Mark Bell's Power Project - Why New Year’s Fitness Resolutions Always Fail (And How to Finally Succeed) || MBPP Ep. 1119

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

In Episode 1119, (guest if applicable), Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza dive into game-changing tips for smarter workouts, staying consistent, and sticking to your New Year's Resolution!   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below!   🥜 Protect Your Nuts With Organic Underwear 🥜 ➢https://nadsunder.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 15% off your order!   🍆  Natural Sexual Performance Booster 🍆 ➢https://usejoymode.com/discount/POWERPROJECT Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   🚨 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   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Become a Stronger Human - https://thestrongerhuman.store ➢ UNTAPPED Program - https://shor.by/JoinUNTAPPED ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Podcast Courses and Free Guides: https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz/ ➢ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamandrewz   Chapters: 0:00 - How staying adaptable helps consistency   5:50 - Trust your instincts and adjust workouts as needed   7:49 - Flexible workouts make exercising more enjoyable   11:51 - Start slow to avoid injuries   13:47 - How gradual changes improve results and prevent injury   17:31 - Building smooth movement through new exercises   19:10 - Control workout intensity to avoid overtraining   22:58 - Managing intensity in jujitsu and weightlifting   24:59 - Building confidence with small, steady progress   28:17 - Exploring squat variations for better training   30:33 - From fun play to elite performance   34:15 - Prioritize health and functional fitness over looks   36:00 - How writing down feelings boosts fitness progress   39:33 - The importance of setting clear fitness goals   41:30 - Daily goal setting for motivation and progress   45:24 - Add low-intensity exercises for better health   47:08 - Combine hobbies and movement for fun workouts   50:26 - Improve grip strength to boost overall fitness   52:07 - Simple exercises that improve total well-being   55:38 - Sparking creativity and joy through fitness   57:25 - Why strength training is key to a healthy life   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

It's not about being rigid. It's about finding ways to keep showing up no matter what. Rigidness, I think, can provide value sometimes, but like sometimes I just see people being too rigid. Okay, yeah, cool. It's great if you can be tough and try to figure that out to still go through that. But there's many more days ahead where you can get to some of these things. Even though you might be seeing someone on Instagram doing this like five days a week. Maybe you do it five days a week, but your workouts are so much easier. What's missing from that whole equation

when somebody's thinking that way? You can have something that you want in terms of the way your body looks, but just shift it to how your body feels and how your body moves. If something's new, you just got to be really careful with it. The cool thing about stuff being new is you get so much benefit from any dosage of it,

because any dosage of it is more than what you were doing before. If you guys have been enjoying the content we've been bringing here on The Power Project, consider leaving us a review on Spotify and Apple. We've had podcasts with people from Functional Patterns, to Ben Patrick, to Jack Cruz, who roasted us on air, but we did that for you, to bring you some of the best information in fitness. We're learning along

with you and leaving a review with how you dig the podcast is really going to be something that helps the podcast move forward. So if you can leave us a review there and enjoy the rest of the show. I got a text from my brother-in-law this morning that he said he and I, you know, I don't have confirmed photograph, but he said that he, he took a shit this morning and it resembled the number 73. And I said, that's the age that you're probably going to start shitting yourself at. That's probably what happened. So his butt, I think is like telling the future. How old is he?

He's 47 or eight. 48. Yeah. But a double digit. Yeah, I know. A double digit. It. What a double digit. I know. That's usually, you know. I don't think he's lying because he did,

I saw proof he did shit at uppercase B one time. What is he, just like squirming around on there and shit? I don't know. I don't know if he's trying to make like a swirl, make a sundae or something. I don't know. Maybe he's just uncomfortable when it comes coming out. So he ends up moving a lot.

Maybe he's trying to do like some like spinal mobility on the toilet, get the hips to swivel underneath them and stuff, hula hoop it kind of. Cause if you end up with a seven and a three, I'm sorry, but that's abnormal. Yeah, either the bowl was moving or your butthole was moving. Or you're squirting and then they just kind of plop

into position. Yeah. Cause like a seven, you can get that in one shot, but a four, you're having to like come back to little like lines and stuff, you know? Very difficult. Angles. But also if like, let's say it's like a long one

and you just choose to snip, snip, snip, you know what I mean? Like, you know, use your muscles and snip it. It could end up in an odd little, you know. Anyway. I don't think he's trying to brag, but I thought it was impressive. It is impressive.

I would brag. It's truly impressive. Let's play this video on consistency to kick this thing off. Oh God, we were, I didn't realize we were recording. Yeah. Andrew hit the button. In theory, consistency sounds like discipline and determination, strong and unwavering.

But in practice, consistency is about being adaptable. When time is tight, shrink the task. When energy is low, do the simpler version. It's not about being rigid. It's about finding ways to keep showing up no matter what Your habits don't have to be fixed. They should evolve with your day The key is not in doing the same thing over and over but in never stopping Even when life gets in the way each step forward

No matter how small keeps you on track Adaptability isn't the opposite of consistency. It's the very heart of it. Consistency is the art of staying the course, no matter the obstacles. Consistency is a challenge we all face. That noise is amazing. I love that.

I love some of that. I think, you know, the first thing, one of the first thing that sticks out That noise is amazing. I love that. I love some of that. I think, you know, the first thing, one of the first thing that sticks out is like shrinking the time or if you don't have the energy, you feel low energy, shrink the task a little bit. Why not just change it up? I'm just awful at time management. And so I knew I wanted to do some sprints before the podcast today.

I knew I had to be here at like 9.30. And so I was like, well, it'd be cool if I got out for my sprints at like 7.30, then I'd have more than enough time. Like if I headed out of my house at 7.30, I probably didn't leave my house until like five or 10 minutes after eight o'clock. And so I still got out early and I was like,

well, I'll just hustle over there. I'll hustle to where I wanna do my sprints at the overpass over here. Got over there quickly and still got in a bunch of sets and looked at the time and was like, oh, time to head back. But I could have easily kind of gotten to that situation where you're like, well, it doesn't really look like it's gonna fit for today,

so I'll just chill here and eat breakfast. And then I would have missed it. And then I could have gave myself another excuse after the podcast. Well, we're doing two podcasts today and I'm getting kind of hungry, I'm kind of tired, and I could talk myself out of doing the sprints that I wanted to do for today.

Yeah, the thing that I love about that video, people call these workouts so many things, but there's a lot of us who are starting to maybe get back into the habit of fitness this new year. You kind of build a rigid mindset when it comes to your exercise. You're like, I have this four day week program, I gotta hit every four days.

And when you don't hit a day to its intensity, there's like this level of, oh shit, I didn't do what I needed to do. But some days, because of a lot of different factors, the energy is not there, you know what I mean? So like, there are different names to this, but I call these flow workouts. When you just go in and you just do a set of a movement,

see how it feels, you do something else, you see how it feels, you just move around, right? So you're getting blood flow, you're still getting some stimulus to tissue, you're still, your body's still benefiting, but you're not, you're not destroying yourself and it's something you're able to do. And you don't have to like, let's say you usually work on a gym, you could just do something like this at home if you can.

Don't underestimate the power of your body weight. And be intuitive and don't be afraid of your own instincts. So and Seema and Andrew and I, we've all been lifting for a really long time. We've been doing physical activity for a really long time. But just because you feel newer or you feel dumber or you feel more like behind or whatever the words are that you're using, that doesn't mean that you don't have... You're good. It doesn't mean you don't have... We got some weird noises going on here in the studio.

It doesn't mean you don't have the ability to use your intuition. Like what do you think today is gonna call for? What are your goals? What are the things that you're trying to be on point and on target with? And there's some times where, again, like the rigidness,

rigidness I think can provide value sometimes, but like sometimes I just see people sometimes being too rigid. Like you had this plan, you were going to do this diet and you wake up and you kind of find out you have like strep throat or something. You have pneumonia. Like it's, okay, yeah, cool. It's great if you can be tough and try to figure that out to still go through that. But there's many more days ahead

where you can get to some of these things. And I think the worst thing you can do is to just think that you don't know what you're doing and that you don't have the intuition and the information to just switch. Cause I think somebody like yourself, and when you say something like, you know, I can do a flow workout.

Well, of course you can do a flow workout because you've been working out for a long time and you can go to do something and you can be like, oh, that guy doesn't really feel right. And then you can shift to something else. Whereas somebody newer might've been dead set on a program they saw on Instagram or from an influencer or from an app,

they go to do a walking lunges and they're like their knees on fire. And now they're like kind of upset and they tried another exercise, their knee is still on fire. But again, if you just have the intuition to know, okay, my knee is giving me really bad feedback, I should concentrate on a different body part,

then you can flow the same way that we're doing it. So like this morning, I had one of those moments where I'm like, okay, I went to bed late last night, my dog in the middle of the night was barking up a storm because he had to go to the bathroom. So I was up at around 1 a.m. And it was just, again, a lot of things were kind of stacked up against me from waking up early

to get in a lifting session. I woke up and I'm like, dude, like, like, like we're gonna do two podcasts today. Like I want to be there cognitively. Okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to go in and do one superset. Can I go do one superset? Of course I can. And then still even with that, I'm like,, I gotta move the car out of the garage.

I gotta get the keys. I got like all these things, right? I'm like, it's just one superset, quit being a little baby. I go do a superset. Dude, that was, that felt good. I'm warm now, it's not cold in here. I'll do another superset.

And then I did another superset and I was like, you know what, my full workout is done for the day. I feel amazing. So even though we have been, you know what, my full workout is done for the day. I feel amazing. So even though we have been, you know, lifting for a long time, I still have to trick myself a lot of the times to do some of these things, you know, even with jujitsu, right? Like, all right, I'm going to, I'll go, maybe I won't get that many rounds in at open mat or I'll just like try to just flow roll. Like that's where Ncma is getting the term for like a flow workout. I'll go do that, I'll go in with the intention of that and I'll still come out with an amazing session. So all that to say like, doesn't really matter where you are, you're still going to have

the good and bad days or the days where you're like super motivated. But yeah, being able to like maneuver and go with the flow of the day is like super duper important and you might end up with like a better day anyways. How do you feel Andrew when you have a workout that's like just you did less work, it was shorter, maybe you didn't do exactly what you wanted to execute on the mats for that particular day, whether it be lifting or jiu-jitsu. How do you feel afterwards? I never feel worse than if I didn't do that light workout.

Obviously there's other days where I will go in with the full intent on having a full-on workout or a full-on session and that session will go really, really well. And I'll be like, dude, this is amazing. Why wouldn't I ever want to do this? But then there's certain days you wake up, your back's a little stiff or whatever it is. The days that I don't get in that workout or that training session, I kind of stay the same.

When I go get a light workout or a couple of rounds in, I come out feeling better every time. I never come out feeling worse. Yeah. I think, you know, in your mind, you know, you have it set somewhere in your head that you got to go like minimum, let's say three times. And there's some really cool shit that happens when you tell yourself in your head, whether you wrote it down or not, when you tell yourself that you're going to do something two times a week, three times a week, and you actually accomplish it,

there's a lot of dopamine, there's a lot of different things going on when you accomplish that each week. So it's not something to take lightly, but there's so many different versions of how you can show up and how you can do these things. Even if you have an injury or you have something going on, could you still spend an hour doing something for jujitsu?

Could you spend an hour doing something for running or basketball or whatever the thing is that you're wanting to do that maybe is some sort of a mimicker or maybe even it's something that is just like way less impact, but still effective. You know, we could all agree that jumping rope would be effective for nearly every sport, but it would probably have a lot of merit for something like basketball. And so let's say you like basketball, you're trying to use it as a way to get some more exercise in. You said to yourself, I got gotta do it three days a week.

The best way to start to do that is to do it, and Seema and I were talking about in the gym, and we were kinda mentioning this idea of like being a pussy about it, kinda. Taking your time with it, having it be kinda low key. So you wanna start to play basketball again, well, it's been a while since you even jumped. So I'm not saying we got to follow this strict six week program

of jumping rope just to play basketball, but maybe you should grab a ball and before you play with other opponents, shoot, do some jump rope here and there or just jump in place and work on the way that all that feels. And now you can say, I did that last week and I feel good enough. I can now go shoot some hoops with my friends and play a game or two rather than just going into it and being like, yo, guys, I fucking blew out my Achilles tendon. I mean, we hear that shit a lot.

We hear that from a lot of friends and a lot of people that they try to go to jump into something sort of out of nowhere with all the best intentions and then they get fried for it And this is something you got to think like it's important to go about this if you're doing any new type of challenge in the new year, whether you're starting jujitsu or You know, you want to do 75 art or you want to challenge yourself to start running, right? Anything that's somewhat of a new input you got to challenge yourself to start running, right? Anything that's somewhat of a new input, you got to treat yourself like a little bit of a bitch. And the reason is, is because your body isn't used

to all of that new stimulus. If you start trying to jump rope 10 minutes a day every day, your feet, the tissue on the bottom of your feet, your Achilles tendon, your calves, your body in terms of absorbing the shocks of hopping on the ground, all of these things are not used to this stress. So you might think like five minutes or 10 minutes

isn't a long time, but for your body, that is a long time. And if you do it too much, I mean, some people get stress, I've gotten a stress fracture when I was just jumping rope way too much, way too soon, right? And then that's back off. So I should have treated myself a little bit lighter to give my body the time to adapt to the new stress that's being placed upon it. You may think it's simple, but you got to realize a lot of these things,

whether you're doing new stuff in the gym, whether it's a new martial art, whether it's a sport, you haven't done it in forever. You haven't a new workout plan that maybe involves kettlebells, you haven't potentially moved that way in a long time or ever. So even though you might be seeing someone on Instagram doing this like five days a week, maybe you do it five days a week, but your workouts are so much easier.

And you call it, and you call your workouts a little bit earlier than you typically want to. And the reason why we're talking in this way, you could be like, no, you got to go in there and you got to smash there and you gotta smash yourself and you gotta do things with great intensity. We're not saying that you shouldn't have intensity. You certainly should.

And we certainly need it at certain times. But if you're starting to spin a lot of plates and you're starting to try to work on many different things, starting to work on something new, if anything's new, as Nseema's pointing out, if something's new, you just got to be really careful with it and the cool thing about stuff being new is you get so much benefit from any dosage of it

because any dosage of it is more than what you were doing before. So you wanna increase your deadlift and you haven't deadlifted in two years or maybe you never really even started deadlifting. You just saw some people deadlifting online. You're like, this looks like cool, this looks fun. It's like something I should get into.

I would love to one day deadlift three plates. You start doing exercises for your lower back and over the course of time, you start getting into it, but there's no reason to like max out on day one. I know that some people might be like, oh, it would be good for you to get a base and see where you're at. But get that base based off of something

that you could handle very easily for like a set of five. And maybe it's not even a full range of motion deadlift. Maybe the first introduction to a deadlift is like a partial range deadlift or a trap bar deadlift, just something that's a little easier than a regular deadlift is like a partial range deadlift or a trap bar deadlift, just something that's a little easier than a regular deadlift. And then you can work your way into it.

And the reason why you wanna do all this kind of stuff is so that you can develop consistency and so that you can do these things for a very, very long time. There are some factors where jumping right into stuff does make sense. I mean, I think maybe for some younger people, like just going to the gym and spending an hour and a half

there and doing set after set with your buddies probably isn't gonna really cause too much issue. But at the same time, I have friends, I have family, I talk to a lot of different people in a lot of different gyms and they're 32, they're 29, they're 27 and they're like, man, I can't really, I can't do that, I can't do this because of my back, because of my hip,

because of my elbow and I'm always like, wow, that's fucking wild. Like they're too young to be saying that. Like, why are they saying that? So just because you're young doesn't give you an invisible force field around you all the time. So you're gonna have to be cautious kind of no matter what, but just know that like when you're new,

you get the newbie gains and everything is a new input at that point. I wanna add this in because like, even something like the practice of rope flow in the course I made, I've told people in that course, like go slow initially, breathe, don't do it fast because you could tweak something. But people swinging around a rope, some people go really fast and like, Oh, I tweak something in my back.

Like what happened? I was going really fast. I'm like, this is why you got to anything new. You're rotating your back in a different, a new way when you do a practice like that. That's movement that you haven't necessarily done. So you do that swiftly and now you're holding your breath. You're gonna tweak something. You gotta treat every new input.

Like you guys see us using this Helix Mace during episodes, but when I started using this, I had no weight on this thing. And I was moving it slowly so I could feel what was going on in my wrist. Any new input I have for myself, I don't go hardcore. I have to feel it out because the goal for any... I think there's an overall goal for any physical habit that we do. And it's that we can perform this thing without any inhibition. Meaning we don't have to think about it.

We could just go jump. We can go jump up and touch a rim without looking up at the rim. We just go jump and touch the rim. We can go to that barbell and lift it. We can go hit a sprint without having a... I could probably touch the net. Either, but that's the thing.

But that's the thing. The overall goal we have for all our activities is that we don't have to think about what we have to do, we can just do it. But the thing is, is when you start it, just like when we started Jujitsu, Andrew, right? There's so much going on in your head. There's so many like, oh shit, do I move this way? Do I sweep this?

Ah, I forgot this, right? But after easing yourself into it, practicing for a while, you get to a point where you can just do things without thinking about it. And I think that's a goal we have for every physical activity, because what are kids able to do? Kids might not even know shit, but they just go do it, right? And I think as adults, we have that ability, but we got to ease ourselves into a lot of these things,

so we can have that ability. Do you use that as a reflection of potentially over-training? So like, let's say that you went to Jiu Jitsu today and you couldn't shoot on people very well because like your hamstrings were blown up from like, maybe you sprinted too fast for too many sets or whatever. You kind of use that as like a marker of like, I kind of, I'd like to be able to spring into stuff every day

and so I got to be a little bit cautious with how many sets and the intensity that I have for my workouts. Yeah, if I'm not feeling that level of like confidence in my movements in something I'm doing, I know that, okay, you know what, I'm a bit fatigued, right? This is taking me a bit more thought than it usually does. I'm a little bit slower to the movement than I usually am.

But like, you know, it's the way I looked at sandbags. When I first started working with sandbags, you know, I think I bit off a little bit more than I could chew in terms of the way I was like trying to do it. Tweak something to my back once, and I was like, okay, you know what, I need to back off, I need to lower the weight, I need to become very, very adept with the 100- pound sandbag.

Very adept, meaning like I can just walk up to it without thinking, just throw it, just chuck it. Then when that became comfortable, I then started being able to do that with 150s. And then I'm able to do that with 200s. And now like, I can just walk up to these bags and I can just mug it without having to prepare myself. Was this a dream that I had or did a beautiful woman come in here

and pick up the 300 pound sandbag at one point? Was that G, oh yeah, Janine. That actually happened. That happened. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, Pino's wife. Julie Pino's girlfriend.

She had a bad ass. Amazing. And then she went out and smoked cram and some sprints. She was a fucking beast. But yeah, no, that's the thing though. It's like, I think, you know, I've mentioned this before but I think we all kind of have a, and it's a real, it's a realistic goal

of being able to do things like kids do them, right? But there's a lot of things like your tissue health, all aspects of recovery, but we can all get that ability to kind of like fall and move and jump and kind of move around like kids. Would you guys say maybe it's like a little bit of like, just get some exposure, rather than really worrying a ton about

like all the details of the sets and the reps and the intensity and everything like that, just get exposed to the movement, get exposed to the sport. I think, I think personally like, yeah, exposure is good. It's good to have like some sets and reps so you have goals, but especially one of the things when it comes to lifting is when the weight of the bar or the weight of the dumbbell is like the only measure of progress, you end up doing stupid things to increase your weight.

You know what I mean? You end up going heavier when you shouldn't be going heavier because you're like, I can, but it's probably not best for you right now, right? There's a bunch of things when it comes to that, like the breath, but I'm not gonna get into that right now. But anyway, yeah, you know, I just think like, I mean- On the topic of breath though, I think it brings up a good point. If you do stuff that you can breathe fairly easy through, maybe not easy, maybe not the right term,

but do things to where you, if you do get out of breath, you give yourself a moment to recover. And then over time, you can start to work on your capacity to be able to breathe better in more taxing circumstances. But certainly if you do it with lifting and certainly if you do it with running where you're mainly nasal breathing or you get into maybe five or 10 minutes of a run

where you got to breathe in the nose out the mouth, that is a great indicator that what you're doing for that day, the intensity is fairly appropriate. I think when it comes to jiu-jitsu and a sport where you have to worry about other people's bodies and what the other person is doing, things just get to be way more complicated, but that's the great thing about training.

So I would say like some of the messaging that we have today, like let's put aside playing a sport where you're playing a sport necessarily against another person, but let's put aside playing a sport where you're playing a sport necessarily against another person, but let's just talk, try to keep it a little bit more to training because if we keep it to training, the beauty of training is that we get to control a lot of variables.

We get to control almost everything. The way that someone goes into jujitsu, I mean, you know, a normal jujitsu class probably is like an hour. You could easily make an argument that if someone's new, it's like, they should probably do like five minutes of warmup, five minutes of like learning ABC, five minutes of this, and then they should be probably done because they're going to be fucking toast if they don't have any grappling experience, right? But you're not gonna probably control that many variables

because of various reasons on how difficult that might be and annoying it might be for the classes to have to change so much. But in the case of lifting, you get to control every aspect all the way down to the point where you could utilize so many different exercises and so many different ways to load the exercises. Yeah, just to do like an extreme perspective shift as like an exercise, like let's say

you've never ever prepared your taxes before, but then you're sitting there, April 14th, taxes are due the next day and you're like, yep yep, I'm gonna do it all myself right now. It's like how good of a tax preparer are you gonna be? Like you're probably gonna screw up a lot of things, right? So with like working out, jiu-jitsu, whatever it is, it's almost like the same thing. Like I'm gonna start Monday and I'm gonna do the treadmill because that's what people do. I'm gonna maybe jump on an elliptical. I'm gonna do all the machines or whatever, and then you're not gonna come back

because you're gonna be in a lot of pain or something weird's gonna happen. So I don't know, it's weird. I would say that yes, some exposures are gonna be really good, but even with that, I know we just said we're not gonna talk about jujitsu, but if it was jujitsu, you might be exposed to a bad training partner,

and then you might write that whole thing off, which is why having all the controllables in the gym is good. But even with that, maybe hire a bad coach or whatever like that could go wrong. But I would say in most cases, that's not going to happen. So getting a little bit of exposure, I think is a really good thing because you start with a really easy win. And like you just said, that's 100% better than what you did the day prior. Um, this all comes from, so I had a friend yesterday who had never been on an assault bike and I'm like, look, you're going to be on here for like three minutes total, don't go harder than you need to just move the thing.

So I had her do, uh, intervals 20 on, 10 seconds off. I was like, don't even try hard. Just, just go. And she got off feeling pretty spent because she's never done it before. But now she has. And so she has that one little exposure of that. Now will she come back and do it again? I hope so. But now she has that. So next, the next time she goes to the gym, like, oh wait, I know what to do on this I can push that button That's gonna say intervals and now I know I'm gonna be on here for like, you know a couple minutes and then that's it fumble so that's where I think exposures come in to play really really well because

Again, like I said, she went from zero experience to now She has some experience and so the next time she has access to an assault bike, she won't feel like it's just like a complete, like foreign thing. I know Judd, I think is it Lionheart? Is that the guy's name on Instagram? Maybe you can bring up the clip, but he had a really good point about squats the other day.

And I thought you could really apply this to a lot of movements, squats and deadlifting. Deadlifting is just a hip hinge and a squat, it's just a squat. But a squat is a movement and a deadlift, those are both movements, they're not necessarily just exercises. And within those movements,

there's so many variations of an exercise. So I could tell somebody, oh, I don't really squat that much anymore, but I squat all the time. Like it's not even true. I don't even know why I say it. I'm actually misrepresenting what's happening in my training.

I just haven't done a regular barbell back squat in a long time. I don't know if this is actually the clip. It's just the first one that I seen him talking about squats. So we're risking it all right here. And I got no sound. Oh, hit the old rewind button. Oh, it's off.

Oh, he's just, okay, even better. He's not even saying anything. Okay, well. I can't remember in the video whether he said anything or not, but anyway, basically he just said that there's a lot of variations of squats, and in that little video that you pulled up right there, there was various variations of squatting.

Oh, are you gonna play? No, I was just gonna, as like background, but yeah, go ahead. Yeah, okay. They're pattern, not an exercise. A pattern that has a plethora of variations. He's doing a, instead of avoiding them, yeah. He's doing belt squats, Bulgarian squats,

regular back squat, front squat, safety bar squat, whatever those side squats are. Cossacks, zircher cossacks. That looks awesome. Zircher cossack, wow. Yeah, there's, and nowadays you've got a beautiful exercise to choose from. I mean, the belt squat is a game changer.

That's the thing. It's like when it comes to this lifting shit peeps, you know, you can squat in a lot of different ways. You know, we do a lot. We've done hopping squats and all these things before. It's great, but I think it's cool that people see more people that are jacked that are doing these things. Because I think, I don't know,

I think when people don't see enough people doing it, they think it's bullshit. What do the studies say? Yeah, exactly. And one of the big reasons why we got into some of this topic too, was like, I was doing some sprints today and I was just kind of thinking like, I think a lot of people out there probably just,

they're not really training that hard and the hardness and the intensity of workouts obviously is determined by what you've done previously. So there's not a lot of people that would say, if you walked a half a mile in 25 minutes, that would say that that's a hard workout. But if you ran a mile in six minutes, most people would say, that sounds pretty difficult, right? The point there being that the person

that walked the half mile probably doesn't have the experience to do what the person that did the six minute mile in. The six minute mile person may be somebody that's been training for that for a long time, and that actually may have been a warm up to another, to a workout that included a lot more work than just that. And so it takes a very long time to be able to build out some of these capacities.

And for the person that started out or for the person that ran a six minute mile, it's really rare and I don't even mile, it's really rare. And I don't even know if it's ever even happened in the history of the world for somebody to randomly run a six minute mile who hasn't been running at some capacity in some sport doing something because it's not a normal attribute of a human being that hasn't participated in physical activity.

And so it takes a while to build out all these things. And so when you see people doing something spectacular, you have to always remember, it took them a really long time. And oftentimes, most things start out not even being very serious. A lot of times they start with play. Again, we've had so many soccer players on this podcast

talking about how that play of soccer, which may have gotten very serious and they may have been on a travel soccer team and it might've turned into something and maybe they played in college and so forth, but it started out as play, started out as something they did as a kid. And that gave them these amazing, almost like superpowers to do so many other

things in their life. But if you can, you just remember a lot of the stuff starts with just something that you did when you were a kid, something you did when you were young. Your exposure to it was not anything super crazy right out of the gate. Yeah. The big thing is literally just anything. Doing it consistently like that video mentioned, but like the other thing that that video mentioned is adapting. You know, you might go kind of hard initially and your body's telling you to not keep going that hard. You're getting, you know, your body's feeling a level of soreness, a level of tiredness. You're not recovering well. You have to adapt and that adaptation

is moving backwards from the intensity that you're working at. That adaptation is going lighter. That adaptation is going less intense. Because if you keep just trying to increase your intensity, you will work yourself out of that game. You'll get injured, which will take you out of it all together. And then you might quit and then not revisit it ever again. So you have to adapt. Like, because I think sometimes it is necessary to just go a little bit harder, see what you're kind of able to handle. But then you realize what you can't do.

And you need to be okay that you can't do that yet. And then you go again, you back off of the intensity. If you want to be able to do anything for a long period of time, no matter what it is, you have to do it in a way where you respect what your body's telling you and you can do it for a long period of time. You're trying to get healthier

and you're probably eating chicken for every meal or the same beef cuts for every meal. And trust me, I know how good some cuts can be. You can make anything taste good. But Good Life Protein is the place that you want to go if you want to start adding some different types of meats into your rotation. They got picanha, they got chorizo sausage, which is still great on the macros because they're using Piedmontese beef. They have lobster, they have all different types of fish, they have actually a bunch of different types of chicken too. They have lamb.

I'm telling you, if you give it Good Life a shot and try some of their different meats, which are still great on the macros, you'll start to appreciate the things that you can get from different meat. Don't think too hard about that one. But check out Good Life, because we're sure that you're going to love the taste and the quality. And it's good for your health.

Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at GoodLifeProteins.com and at checkout enter promo code power to save 20% off your entire order. Or if you want to save even more, use promo code power project to save an additional 5% off your build the box. Again, GoodLifeProteins.com link is in the description as well as the podcast show notes. But I want to see results in SEMA. I was told by David Goggins, I gotta carry the boats

and I gotta do all these things. What's missing from that whole equation when somebody's thinking that way? You know, it's, when it comes to New Year's stuff, it comes to fitness stuff, it's usually just like, it's usually how the body's looking. I would have people shift their goals in terms of, I mean, you can have something that you want for terms of the way your body looks, but you should shift it to how your body feels and how your body moves, I think. Because I think those are like, if you can't get yourself

into a deep squat, right, without a level of knee pain, you can over time improve your strength, improve your movement ability, and you can feel different being able to move into a deep squat. But as you're building these abilities of movement and then having your body feel better, the byproduct is usually

that your body also starts to look better. And you can do certain things like taking measurements and weighing yourself each week, just to assure that you're moving in the right direction, but it's probably not in your best interest to focus purely on your body in terms of the way it looks. Like you can, you pay attention to it, but have movement and the way you feel be the primary goal.

Because those are things that you can feel every day when you're getting out of bed. Like, you know that the things you're doing is making a difference when you are actually feeling better doing everything in life. And that's more tangible than how you look in the mirror. Yeah, do you ever have anybody journal, like, literally, like, how are you feeling?

I literally, the group I'm working with right now, the first week, I gave them homework in terms of, like, writing out their movement goals and what they want to be able to achieve as far as movement to envision that. I think it's important to like, you know, if you're someone who suffers from knee pain or lower back pain, those are things that you haven't not felt in a very long time. And what would life be like if you didn't wake up feeling that if you didn't walk around feeling that having Having a literal belief that it's possible not to feel that, because a lot of times you don't believe that that's not possible,

and because you don't believe that's not possible, you don't do anything to get rid of it. I think that's so important. That's really cool, by the way. But I think it's so important to, I don't do this, but I can see how powerful this can be of documenting literally how good you feel. Because you can then look back and be like, dude, what was going on during that period of the year where like everything was just clicking like, damn, what was happening? And then you can look back and be like, oh shit, I was in such a good mood.

What was I doing? You know, whatever that practice was at that time. Oh, maybe I just go back to that. What a thought. But if you don't have that, you turn it into a tangible thing. This thing that you cannot reach out and grab and touch, maybe you can, but you write it down and then now all of a sudden you have something in your hands where you're like, oh wait, that's right.

I did make progress during that time. I wasn't depressed during the summer because I was training every day or whatever, you know, whatever it may be. So I think that's actually pretty damn cool. You got to start doing that. I think David Goggins, you have to always remember, he just has a tremendous skill set. And so whenever you hear somebody like Nick Bair or David Goggins or anybody talking in a way that's aggressive about getting after it in a physical activity, you have to, again,

you have to take a step back and just recognize those guys been doing this for a really long time. Yeah. And yeah, they do work out very hard. And David Goggins has stories of like shitting his pants and like bleeding from his feet and his toes are falling off. And he ran through it and all that stuff.

But I would say that he, you know, over time built a capacity to be able to handle more and more and more. It's not like that's not where he started. He didn't just start out. I mean, he failed Buds, I believe several times, right? Before he was able to get through it and actually pass, right?

So he had to really, it was something that had to be worked at and worked on. And I'm sure that he started to really learn his own level of intensity and what felt right for him. I think in Seema's point, it makes a lot of sense. I think that people are kind of fearful to write stuff down. I think people are a little scared about their goals. They're scared about like writing it down

or telling somebody. They're scared to like tell their friend or their significant other, look, you know, I need to lose 40 pounds and I need to, you know, get on target with this. I think they're a little, they're nervous about it, you know, because now you're accountable for that. And maybe now if I say that to my friends

and the people around me and people that love me, now every time I eat, maybe they're gonna judge me. And maybe they're gonna, but I would say that most likely that's not the case. You don't have to necessarily tell everybody of your plans, but writing down your goal can be really, really important because as it's been pointed out before, I remember hearing this famous speech

where the guy was saying how he could beat the greatest archer in the world. And he built the guy up and he's like, this guy's won X amount of gold medals in archery. And he goes, all I'd have to do is simply just blindfold them. He goes, you can't hit a target that you can't see. So if you don't have an end target that you're trying to search for, then how are you ever going to know where you're trying to end up?

If your goal, like again, if your goal is something kind of modest, like let's just say you had a goal to run an eight minute mile. That's like, it's not crazy for most people to be able to accomplish something like that. That's like a really reasonable goal to have. And you can work your way backwards from what are the five things, seven things that would be helpful for me to be able to run an eight minute mile? You know, what would those things be? And maybe there's like some lifting in there. Maybe there's XYZ is in there, right?

And whenever you kind of fall off or you can kind of go back and look at that goal and say, well, I kind of had, I do have that goal. And you know, here are the five things I'm supposed to, I'm not really following through on most of them, but I could get back to doing this one and then you get yourself back on track. And that's how you kind of continue to go towards that goal. Years ago, when I wanted to work towards being wealthy and building up my business, I remember just figuring out,

I'm like, oh, I just wanna figure out what does it look like to make a million dollars in a year? Like, what if I just divide that by 365, what do I end up with? And you end up with 2750. So I'm like, all right, I wanna make 2,750 bucks every day for a year and become a millionaire basically. And I wrote that down.

And there's a bunch of other stuff that I've written down as well and it's nice to have a target. And sometimes you fall at a rhythm with some of those things and sometimes you, but writing stuff down can really, it's more than just your body knows that you wrote it down. Like your brain, like your whole system, it understands that like you wrote it down, that goal actually meant something to you.

And it's not something you get to really just disregard. So it's kind of playing in the background all the time. Speaking of, let me turn this one off before we get double video. Here we go. And there's no fucking sound. It's Thanksgiving morning. Fucking 30 degrees. Most of you are probably watching this curled up

on the couch fireside. Stuff in your face with mashed potatoes and gravy, watching a bunch of glorified balloons make their way down Madison Avenue. Guess what motherfucker, we call that weak behavior. I could be home, crushing crescent rolls like a little bitch, but I'm not. I'm out here making it fucking happen. I tore both my ACLs back on mile 37. But you don't care about that shit. I'm thankful for this day.

I'm thankful for the pain. And just remember, when your drunk aunt starts mouthing off at the table, tell her to shut the fuck up. And stay hard. Have you guys seen the Goggins memes where someone's like, oh, it's David Goggins. Have you seen that? No. Someone's in the car. I don't know how you can David Goggins, have you seen that? No. No. Someone's in the car, I don't know how you can search for that,

but you should see if you can find it because they're amazing. But somebody's like all pumped, they're like, oh my God, it's David Goggins. And then they go, shut the fuck up. It's like, you should be out running. Why are you sitting in your car? Are you fat ass with the air conditioning on and all this stuff. It's amazing.

Oh my God. We need people like that though. We really do need people like that. in your car, you fat ass with the air conditioning on and all this stuff. It's amazing. Oh my God, we need people like that though. You know, we really do need people like that. Let me ask you guys this, low intensity inputs. I think, you know, it's, when trying to set fitness goals, there's so many things one can do. I know how people can get overwhelmed, but it's also good having different options.

You know what I mean? For a while, Jiu-Jitsu was my only option. Now I have so many different things I can do that it almost actually kind of takes the stress out of progressing at just Jiu-Jitsu because I have so many other things that are bringing me physical benefit. So what are some of your favorite low intensity inputs

that you think people can pick up this new year that'll still help them get towards their goals? Well sprinting certainly is not low intensity, it's very high intensity. However, there's a lot of stuff I can do that's low intensity to help me get better at sprinting. And so like mobility work, myofascial release, plyios aren't necessarily low intensity, but they're fairly simple. Sometimes I've done a couple of workouts recently where in between bench,

I will just do like a box squat jump because I'm already like on the bench. And so I'll go to the end of the bench and I'll squat down to the end. I'll squat down, sit down, pull my legs up a little bit, flex the hip flexors and explosively, you know, pop up from there. There's been a bunch of other things that I've been,

you know, incorporating the rope flow, going on walks with a weighted vest. And, you know, you tend to like, to try to balance all these things out and just try to spin all these plates at the same time. You tend to like forget or you lose certain things at certain times of the year. I was just like, oh, you know,

I haven't been walking quite as much as I'd like. So I need to do a little bit more of that. And then I was also thinking, I haven't done as much zone two cardio. I haven't gone for just like a regular plain jog in a while. And so I was thinking, I would be good to go and do that. But for the reasons that you're pointing out is that some of these things are,

they're low intensity inputs and we need a lot of those. And one thing you can do is again, you can just sort of set your life up to where you have stuff just lying around. We have these little mini club things here that we're doing stuff with our wrists, our forearms. And if you have stuff sort of just around the house, then there's so many different things

that you'll be able to get to. You have a jump rope that's convenient. That's, I don't know, maybe it's near your front door and you just walk out in the morning, you hit a couple of jump ropes or jump rope for a little bit before you get ready for work or something like that. Those are all like, I think really good options

to some low intensity stuff. And cause someone's gonna ask, by the way, this Helix Mace, you can get it at the Stronger Human store. That smaller one isn't available yet, but these longer ones are. So that's there. Andrew? I was just thinking, I haven't done this in a really long time. I've just been too busy to do this specific thing, but I used to grab my camera and just

go walk. And I wasn't trying to get exercise. I was like, oh, let me just go on what's called a photo walk. So what I did was I combined a little bit of low intensity movement, low impact, everything with something I really enjoyed. So I would be gone for a long time, just taking pictures and just having fun. But I was actually getting a lot of steps in. So if there's something that somebody just simply enjoys to do, Mark talks about this all the time, like what did you used to do when you were a kid?

Like, can you go back and do that? Our boy Russell, buddy, he'll jump on his bike, right? And the other day, shout out to him, he was talking about like being able to make it up this like really long hill. For the- I think he's, yeah, recently he went like eight miles or something like that.

Yeah. So, and you know, it's like, that's also extremely enjoyable for him, right? Like you're seeing so many things outside and you're having fun doing it. So outside of rope flow, because I think I just talk about that so much, I love it so much,

to try to bring up something new would be to say like, yeah, is there some way you can combine something you already enjoy doing and then mix that in with some walking or whatever it may be. For me, it was like photo walks, right? I would just grab a lightweight camera and I would just go for a walk and take pictures

of things that I thought were cool. And sometimes they ended up being cool pictures. And most of the time it was just like, oh, another street sign, like very fucking hardcore, bro. So it was like, but it got me out of the house, you know, and you combine that with getting into the sunlight and all that good stuff. So yeah, kind of mixing in a bit of a hobby

with some movement, I think is just fun because you're now having fun and you're getting some movement in. I have a friend who recently was talking about how he really likes to listen to like books on tape type thing and, or audio books and books on tape, audio books and podcasts and tape, audio books and podcasts and stuff like that.

And so he was like, he doesn't really have that much time to himself. He's like kind of just always with his family or his kids. And he's like, well, so now I just do, I do 45 minutes of rowing. He gets on a rower and that's where he, you know, kind of doubles down on doing something he enjoys. He likes to learn. He's learning about stuff that he enjoys.

And then he's also doing some cardio at the same time. So there's so many different ways you could kind of figure out how to get some of this stuff in. And this stuff could help prep you for more intense stuff. I was telling Encima in the gym, I was like, it's really taken me about two years to really be able to sprint. I went to the track a couple of times and hurt myself various times trying to like sprint or just even pick up some speed.

I hurt myself a bunch of different times, a bunch of different ways. And that's when I was like, well, maybe I should just run because I can jog. I was like, that's a cool start. Maybe I should just run because I can jog. I was like, that's a cool start. Maybe I should just get decent at jogging. And that's how the whole half marathon, marathon thing happened was out of that.

But the whole time in the background, the goal was to be able to work on just being able to move faster. I never really cared that much about like running super long distances, but now it feels great. I could go on a 10 mile run randomly at any time and it wouldn't matter what day it was,

I can go handle that. And it probably wouldn't be hard to recover from either, even though I haven't done one in a while, the capacity is still there and it feels great. I wanna add into all this, like I think something big that goes all through all this is like really diming in on the things that really do interest you and the importance of that. So you'll have your workout plan. You know, Andrew's mentioning rope flow. There's a lot that happens there

with the back. There's a lot that happens there with dynamic movement. But you know, one thing for me over the years, I'll mention this on the pod. Anyone who's listened for a long time has known that like I have massive disdain for my wrists. I have very small, feminine wrists. And, you know, there's a lot of factors in the way that I've trained through the years. You know, I've gotten very strong with barbells. Like, there's a weakness that I've had in my hands, right? So, you know, I've dove in... I've dove-dove-dove-dived. Diven. Dove. I've dove in, dove, dove, dove, dove, dove, yeah.

So I've dove into like, you know, training with this. And the thing is, is like, when I train with this thing, I'm in front of my TV when we're at home, I'm bringing it here when we're on the podcast. I do these very high, small repetitions of these certain movements that have helped strengthen, strengthening my hands my wrists and my tendons Etc and they've actually been making a very big difference this small input that doesn't take much out of me because today I was with you in the gym and I was just like

You know we were talking about like curling this thing That's a very lightweight, but I was like I can easily curl 50s I can easily curl 60s And then I when I curl the 70 with minimal effort and I've never curled a 70 pound dumbbell that easy before. And I don't dumbbell curl much right now. Like I don't do that, but it's because I'm diving into something, an aspect of training that I'm very interested in in terms of straining the hands and the

forearms and the elbows. And it's making a huge difference, but it's not taking much out of, it's not taking anything out of anything else I do, and it's a microdosed activity. So because this is something that I just keep with me, it's something I can do anywhere, right? So one of the things to think about, I think here is like, I know not everybody has exercise at the top

of what they wanna do in their life or the things that they find enjoyable, but if you can, can you keep a kettlebell in your office? Can you keep something at home? Can you keep like a light sandbag? It's just something that you can lift and touch because even though not everyone's a workout nut, at the end of the day, we are all people that move. And if we're all people that have bodies that move, we should all be doing

things that will help us take care of our bodies. It doesn't mean that you have to... Working out has to be your identity, but at the same time, taking care of your body, I think, is part of everybody's identity. Not working out, just taking care of your body. So what are the things that you can keep in your environment that are going to continue to serve your body?

Think about that and add it in. Yeah, that's where I just like, I can't love rope flow enough because of everything you just said. And this it's one of those things you can just have with you all the time. And it takes, it takes almost no effort to just like grab it and start twirling and stuff.

But how much fun you have doing it, like it's kind of like how Mark was talking about, like you get into the cold, you get out of the cold and tell me you don't feel something. Do some rope flow and tell me you don't just instantly feel something. Oh yeah. Like you can feel like physically you can feel like the decompression or you know if it's a shoulder thing you can feel like, oh I'm a little bit warmed up, I feel a little bit better.

But then also you're just moving and you're going to like, you're just going to have like a better just overall like, what's the word I'm looking for here? Just outlook essentially. Like you're going to be more positive when you're done with it. And I don't think you can, of course you get that with like lifting because you get the endorphins going and that sort of thing. But I think a lot of it comes from literally moving.

I think that's why like runners get the runners high because they're covering ground, they're like moving. And I think I experienced that with rope flow. When it comes to a lot of what we're talking about, it's so that you build a base that's so strong that some of what you do, some of what you're doing ends up being recovery. Some of what you're doing just ends up being really enjoyable. I know we all, and I still hate the guy that says he ran five miles and loved it. You know, like someone's like, I

ran five miles this morning and I felt great. You never understand that when you hear that, you're like, what the fuck is that? Fuck that guy. I'm so energized. I'm so ready to tackle the day. Yeah, you're like, that guy is the worst. Yeah, what's he talking about? But it happens. You build a capacity to wear a mile, two miles, three miles,

feels real comfortable. It feels really good. For somebody else, for a while, it might just be like a walk or weighted vest walk or a walk with some hills involved or something like that. But over time, you could become that person that has these various capacities.

And again, we do understand that your life goal isn't necessarily all involved in fitness, but building out these capacities can make it to the point where going to run for two to three miles can be super enjoyable. The importance of that skillset is you can carry that with you anywhere you go, and all you have to do is keep up a little bit

on your, a little bit of maintenance on like some running here and there, and you'll always have that capacity to go do that, and to have that be fun, enjoyable, form of fitness that helps you maybe recover. Maybe it's something that you just like doing. You were talking about the runner's high. Like the runner's high, that can be an amazing feeling.

Can help you with creativity. Can help you with just a laundry list of things to where it's worth getting some decent shoes and learning how to jog a little bit and fucking with it a little bit. You know, one thing I do want to mention too is like, if you're listening to this podcast and you're probably into fitness, but if there's anyone in your life that feels that, oh, I'm not a fitness nut or this or that, ask them about anything that they love to do. Whether it's like, you know, they love to go out and have fun with friends or they love to go hiking

as physical. What are some non-physical activities? Cooking, right? Just ask them about anything they love to do. Wine tasting. Wine tasting, right? Ask them how long do they want to be able to do that and have it be enjoyable. Because the thing is, is like you are going to be sitting in your body for as long as you live. And either the body that you're in can be a pleasurable experience where you get up and you feel painless and you feel springy and you feel happy doing whatever activity you're doing, or you get up and you feel creaky and you can't wait for the day that you die.

Because at some point some people cannot wait for the time that they get off this earth because they're in so much pain and discomfort. And if you have the habit of taking care of yourself, you can stave that off and potentially I just saw this 90 year old guy running with his grandkids. I don't know if you guys saw that video on Instagram, but I saw that and I fucking shed a tear because I'm just like, that's so beautiful. This guy's just kept it up to now he's 90 something years old and he's sprinting with his grandkids. You can't tell me that's not possible. And it is possible with just some inputs. You don't have to be

a fitness junkie to have the inputs. But if you want to enjoy your time on this earth, you got to do something for your body. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.