk very. well to begin with. And now if we're overloading that walking, maybe that's not, maybe that's not the

greatest place to start is all I'm saying. Yeah, absolutely. And the idea is this is ever, I've never seen a body that doesn't orient to a one-sided asymmetry, one-sided rotation, one-sided oscillatory pattern. Like everybody has like a one-side dominance with what they do. And the problem is that as we like, I really, despite not competing in athletics, I played sports really hard. I would play basketball and when like if you play basketball and you're trying to compete with really tall people, the only way to compete at all is by moving as fast as

as possible in the horizontal plane. So I had to learn to develop a lot of quickness to be able to compete at all. These weren't even great basketball players, but even just to compete with anybody, you have to move really quickly. And because of that, I learned to play really hard. And so I exacerbated all these asymmetries on my body. And so now I have a spiral malformation on my body that I now have to undo that has become ossified. So it's one thing, like most people when they think about imbalances on the body, they'll think like, you know, I have this tight muscle here, this other type muscle here, this other tight muscle here. And to me, I think of it not just from a myofascial perspective, like an anatomy trains model, thinking about an entire like integrated web of problems,

but an integrated web of problems where there's a dehydration in fascia, but then also ossification within that fascia that's holding the body back. So essentially, everybody's spiraled and there's something structurally holding them back. So if you just decide to go train and go push yourself, you have to realize that you're working around that imbalance. And some people face the consequences of that at a younger age. I faced it at a younger age in my early 20s. So I was like, okay, I better slow my role and figure this out.

For some people, it may not happen until they're 55, 60 years old. But I've never seen it not take place, even with people that take performance enhancers and all that stuff that are on peptides or morlin uh they do the PRP all my clients that i had way back in the day they were on some of this stuff like way back and like way back when it was like even considered even more experimental and i got to see little by little like the long-term aspects of it so like everybody suffers from the consequences of of that that cast that dehydrated imbalance in the body so to me it's not that like i'm like i said mark i'm really open-minded about training is just i don't like working around that cast because i think that

if we overcome what's in that cast, that thing that's holding us back, that we have probably a lifespan that doubles or triples from where it's at currently. So to me, I just think that the potential benefit, the potential payoff is so big that to me, the risk of losing those types of gains, if I solve that problem, it just isn't worth it for me personally. The people I hate you are listening to you say open-minded and they can't believe it. Mark, you know how many people have hit me up that are fairly prominent and I'll have an engagement with them and they're like, dude, like you're not a fucking asshole at all. Like you're actually super chill. What?

I'm like, yeah, bro, you know what? Never happens. People just don't DM me. They just don't hit me up. Like, Mark, you hit me up. And I was a little bit hardcore because I was like, I didn't want to make peace with the field because it's like, I don't know. I feel like the industry's kind of made it awkward with me because it's like nobody just wanted to have a conversation with me. Like I was open to dialogue 10 years ago with anybody.

I'm like, anybody who wants to come and talk, we can talk shop. We can have a discussion. But 10 years ago, nobody wanted to talk. Everybody was just wanted to just slander me in every way. But yeah, like, I tell people like, if you want to do a bench press, fair enough, the risk, the reward of a bench press, I think there's some there. I think to some degree there's risk. And there's more potential damage that can be involved in it in terms of like disintegration through the body. Hell, even a back squad or deadlift.

if you're let's say like 16 let's say if you're about 18 to 22 years old if you pick a year in your life maybe six months in your life and you want to do them and get like one rep max strength on that for a while then do it but just over a prolonged period it's not going to be a smart thing to do so to me it just comes down to that's i wouldn't never do it i've never gone down that path i think there's a better way of doing it which is why i don't do it but for me that whole idea is that i've always have been open-minded and when people send me things they'll be like like hey nowdy what do you think of this i'll be like there's some contextual utility to that they're like wait what i'm like yeah like you could that that could be you could do something with that however this

guy's getting ahead of himself i people send me this type of shit all the time it's just i what i've learned in life is that sometimes you can't control the reputation that you're going to have like people see you speak they'll make they'll they'll they'll they'll they'll put you into a meme category and they'll be like now he's just a functional movement bro he's against lifting heavy he's against axial loading entirely because he's against the deadlift and he says it the the back squat rather he's he's not very supportive of the back squat so therefore he must be completely against axial loading and that's never been the case if people ask me I'm like no I want axial loading to some degree you want to load the spine in different contexts but it's like how you go about that how

you adapt to the to the loading matters a lot to me so I just realized that people have just put me into a meme. Like, the people have memeified me, but they just, because they're not willing to want to have a conversation. And I think this, Mark, I think that most people understand that I'm nuanced. And if they find out that I'm nuanced, then they have to start taking on what I do and then say, you know what? Like, maybe, maybe he'll have to start admitting that I'm right about more things that I'm wrong about. And then they'll have to start changing if they have that conversation. One of the questions that I sent you in a, in a conversation, and it was something that sparked this conversation here today was, yeah, like how much of this stuff can

you do? You know, like somebody wants to look good. Somebody wants, you know, wide shoulders and a wide back, and they want to train some lats, and they want to, they want to hypertrophy the muscles, and they want to utilize some standard protocols to hypertrophy the muscles. It's like how much of it can you do? I guess it depends greatly individually because we see some bodybuilders that, you know, walk around, they look like they can't wipe their ass. And then you got other bodybuilders that move really well. You had flex wheeler, even on stage, you know, doing

splits and doing a double bicep pose and things like that. So there's some guys that can maybe keep some of their mobility or their athleticism. Then there's also a whole other category of bodybuilding which no one ever thinks about. But it's the drug tested individuals that, you know, maybe they don't

lose as much of their mobility and things like that. But, you know, how much of this stuff can, you know, if we enjoy doing some of these things. Doesn't it make sense for us to still do some of these things? I guess the caveat being like you don't have symptoms. You're not in pain. This is kind of like you start moving into like questioning people's coping mechanisms in life.

Like don't get me wrong. Like I was pain ridden, but I could still train fairly hard and push myself. I had way more muscle than what I do now. I was never like a massive bodybuilder by any stretch, but I had way more muscle than I did now. I just, I asked myself a question at a pretty young age, like, why am I doing what I'm doing? Is it like, am I trying to just impress other people? Like, what's the game? Like, am I, what's the point of this is the question?

I'm, before I was ever a gym guy, I was more somebody who's just like interested in people. I liked watching sports. I was never a gym guy. So I've never been able to identify with these people. But I've had these guys that are a little bit more burly. they're a little bit more muscle bound and they they can't seem to cope without doing any kind of exercise like or they have to do something they have to lift heavy in order to deal with their to deal with their anxieties and I just say like look if that's what you want to do

fair enough it's just like I just feel like you're leaving a lot on the table if you just like if you just regiment yourself to just say like hey this is what I have to do I have to lift weights like this like what does enjoyment really even mean to me like that's the question that I ask like when somebody says, hey, I feel like I'm getting a reward out of this. The question I'm left to ask is I'm like, well, what are you getting out of it? Like if you say that like me doing deadlifts or doing back squats, that I'm getting something out of it because it's fun, but then you're herniating a disc that I'm just like, objectively speaking, what are you getting? To me, I'm a pragmatist in everything that I do, Mark. Everything about me is about being pragmatic.

And I like, I like feeling good. I like feeling like anabolic. I like feeling parasympathetic. To me, that's the idea of feeling good. When I'm in a feel good stage and I'm in, like, I'm in the zone, when I'm sleeping and like, and then I just wake up in the morning and I get all these visuals of different geometric sequences and movements that happen, different ideas for new concepts, that's when I feel good. Like, that's my high. And I think that in general, when people work out, they don't really, I don't know if they

really fully ever experience it to the degree that they, that they could, because they have this crutch, like, exercises this crutch. And they're always just thinking about like trying to get this next high through exercise. So to me, I'm like, I just don't know if I'm ever going to be able to coincide with some of these people. Like if somebody has a fucking massive jawline and a super thick neck, I don't, I think what I'm going to say is in a sound alien to them. And it's, it's archetypical. They're going to just think like he's just a little squirmy little weasled guy who's just super fucking weak. He's a little beta.

Don't listen to him. But on my end, I'm kind of like just thinking like, I don't, I, they just shortchanged him. they kind of fit into a stereotype they fit into a stereotype I don't feel like I do based upon what my culture was I just think it's it's problematic when people kind of just feed into that man so it's like I wish I could explain it better but it's more like it's very self-limiting to say like this is I like I have to work out really hard because I know where that ends like when I see people that work out really really hard that push their bodies to the limit that are more muscle bound

it's rare extremely rare and I've met people like this in person it's very rare that these people don't end up on testosterone by the time that they're like 38, 39, 40 years old, they end up on testosterone. And so to me, like, my biggest thing, Mark, is like, I know that you're into PEDs. You're probably comfortable with it. You found something that you can do for yourself that you're comfortable with in terms of how you approach it. And that's your life.

You live your life the way that you want to. But I like to just go out in the nature. And, like, here in the next few days, like, in a couple weeks, I'm going to go out my van, go drive out into nature, and I'm just going to take bone broth with me. And that's all I'm going to consume. And I'm not going to do anything. I'm going to leave my phone. I'm not going to touch anything.

And so to me, the thrill of life is trying to experience who I am absent of doing shit. Like, I want to know what that is. I want to sit the fuck down and be like, okay, what am I when I'm not talking to anybody? What am I when I'm not eating anything? What am I? What's the point of my existence is what I'm trying to find out? Like, what is there in the absence of activity? So when I think about people that are in the fitness industry, that's so,

far beyond their mindset because for them, their escape is through movement itself. And I think that that's a problem. And they might think that I'm crazy. They might say all these things. But I'll say this, Mark, is that I believe when I find out what's in the essence of sitting there doing nothing, what I think we're going to find is regeneration. What I'm going to find is a level of creativity that enables me to be better than a Bo Jackson.

It enabled me to be faster than a Usain Bolt. It enables me to be operated at a physical capacity that goes beyond anything else. Because when I give myself this space to just sit there and think about movement and think about what's being what I need to solve in my life. And I'm thinking about my biomechanics. That gives me the opportunity to sort out my mechanotransduction so I can change. So that's really that's really it. Like I want one. Let me put it this way, Mark.

I want the same things that you want and I want the same things that most people want in the fitness industry. I want to get super jacked. I want to be super tan. I want to be really fast, really athletic, super strong, jump super fucking high, be able to do a back flip dunk. I want all those things. But I understand that it's like I'm not going to get there if I keep doing the same shit that everybody else ever did.

But then never mind that, like, that came as an afterthought. I didn't come to that conclusion until about five years ago until I started discovering more things about what I was seeing in movement. I didn't come to those conclusions until way later. Prior to that, I just wanted to self-actualize. was my whole thing and I just don't think that most I know that there's people that lift weights and try and self-actualize but the way that I just don't think that you can do dead lifts and back squats and do them continuously and self-actualized there's like a

neurological block that comes with that and if you say that you get enjoyment out of it I just if I'm gonna be completely honest I just fucking think you're coping there's a lot there that I agree with and there's some things that you say in your live in your live talks and you talk a lot about addiction and I I I I know that people listening might be frustrated that I'm agreeing with you on some of these things. But if we're just to peel the layers back a bunch, you know, I started lifting at a very young age. I don't have any problem admitting that I happen to be quite a bit stronger than my friends. I was bigger.

I had two older brothers that like beat the crap out of me. So, you know, that might have made me a little rougher, tougher. They also taught me lifting at a young age. So, you know, right out of the gate, I was a little bit ahead of the curve. And I started to enjoy the comments, you know, the compliments from my brothers, the compliments from my peers, compliments from. And I didn't get those compliments in school because I really struggled in school and had all kinds of issues with learning and things like that. And so I steered away from some of that as a younger person and I got more and more into lifting. But here's an interesting thing for a thought experiment for people is how much do you really enjoy lifting?

like let's say hardcore lifting how much do you really like it uh do you like it so much that you can drive to the gym without cranking some music that just is absolutely blasting your ears off and you you need to get all fired up can you do it without a pre-workout do you love training that much do you love training enough to uh forego staying up and watching another show and go to bed at nine a nine p.m a lot of there are some people that like it that much but most don't like it's You know, there's a truth to it. And the same thing with the whole testosterone thing and getting involved in performance enhancing drugs.

I started taking them when I was 25. Now I'm almost 50. And I've enjoyed a lot of great things off of my powerlifting career. And including being a multi-millionaire, it's helped me with a lot of things. And it also, by developing myself physically and pushing myself physically, it helped me to develop mentally as well. But I also have some issues with just doing one thing at a time.

You know, like just sitting there watching TV. I'm like, oh, I work on my tibs or something. You know, I'm sitting there doing, you know, shit with my toes and all kinds of stuff, which I know is not necessarily a huge problem. But there is a little bit of an issue of just not being able just to completely just downregulate and really just kind of absorb what's around you and really question the fact of how much do I really love?

of what it is I'm doing. And those are some of the questions I had to ask myself more recently because I've been getting into running and I did a little bit of distance running, but I wanted to make sure I didn't get caught in that, in that whole thing. That's an addiction of itself and started getting into sprinting. And now I'm like, you know what, I like sprinting, but I'm not just going to like, I just don't want to run in a straight line. You know, I don't want to just like run in a straight line as fast as I can.

That's a great, that's a nice ability. I'd like to be able to achieve certain things with that. But now how great would it be to develop force and to develop the ability to do ballistic movements with all kinds of other stuff, throwing med balls and doing, you know, just jumping and doing all kinds of different things, playing different sports. So that's kind of where my mind is going towards now. It's like if I think back far enough, when I was a kid and I used to go to my brother's football games, I was on the sidelines chucking the football up in the air all the time.

I was always playing. I was always doing something. I just enjoy movement. So yes, I do love lifting and I'll always love lifting and I'll always, you know, have a certain respect for lifting and other lifters and so on. But if I really boil it down, I actually just love to move. So I just need to occupy myself with certain movements that that don't require me to get all amped up, that don't require me to inject myself with something or don't require me to blast a bunch of music. or take a bunch of pre-workout. Yeah, totally, totally. Like, the whole, for me, like, the whole note, when I was a kid, my parents, I remember they, they, I'm that same kind of guy that gets addicted to things. And I remember when I was about, I think it was like 10 years old. I started playing like Super Nintendo. My parents got us a Super Nintendo.

And I was just playing Street Fighter, just nonstop, just every game that we could. And I would literally be there all day long. And eventually they were like, like the term that always permeated through my childhood was Vizios, vizios. In Spanish, that means addictions, that people have addictions. Like, my parents knew, like, a long time ago that people's addictions, what were, what held them back from being able to find success in life. And so they, they were very unorthodox from the, from the typical Mexican family.

You know what a quinceaniera is, Mark, Bill? Mark? I do not. Sorry. I don't know why I called you the first and last name, Mark. Sorry. I was, I always taught, whenever I'm, wherever I think about it, I'm like, that's Mark Bell. But yeah, anyway, but you've, you know what a Kinzenegra is, right, Mark?

I do not. A Kinzenera is like every time that a 15-year-old Mexican girl turns 15, there's like a big party that everybody has. And everybody throws down money. Like, it costs several thousand dollars to put money together for everybody to have a fucking little festival for that 15-year-old. And as you know, Mexicans, they tend to repopulate pretty rapidly. And so they populate pretty quickly. And so they end up having a lot of quinsanillas. And so I'm like, so my parents would see that.

And they just see people just constantly spending money on this shit. And they're like, well, what's the gain in that? And I remember being a kid, I would just see them. I would observe them mentioning it. And they're like, yeah, I'm not going to waste that money. I'm going to save that money. That's what I'm going to do. They'd see people buying all these like luxurious cars to try and like mask an inferiority

complex that they have because they're Hispanic or whatever. And they're like, well, we don't want to like look like we're lesser than. So we want to buy a car and then built. spend money outside of our means and get lock in like a like a bad credit report pretty much because we're spending money like idiots and so they would be issuing that kind of critique essentially when I was a kid my parents spent a great deal of time looking at people overcompensate and so to me I kind of took that to its logic they would call that out and then as I became an adult I started taking that to its fullest logical conclusion in terms of everything and so when I was young I felt

like they created an existential crisis in me. So between the ages of about like 10, 11, all the way to about like I was like 19 or 20, I was like, dude, I don't even know. There was like a decade in my life where I'm like, I don't even know what I'm doing. I was just, it was, it was a lot to have the process for a kid to be told, told that, you know what, people have addictions and they need to stay away from them. They didn't allow me to live in my addictions for the most part. They're like, no, you're going to go play basketball. You're going to go do something else. Do not sit there and play video games. That's just not what's going to happen.

Aim to get good grades. Aim to be a somebody. Aim to do something with your life. Very unorthodox parents. And so to me, that whole notion of addiction has always been an interesting thing to me. And it's always been, well, I don't know if it was interested in, it was interesting to me. It was just, I was raised with that central theme and overcoming addictions being the thing. My parents didn't know what it meant to eat good or what it meant to eat a healthy diet,

but they did the best that they could. They wouldn't allow, they wouldn't bring this. chips, they wouldn't bring us cupcakes or any of that stuff. Sure, we ate a lot of tortillas and whatnot, but that's what they thought was healthy. So they were like, you know what? Their grains, they're good. Maybe they're good on the digestion or whatever. So they had that intention in mind.

So I was just raised very pragmatically, Mark, and I just think that most people, when they, when most people take on my mindset, it's hard. And I can understand why it's so hard for people to live like that because I don't know. My parents had to find success from a very disadvantaged spot. And if they spent time living like most people did in our culture, they would have never gone anywhere in their life. But they became very successful as a result of being really precise. So to me, it was kind of like, I took life from the approach.

I adopted it in this framework because I got to see them like grow and become very successful. From like literally seven of us living in a travel trailer that was about 100 square feet and a suburban, the old beat up suburban to them having a whatever like a 4,000 square foot house on a huge acre lot. They had multiple investment, real estate investments, all this stuff. And they did very well for themselves. I got to see that whole process. And I got to see that they never skipped steps through that process. So it was a very unusual upbringing that I had.

So I think that maybe I come off as pompous or I come off as dismissive to people when they want to like engage in this stuff. But I just had an upbringing where there wasn't a lot of wiggle room to. find success coming from where you were coming from. Like being a short man in this world, not the easiest thing. Being a short male, like if you want to date and you're a short guy, not easy. And it's not, for me, I don't even give a shit about it. But for the longest time, it's been uncomfortable for me to tell people like, hey, I'm a short man. Like, what does Mike Israel tell have to do?

He can't grow vertically. So what does he have to do? Compensate by building laterally. If you look at what's Jeff Nippert, same thing. It's like these guys all have like this small man complex. And on mine, I never, like, I never did. I'm like, I don't care if I'm small. Like, I want to understand why I do what I do.

And I want to understand why people do what they do. 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.

American 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,

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 things you can do in terms your lifestyle. And if you're a candidate, potentially TRT. So these are things to pay attention to 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 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 to MerrickHealth.com and use code Power Project for 10% off any panel of your choice. So when you come at that, when you come into the fitness industry with that framework,

you're bound to come up with something that's going to be completely different than anything anybody else has ever done because my objectives were just different to begin with. Don't get me wrong. The idea of moving well, was an interesting thing to me, but it wasn't like the central theme to me. For me, it was more like, how do I overcome addictions? How do I not live within an addiction? Because there's this inherent shame that was put upon me from my parents. That was the correct shame.

It was the correct impulse that they put into me. And I got to see them succeed. And I have attained a certain degree of success with it. And I advise for anybody else to think about overcoming their addictive behaviors, finding out what they're dependent on and doing whatever they can to stop. doing whatever that thing is, especially if it's not serving them. I'm sorry if I'm all over the place, Mark. It just, I think in, I think in different ways.

So I apologize. Yeah, when you have, you know, when you have a kid, you never expect them to be a thinker like yourself. My son's a thinker. So it's wild the conversations that he and I get. He's 22, the conversations that we get into are like, damn. Like he's like, hey, do you think it's immoral to bring a child into this world? And I'm like, I'm like, holy crap, this is a really loaded question.

Anyway, what are some of your thoughts on like rope flow and some of the things you're seeing on the internet? I'm, it's like, I guess you can swing them heavier and you could do something. I just see that there's like, I don't want to bad mouth it, bro, but it's just like, I don't see anybody fixing their mechanics doing that type of training. I just don't see it. It's kind of like, yes, you can go through these motions. Can there be some potential, like, let me put it this way. If a body is spiraled in one direction mark, it's not going to get fixed by doing that stuff. It's not, it's like you're not, there's an absence of force production that's in that.

Let's say if you, like, grab a parable and it's heavy and you've got to swing and throw that thing, like there's a force transfer element that exists within that. Whereas if I see something like rope flow, it's novel, I think it's good. I think it's like, it's okay. But for me, in terms of like tiers of what I think is going to be like the end. S-tier stuff, I wouldn't put it on S-tier. I would say it's like mid-to-lower tiers of what I think. Maybe that would be good to do one day.

Just people tell me, hey, naughty, what are the tiers of each one of these exercises? So to me, what I like about it is that there's like multiple dimensions that you're potentiating. I just wonder what you're going to get out of it. Like, what's the net gain that you're going to see from it versus just swinging a mace club versus learning to swing like a parable, for example, like a rope? ball. I just don't know what the net, how much more net gain is going to be there. It looks interesting. It looks like you're doing Poi or whatever. It looks like an interesting form of

training. But I don't know. I've seen it. I've kind of thought about doing it. I had a, I had an intern who did it before. Like this was like back in like 2012, 2013. He was like, he was an intern that I had at my facility in San Diego. And so he was doing it. He had, he had learned it. And I was like, I was like, I just never caught on to me. I saw him doing it. And I was like, Yeah, I don't know. I never, I never got into it. Something, you know, I think when I see your method utilized, like what comes to my mind, this idea of, like, if we said, hey, I just want your shoulders to be, like, rounded forward as much as possible. And I don't want your shoulders to, you know, ever be, like, in line with your hips. And we could say, okay, well, let's just spend a lifetime of just making the pecks really tight and do a lot of bench pressing.

and a lot of motions that keep us here. Maybe you're a collegiate wrestler, so you're kind of always stuck in that posture or that position. So people know that certain sports and certain forces can potentiate the body to get kind of stuck in some of these positions. But with what you have and what you present by utilizing some of these various movements through cables and other forms of loading, I guess you'd say,

for some reason people don't believe it when they when they see you doing these things I'm like well logically it makes sense because he because he's not really it's not that different than somebody like trying to build a bunch of muscle mass and they kind of end up stuck here we know that that can happen and so we even tell people like hey if you're going to like bench often you know you should make sure that you work other areas of your shoulder make sure you work the back of your body not just the front of your body otherwise you're going to end up with these imbalances so people kind of have only seen it as more of a thing on the negative side, but they don't really understand that you can unwind your body with weights if you do it intelligently. Yes, of course. And that's what I always tell people. I think people have like this idea of fixing posture is just like, I'm standing upright with my shoulder blades down and back. And I'm like, that's not necessarily what good posture is.

To me, good posture is just like, like good posture is the result of moving in a certain way. And then the body manifesting those good movements through like a certain like body positioning, a certain kind of muscular skeletal development. And so I just think that people, when they look at what we do, it's like, you know, when you watch Jiu-Jitsu, it doesn't look like much is going on. Just looks like two guys. You're kind of like, that's kind of gay. These guys are like rolling around. Like what the fuck is this, right? Like it doesn't look like anything impressive.

And I think with FP, it's like that. It's like most people are like, you know, this just doesn't look very impressive. It looks really easy from the exterior. Why is that really going to matter? And it's not until somebody comes into the gym and they do it that they get humbled. And they're like, wow, this is way harder than what it appears to be. It looks way more difficult. I remember back in the day, I used to like, and everybody comes to this understanding.

If they've, like, if they've boxed, you know, you watch boxing and you're like, seems, I guess, kind of simple enough. You're kind of just throwing your hands at somebody's face. And then like, that's just what it is. And then one day, if you sparred, you watch yourself spore and you're just like, your jaw, at least for me, when I would watch, I would be like, your jaw drops. And you're like, I look like an absolute imbecile. And it's just as simple. It's just staying here and issuing like small motions.

And you're just like, okay, I'm here, here, here. You'd think it would be the easiest thing to do because it's just boxing. It looks simple. But it's not until you do it until you're in it, that you're like, okay, there's something way more going on with this. I remember a while back I was I was working with the Kyle Dake and like Daryl Christian and they were um they were I think I would understand it more now because I understand wrestling but I remember just watching it and they would just start chopping it up having a conversation about like wrestling positions and whatnot and they would just say like okay so yeah if I get here and then I do this here and then I do this here and I'm just watching it from the exterior going like dude if anybody was to watch this and they let's say they just watched them having a conversation they would just assume this is just bullshit these guys are just just talking bullshit. And the next thing you know, then, like,

Darrell grabs Kyle and then throws him, like, on a fucking suplex or whatever. Just suplexes him out of nowhere. And I'm like, what the, like, what? And then Kyle will be like, oh, I get what you're doing. Then Kyle would grab him and then suplex him. The sickest motions.

The sickest craziest motions. And you just see, like, what the setup is to it. And you're like, that's the most boring shit ever. It's the most boring stuff that you could possibly do. It's the lame as shit.

I don't want to get involved in it. FP is essentially the same thing. And I told people this a long time ago. like that functional patterns is a jiu-jitsu to martial arts that essentially it's it's like people just think that it's simple that it's whatever and that it's that's hyper simplistic that there's not much going on to it going on with it and so they just kind of oversee it and so what i've done is i've said you know what like the gracy's institute had a challenge to other martial arts i institute challenges to people as well and i just say well if you know if it looks that simple

that produced the same kinds of evidence that we do on our page like if you look at our fp evidence page we have thousands of results there we have a backlog of like probably another thousand that we still need to put up there and we just put them up one day one result at a time at some point we'll have to start putting up like seven or eight at a time to be able to keep up but it's like functional pattern it's like when you when you see it it just looks simple it looks stupid the first time i saw jujitsu in the ufc i was like dude this just looks dumb it's just like this little guy hoist gracie grabbing these dudes and then like they just the guys just started doing this and we're like we don't understand it i remember like my my brothers

When we first watched it like the first like UFC one and we read to the video from Blockbuster or whatever the I think it was Hastings or Blockbuster. We watched the video and then of course after you get done watching an event like that what do you end up doing Mark? Oh, you end up going at it. Yeah. So that's it. And so then my brother, my oldest brother gets on my older brother and he starts like pinching him. And he's like and then my brother starts like he started going like, ah, he's like you better tap out,

Brom Hoyce crazy. That was what he thought it was. He was like, I'm going to just pinch your skin and see if that's where it ends up getting you to like tap out. Like, it just looked like nonsense. Like when you looked at Jiu-Jitsu from the exterior, like, yeah, he's kind of punching him, but then he just like chokes him out. This looks like retarded.

This doesn't make any sense. And I think that so often with people that are in this field, they look at FP and they're like, now he's over here swinging. They say, I'm like swinging in circles with the cable machine. They just don't understand it. And I think at some point, I don't know if they'll ever understand it, Mark. I don't know that people, sometimes people ever care to want to understand it. And I don't think it's my responsibility to get everybody to understand it.

I just try to get everybody to understand it that wants to. But yeah, I'll just put it this way. It looks easy. Put yourself in it, though. And like I said, I've never had a single person of whom I've trained that once I got them to learn it, that I wasn't able to break them. Like, I'll break anybody. I'll break Olympians, like nothing. I can break anybody on a, and with very little weight.

Although I do load people up, I have people lift heavy weight. but I can break just about anybody in the training room and it's not because it's like I don't know how to kick somebody's ass When I first became a trainer, trainer mark, you know what I was known for? Beating the fuck out of people. Fucking destroying them.

Like my coworkers, they could not give people as hard of a workout as I could and I would put them through these workouts and I wouldn't injure them and you'd see people just drenched in fucking sweat their muscles, they would feel like they were burning everywhere.

I had one dude he was like, I think he was like, his name was Kai. He was about 55 years old. I put on about like 25 pounds of mass on him in a matter of like three months or like no steroids, anything like that. It was pretty much lean body muscle mass. I put like 25 pounds, blap.

He was fucking super jacked and people were like, yo, what the hell happened there? So I was known for that shit when I first started. Within the first six months of my career, I was known for being that dude that could beat the shit out of people. So breaking a body is fucking easy to me. Can you fix the body? Is the other question. Can you break the body down so then it really,

rebuilds to a better version of what it was on an athletic basis, that's where it takes, that's where, and can you do it for anybody is the other thing too? Can you do that across populations, not just for a small, select few people, but can you do that for 99.9% of the population? That's what I pride myself on. And it's as much as people want to overlook it in this industry, this niche in the industry, that's what's happening. And so I don't think that they're ever going to get it, but unfortunately there are enough

people that I think are. you're working with a lot of people that are underserved that's for sure a lot of people that are in pain people have disease and that's really amazing watch average shows too average shows too like i like i said we work with like it's not like we're always working with broken people like we had a guy that came in yesterday he's a pro basketball player and he's going to come in and get some training and he's not particularly injured i had another dude that came in yesterday he fought in the ufcc a long time ago and he's uh like blackbell jiu jihitsu trained under hickson gracie and he's had injuries But if you look at this guy, I'm like, yo, this guy's a, he's a freaking gorilla.

This guy's fucking just swole, like just super strong. And it's like, yeah, the guy's just like a monster. I was like, I was very impressed by his structure. So I could, we train monsters all the time, too. It's not like we don't like, we don't like train athletes. We can. Like we have, Amir Abdullah, he's been doing an FP. Had a pretty good season this last season.

If he didn't, I think he dealt like with like a short term rib injury on impact. He came back from it, sprung back and had a really good season. one of the highest kickoff return averages in the entire NFL. And so it's, I don't know if this happened by mistake. So we were, I pride myself in being able to enhance everybody. Yeah.

And when I was working with you, when I, you know, I came out there and, and had the opportunity to work with you twice. My wife worked with your, uh, girlfriend as well.

And that was, uh, that was a great setup. That was a great day. And you did kick my ass. But it wasn't, you know, it wasn't crazy because you,

you know, you could have obviously kicked my ass worse. But what's interesting about some of the, The sets that you do is sometimes they could last, you know, a minute, 90 seconds, two minutes, nearly three minutes sometimes. You're like, holy crap. And I don't even really know how many reps we did. It's not like you're sitting there like six, seven, eight, nine, ten. It's like you do a couple reps, but the weight is quite a bit, especially for what we're doing.

And how did you kind of come to this idea of having these sets last so long? Because that's uncommon. That's very uncommon. I didn't come up with it, Mark. What pretty much happens is like you work with somebody and it's like, I had a guy that was like, I mean, this is just, imagine that you're trying to control the body. Like, I don't know if this is like a visual that I had at home with the first day I became a trainer. I was like, I just want to be able to control the body and have the muscles that I want fire to fire when I need them to fire any muscle.

I want to be able to control that for anything. And so I just, when I would cue people, like, and I would say, hey, do you feel this much? muscle working and they say no, I'd be like, well, shit, how do I get that muscle to fire? Well, let me try this. Can you feel it now? No, all right, let me try this. Can you feel it now? No. And then, like, I would just see how the shape of the body would correspond to them not having that sensation. So then eventually, would you just, you put in your, you clock in tens of thousands of hours doing this stuff, working with people, and then thinking about it for tens of thousands of hours and asking like, where did I go wrong? And eventually, will you, you just, you know,

end up at is like having to like get to that place let me put it this way mark to even be able to have you do a set for about three minutes and not have like the wrong parts of your body burn out is a skill in and of itself that i just had to learn but most of it's like i didn't want to have to do that but it's almost like you have to because it's like every every body every human has their nature i don't think there's an intrinsic human nature but i think everybody has a programmed nature to them especially when it comes to their movement and when you get when you challenge them in a way that's unusual to the way that they normally would move, you're going to see that nature come out.

And essentially, what I've learned is that whatever a person is doing physically to overcome a physical stressor is usually what they need to not do in order to find success with their structure. It's almost like, in order for somebody to get neuroplasticity and fascial plasticity,

you have to legitimately get them to do something different. And that could literally quite be like if you have somebody doing abduction and you notice that their hips drift off when they kick their right. Like let's say you have like the pelvis here, right? You have the femur that's like this. And you're training in abduction and you say, okay, what I want you to do is just kick your femur out like that. And every single time they kick the femur out, they kick and then they move their hips that way too. And you're like, well, you're not really doing femoral abduction. They're both moving in the same direction.

So instead what I need you to do is move this this way and then kick up. and when you get them to do that, they begin to feel the firing in the in the in the in the musk of theure. But now that's depending on how the spine like in order to get that feature in their body to lock in that new feature, this new motion from them doing an abduction like this and always kicking their legs sideways to them getting here. You have to think about how you're going to arrange everything else on the body to make to make that thing happen. And so what I find is that people try doing a variance of different movements. They like to do all kinds of different movements.

exercises, but I don't think about it like that. I train the same exercise every single day. You know which one that is, Mark? What do you think it is? I don't know. Gate, walking. I train it every day of my life and I'm trying to find the better way of performing my gate. You see what I mean by that? So the idea is it's not about creating variability when you exercise. It's about trying to do whatever it is that you're doing differently from the way that it was done and trying to add active mechanical drivers to that specific thing. So I guess I'm all over the place. So the idea is that it's like I got to this place of being able to to, I got to this place of doing these chamber sequences or these sets

in a long, in longer terms to try and control for the person doing the exercises in relation to their current nature. I'm trying to change their nature. So let me give you an example. When I worked with Kyle Dake, he was a very defensively oriented wrestler. He always has been, and there's not, there's not much that you can do about that for the most part. When I worked with Kyle, he was flat-footed. He could not move on the balls of his feet. He could in spots, but the moment that he would, his legs would gas out, his hip flexors would gas out, his lower back would begin to seize up and cramp up, and then he'd get tired, and then he would lose matches. So we learned to develop a style that was like really, really, like funky, really hyperfutable.

flexibility dominant, and it was very oriented around this thing called the chest wrap defense, where you grab a guy like this and you flip them over, over your back whenever they try taking you down. And so I saw that pattern in his strategies, and I said, well, I need to get this guy to not do that. My job is going to be, because if I know he's already good at that, then I have to assume that all his imbalances are carrying into that. Because whenever he would chest wrap, he would externally rotate his right femur, and he would have his right femur into a more internal rotation.

whenever he'd get into that chest wrap defense. Lo and behold, I would see some problems pop up with his left hip and his left knee because there was this hyper flexibility in his left hip, left oblique area. And so I was like, okay, in order for me to change Kyle, I have to get him out of that element and to help him develop strengths elsewhere. So for me, I was like, I need to get him to move better to wrestle in open space. His coaches were like, dude, you're not going to make that happen. You can't just change his guy's nature.

You have to play to his strengths and not catered to his weaknesses. And I'm like, bullshit. Kyle has phenomenal footwork. just have to, like, be able to help him tap into it. I need to guide him through the process to make that happen. Time passes forward. He wrestles Jordan Burroughs, and he beat him with footwork. And his coaches before that were like, you have to catch the rabbit.

He never like, because, you know, they knew that Jordan Burroughs had a great footwork. And I was like, yeah, Kyle's footwork is better. I've seen it happen in spots. And I need to improve upon it from what it was before. But his footwork, like, his footwork is better than Burroughs. We're going to beat with this guy with better footwork. and he beat him with better footwork. And it was just enough.

And it was enough for him to, I think, win, like, very dominantly in the way that Kyle wins matches on both of them. But that was an example of me looking at an athlete, seeing what his intrinsic nature was and then changing it. Another fighter that I worked with was Jeremy Stevens. He was a brawler. Guy was just an absolute brawler. He had no idea how to fight moving backwards. So I was like, this guy does it. And I would notice that when he would fight, if guys kept moving backwards, he would do pretty well.

But if the guy stepped up to him and they were like, I'm not afraid to get hit by one of your big friggin missiles coming my way. He'd push him backwards and I could see like, like Jeremy would get disoriented. So I was like, okay. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to work on getting Jeremy comfortable on his back foot. How the hell do I do that? Because any time I do it, he would fall off balance. He would feel weird with his body.

He'd get extremely frustrated. He'd get angry at me. And I would, so I had to find a way to hack it to get him better to fight on his back foot. Like, it came from that to then. it's like he can fight on his lead foot and his back foot and he had a very prolonged career he's still fighting professionally at a pretty damn high level and so that's another example of another athlete I'm just illustrating that as an example because I see this the same way I see some people who I'm like oh look

that person is more lateral spine dominant they like to move they like to undulate laterally too much what do I need to do so have them stop doing that or minimize it and add in more transverse rotation elements I need to add in more oscillations I need to get their hips to maybe do that motion more versus their head doing more of that motion. So it's like every person has a preset pattern. And to me, my job is trying to identify what that pattern is, break it and then institute new, more functional patterns

to make them more well-rounded. That's kind of my conceptual framework of it. A lot of the movements that you have people do, like I haven't been exposed to them before. I know that sometimes maybe there's like a PT or, you know, maybe having some of the people do some of these movements. but, you know, like you're grabbing a cable and then you're like, you're kind of almost twisting, like, the opposite way that you would normally think. Yes.

And you're just, you're moving your body around and rotating your body around. I mean, if you're going to do like a row, like I think people automatically, if they're rowing with their right arm, they're going to kind of automatically want to lean to that side and, and, yeah, rotate to that side and kind of spiral to that side. Yes. You do a lot of stuff that is the opposite. it and then you're making people kind of flex muscles or with me you were like oh turn your hips this way and i'm like i'm not i don't even know if my hips go that way you can you can get them to do it but what i learned was and i kind of already knew this about myself but i'm like man i'm just all

one piece like i'm i'm like a like a tombstone and uh i need to be able to get my body to be able to be able to basically kind of like you know ring your body you coordinate well you coordinate well, Mark. Like, yeah, like, give yourself, yeah, it's like, you're like a block, but you do coordinate really well. Once you get, like, dialed in, it's there. It's just like, that's one of the things that I'm like, I think like, like, like, like doing the back squats and the dead lifts and whatnot. I think that that's like that's like that's like that's like, like that's like, like, I tend to orient people away from that is because it does make you more blocky. I don't like, I don't like, I don't know if you want to go into that or not, but it's like, it's like,

yeah, let's go in a little more because I think like some of what you're practicing and some of what you do is like you're kind of ringing somebody out. And I don't know how to put it into word. That's exactly it. The way that you feel after you do certain FP movements, I've never really felt before. Now, I've done PT movements. I've done, you know, movements for therapy and things like that.

But the feel is very, very hard to describe because it's like the input feels so clean. And it feels so, I'm not just trying to blow smoke up your ass or to pump up functional patterns. But I really believe in a lot of what you do. And when I, when I, when I, when I was doing some stuff with you, that input just feels, it feels, um, it feels perfect. It feels like the exact thing that you need. You don't normally get that from, you know, if you're just in the gym doing some curls or

something, you don't get the same feel. So kind of what is that kind of ringing out process that you're going through? It's like, it's, and I wish I was better with words, Mark. Like that's, that's one of my big, been one of my biggest issues in my life. It's like what my brain is experiencing and what it's, what it's visualizing, it just never comes out. Maybe something wrong with my brain or whatever. Maybe that's like part of what my package is.

But I believe what's happening, I'll try and simplify it. It's like your fascia is oriented in a direction. And so imagine that it's like if you have like a forward flexion like this, that the fascia on the front side of your body is pulling downward, right? And so therefore the fascia on the backside of your body is going to then get pulled upward. When I rearrange the fascia to go in the opposite direction, and I tell the arrangement to go the opposite direction. And I actually successfully do that.

What are you going to experience in that context? Maximum fatigue because your body is like, hey, this is entirely new. When something is new, what happens with anybody the first time that they work out? They get massively sore. They feel muscles burning everywhere and whatnot. So the same thing is going to be the case that any time that you do something new, that your body is going to respond to it in accordance to that. So I think that what happens when we do this,

the exercise that we do is we just change the direction of where the fascia likes to orient, where the direction of where the muscles want to pull. Like a muscle can either pull to its origin or its insertion to either direction. So if it's always used to being pulled towards its origin, then what's going to be the best thing for that muscle to be pulled towards its insertion? Of course, you need to strengthen it in both directions. But I'm saying that if you have more of an inclination of strengthening it more towards its origin than its insertion, then it's going to be better for you. Then if you train it from the insertion to the origin, I think I'm saying that right, then you know what I mean.

Then that's going to be what's going to yield the challenge. That's what's going to give you that signal that you're looking for. And it's it's enabled you to get less noise. So I just think it's you're fighting the facial direction. You're fighting the direction of which your body is going when you do the motion, the way that I'm talking about it. And so like if again, that was one thing. Like with the reciprocal row, for example, this is about like in 2014, I would just notice if

somebody would do a row up, they would pull back, they would rotate to their right immediately. every single time. And I notice I would do that. And I'm like, well, this goes back to the whole thing, Mark, why am I doing what I'm doing? I need to constantly reevaluate why I do everything. So then at that point, it gives me the bandwidth to come up with something new, to come up with something novel,

because to me, if what's been done hasn't solved the problem, that we need to discover something new to actually get to a closer resolution. So if I do a row, I'm like, okay, well, if I pull back and I keep rotating to the right, what happens if I rotate to the left? Well, I don't get any tension there. But what if happens if I hold that and I keep turning? And this is all intuitive. I'm not like, it's not like I'm putting these things into words.

I'm just going like, I'm like a monkey just going like, I'm just kind of like thinking about it. I'm just processing it. And I'm like, okay, well, what if I do that? And then I test it. And then something different happens and I get a different reaction that I'm like, okay. So I intuit it. Then I, but there's mechanism. There's like physics that I'm extrapolating, like applied physics.

And then I do it. But the key distinction is that, like, I'm probably changing everything again, like, in terms of my orientation. But the key thing is that, like, you have to, the premise of FP is just trying to get people to do what they're not doing and develop strength in whatever it is that they're not doing, to reinforce strength in their weaker habits. And the, I don't know if we, I think the last question you asked was, why does the sensation feel like it does more? What was the question? Yeah, something along those lines. And we were also talking a little bit about how Watts and Deadless can throw all this off too.

Okay. So I guess if anything, we can just switch gears to that. It's like, man, I completely ruined it here, Mark. I'm trying to think of like, I'm trying to gather myself here. I guess we'll just pick it to the. Yeah, when I was working with, I could see you working through, like you're showing me something. and you're kind of working through like the exact, you know, movement that you're looking for.

And then even when you were watching me, you're like, you know, no, you're hip, you know, move your hip this way. And you're basically getting me to move in a bunch of different ways in my body is not really used to that because it was more used to the deadlifts and squats and those types of things. And maybe those things kind of made my fascist stick. I heard people kind of talk about the idea of the shirt twisting type of thing. Yes. things with that. So now imagine that you never twist. Thank you. This is like very helpful, Mark. So imagine that it's like that you're operating in a squat linearly and that if you get really strong at that, eventually you're going to lose the capacity to rotate the ribs

and the pelvis in the opposite direction. And so imagine that if you spent a lifetime developing strength to just be linear, that eventually what ends up happening is that this capacity is lost. Now what ends up happening is that they both rotate together, but they don't rotate as opposed to another. Like you'll see quarterbacks do this sometimes. They'll have like this quarterback training where they'll be like this and you'll see them turning their hips to the left. You've seen like when they when they try and create that separation between the shoulder and the hips. That's all I'm doing with you, but I'm doing that with the resistance training element. That's what I'm trying to implement. That's what I was trying to implement with you when we did it.

And that's what ends up creating the fatigue. So the problem with squats and deadlifts is that for one, they arrange you to be that way. But then never mind that the consistent compression on the body, the consistent compression on certain disks, I think over time trains those areas to not want to rotate. And the creation of space needs to be there in order to facilitate those types of rotations, to facilitate bends. But if the space has been reduced, or it's been shifted in one direction, or it's been bent to one side, now you can't get as much of the motions that you're going to be looking for. And you won't be able to get those, you won't be able to access those positions that you would otherwise. So to me, when I look at something like, again, like a deadlift or a back swat,

it impedes that kind of adaptability long term, especially if you continue to compress and then things get stuck. Because that's one thing people don't pay attention to is that once they've done resistance training and they've loaded themselves longitudinally long enough, what ends up happening is that their body gets stuck there. And I don't know if you ever see that stuff online where people are trying to distract themselves or like they'll be yank in their head to try and like unlock it. That's not the way you're going to unlock it. Like maybe you might be able to get away with that one time, but it really just goes right back to where it was before. The muscles will just pull it right back to where it was.

But for me, yourself apart like that. Well, to me, what I think, well, to me, what I think about it is just like the upper cervical region. Like if you look at those vertebrose up there, man, they're really small. And if you look at the ligaments that are up there, really small tissues. And what you're doing is just taking those guys and potentially like either risking tearing them or making them significantly lax or significantly tight and causing significant

neck problems. So yeah, like to me, the, the concerns of spinal compression cannot be understated. And when you do something like back squats and deadlifts repetitively, it's going to have those impacts. And to me, it's just very obvious when I begin to start seeing how people rotate, how people twist, how people differentiate motion in the transverse plane, it's very obvious the kinds of damages that that kind of lifting ends up doing. What if we train a little bit more like an athlete where we're doing, you know, we're doing a little bit of squats. We're doing a little bit of deadlifts here and there. Maybe coach wants us to do it. Maybe we need to gain a little bit of weight for our sport. Maybe it's not the most optimal thing.

But it just because of the way things have been forever, then strength coaches are kind of on board with some of these movement patterns. Do you think, you know, someone could sprinkle in some of what you do and still get good enough results to help them to keep a somewhat healthy gait? Absolutely for sure, of course. And I think it's just what I do is most of the time people just say it's in like, I'll just throw a medicine ball in the transverse plane. The problem is that what I do and what people think we do is is not really what it is. Like I think we have one of the one of the trainers or physical therapists for the New York Yankees.

I think he's a human foundations certified practitioner. So we've had that. We have like multiple, there's a lot of professional athletic institutions that have functional patterns practitioners that are already in there doing this stuff. I just don't post about it. I don't like to name drop like that very often unless I'm like I can sign on it and say that I'm doing something about it. But yeah, you can mix in functional patterns for sure and get some benefits.

It's just like I'm a purist, man. Like for me, I want to get to the end of this road. I want to see what's in it. I want to investigate it to the deepest depths. And I'm going to isolate variables as much as possible to get to that place. But yeah, if somebody wants to dabble in it and still use it to their capacity, that's fine. I just think that as you age,

you're going to end up having to use more functional patterns versus doing the things that you were doing before. I just think, like the other stuff, it has a shorter shelf life. But yes, absolutely. You can mix in functional patterns

and get some benefits. Let's maybe just end on a little bit of rapid fire, if you don't mind. No worries. Yep. Bodybuilding. What am I? Gay?

Powerlifting. Powerlifting. Gay? Just like, yeah, just thoughts on. It's just dysfunctional. It's just like, my whole thing is anytime you're posturing, trying to be like,

I'm strong in just, anytime that you're posturing, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, it's just functional. I just, if you want me,

do I'm going to give you the real answer, Mark, or the political answer? If I'm going to give you the real answer, it's like, you're action faking. I just think it's like, power lifting is action.

No, you know what? Bodybuilding. So when you say bodybuilding, what do you mean by that? Like, competitive bodybuilding or do you mean like building as a strategy people utilizing power lifting is like a strategy and Olympic lifting and those kinds of things yeah so not the sport you mean like just like as a strategy for developing strength or something like that I guess or just yeah I don't know

whenever they think the utility is you know you know I take my positions back I'm not going to say gay I'll say the cultures are gay I'll say that the cultures are super gay I'll say that But I'll say that there's functional elements to bodybuilding. Absolutely. You want to build muscle. That's good. Power lifting, I like the idea of the creation of pressure through the body when you're lifting something. I'll give it that.

I don't like the sagittal plane elements of it. That to me, I find to be frustrating. Olympic lifting. I like the propulsion aspects of it. I just don't like that it's primarily linear. But it has, I don't like the deep ranges of movement. motion that are in, especially if like you're in a deep squat and you have the ball over your head, not a

big fan of that. CrossFit. It's just gay. High Rocks. Fuck. I'm not, I mean, it's just, it's even more lame than CrossFit because now there's not any force production. It's just more cardio

from what I can tell. So it's even, I probably shouldn't be calling it gay, but it's like, I almost have to because it just is. It's just so annoying to watch. But yes, sorry, Mark. I just, it's just a first thing that comes to mind? Knees over toes. Hold on. Knees over toes. Oh, the Ben Patrick

stuff. Okay, I forgot about it. Okay, so knee over toes. There's some contextual relevance to it, but if you get to that deep range of motion, it's like it's going to just cause an excess laxity in the hip fluxors. You're going to end up straining your Patelor tendon, getting into that position over and over again. You're going to end up, I don't want to give out too much IP. but you're going to end up causing significant problems in the hips.

The hip sockets are going to be issues with the labrums. I guess it's kind of a position to explore. I'm not a big fan of getting into extreme ranges of motion without like getting good at small ranges of motion first. You need to conquer small ranges of motion before you expand into bigger ones. Kelly Strette. Smart guy, really, really smart guy, very high IQ. The way he solves problems is just not effective.

It causes too much hyper flexibility. Let's just put it that one, that way. He trains the body through too much deep range of motion. Goda. Touch, like a version of touch butt. It's like there's not enough force production that's inside of it. Fucking Mark, you're just starting some shit. Okay, so Goda.

Impositionists, like a motherfucker, whatever, whatever they see is what's in reality, but they can't see what they, like there's spots of what they talk about. that are relevant, but the problem is that what they see is not in everything, which is why I never say, oh, you have to put your head over your foot. Head over the foot is always the fucking thing that you're going to do. Oh, you got to go inside ankle bone high. Like I can't, it's just like the imposition is what's annoying for me. It's like there's context. And this is the thing. I'll just say this, Mark. We don't know if inside ankle bone high is a bug or if it's a feature. You don't know. We don't know if a flat foot is a feature or if it's a bug.

I say that what we need to do is conduct more tests before we come to that determination. That's my perspective on it. So I think it's more unknown. I don't like how much they impose. I don't like the impositional nature of Gota. Super annoying to watch. One of my friends, Corey Schlesinger, he works with the Detroit Pistons. He said, all of my athletes are flat-footed.

And they're unbelievable. Is that a bugger feature, Mark? is how do we fucking know how do you know you don't know if it's a bug or a feature so when you're telling me oh inside ankle bow high i'm like bro i don't fucking know i've seen so many athletes that have flat feet guys that can dunk fucking basketballs do windmills and they're short dudes and i'm like like what the fuck like what is that i don't know that's what i'm saying i don't know so when they talk about these things it's really difficult to make that determination so that's why when they say that stuff it's like they're when i say somebody's an impositionist i that's like

possibly the biggest insult that I could make because you're literally wanted to impose your worldview on reality and say this is the way that it is. And I'll just say this. I've known so many people that try forcing things to be what they are. Like let's say for example, people who impose shoulder blades back depression, physical therapists do that all the time and they fuck people up. My gym bro is filled with people that were given all that information. And guess what? Now they're all fucked up. At least to the lower back problems, to their hip problems, the next problems, shoulder problems, all sorts of shit. So I have to help them unravel those types of of problems and why is that there? Because they just impose, oh, the upper traps are too big

big macho jackoff. And I'm like, no, these macho jackoffs are what you want to look like, dude. Like you want big ass upper traps. Like you don't, like you want big traps. But just the physical therapists were like, well, I want to be kind of like feminine and dainty. So now I'm going to demonize these fucking bodybuilders that actually have good upper body development. You see what I'm saying? So to me, it's like I just don't like when people incorporate their imposition. And with God God damn, do these motherfuckers impose like crazy. Weck method. Impositionist like a motherfucker.

They skip so many goddamn steps along a process. They have, it's like everybody's got good ideas, but they're too dogmatic in their worldview in terms of how you do things. It doesn't apply. It doesn't really get results. You don't see people's posture. Let me put it this way, Mark. If a method doesn't improve a person's posture, if it doesn't improve a person's posture, then what's it doing? What's it doing?

It's making it worse. So ultimately, your posture is a determinant telling you, if your posture gets worse after doing an exercise, that's either a bad exercise, but it's more than likely bad execution or it might be the wrong time to use that exercise for that given individual. But if a method is not improving posture, then that means it's skipping steps along a biomechanical continuum. So to me, it's just kind of like, a weck method is like naive optimism, I guess it is about fucking movement or whatever. I don't, like, honestly, I don't even look into it anymore. I haven't looked into it in several years. I just, you already know that Weck and myself, we've had fucking beat for, for quite some time.

And it's like, I don't even want to get into that shit. But my whole thing is that they're also very impositionist. It's very theatrical, which I just kind of, just fucking lame to me. I don't like the theatrics of it. It's like, it's like they're trying hard to create force,

but they don't know how the fuck to really get. Maybe WEC himself kind of knows how to create force to some degree, but I don't think that he can transmute that onto, other people because its first principles are still too broken to pull that off. And I think most of it just comes down to that they're still skipping too many steps along a biomechanical continuum. I don't think a lot of people know this about you, but it's my understanding that you have a long, extensive history of martial arts in your background, right?

I mean, biomechanics, but I've worked with people, like I've worked with fighters for since 20. Yeah, for like 15 years. I would say I've been. and at the highest level, I've been, I've been, in that regard, Mark, I've been in the, in the industry for, like, in that field for a long time. And I've been, I've been so blessed. I've, I've been around literally the best coaches in the world for this shit, like, fucking phenoms. I've been around, when you've been around the best wrestling coaches in the world, you've been around the fucking elites. The only things that I haven't really been around enough are, like, high level boxing coaches. But that's going to be the next step that I get. I've had to, like, learn how to box better. on my own like i'll say that but i've i've trained in it i spar from time to time like i've had like back of the day i would spar a little harder i'd go in there with a few pros and like uh like amateur fighters and whatnot but i trained it but not i don't really classify myself as

being a martial artist because i don't practice it enough i practice the mechanics of it more than anything but yeah i've been in it for a while yeah i just bring that up because i think that's striking i think uh it's just a great skill you know and when i think about like you know all the different things we want to do with fitness and all this different stuff. A lot of it's great. But shit, like having a skill to be able to hit a heavy bag, a speed bag, being able to kick, being able to do some of these movements, I think, is excellent. It's great for the fascia.

It's really good for the fascia. And it's fun too, but it's really good for the, let me put it this way, Mark. I don't ever have fun. It's rare I do anything that's fun. For me, it's like if it's not, I'm a pragmatist to the extreme and it's like, I do it because it just feels good. I'm just trying to feel good. But I'll say this, it's really good for the fascia.

It's good for the development of elastic recoil with the caveat that you're doing it well. If you're not doing it well, it will fuck you up like anything else. Like the martial arts can, if you throw a kick the wrong way and you do that repeatedly, that will set you up for a hip replacement. That's just how it is. What's the deal with some of these new machines that we've seen you on leash on people? Like the vector you mean? Yeah, pretty awesome.

Yeah, I think it's like, people don't know, they don't understand it. They don't understand. Really, the idea of the vector trainer was to create multiple vectors of resistance where it's like, imagine that if you're going to, if you sprint, there's a little bit of a vertical component to it and a little bit of a horizontal, or a lot of a horizontal component to it. And so what I thought about with the vector trainer specifically was to potentially both the vertical axis and the horizontal axis simultaneously because they're both

operating at the same time whenever you're moving in space. And so I had that idea. This was like a, this is funny too, man, because it's like it completely fucked me over with project function. I don't want to talk too much about, maybe we could talk about that on another podcast in the future. But this is, we were supposed to be working on a bunch of things with project function. And really what I wanted to do is just separate the two functions of the vertical and the horizontal. And you would just be able to adjust for each one. We're supposed to be able to just for each one of them. And somewhere along the lines, my engineer was like, okay, I want you to do them at the, like, you want me to do them at the same time? And I was like, I didn't realize it.

I gave him like about a month and a half, two months to help me, like we worked on it. And then he finally said it was like, okay, well, it's going to be both of them at the same time. And I'm like, fuck, okay? I thought it was going to be too complicated, but we managed to pull it off. So really, the idea of the vector trainer is that you can train multiple planes, planes of resistance at the same time. So you get the vertical components of it, you get the horizontal components of it. We have other versions that train other elements of it where you pull down and then you push forward, you push sideways and you push forward and you pull back. There's a multitude of different ways that you can do it. But to me, I thought about that idea, fucking, I don't even know, like 16, 17

years ago. I was like, man, it'd be cool to be able to train both vectors at the same time, to train both directions at the same time because I'd be using a pulling machine and I'd be like, man, that would be nice if I could really load heavily something and like, it be coherent. Because you could just do that. You could just grab like a weight in your hand and then do like a transverse twist. But it's not coherent. It's not, it's not, it's not, it's not to be like a coherent potentiation. And so for me, I was like, it'd be interesting to do both.

And then sure enough, like we've used it. And it's been a pretty freaking, it's done very well for some people. I'll say that for sure. And you have, your HQ is out there in Las Vegas. And then you have gyms throughout the country. People can go to your website and they can, they can look up functional patterns. people can just sign up and they can join, right? Yes, well, here are Project Function.

So we have three different Project Function centers right now. We just got them set up. We're getting the fourth one set up in the Bay Area as well. We have there's one in Morgan Hill. So we have Project Function of Morgan Hill, Santa Monica, and my headquarters is here in Henderson, Nevada. And we'll be having another location set up in Summerlin. So we have those facilities.

Those are just getting set up. And then we have maybe about like 35 or 40 other functional patterns facilities worldwide. And those are mostly oriented around like personal training, sometimes they do like group training classes and whatnot. So that's kind of how those are set up. These are like legitimate gyms with with patented equipment that or patent pending equipment, but it's in the process of getting patented. It's all proprietary equipment.

And it's just, it's a completely different ecosystem than what, uh, what would you to probably find in the field. So yeah, those are the main two ways that people link up with our ecosystem. And then obviously we have online educational material too. Ladies and gentlemen, the lever king. I apologize for being so long-winded about things. There's just a lot going on. I think at some point, Mark, I won't have so much going on that I'll be able to, like, focus on talking about one thing at a time.

It's just my life is like, I'm just juggling. My life is just constant juggling and I got like 40 balls in the air. And I'm just like trying to figure it out. So if I was incoherent through this pod, I apologize. If people want to find out more about functional patterns, what's the best place to direct them to? Go to the functional patterns Instagram page. I would say that that's probably the best place. And then if you want to get into like the deeper aspects of like how I think about exercise a lot of times, follow the leberking page.

And if you want to really understand like the deepest, deepest thoughts like where I'm like raw dogging, how I view the world, then follow my nowdy thoughts page. Yeah, and then also the functional patterns. What is it, the 10-week course? Yes, so we have a 10-week online program that we use to kind of just get people like the basic understanding of like the nuts and bolts of what we do. So just kind of you learn basic aspects of mobility. You learn about posture, different corrective exercises that help you improve spinal integrity, improve your gait cycle, efficiency. Then there's also.

I want to encourage people to give that a shot because. it kind of reminded me of boxing where when I learned how to box when I was young, I was like, do I ever get to throw a punch? But the beginning of functional patterns had to do a lot of stuff that's going to be really beneficial. A lot of us need to take a step back and a lot of us need to work on some mild fascia release, which is explained insanely well in that 10-week course. And I think it's a great place for people to start. Appreciate it, bro.

Thank you so much, Mark. And sorry if I ramble too much. No, I loved it. Thank you for your. time day man i really appreciate it appreciate you bro thank you