Mark Bell's Power Project - Why Strength Alone Won’t Make You Athletic Ft. Bill Parisi

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

Bill Parisi breaks down why strength training alone won’t make you athletic—and how too much predictable, sagittal-plane training may contribute to stiffness and injury. We get into fascia, connective tissue, breathing, tissue preparation, pulsing stiffness, and why the best athletes have to create and release tension in milliseconds. Bill also shares the 15-minute warmup system he says gets a 98% success rate with athletes of any age.Special perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK/TRT/PEPTIDES! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com and use code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off Self-Service Labs and Guided Optimization®.🧠 Methylene Blue: Better Focus, Sleep and Mood 🧠 Use Code POWER10 for 10% off!➢https://troscriptions.com?utm_source=affiliate&ut-m_medium=podcast&ut-m_campaign=MarkBel-I_podcastBest 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎➢https://emr-tek.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast➢ https://www.PowerProject.live➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerprojectFOLLOW Mark Bell➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybellFollow Nsima Inyang➢ Ropes and equipment : https://thestrongerhuman.store➢ Community & Courses: https://www.skool.com/thestrongerhuman➢ YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=e#PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Have we made athletes better? I almost sometimes wonder if strength and conditioning to some degree, even though it's my favorite topic, have we kind of gotten in the way? Absolutely. Well, I mean, we just overdone the sagittal plane motions. This fascia we know now can change. It can grow. It can become more elastic.

We know it has six times more the proprioceptors than muscle. This is all non-negotiable. This is factual stuff, right? This Newtonian lens of looking at the human body like a machine is wrong. It's outright wrong. That's why we live in the injury epidemic. The magic is the rate of relaxation, not just the rate of firing. All right, Bill Parisi, welcome to the show.

Really appreciate you coming on the show today. Preci's speed school has made its mark on the strength and conditioning world. When did this dream or vision start? and maybe when did you like realize or recognize like, wow, this is something I think I can turn into a thing. Yeah, well, it really started for me, you know, back in high school when the journey really began. I was a football player and wasn't that fast. Coach said go off a track to get faster my sophomore year. And went out for track.

Coach had us try all the events. I tried all the events. I was pretty good in the javelin throw and went on to compete in football and trained for javelin. I was a top 10 thrower in the country by my senior year. Got invited to a national, the junior national meet. I was top 10 ranked top 10 in the country for my age group, 18 and younger. And went to a big junior national meet and top two place finishers made the U.S. Olympic team. And I missed that second place by two inches on the last throw of the meet.

and that really was when I got real serious about training and saying to myself, I'm never going to let that happen again, because all I wanted was that USA red, white, and blue sweatsuit, you know, that year the junior team was going to Tokyo, Japan to compete. And I went on this quest. It's been a 40-year quest now, 41 years, to be exact. I'm 59 to, and that was 1985. So I was been on this quest to learn everything I can about human performance.

And that was really the beginning. You know, for me, it led me to compete in the javelin throw in college. I was a visual on two-time All-American, went to the Olympic trials, competed internationally. And that quest to learn how to become a high-level javelin thrower, at 5'10, right? I'm 5'10. To throw at a fairly high level, I threw, you know, 240. 237. But I, you know, was top 10 Division I one college drawer for three years in a row. And, you know, fairly high level. But to do that at that level, at 510, you got to run down the runway

really fast and you got to take all that ground reaction force and have it travel throughout your whole body. And your body becomes this sling. So everything about throwing the javelin, the athleticism you need is unique, and that led me into sports performance. Because ultimately, for all sports, what you have to do ultimately is manage ground reaction force for a lot of different reasons. For me, I needed to manage ground reaction force translate linear speed into hand speed. So I had to translate ground reaction force, linear speed and ground reaction force into hand speed, because there's not too many events where you run almost full speed with a seven foot eight foot spear in your hand and try to launch it so that study of human movement and how to how to manage those systems to create this impact has led me down this rabbit hole that's been 41 years of managing ground reaction force and and really overall tissue health you know i think uh this mentioning that tip of the health piece at the end

One thing that a lot of people kind of report, especially when they go down the lane of one type of, let's say, aspect of lifting, is people find that they get pretty stiff. Whether that's stiff to the touch and their tissues don't feel supple, whether it's like just general aspects of stiffness. So I think a good place to start here is like what do you believe leads people or what are some factors that lead people to being stiff and feeling stiff? And then we probably lead into how ways to kind of fix that. Yeah. Well, I think what's not really understood is by most coaches is the muscle physiology, right? The anatomy. And when you look at tissue, specifically not just muscle tissue, but all tissue,

what gives it its integrity and stability and form is fact. fascia. And fascia is a combination of type one collagen and something called ground substance, which is basically like snot or wet cement, if you will. And the collagen is rebar. I also mentioned that you've been talking about fascia for a very long time. And I don't know how much attention you pay to social media, but it's like a divide on social media with like classical strength conditioning coaches who think all the fascia stuff is bullshit. And then deep on the other side are people who are all into fascia and kind of against classical strength conditioning. So it's great that you deal with both, but I just want to kind of mention that.

Well, let me, it's funny because I'll address coaches that think it's, you know, not, not applicable. The science is catching up. And just like when I was in high school, the science back then, you know, told us to take salt tablets and not shrink water, you know, and you go to jail if you do that today, right? So now the imaging equipment to look at this connective tissue, let me just lay out the facts, okay? Here are the facts about fascia and the reality of it. Fasha surrounds every cell known as the endomycin, right? It's the water balloon the cell is encapsulated in. And then you take a couple thousand cells, and that's surrounded by the periomycin. And then the entire muscle itself is surrounded by the epimicin. That's fascia, right? That's type 1 collagen and ground substance.

Ground substance are molecules that are proteoglycans, glyclosimidoglycans, hyluron, these molecules that make up this kind of wet cement. Now, this fascia we know now can change, meaning it can grow, it can become more elastic. We know it has six times more the proprioceptors than muscle. It's one of the largest sensory organs like the skin in the body. This is all non-negotiable. This is factual stuff, right? So how can you ignore that? Now, when we talk about training and preparing tissue, the fascist system is one of many systems, right?

When you do a bench press or you do a squat, if you're deconditioned, that's going to affect the cardiovascular system. there's never one system that's the only system in play. When you train, all systems are in play, right? So your neurologies in play, your muscular systems in play, your cardiovascular systems in play, your fascia systems in play. It's based on what you're doing and how you do it is going to put an emphasis on a specific system. It's really that simple.

So when you do pogo jumps and you really focus on keeping your knees locked and bracing and creating tension throughout the whole system, and you're getting free energy from the Achilles, you're training that tendon. To me, that's fascia training. It's tendon driven. And there's other things we do from an isometric standpoint that are tendon driven. So tendons, ligaments, apnoirosis, fascia, the cell surroundings, like I just said, epimicin, endomycin, parent. It's all the same stuff. It's all type 1 collagen and ground substance. 80% of tendons, ligaments, apnoirosis, fascia, it's all termed fascia. And we know tendons can be trained. We know ligament density and size increases with eccentric loading and deceleration training.

We know ligaments and tendons change based on training load. Robert Schleip, who's a German scientist, did an ultrasound on Thomas Roller's right peck. And he noticed a 4-millimeter apnoisseus going across his right peck. He did an ultra-javelym thrower. Thomas Ruler is a gold medal winner javelin-thrower from Germany. Ultrasound, 4-millimeter apnoirosis, like an upper body Achilles tendon on his right side. a half a millimeter on the left. The body formed a collagenous tissue network to aid his arm in throwing the javelin. That's non-negotiable. So when you take thousands of throws through mechanical

transduction, through fibroblast cells that are little cells similar to osteoblast cells that build bone, tino sites that build tendon, you know, these cells build tissue based on how we load. So, How is fascia training not real? Like throwing and med ball training is fascia training. When you do med ball training, you're not building bigger muscles. Maybe you're building some coordination with neuromuscular power. But what are you doing with volumes of med ball throws? You're creating more of an elastic tissue in your body other than muscle.

And that's what throwing the javelin or somebody, like Thomas Roller, who's a world-class thrower, they develop these additional or enhanced slings, fascist slings, you know, and as an athlete training the right way, you know, it's a reality. And I'll say this, too, for the strength coaches that don't buy into it. I'm going to give you a couple names of coaches. Bobby Strupp's, Mike Manzias, and Alex Guerrero. Bobby Stroop, Patrick Mahomes, since he was nine years old, Alex Guerrero, Tom Brady, who, by the way, took over the Raiders organization

in terms of their health and wellness when Tom bought into the Raiders. When he took them over, they were 32nd worst team in the league with injuries. After one year, they were ranked number one. Mike Manzius trains LeBron for the last 20 years. They all buy into training connective tissue and understand it. So if you want to argue and you want to say, I mean, hey, it's all bullseousy, shit, man. Well, maybe you should like see what those guys are doing. Maybe they don't call it fascia training, but I've spoken to all those guys at length numerous times, and Bobby speaks at

my clinic every year. Tremendous calls with Alex and Mike. I mean, these are the greatest guys on the planet with longevity. So, you know, Alex Guerrero calls it pliability, right? pliability training or pliability. It's fashion. And Alex says it. Yeah, it's, you know, it's fashion. People thought he was a voodoo doctor. So, I mean, now he's running the Raiders. I mean, his client is going to be a billionaire and the greatest football player of all time. Like, how do you argue with that, right? So that's my comeback to guys. Because when I first started in the industry in 92, all the Polyquin followers were saying speed training is bullshit and you don't need to run to get fast. That's what guys were saying.

You don't even need to spread. Just get strong and you get faster. That was the paradigm and let Charles Pollockland rest in peace. And I had Charles at my facility and he did a clinic for me and all. But there's a lot of those guys, those strength guys. But that's what they know, right? I mean, that their whole Bible is strength. And the pendulum has swung to the side of strength so much that kids are strength training at 14 so much so often,

their connective tissues are so bound up from repetitive patterns of the sagittal plane. That's why we live in the injury epidemic. It's not why that happens because I think, I don't mean to interrupt you, but that mentioned right there. I think when some people hear that, let me just kind of. play the paradigm of the other side. Well, this wouldn't happen to these kids if they just straight train and do their sport. If you strength train and do your sport, there should be no reason that any of your connected tissue gets bound up, right?

I think false. Yeah, but why? Because if you're repetitively doing sagittal plane movements, deadlift, squat, step up, lunge, and you do it all those, and then you go try to play a sport, You don't have the pliability in your rotational ability and your ability to respond and react. So here's the example I give all the time. I have a couple examples. So Stuart McGill is a friend of mine, famous biomechanists out of Canada, right?

And some people buy into what he does. Some people don't. If you're smart, you would listen to him. And I will agree that you can overdo anything. Like you can overdo core stiffness. Like you can overdo it. But the reality of it is this. Here's the facts.

When you sagittally, when you load vertically, when you vertically load the spine, which you need to, and it's healthy and you should do it. And all athletes should do it. We've overdone it. When you overdo it, the spine begins to form the collagenous network, the annulus fibrosis, the collagen network around the spine, becomes more like. a log where if you do that over and over again and that spine becomes more like a log and you try to twist it breaks and you look at Tiger Woods and you look at people that vertically loaded and we're trying to be a twisting athlete there's challenges when you do a lot of vertical loading and you have to be a dynamic twisting athlete so that's one thing and we know when i talk to Bobby strupe who

trains Mahomes, right? His spine is like a wire. He vertically loads. He does it once every three weeks based on the time of year. But there's lots of other things that we do because that collagenous tissue around the spine needs to have the properties of a wire, not a log. And people don't understand not just muscle adapts to resistance, which is known. as mechanical transduction, but connective tissue adapts to resistance. So you are triggering the fibroblast cells to really make your spine like a log. Great if you're a power lifter and not so bad if you're an offensive lineman, but not really good if you're a D-back or your wide receiver that needs to have dynamic twisting ability. And if you overload that spine, if you overload the sagittal plane,

their ability to maneuver can get restricted. And the tissue, actually just gets more densified. The connective tissue gets densified. That's the challenge in that sagittal plane pattern. The tissue gets densified. So when you talk about tissue restriction, there's only three things that restrict tissue restriction. One fibrosis, when the tissue becomes fibrodic,

that's really bad. Like, you're really challenged, right? And that sometimes could happen if you're living in the saginal plane and you're doing tons of, you can get fibriotic tissue based on repetitive movements over and over and over again. The other issue is densification. That's where the hyloronin or hylurotic acid molecules clump together and these molecules clump and your ground substance that fluidness becomes more like peanut butter where it should be hot syrup. And the viscosity of the tissue changes. Low viscosity, when we're about to perform in sprint, it should be hot syrup,

that tissue, viscosity. When we're chilling out, not doing much, if we're a high-level athlete, maybe it's like cold syrup. As we age, that stuff becomes like creamy peanut butter. And grandma is like cold, chunky peanut butter. You know, so the viscosity changes and understanding, like, listen, if you're a high-level strength coach, you're studying molecules, okay? You're studying ground substance, you're understanding proteoglycans, glycans, glycons, hyluron, how to secrete hylirone through fasciates.

This stuff's non-negotiable, right? And this stuff is science pioneered by the Germans and the Italians. Not many people in the U.S. are even looking at or studying this stuff. So when you want to go deep science, you got to go to Germany, you got to go to other countries

to understand. And that's why, you know, when you read about some of our pro athletes, McCaffrey, or going to Germany, in this treatment, going here to get that treatment, U.S. strength coaches better wake up because if they don't, they're going to be left behind and they're going to be sitting there looking in the mirror and be like, how to hell

did I miss that? Because it's coming. Like, it's coming. And it's non-negotiable. And I will go and compete and talk with anyone on the planet about this. And I'll get my team of the guys that are training the best guys on the planet and have that conversation.

So I'm like fired up about that one. have we made athletes better? You know, we talk about Patrick Mahomes and his abilities. And in that show quarterbacks, they show how Mahomes can kind of move his head around like an owl and how he can keep his hips, you know, like perpendicular to the athlete he's throwing it to. But he can move his body and contort his body all these different ways while still running high speed, you know, away from a 250-pound lineback. My curiosity is did he kind of possess some of that beforehand, or is that something that got taught?

Because, you know, if we go back and we look at the athletes from long ago, you look at Archie Manning or you look at Fran Tarkington or you look at a Jim Brown or you look at these athletes from long ago, Walter Payton just running hills. We look at some of these athletes from long ago, like they were stepping on the gas pedal hard too. when they were doing some outrageous stuff, I almost sometimes wonder if strength and conditioning to some degree, even though it's my favorite topic and it's your living, it's what you've done,

have we kind of gotten in the way? Absolutely. I mean, you know, I mean, we just overdone it. I mean, we just overdone the sagittal plane motions. We just overdone that, you know? And when you look at those guys, like here's an example, right? If you were a betting person, I had two people here, wrestlers, a wrestling match, and they both weighed exactly the same weight. Call it like 182, right, 182 pounds.

They both have the exact aptitude of skill, of training. Same weight, same skill level. But one wrestler grew up in the city lifting weights. The other wrestler just was a farm boy and did chores his whole life. That's all they did. The farm boy never lifted, but he just did. grew up on the farm and did chores and the weight, the city kid only did was lift weights, never did any type of chores. Who are you going to bet to win that wrestling match?

Bill, I would bet the farm boy, but, but again, let me play strength coach real quick. If the farm boy is lifting stuff on the farm, but my wrestler who's in the street, who's in the gym, can bench 315, can potentially squat 405, these are numbers I can see. this farm boy stuff it's a myth we might see it but like it's not necessarily something that we can track with numbers okay i mean at the end of the day i get the importance of tracking but at the end of the day it's about the outcome of performance right now i'm saying where's there's ways now to um do things like chores in the wait room a tool called the tool called the viper so my friend michaudel court was a Canadian strength coach back 25 years ago training as hockey players as high level

hockey players getting them stronger the bench press squat deadlift went to the hockey coach during the season how my guy's doing you got to get them stronger around the puck they're not warding people off well okay gets that info next season stronger bigger dead bigger squat bigger how my guys doing still got to get them strong around the puck well who's beating my guys the farm kids. So Michelle invented a tool called the Viper, which he built the bail of hay for the gym with handles, right? And now when you look at, when you look at different programs, like University of Tennessee basketball, right, they're a big, they're a big fascia training program. The head strength coach there is amazing. When you look at, when you look at the, what they do, Zichai Ziegler,

who was a 5 foot 8 and 3 quarters point guard for the University of Tennessee, five foot eight and three quarters, one defensive player in the year for two straight years. How do you define that? How is that happen? You think because he has a big bench, press, and squat? I mean, because he is body, his fascia, his neurology, everything about Zoh, Akai Ziegler's existence at 5'8 and 3 quarters, 175 pounds, defensive player in the year in the SEC, it's because he knows how to make his body a statue of steel in milliseconds and then relax it.

Steel, and that is done and facilitated, not just through the neurology of the nervous system, but fascia. And that's because fascia has very high proprioception. It's all intertwined together. So I think it's hard to negotiate. You mentioned earlier briefly about like an injury epidemic. Yeah, what the hell's going on with that? We're seeing people like it.

You know, the NFL, it's like just whatever team can kind of make it to the end of the year with most of the guys standing is the team that's probably going to win the Super Bowl every year. Yeah, yeah. I would say, just to kind of wrap up the conversation about training, fascia, the point I want to make is that we've been looking through the lens of Newtonian mechanics of the human body, like looking at the body more like a machine, right, where we have fulcrums and levers and access points and, you know, where we're stationary. where we have a fixed frame of reference. You know, that's when we squat and bench. And that's needed. But that lens and how people look at anatomy

and even, you know, anatomists of 500 years with dissecting from muscle disregarding the fascia because they thought it was packing material and had no use, just like the, you know, the bubble wrap in Amazon boxes. It has a lot of use. But this Newtonian lens of looking at the human, body like a machine is wrong. It's outright wrong. The body's more like a plant than a machine.

I was at Oracle, Arizona, a number of years ago, at the Biosphere 2 project, which is a three-acre greenhouse that they built in 1989 to see if we can live in out of space. They put eight scientists in this three-acre greenhouse, and they man-made different environments. rainforest, desert, ocean, farms. They brought in animals. They brought in plants for oxygen. They brought in everything so these people can live in this greenhouse for two years without any outside air. They grew trees.

And you know what? They grew trees. They grew fast. They grew healthy. But once the trees got to about 30 feet tall, they tipped over because there was no wind. There was no stress wood. The trees need wind. They need unpredictable stress to develop a deeper.

rooting system and to develop the stress wood that gives them the support. The body's more like a plant than a machine. We need unpredictable stressors. We need to do things in an unpredictable environment. If we live in the sagittal plane, if we live in this predictable environment with fixed access, fixed frame of reference all the time or too much, and now we go try to play a sport, which is a very unpredictable environment, we're going to get injured. That's why we have an injury epidemic because we are just spending too much time in a predictable, fixed frame of reference environment. That's the challenge. And it's very simple to me. But that's what most strength coaches know. That's what their Bible tells them. It's like it's their Bible, strength, squat, bench,

power clean. It's what they were brought up to do. And, you know, listen, I have a lot of colleagues being a high level track and field athlete, that pay a lot of, you know, respect to those lifts. And so do I. Like, as a javothor, I, I squatted, I snatched, I cleaned, you know, for 190 pounds. I cleaned, you know, 350. I snatch 250. Like, I get it, you know, in terms of the importance of those things. But I was, you know, my technique was very specific.

I was very focused on what I was doing and how I was doing it. to try to administer that stuff to 90 guys and to do it in a risk-free environment. And when you do it, if you're not like really crisp a technique when you're loading the system, you're breaking tissue down and you're creating issues with the athlete. And I don't see how that's done at a high level with 90, 100 guys. You know, I mean, some guys think the risk is worth a reward and God bless you. and, you know, yes, you know, you run the program, I'm just saying when I go into weight rooms, high school colleges,

and I, you know, got a squat, no doubt about that. But when people are cleaning and doing Olympic lifts, man, there's just a lot of faulty technique, a lot of faulty technique. So I think injuries are occurring when those things are happening. One, actually, I don't mean to go back, but when you were talking about tissue, you mentioned fibrosis, densification, and I don't know if I missed the third one.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So I wanted to go over that. Three things that limit tissue pliability. Fibrosis, obviously, the tissue becomes like felt. The collagen gets matted and really tight and knotted together, and that's fibronic tissue, right? It's the actual collagen fibers intertwining, twisted and no pliability.

That's, that's, you need manual work. You need like intervention to, to really overcome that. The next is densification where the molecules, you know, glob up. And you need, obviously, you need some work with up, but manual work, you can do that on yourself or get some work and ways to, to break up that, that densification, vibration, movement can break up that densification, like catch up. sitting in the refrigerator for a while. You've got to shake it up, right? I mean, you've got to, you've got to get more lower the viscosity of that tissue. But pockets of the tissue can become

densified. And within pockets of that tissue that's hard, it's densified. You also can get trigger points where the neurology is hyperactive. You know, the trigger point, there's a patch of tissue that's hypertonic. It's like turned on. And you've got to put pressure and you got to do some things to manipulate to relax that tissue. So the third one is neurology, you know, hypotonic tissue or the body is guarding and the body's not relaxing in a specific range of motion. So knowing how to get the body to relax and not guard, knowing how to find trigger points and get that densified tissue to break up that ground substance to, you know, you know, lessen that viscosity or decrease the viscosity of tissue and get those trigger points to relax.

And then obviously the first one, fibrosis. So understanding as a strength coach, you should understand these things and you should understand how to manage tissue, what densifies tissue, how to how to, you know, evaluate densify tissue, and then how to prepare the tissue for training, you know, how to optimize tissue health to go into a session. So the risk of injury is lower. Bill, something I want to ask you about the neurological aspect about helping a tissue relax. As Mark mentioned, I've done a lot of bodybuilding and powerlifting through the years. I actually started off as a soccer player. I got injured after 15 years. Soccer got into lifting. And you know, when you get into lifting and

you start getting, you want to get bigger numbers, you start doing the Valsala, a lot, right, to to create tension and lift heavier and heavier numbers. And I managed to do that. But one thing I noticed as I got into Jiu-Jitsu was that I was creating a lot of tension when I didn't need to be when I didn't need to create tension. And I was holding on to that because I'd be creating force and then inherently without me realizing I'd hold my breath for a little bit to do that. And over time, I stopped doing that as much with, actually, I don't do that anymore when it

comes to jiu-jitsu, but I noticed that when I roll with people who really come from the gym, when they're trying to produce force, they create the pattern of constantly. And one of the first things you have to remind somebody new to jih Tjitsu is breathe. But when someone has the tendency of when I create force, I hold my breath, that doesn't work well in a martial context. So one thing that I've been doing and one thing I've been helping people do is learning to breathe while lifting and creating force. And one thing is that when you are exhaling, when you create force, right? Like boxers hiss when they throw punches.

When you're, if I'm throwing somebody, I'm going to, you have the key or the ha, right, to create a level of tension, but you're still using the breath. You're not holding more tension than needed for the demand. Now, what are your thoughts on breathing and force production and how that could have an impact on the neurotic? of tissue tension. Yeah, it's a great point.

You bring in, you know, intra-abdominal pressure is really what the conversation is. And there's a couple things to, that helps to manage that intra-abdominal pressure. First, the pelvic floor, the diaphragm, and your abdominal structure, your abdominal muscles. You're, you know, your transverse abdominis, your obliques, your rectus.

you have this cylinder, right? You have this cylinder as your core. And understanding, think of your cylinder as a tire. And if you let the air out of the tire, it's not good. It's going to be a very dangerous ride. The tire has to have a certain amount of pressure. Too much pressure is no good. Too little pressure is no good. You got to have the right amount of air in your lungs, and it should be deep breathing. It should be where you're kind of filling your belly with air and you're kind of pushing your belt out. So it's lower abdominal breathing.

So your diaphragm is like an umbrella. They call it the umbrella muscle. The diaphragm actually, when you inhale, it comes down and expands. And when you exhale, it contracts and comes up. And when it comes down and expands, it opens that thoracic cage, that rib cage. That diaphragm also is linked to your glutes.

If the diaphragm is hypertonic or always, you're doing tons of cardio and you're always breathing, it inhibits glutes. It inhibits glute activation. So one of the things that we do, we focus. I've never heard the diaphragm being linked to the glutes before on this show. A lot of people have come on and talked about breathing, but this is the first time I've heard diaphragm the glutes. I've heard people talk about glutinisia, like you have glute amnesia. Yeah, gluten amnesia, and that's for a lot of reasons.

You know, it could be poor big toe activation. It could be, you know, the neural connection. But the diaphragm definitely, if you have a hyperactive diaphragm where it's always tonic, it's always kind of turned on, it definitely could inhibit maximum glute activation or inhibit the glutes of getting the maximal firing or getting the glutes late to the party. So when you do forced exhalations

and you take a big inhale and you exhale for 10 seconds and you blow all the air out of your lungs and at like 7, 8, and 9 you're gonna imagine you gotta blow out the candles on the birthday cake. You're getting the diaphragm to relax. that's one of the exercises we do and, you know, to help our athletes get the most out of managing this intra-abdominal pressure.

So that's one thing to kind of help reset the diaphragm is forced exhalation so we can get it to calm down a little bit. In terms of creating more stability, you want to bring air in the lungs or they're about 75% filled with air. Think of the air coming in to your lungs and into your structure as a stable tire. You want to have enough air in the tire about 75% filled, but you're not bringing air into the chest. The air is coming into your abdominal region where you're thinking about pushing your belt buckle out. that's where you want the air to sit and you want to maintain that air and that pressure and still breathe and still be able to breathe that's why they hiss they hiss and they a boxer will hiss or venus will grunt they do that because they maintain intra-abdominal pressure and it's like

it's like they let a little air out and then they sip a little air back in before they have to create force again. So they're still breathing slightly. They're not holding their breath, but they are maintaining intra-abdominal pressure in the lower abdominals. What this does, this anchors the limb structures. This anchors the extremities, right, the distal extremities. So the core and this cylinder, which is the pelvic floor is the bottom, the diaphragm, the diaphragm, the diaphrags, is the top and your, you know, your obliques and your transverse abdominis are the sides of this cylinder. Your erector spinae is the back, your rectus of the front. You have this cylinder. That has to maintain a certain amount of pressure, like a tire. And when we have that, that is the foundation

that the cannon is on, because if you have a weak, if you have no pressure or you're letting all your air out, you know, and you're trying to be quick or explosive or tackle or hit or punch or whatever. It's like shooting a cannon out of a rowboat. See, you got to take that cannon, you got to put it on a block of cement and lock it in. This is the block of cement. And to make it a block of cement, got to bring air in. You've got to hold air pressure at the bottom. And when you do that, all these things have to work together. The abdominal muscles, the transverse, the erector spinae, the rectus, all these things with the pelvic floor muscles along with the diaphragm. They all work to create this pressurized cylinder that is the block of cement and the cannon

is the legs firing into the ground or the arm whipping overhead. And it's got to be fluid. Without that stability, that intra-abdominal pressure, without that foundation of stability, you're never going to maximize limb speeds. I will never go to a doctor, ever again about my general health. All they want to do is put you on pills. Really well said there by Dana White. Couldn't agree with them more. A lot of us are trying to get jacked and tan.

A lot of us just want to look good, feel good. And a lot of the symptoms that we might acquire as we get older, some of the things that we might have, high cholesterol or these various things, it's amazing to have somebody looking at your blood work as you're going through the process, as you're trying to become a better athlete, somebody that knows what they're doing.

They can look at your cholesterol. they can look at the various markers that you have and they can kind of see where you're at and they can help guide you through that. And there's a few aspects too where it's like, yes, I mean, no, no shade to doctors, but a lot of times they do want to just stick you on medication.

A lot of times there is supplementation that can help with this. Merrick Health, these patient care coronators are going to also look at the way you're living your lifestyle because there's a lot of things you might be doing that if you just adjust that, boom, you could be at the right levels, including working with your testosterone.

And there's so many people that I know that are looking for, they're like, hey, should I do that? They're very curious. And they think that testosterone is going to all of a sudden kind of turn them into the Hulk. But that's not really what happens. It can be something that can be really great for your health because you can just basically live your life a little stronger, just like you were maybe in your 20s and 30s.

And this is the last thing to keep in mind, guys. When you get your blood work done at a hospital, they're just looking at like these minimum levels. At Merrick Health, they try to bring you up to. ideal levels for everything you're working with. Whereas if you go into a hospital and you have 300 nanograms per deciliter of test, you're good, bro, even though you're probably feeling like shit. At Merrick Health, they're going to try to figure out what type things you can do in terms of your lifestyle. And if you're a candidate, potentially TRT. So these are things to pay attention to

to get you to your best self. And what I love about it is a little bit of the back and forth that you get with the patient care coordinator. They're dissecting your blood work. It's not like if you just get this email back and it's just like, hey, try these five things. Somebody's actually on the phone with you going over every step and what you should do. Sometimes it's supplementation, sometimes it's TRT, and sometimes it's simply just some lifestyle habit changes. All right, guys, if you want to get your blood work checked and also get professional help from people who are going to be able to get you towards your best levels,

heads AmeriHealth.com and use code power project for 10% off any panel of your choice. And you're never going to create your body to become this statue of steel that. that creates this unbelievable force like the two-inch punch, Bruce Lee, right? It's knowing how to manage this pressure. And it's not just abdominal strength, right? It's not just about timing. It's about neurology. It's about creating that stability.

It's a skill. Some athletes have it naturally, like a football player that can just make contact and just incredibly just put damage on people, like run people over or tackle people, but they might not be the strongest, they might not be the biggest, but they have the ability to create their body to become a statuous steel. And that's a combination of not only intra-abdominal pressure, but the combination of the neurology working with fascia of creating limbs and everything that becomes super stiff. When a world-class sprinter is sprinting,

his foot is hitting the ground when they're sprinting at top speeds, their foot is hitting the ground at eight-hundredths of a second, producing five times their body weight. So a 150-pound sprinter, a light guy, is generating 750 pounds of force in eight-hundredth of a second. That amount of force through one limb, single limb, the amount of strength and the amount of stiffness you need to run at 26, 27 miles an hour with that kind of force, that's beyond weight room strength. That's neurology. That's neurology co-contracting muscles, creating pulsing stiffness. That is a skill. Dan Path, a world-class sprint coach, coached three guys sub-10-0,

three guys under 10-0 that did not lower-body weight train. Because they mastered the neurology. Now, they didn't lower body weight train for a host of reasons, injuries, whatever. But that comes straight from Dan, a world-class Olympic sprint coach. So this other concept of understanding neurology and that neurology and creating that stiffness when that foot hits the ground at eight hundredths of a second, that's not just weight room strength. It's a lot more than weight room strength.

And that's where, you know, the study by Peter Way and in 2000, Harvard University, he did a study with world-class sprinters in 2000, and he identified why world-class sprinters are so fast because they're so much stronger for their body weight compared to everybody else. That study identified relative body strength or what they call mass-specific force. How much force that athlete can generate based on their body weight. That's why the weight room thing exploded in 2000. And everybody started going down there because of that one study, basically. And then now the research behind fashion and everything else changed.

But I'm going to pause there because that was just a tangent. No, that was amazing. You know, I do find it interesting with somebody like Dan Path, not necessarily utilizing weight training for the lower body. But I think the mistake that we sometimes make, if you hear that and you're novice and you're not, you're not smart to some of this stuff, it's like they trained the crap out of the legs. And they train the crap out of the entire lower structure, probably especially from the knee down. down, probably a lot of drills for the ankles and Achilles and probably depth jumps and all these things that you can train, you can train in a gym with nice variables of adjustment because you can, you can choose the floor that you're on, you can choose the surface you're jumping from, you

could choose how high you're jumping. I mean, you can, you can almost like, almost like your weight training where you select a weight. Somebody goes to use the 30s for walking lunges. They can now just grab the 15s if the 30s were too challenging, right? So I think that sometimes we say weight room, we're just always thinking about like the weight and strength and conditioning. Sometimes the conditioning side falls off a little bit and we miss some of the golden nuggets in there. But I would imagine Dan Path was still probably trying to do stuff with these athletes to

figure out how they can deal with those. Yeah, he's 100% working neurology. and working pulsing stiffness, right, through isometrics and through different forms of adaptations. And what we're talking about now, and we're going down the road of dynamic systems theory training, where the body self-organizes. So there's these concepts of motor learning, right, two concepts of top-down cognitive queuing an athlete where you know what you want to accomplish and you're working on a specific skill or exercise. And then there's, you know, you're not thinking about anything.

You're creating a constraint in the environment or the task constraint that body has to figure out. So an example would be, you know, doing a barefoot hop with a title tank on your back and you're just doing a pattern hop. But you've got to balance and you've got this water sloshing around. the body has to figure out how to find stability. So there's lots of ways to create constraints. And again, this is called dynamic systems, Nicole I Bernstein, in terms of the constraints-led approach,

you know, creating a constraint either in the environment or in the task. An environmental constraint is the different surfaces. If I'm doing barefoot, you know, light plios, I can do that on a mat, on a harder surface, on a rubber floor, and I can actually do it interchangeably on these different services because that environment's going to change how I adapt, how my body has to self-organize and adapt. But 100%, there's ways to stimulate the organism through the environment or through the task

that will elicit a response for the organism to respond, just like wind will get that tree to be stronger. And that's exactly what we're talking about. it seems like reaction time is something sometimes that can be a little bit difficult to train or to think of ways to train but i've noticed that when you're training your athletes you're almost always queuing them is that to in great obviously that's for organization purposes because you're dealing with like 30 or 40 athletes at a time but i would imagine it probably is also to do with reaction because if you say one or three or five or whatever different numbers you may shout out they have to react to that yeah i mean like Like, one of the things, listen, I'm always learning, right? And I always want to be the dumbest guy in the room, and I strive to be that, and I always want to surround myself with people. And I learn more from my athletes and logging hours and just always being curious, right? Always never thinking I have it figured out, never thinking what I'm doing, this is the end all, be all. And, you know, really one area where I feel we've made great progress is tissue preparation.

and really knowing how to prepare a tissue. I think we're getting to a point. I just booked a clinic. I'm going to go to Penn State, and I'm doing an in-service for Penn State. Last year I did University of Oregon, University of Tennessee, Yukon, Men's and Women's Basketball.

I did all the NHL strength coaches. I've been getting a lot of good traction in terms of this tissue prep concept and what we're doing in our warm-up, which is complete game-changer. because we're addressing all these different things around the tissue. We're addressing fascia. We're addressing neurology.

We're addressing the neurological response time. So our preparation, our warm-up, the queuing I'm giving when I say one or three, that's an audio cue they got to respond to in the warm-up. Or I might be holding up my fingers, two, one, three. It's all in our preparation phase. So we've mastered this 15-minute routine that, I get like a 98% success rate of any athlete, any age, when they get done with this routine,

they feel better than they ever felt before. If it's the first time I'm doing it with them. I mean, I do it to coaches. I do it to athletes. And I've continued to hone this down over the last bunch of years. And we've always been known for our active warmup. We pioneered it 35 years ago, but now we're getting really deep into the science and how we're actually through a series of what we call our yo method isometrics. In our warmup, we use our yo method isometrics.

We use our yielding, we use our overcoming isos and oscillatory isos, all in the warm up. And we do them and we interchange these isos in the warm up without any equipment and, get tissue to sliding glide because what we're doing in our warm-up with our isos series and we we use all these three forms of isos intermixed with one another in a certain order in certain angles at certain times we're getting the tissue the ground substance the lower viscosity we're getting the tissues the sliding glide and we're getting to the neurology to learn how to relax and then fire quickly and then relax quickly the magic is the rate of relaxation not just the rate of firing it's how the rate of

relaxation so in part of our warm up we'll be in an iso position say an a b a quadruped position with the leg out to the side and in an a b abducted fashion um you know abducted and we'll be holding that in an iso And then on the count, when I say one, they want to think about just letting their leg drop to the ground, like shutting it off. Now, we don't do that because you don't want to risk the foot falling to the ground and damaging the MCL or the ACL, right? But we'll set them up and just teach them that without taking that risk. But then ultimately what we want to do is the leg is out to the side. On the one, we want to literally drop the foot, but don't let it hit the ground. Relax it and then catch it before it hits.

so we're training we have a whole series that we do where we train the rate of so we're in this iso contraction and then we're on the number we're relaxing on the number we're shutting the tip shutting it off let it relax but before it hits the ground no matter what movement we're in or before we have to catch it and turn it on again so we're kind of thinking about turning it off turning it on turning it off turning it on so and that that does a lot of things because that's what I call an oscillatory iso. So we're iso in, we're kind of relaxing, turning on, we're kind of pulsing. We're pulsing it because athleticism is about creating pulsing stiffness.

So when my foot strikes the ground, when my hand strikes the opponent in a combat sport, at that strike, everything has to turn on and co-contract and your body has to become, statue of steel for a millisecond and then relax. So when I swing that golf club, I load up my elastic tissues, I use muscle and neurology to make that initial drive. And as that club is coming down, there's an element of relaxation. Like, I got to stay relaxed. I still got momentum. I started that momentum with my leg drive and my hips, and I created that whip. And as that golf club comes down, it's flying at a high speed if I'm good at what I do and at ball contact the neurology and all the muscles co-contract to create a statue of steel for a

milliseconds so when that club hits the ball it's boom followed by relaxation and that happens naturally it happens naturally so it's it's When that ball strike hits, it's a combination of the neurology creating stiffness very quickly and then relaxing very quickly. So I hope, I mean, and that's the case when I put my foot into the ground, when I sprint. Think about that. When I'm sprinting, my leg is firing. My hip flexors have to bring my leg forward. My glutes have to relax when the leg.

coming forward. When I reverse that, and now I got to extend my foot into the ground violently, well, my glutes have to fire. My hip flexors better be somewhat relaxed because I'm trying to extend my hip. And when that foot hits the ground, guess what? To create 750 pounds of force, everything's lighting up in a co-contraction, almost isometric fashion in a very short period of time, a very short amount of time. Everything has to become super stiff and then everything has to relax, well, muscles have to relax again to recover the limb up to cycle again. So whether it be foot strike in a sprint, whether it be a golf club hitting the ball, a baseball bat hitting the baseball, me trying to tackle someone and accelerate fast and all of a sudden, if I accelerate and I'm all

loose and no tension and hit someone, I'm going to get hurt. When I come and make contact and tackle, I got to create tension. My body has to become a statue of steel to be able to make good explosive contact into an opponent. And that's the neurology and the fascia facilitating co-contractions to create pulsing stiffness, which is not a bad thing. Pulsing stiffness is what athleticism is built on. Got time for one more question? Yeah, I got four minutes. And I'm like, I said all that without taking a breath.

So my inner abdominal pressure is depleted. You know, there is one question I wanted to ask you, because, you know, we do different aspects of soft tissue work. I use this tool called a body lever that allows me to work on my own tissues. Do you, I know that you have this practice that helps athletes. prime their tissues before training or prime their tissues before action. What do you have athletes do outside at home? I know like, you know, elite athletes that have coat, like that have, you know, the money to, sometimes they'll get massages.

But do you have your athletes do anything on their own? Oh, yeah. I mean, self-mile fascia work is huge. As simple as a lacrosse ball underneath the feet is a game changer. And when you put a lacrosse ball underneath the feet, It's not about rolling it, you know, haphazardly. It's about finding the tension. It's about finding the hot spots and putting pressure on the hot spots

and dissipating that hypotonic tissue. It's also then taking a softball and, you know, using a softball in a way. And my sons have a great, my one son has a great routine on his social media channel. under the Perisi brothers. He has got a soft tissue routine with the softball that he brings it through. And just finding those densified tissues is a game changer. So all you need is a lacrosse ball and a softball. And you've got two incredible tools to break up that densification and prepare tissue.

And then we do a whole mobility routine that really focuses on the neurology because tightness is really a lot of times due to just the body guarding, the body not allowing these ranges of motion that we need to get into. So if someone was to do a hamstring flexibility test and we would have measured their hip flexion lying supine, they're going to have a certain angle. Maybe it's 90 degrees or maybe it's less. If we put them out under anesthesia, they're going to have a lot more range of motion. because neurology's turned off.

And the only thing that's going to limit them at that point is fibrosis or densification. So once you take neurology out of the picture, your range of motion is going to increase. So we need to do things in our warm-up to relax the neurology. And how do we do that? Not by sitting and holding. When we do mobility, it has to be oscillatory. It's got to be, you know, you don't hold the position more than a second. or two so long slow static stretching the body tends to guard when you sit and hold

stretches the the muscles tend to co-contract you got a you got to have a rhythmical kind of slow bounce very so like a one to two-second rhythmical flow now some of the pioneer leaders in stretching are christenad frederick stretch to win out of Phoenix Arizona those guys are legendary and And again, guys, here's the deal about me, right? I'm going to give credit, like, a lot of the stuff I've gathered over the years, man. I've been in practice for a long time. I've had some self-discovery.

But I learned a ton from some people that are really focused in different areas, right? So from a flexibility standpoint, Chris and Anne Frederick, they're the best in the world when it comes to flexibility. I mean, it's not even a question. They are great, and they have unpacked it. They've been doing it for 35. years and you know so all the things I'm sharing I've gotten from credible sources you know researchers PhDs that are PhDs licensed massage therapist I got you know guys Tom Finley let his soul rest in peace he's an MD PhD and massage therapist that's

why I'm learning fashre from right Robert Schleip a PhD massage therapist Keith Barr PhD strength coach that that really understands connective tissue. So it's, you know, Stuart McGill, who's done incredible things. So it's taking all the information from all these really smart people that expand in a lot of different areas of strength of conditioning. And then formulating my own strategy. That's what I've done with this tissue prep routine.

Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. And it's always great to see that you're still on the front. lines. Like, you're still actually coaching. I'm sure there's been times in your career where you could have passed it off to somebody else, but I see you still in the trenches and I got a tremendous amount of respect for that. So thank you so much for all that you do. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Mark. Thanks for having me, guys. I appreciate it.