The Tim Ferriss Show - #252: Inside the World of SuperTraining - Mark Bell

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take

Starting point is 00:00:33 one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D

Starting point is 00:01:00 and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week,

Starting point is 00:01:38 which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time, because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free. It's always going to be free. And you can learn more at Tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's Tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first

Starting point is 00:02:23 subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out. Tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely

Starting point is 00:02:50 that you'd dig it a lot. And you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out, if the spirit moves you. Mark Bell, at Mark Smelly Bell on Twitter, who is the founder of Super Training Gym found in Sacramento, which is oftentimes referred to as the strongest gym in the West. Prior to opening his own gym, he spent years studying and training under the legendary Louis Simmons at Westside Barbell. Mark is no stranger to the iron at all. His best geared lifts in competition include a 1,025-pound squat, that's 465 kilos, an 832-pound bench press, that's 377 kilos, and a 738-pound deadlift, that's 335 kilos. Mark is also the inventor of the patented slingshot, a device utilized to assist a lifter in maintaining proper bench press form while also allowing the lifter to use more weight

Starting point is 00:04:07 or perform more reps. He now has an entire line of products and has been spectacularly successful. In this episode, we cover a lot, including his most important lessons for building strength, how to avoid injury and breakdown, the lesser known or some lesser known training techniques that nearly everyone overlooks, how he became a millionaire by offering his gym memberships for free, which in and of itself is just an incredible story, and much, much more. So we really dig into the audio. We recorded this at his gym. And while there, we took a full tour of his facility, looking at some crazy equipment and custom modded equipment that he has at the Super Training Gym in Sacramento.

Starting point is 00:04:49 If you want to see that video, you can. And it is at Tim.blog forward slash super training. All one word. Tim.blog forward slash super training. And for links to everything in this episode, as usual, you can find the show notes at tim.blog forward slash podcast. So without further ado, please enjoy Mark Smelly Bell. Mark, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tim.

Starting point is 00:05:15 I'm fired up to be here, man. This is going to be fun. Yeah, it's been a while since I have hung out among the Goliaths here at Super Training. Jim, this is my first time in the new location. I like the digs. I'm glad we got you, you my first time in the new location. I like the digs. I'm glad we got you finally to the new spot here. We're having a lot of fun here. You know, this is kind of a dream come true. This is 10 years in the making. Super Training Gym has been around since 2006. And, you know, I started off in somebody else's gym. And then I

Starting point is 00:05:41 had my own spot for a while where we were near a Hmong funeral home where they were sacrificing all kinds of animals and shit like that. That was really bizarre. But to come to this and be able to offer the gym, the gym is free, super training's free. And it's just a dream come true to be able to share knowledge. And my mission and goal in life is to make the world a better place to lift. So explain the business model. So how did you decide? How the fuck does that work? How does it work? Yeah, no, no, honestly, like what's, how did you make that decision? You know, when I first did it, one of my good friends asked me, he said,

Starting point is 00:06:16 he said, why, why are you making the gym free? Because the gym wasn't always free. The gym used to be 125 bucks a month. I just kind of made that value up out of the four times a week that we get together and the amount of coaching that I was offering everybody. To me, it would have been valued a lot more than that, but powerlifters typically don't have that kind of dough to shell out two, 300 bucks a month. So I made it 125, but when I switched it to be free, one of my good friends, he was like, why are you making the gym free? And I said to become rich and famous. And from that moment on, that's when things started to really kick in and things

Starting point is 00:06:50 started to really groove. Because at that point, everything started to make a lot more sense to me. It was like Neo and the Matrix. Everything just kind of started to come together. One by one, things started to unfold. My brother passed away around that time. It was just a message to me. It was very simple. Life is short. I don't give two fucks about what other people think. I need to get myself heading in the right direction. I need to do the things that I want to do. I need to follow through with my hopes and my dreams rather than be so fearful of stuff. A lot of people are fearful of kind of jumping in with two feet into stuff. And I was like, you know, I can't have that mentality anymore. It's just not going to work. It didn't work for my brother

Starting point is 00:07:34 and it's not going to work for me. So I need to just forge forward and try to figure out a way to keep moving forward and to share the message I want to share and to do it my own way, do things my own way. So making the gym free was a byproduct of the slingshot being invented and the slingshot giving me the financial means to make the gym free. But I knew that the gym being free was going to give me back everything tenfold. And aside from that, the, or in addition to that, rather, the slingshot was made inside the walls of super training gym. So I can never really repay super training gym what it's done to me, no matter how we slice it. So the gym being free is just my way of paying back to the powerlifting community. Did you make that decision in part because it was just consuming like 10% of your

Starting point is 00:08:26 bandwidth, having to keep track of membership payments and all the details that go along with that kind of profit and loss. And by freeing it up, it just made your focus on other things more pure. And what are the rules? Like, can anybody show up anytime they want, or what's the commitment that you look for, if anything? I like some of the words you just said there. You mentioned the word pure. I'm not like the humanitarian of the fucking decade or anything like that. It's nothing corny or weird like that because financial gain is on the front of my mind. It's not in the back of my mind. It's on the front of my mind. That's, you know, I'm a scoreboard driven person. You know, I'm trying to put points up on the scoreboard. And as an adult, how do you put points up on the scoreboard? You put points up

Starting point is 00:09:09 on the scoreboard by making money, right? Dollars and cents we're talking about, right? And so that's kind of the mission. That's kind of the goal. And so by making the gym free, it allowed, it gave me a testing ground for a lot of the products that I have. It really opened the doors for a lot of other financial gain that maybe when I first made the gym free, I didn't recognize. But once I made the gym free, it was, I kind of just started to think more in terms of, okay, like I literally own everything that's in here, including the people now. I basically purchased the people in some weird way because they're no longer paying me for my services. I'm allowing them to train here for free with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment. That gym is so expensive to go over each piece of equipment. Every barbell is specialized. Every plate is specialized. There's nothing in there as normal, especially

Starting point is 00:10:00 the people. Nothing in there is normal. So everything's a little different in there. And because of that, it allowed me to kind of recognize that I have a place, a real strong testing ground where I can test products. And also I'm not a product company only. I'm 50% products and 50% media. Without media, social media, without YouTube and without- The magazine. The magazine, Power Magazine, without all these different formats. I'm a subscriber. There you go. As you know. Yeah. And without these different formats to get the message out there, then what am I?

Starting point is 00:10:34 It's great to see that it's all working through the podcast and through other things. Trying to make the products popular, trying to make the gym popular, trying to make money, all those things are definitely on the front of my mind. You did mention how does the gym work? The way the gym works is not that complicated, but what we do is we do have an email address that's associated with the gym. It's not plastered everywhere, but if you do find it, if you do work towards finding it, and you're able to communicate back and forth with us, then you're able to come here. So it's not that complicated, but we try not to advertise too much. The sign that you saw out front today doesn't say gym.

Starting point is 00:11:12 We don't make it super simple to get here. And then once you get here, we sort of make it a little bit confusing on what's the next step. You know, somebody is like, hey, I'm supposed to talk to Marcus. I don't know what's going on. I'm like, I don't know what's going on either. They're like, well, don't you to talk to Marcus. I don't know what's going on. I'm like, I don't know what's going on either. They're like, well, don't you own it? That just happened like five minutes ago.

Starting point is 00:11:27 I was like, I don't know, Marcus. I'm just a fly on the wall here. I have no idea. Yeah, they're like, well, don't you own the place? I'm like, yeah, sort of. Don't worry about it. So we make it a little confusing. Go lift some heavy stuff.

Starting point is 00:11:37 We'll talk in a half hour. Yeah, and then, you know, when I see people in here working, like if you're not sweating, I'm not talking to you. There's just no point. We're not going to have- Unless it's a podcast. Yeah. We're not going to have-

Starting point is 00:11:48 I'm intimidated by all the mutants you have back there. That's right. There are some mutants back there for sure. But if I'm not seeing that you're working, then there's no room for me to have conversation with you. I'm not going to help you out of nowhere and just start giving you a bunch of advice unless I see that you're hungry for it. Yeah. And you have, I observed because we're effectively in your recording portion of the office at Super Training Gym.

Starting point is 00:12:13 And someone came in earlier. HQ to talk about the schedule. So the schedule for the gym, can you lay out the days of the week and what you do on them? So the gym schedule is we get together every Tuesday and Thursday during the week from about three until approximately seven. And then Saturday, Sunday is from nine until about one. In terms of like the training split, it's pretty simple. We do a lower body once a week. We do upper body once a week.

Starting point is 00:12:42 I'm sorry, we deadlift and squat once a week. So I guess it'd be lower body twice a week and upper body about once a week. I'm sorry, we deadlift and squat once a week. So I guess it'd be lower body twice a week and upper body about once a week. Every Tuesday is deadlifts, every Thursday is bench, and every Saturday is squats. After a while, it starts to get kind of pre-programmed into your body and your body's kind of like, oh, today's a squat day. Today's, rather than it being Tuesday, it's deadlift day. You know, that's how meat heady we get around here. When you, when you start just instinctively exploding off of the toilet into, into like exploding on the toilet and into the toilet, you know, you've had too much pre workout stimulus. Number one, and it's squat day. That's right. So first of all, I want to recommend a couple of things. First is, and there's a poster here on the wall, two documentaries that I think

Starting point is 00:13:24 offer a lot of insight into your background and your family and also your brother. Because I don't know if we'll have time to really dig into the details. But Bigger, Stronger, Faster, which is how we originally met, I believe. Because I saw the documentary. I was really impressed. So the tagline is it's still cheating if everyone is doing it, which is about performance enhancing drugs. It's a great doc, which was made by your brother. Yeah. And now it's kind of like, uh, it's kind of in that classic status, you know, and I liked it so much. Number one, I reached out to try to find you and realized, oh my God,

Starting point is 00:13:55 you're in Northern California and then traveled to Sacramento to embarrass myself. I was like, who is this skinny guy? Who is this guy? He has a huge head. Why is this guy trying to throw kicks at me and stuff? What's going on here? And then the other is prescription thugs. Right. Which covers a lot of semi-related topics, but also goes very deep with your family. So those are just two things I want people to check out for further watching and resources that I would highly encourage checking out. The training split, could you talk about Louie Simmons and Westside and what are some of the key lessons you learned?

Starting point is 00:14:31 Yeah. I trained with Louie Simmons for about a year. Also worked with him and coached under him for about an additional year beyond that. And for people who don't know him, could you just give them an overview? Yeah. Louie Simmons is the owner of pretty much the strongest gym in the history of lifting. He created a community that was so competitive and so strong that thousand pound squats were routine. 800 pound benches were routine and 800 pound deadlifts were very routine. Keep in mind, this is back a few years when geared powerlifting was a little bit more acceptable. Now people have taken the powerlifting gear off.

Starting point is 00:15:12 The powerlifting gear is very supportive, and it adds additional pounds to what you can actually lift. And for those people who don't follow powerlifting gear in this particular case, referring to multiply bench press shirts and deadlift suits and stuff. Stuff that looks like a straight jacket type of deal. That improves your leverage. Yeah, it improves your leverage. Yeah, improves your leverage. But regardless of what people wore and didn't wear, at the time, that was the style of lifting that was popular. And Louie created the fastest, most explosive, strongest athletes in the game without question. And he would have what seemed like 10, 15 guys at a time that were just crushing world records and some different weight classes. And, uh, year by year, you know, the things would change a little bit in the gym and they'd get new guys in and he would still create, you know, monster after monster didn't matter. Just the only thing that would change in there was the names.

Starting point is 00:15:56 The numbers would go up a little bit. Uh, the names in there would change a little bit, but it was still the same thing. It's still him, you know, Westside barbell kicking the crap out of everybody. Uh, Louie, um, was a pioneer in a way of, uh, bands and chains being utilized in training the bands and chains help to accommodate resistance. The weights are lighter at the bottom and they're heavier at the top. As your body becomes in a more advantageous position and more favorable position, position, you're getting more weight on the bar as your body's in the least favorable position, such as the bottom of a bench press or the bottom of a squat, you have less chain weight or less resistance from the band. And so it gives you an opportunity for a lot of things. Number one, it can help you produce more force, which

Starting point is 00:16:40 is great in any sport. It can also help you to just be faster, be more dynamic. The other thing that it's going to do is it's going to allow you, it's going to help prevent injuries because as I mentioned, when you're at the bottom of the lift, there's less weight on you. You have less overall weight on you. So for example, if you were to bench press with some bands on the bar at the bottom of the lift, if you had three plates on the bar, like I was using today, it would be, you know, let's just say it's 50 pounds of bands total at the bottom with 315, it'd be about 365 pounds at the bottom. And if it jumped up to a hundred pounds extra, it'd be about 415 at the top. So as you can see, again, the weights are lighter at the bottom, heavier at the top. It allows for acceleration. You can accelerate through the weights and it allows for a kind of consistent tension on those weights.

Starting point is 00:17:30 So Louie paired up speed training, dynamic effort training as he calls it, with maximal effort training. So he basically attacked training from two different ways. And there's a third way I'll talk about in a second, but the main two ways that he attacked it from were from the perspective of if I can move faster, if I can become more explosive, I can move more weight because in some cases it just becomes a race against the clock. If you go to bench press 300 pounds and it's going to take you 12 seconds, the odds of you making one rep last that long like that is probably, probably not very good. Anybody out there that's listening to the show that can bench press even 300 pounds,

Starting point is 00:18:11 take 200 pounds and try to go five seconds on the way down with a five-second pause and five seconds on the way up. And you'll quickly realize that time management of those lifts is crucial. You want to get underneath the weight and get it the hell over with as quickly as possible. So the speed element and the speed aspect is crucial. The other way that he recognized, you know, just gaining strength was to simply just get stronger, work on handling more weights and trying to figure out different ways and different angles to handle more weights. He came up a lot of new and creative and different ways of handling big weights. So it wouldn't kill your central nervous system. And so it wouldn't kill your knees and kill your elbows

Starting point is 00:18:54 and things of that nature, because he started to use a lot of specialized barbells and specialized. He would squat off of boxes back in the day, and then he started squatting off of foam. He's even put springs inside of barbells to create a different effect. One barbell in particular had a spring in the middle, and it kind of looked like the spring inside the roll of toilet paper or something on a shake weight. But you would squeeze the barbell together. It was like on a regular bar, like for bench pressing. You'd squeeze the bar together, and sure enough, it'd blow your chest up. It would crush you. So he had a lot of great innovative ways, but those were the two main ways he thought of to increase strength. One was to max out, to go as heavy as possible. Max effort day. Max effort day. And to choose different exercises

Starting point is 00:19:40 each week. That's kind of the basis of the conjugate system. You might do a box squat one week. You might do a regular squat the next. Next week after that, you might squat with chains. The variety is both good and bad. Sometimes a variety got to be so large that you no longer knew what the hell you were doing anymore. And sometimes the variety was a welcome change because you might be a seasoned lifter that is just so tired of doing the same shit over and over again that you can't even. The other huge advantage of changing things up is in a good way, you kind of don't know where you stand, which I think is kind of nice because being a competitive lifter and being a competitive athlete for so long, you can get really frustrated and the ups and downs can be very, very, the downs for sure can be very, well,

Starting point is 00:20:29 the ups too. They can all be very negative actually, because you don't want to be kind of even keel as an athlete. You don't want the highs and lows to ever be too great because it can kind of throw you for a loop when something unexpected does happen. And the third way to increase strength is to have more muscle mass. So Louie recognized just hypertrophy, just some bodybuilding style training, the repetition effort method, as he would call it. Just simply, once you're done with some of the main movements, he would do three sets of eight, four sets of eight, five sets of 10, basically get in more work, more volume with different exercises uh that would allow you to help build muscle mass so you get done with the main lift and the overall volume of the main lift may not be through the roof because there's only so much you can do with a barbell you'd move into assistance exercises

Starting point is 00:21:17 that's where you'd get your volume in and that's where you'd build muscle and if you look at a lot of these concepts whether it's the bands of the chains uh box squats uh board i don't know if i'm using the right word presses where you have i guess what are what are they technically they're two by fours i think so yeah just sort of put together different heights so you can stop the bar from in this case the chest at say four, just six inches. Partial range of motion. Partial range of motion have become very popular. Do you have a particular opinion about when people should incorporate versus not incorporate these things? Because you could go to, I'm sure, many different gyms where you have somebody who's bench pressing 45 pounds and they have like 17 different accessories. For someone who is athletic, but not a power lifter, getting started focusing on these three lifts, at what point would you introduce things like bands and chains and so

Starting point is 00:22:14 on? That's a great question. You know, first of all, I think that a little bit of lifting, a little bit of training, what we're doing when we're going to the gym is what I call artificial exercise. We're making shit up because we don't have to do the same tasks that we had to do hundreds and hundreds of years ago. We're not carrying buckets of water and we're not digging ditches and we're not building stuff as much as we were in the past. And so you got to make shit up to get to be muscular, to even look manly. You got to like make stuff up to kind of make up some ground for the girly shit that men do nowadays. That's kind of make up some ground for the girly shit that men do nowadays that's kind of where we're at i mean seriously hanging out on a computer all day

Starting point is 00:22:50 and all these different things were not really things that we were probably designed to do but anyway a lot longer story for another day right kelly starrett in here and have some wine yeah yeah exactly let him go off on sitting yeah yeah exactly yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think that one of the key components to kind of all of this is that when you're a newer lifter that you just try to keep it simple. And even as you advance, anything seems too good to be true. It is. There's no tricks, unfortunately. There are some things that can help. You use the term, and I love the term, accelerated learning.

Starting point is 00:23:25 That is probably the only trick that there really is. Like find somebody who knows what they're doing and rub elbows with them and try to find other people that know what they're doing because that will actually accelerate you to the top faster than you can imagine. Much faster than finding like some secret fat burner or something like that. Finding people that know how to lose body fat, finding people that know how to build strength and getting around those people is gonna be a crucial element. For newer lifters, I always just suggest, and even older lifters, again,

Starting point is 00:23:53 five exercises is about all that you need. You don't need to be in the gym for hours on end. If you feel good for the day and you wanna do more exercises, then ride it out and go ahead and feel better and do it. But a real crucial thing to your training, and this is something that has taken me a long time to learn, your training should make you feel better and not make you feel worse. If you can kind of always keep that in mind, your training should make you feel better and not make you feel worse. Think about that the next time you have some stupid idea

Starting point is 00:24:25 to do something, you're like, oh, I'm going to try to run 12 miles. And you haven't ran one mile in the last couple of years. Tim Ferriss knows exactly what I'm talking about. I do. I still follow his social media. He's doing something crazy all the time. Yeah. We both have spent, we specialize in certain in certain types of gross indulgence. Right, right. Yeah, so you just want to be careful. I mean, if you haven't sprinted in a long time, it's probably not a great idea to go do 10 sets of 200s

Starting point is 00:24:55 on a track somewhere. You've got to ease your way into stuff. You've got to take your time. You've got to build up towards something. And then once you build up towards something, you can start to add in more stuff. The bands and the chains and stuff are great. Anyone can use them.

Starting point is 00:25:09 I never want to tell a new person that they can't do something because why not let them enjoy themselves the same way or like let them have access to all the same stuff. Let them use a slingshot. Let them use bands. Let them use boards or whatever they want to do. But just kind of keep in mind, the basics are going to be the stuff that really gets you there. People from the seventies didn't have any problem gaining strength and they didn't need any special tools back then. They had less stuff than we do now. Well, and a lot of what Louis does is

Starting point is 00:25:41 based on his reading of the Soviet research, as I understand it, which was from, I mean, certainly those previous decades. Yeah. Olympic weightlifting. Yeah. And, uh, just as to underscore a couple of things. So the, the speed or rather time being your enemy. I mean, I've heard this from also Olympic lifting, right? Same story. It's like the less time you spend under the bar, the better. And that was from a guy named Jersey Gregorek, who's a four-time world champion in Olympic weightlifting. The footnote that I placed in my head when you mentioned five exercises, what would, if you were picking five exercises for a novice or an intermediate, right? Like, let's say somebody who hypothetically was an athlete, maybe a baseball player, I'm just making

Starting point is 00:26:22 this up, soccer player in college, has a regular sort of physical practice, but has not lifted per se, has never had any instruction. What would the five exercises be? This actually is very simple. Take the activity that you want to do and think about if you were to ask a hundred people, if you asked a hundred, if you got in front of a hundred people and said, hey, what five exercises do you think would be good for a triathlete? Give or take, there's going to be a couple things in the gym that somebody might say one thing over another.

Starting point is 00:26:51 But in general, there's going to be some sort of a press, maybe two pressing movements. Maybe one person's excited about incline bench and maybe one person's excited about overhead. So you have two pressing movements. Maybe somebody in the room is a big fan of doing squats. So you have two pressing movements. Maybe somebody in the room is a big fan of doing squats. So you have a squat. Maybe somebody else would rather see like a leg press. Maybe somebody else would rather see like a deadlift. Go around the room and you're going to, you know, you can kind of narrow it down. Maybe you end up with 10 exercises total. You can probably agree upon about five exercises, right? Now take those five exercises and start to think about how do I build

Starting point is 00:27:27 up these exercises through other exercises? So for example, assistance, yeah. For example, we, we have, you know, things like a, an overhead press. What are some of the muscles involved in overhead press? You don't have to be insanely intelligent to be able to grasp some of this. You know, just kind of think about what are some of the muscles that you see flexing in the mirror when you do some of these movements. Your triceps are firing, right? Your shoulders are firing. So can a lateral raise help your overhead press? I would think so. It's going to help build up your shoulders, maybe help with stability. Would work in the back of your shoulder, help make the entire shoulder more stable so you can press more weight. Sure. Well, um, triceps are involved heavily.

Starting point is 00:28:09 So you start to break things down in that sense and things start to become very, very simple and they become a lot less complicated when you think about, that's one of the things I really loved about the West side barbell approach is, um, that's kind of where I started to really see that kind of stuff. And my eyes became very open to the fact that you can kind of narrow everything down by what is going to help me get to that? What's going to help make me better in a particular sport? So if you're grappling, maybe you want, you know, maybe you want more hips. So maybe you're going to squat a little bit more. Maybe you're going to do more sumo deadlifts. Maybe you're going to do more med ball throws.

Starting point is 00:28:46 Maybe you're going to do some more athletic stuff, maybe some twisting of some kind. You're going to kind of think of a few exercises that you want to do on a regular basis, and you want to try to figure out a way to overload those exercises and ways to become more efficient in those exercises. And so from that standpoint, it gets to be very simple. You kind of think about just even building the muscles rather than thinking about, I always hate the term like functional because I don't understand what a non-functional movement would be.

Starting point is 00:29:16 The human body, you know, you see some people that are gifted at like dancing or figure skating or gymnastics or any, I mean, the human body can do all kinds of crazy stuff. So, uh, show me an unfunctional movement. You know, I don't know what that, I don't know what that means. Um, versus a functional movement. I mean, I get the basis of it, but, um, anyway, the point is, is, is we're, we're made to move and we're made to, we're made to move through these ranges of motion with these given exercises. And just trying to associate them with what is going to make those exercises improve to get stronger is going to be probably the most functional and easiest way to get through these workouts. So if we look at, say, three primary exercises, if we're looking at the bench press, the squat. So let's, I mean, we could make it specific and say it's kind of a low bar,

Starting point is 00:30:05 wider squat, maybe for powerlifting and then a deadlift. And you could, you could pick conventional or sumo, whichever you want to talk about. What would be some lesser known assistance exercises that you've found valuable for each of those? When it comes to both the deadlift and the squat, not that it's lesser known necessarily because some coaches really understand the value of it. I love single leg stuff. Whenever you have an opportunity to do something standing or anytime you have the opportunity to do something with one leg or one arm, I think you're better off. But not because the main barbell movements are

Starting point is 00:30:46 great. We do so many of them already. That's kind of the beauty of doing these single leg or unilateral exercises. So think about lunges, think about step ups, anything like that is going to be give you a different stimulus. And it's also going to kind of take you through a range of motion that's going to kind of dynamically stretch the opposite hip and stretch the opposite leg. And it's going to create a lot of motion. A lot of times when we're lifting, we're not really moving around a whole lot, especially when it comes to the bench or comes to the squat or even comes to the deadlift. There's just not enough motion going on with those movements. So my favorites for deadlift, aside from the unilateral stuff, my favorite stuff for deadlifting is simply

Starting point is 00:31:32 partial range of motion deadlifts, which would be, you can deadlift off of some blocks or deadlift out of a rack, and that can help build up the lower back, help build up the upper back, and therefore help with your overall deadlifting performance. One thing that people don't sometimes realize is that when you do a partial range of motion deadlift, because it builds up your lower back, it can build up your speed off the floor. So sometimes I think people think, oh, I'll do a deficit deadlift, which would be you increasing the range of motion in a deadlift by standing on top of the block or something. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, by standing on something or maybe instead of using 45 pound plates, maybe only use your 35 pound plates or

Starting point is 00:32:13 something smaller than a 45 pound plate and circumference. So those are, you know, there's a lot of options when it comes to like, how do I figure out how to get faster off the floor? But anybody I've ever worked with, they've gotten faster off the floor from getting stronger and from handling more weight rather than handling less weight, which sometimes a deficit pull can actually make you handle less weight. So whenever you can kind of find something that's going to allow you to handle more weight, but still, I don't want to say safe because none of this stuff is all that safe once you start really getting after it. It can be dangerous. I don't want to sell people on a bag of goods.

Starting point is 00:32:49 It's not true. But once you start to handle some big weights and anytime you have an opportunity to do something safely and effectively, you might as well go for it. And in the case of, say, bench press, what are some movements as assistance exercises or warmups that you've consistently used that might not be obvious to just a recreational lifter? Bench press, I'll tell you, I'll talk about assistance movements first. Obviously, I'm the inventor of the slingshot, so I'm always going to back that thing up. But the slingshot is not valuable for the reasons that people think it's valuable for.

Starting point is 00:33:25 A lot of times people want to just handle more weight with it. They just want to load up a ton of weight. And it can be used for that. It can be used for that very effectively. But here in my gym, what we do is we use it for more reps and more sets. So once we're done with kind of our main lift for the day, I want to also say we don't exclusively just use a slingshot all the time. We do a lot of work use a slingshot all the time. We do a lot of work without the slingshot on. The slingshot makes up 20 or 30% of our overall bench pressing.

Starting point is 00:33:51 However, if we're hurt, it'll make up about half of what we do. So we'll go through a normal workout. Anybody out there listening that likes to do certain styles of training, go ahead and do whatever that style is, fives to five or three sets of three. Once you're done with that, throw a slingshot on and do three extra sets, three to four extra sets, add about 20 pounds per set or add weight as needed. Each person is going to be a little bit different and just follow through with the same exact reps that you did with your raw work. So, you know, just a sample workout. If I did three sets of three with 275, I would then put on 295 for three with the slingshot on 315 with the slingshot on for another set of three. And then I'd finish with 335 for another set of three. All three of those

Starting point is 00:34:39 sets are sets I would normally would have never been able to do without being able to throw the slingshot on the slingshot. It's going to The slingshot is going to allow you to handle more weight. It's going to allow you to do more reps, more sets, handle more overall volume in your training. And the method that's referred to when you talk about slingshot or reverse band training is called the future method. You're getting your body ready for heavier weights that's going to be able to handle in the future. And for people who aren't familiar, and please correct me if this description doesn't do justice, but the slingshot in this particular use case, because you can use different types of slingshots for different purposes, right?

Starting point is 00:35:14 On the legs and otherwise. In this case, if people could imagine you lifting up your arms out in front of you like Frankenstein, and then if you were to take take a thick but uh but elastic fabric uh and i'm not doing justice and wrap around like a knee wrap yeah like a knee wrap around your upper arms right and then lower a bar to your chest though that fabric that material would make contact with your chest in the lowest portion, the weakest range of motion and help you to accommodate that larger weight. And it goes without saying, but knowing the internet, I'm going to say it anyway. You guys have very good spotters here.

Starting point is 00:35:55 Yeah. So you're not just walking into your garage and slapping on more than your max, you know, one rep capacity and then hoping for the best. Yeah. If you want to if you want to see cautionary tales on that, you should just look up bench press accidents, bench press fail on YouTube to give yourself nightmares. The, what about back work? Is there any particular type of back work that is helpful or important to the bench press? And I personally, number one,

Starting point is 00:36:22 not terribly good at the bench press it's not part of my regular regimen right now with focus on gymnastics but a lot of people are very interested in it i saw you doing for instance when we came in band poles of some type so i'd love for you to talk about maybe some warm-ups that you use for it and uh secondly just as a as a note for people who are wondering when we came in you, I think, in the process of getting warmed up. And I said, well, when do you want to pick up doing the podcast? And you're like, well, I'm going to start doing my workout and getting into it probably 35 minutes. So it's not like you're in the gym for four or five hours. But could you talk about the warm-up and back work that's helpful?

Starting point is 00:37:02 Just before we move on to some of the back stuff, I just want to give you a couple of exercises without the slingshot because I hate to be that guy that's overselling something. Close grip bench press, very simple. Go with a closer grip than what you're used to. Don't go with such a close grip that it crushes your elbows

Starting point is 00:37:18 and it hurts really bad. Whenever you're in pain, you're probably doing something wrong or there's something from a long time ago that's bothering you. There's other options. So there's other ways of doing it, but simply just go closer than whatever your normal grip is. If you find that you're very strong with a close grip, then try to go with a wider grip. And again, don't go out so wide that you're feeling all this pain in your shoulders and stuff. Pain is a great indicator of like something ain't right. It's kind of like,

Starting point is 00:37:43 it's kind of like if you pulled food out of your fridge from a few days ago and you heated it up and stuff and you went to eat it and it smells really bad and you decide just to eat it anyway. Well, you might get sick, right? You might continue to do more damage. You might get hurt if you have pain while you're doing some of these movements. So if something feels weird, it's weird for a reason and you'll have to try to find something different to do. Another thing that can help the bench press tremendously, and it's the easiest thing to do, is to do pause work. Take weights, pause them on your chest, count for, you know, three Mississippis or so. You get a good three-second count in there and then press. When you press the weight back up, make sure you're not sinking the weight back into your body more.

Starting point is 00:38:27 Make sure you're staying tight the entire time. You're trying to stay so connected to the bar that you're kind of zeroing the weight out, but you're not zeroing the weight out by resting it on your body. You're just creating so much tension and so much tightness that you're literally just kind of holding the bar, just barely touching your T-shirt. That'll build up a tremendous amount of strength and it will help a ton with your form. I call it idiot proofing the bench press because sometimes you get some people that get excited and they want to move really fast and explosively and show you how strong they are. And they start going all haywire, the left arm's going, the right arm's using their

Starting point is 00:39:03 ribcage as a trampoline. Yeah. yeah, they're going just buck wild, right? Which is cool. It's great to be motivated. But try doing some pause work. You'd be surprised at how much it can really help your bench press. Moving into some back movements, the movement that you saw that I was doing here is very simple. We just had some bands attached to a machine. Anything stationary that's bolted down or anything that's heavy in the gym that won't come shooting back at you when you put a band around it would be a good thing to use.

Starting point is 00:39:35 Something you could do in your garage very easily as well. You can do at home, again, making sure that whatever it is you hook it to is very secure. All I was doing is just pulling the bands towards me. And you're pulling them sort of towards eye level? Yeah. You know, there's no wrong or right way to do it. You just pull wherever you want to pull to. We have a very scientific thing in here that we talk about quite often. Somebody says, hey, Mark, you know, how many reps should I do? I always tell them some for a few, you know, or the old Muhammad Ali,

Starting point is 00:40:05 RIP, the old Muhammad Ali saying of, you know, how many reps did you do when you did sit-ups? And he said, I only counted reps once they started to hurt. Those are the only reps that count, no pain, no gain, right? There's really no wrong or right way to do this. All you're trying to do is you're just trying to get the upper back kind of warmed up. And what I'll do is I'll pull and I'll hold for five seconds, try to hold my, I'll try to keep the positioning of my rib cage upward. And I'll pull really hard, pull my arms back behind my body as far as I can, which is not very good for me because my range of motion isn't, it's really crappy. Uh, but then from there I'll walk away from the rack. And what that does is it puts more tension on the bands. And then from there I'll just move my elbows up and I'll move my arms are bent. My arms are bent, right? So you're simulating in a way the bench press

Starting point is 00:41:00 position. Yeah, right, right. Yeah. And it's like a standing row or whatever you want to call it, standing bench or whatever. And so, yeah, what that does is it's kind of activating my lats. It's getting my back kind of ready to go. And I'll continue to kind of move my arms around in different positions. Sometimes I'll find something that feels a little awkward. It doesn't feel right. And so I'll hang out and I'll move around in that position longer, or I'll say, oh shit, that's a little bit weird. Maybe I should get on a foam roller. Maybe I should figure out what is that back there? What's going on in that spot?

Starting point is 00:41:32 Something I maybe didn't notice and maybe I didn't notice I slightly tweaked something at some other point in my training. The warm-up is an evaluation of how you're doing for the day. And so that's – Like a diagnostic tool, right? 100%. an evaluation of how you're doing for the day and so that's that's a diagnostic tool right a hundred percent it's actually since since I saw you at the previous location and saw you doing sort of face I go would you call it like it's face pulls but you were using cables and you're also using bands and I started doing that and I still do that yeah even at the beginning of my gymnastics routines and I have a stall bar you don't need to get one of these

Starting point is 00:42:04 necessarily they're real pain in the ass to install it's like a gigantic ladder on the wall it's a real pain a non-stall bar and uh but i will do the the work with bands and whatnot like you said to diagnose if there is an issue right before i put a lot of load on it and i'm like oh my left infraspinatus is really grumpy today. Therefore, I'm going to lay down and like put a lacrosse ball underneath it and then do internal external rotation until it calms the fuck down. So I don't blow it apart when I try to do something on the rings. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:42:35 And it just, it's also possible. It's just not in the cards for that day to do anything all that spectacular. You start to move around and you're like, man, I don't know what's going on. And maybe something happened at home that you're pretty upset about. Maybe you're not feeling good and yada, yada. And all of a sudden you're kind of got this downward spiral of things that are kind of against you for the day. And maybe it's not in the cards for you to lift all that heavy for that particular day. The other thing I do is I just turn back around the other way with the bands. So I'll just turn facing away from the bands. The setup you saw that I had, I have two bands. I have one band choked around the rack and then I have another band going through

Starting point is 00:43:09 the other band. So I have two basically handles for the bands where I can press and pull and do whatever. So I'll turn the opposite way and I'll bench press with the bands. I'll let the bands go way up over my head and I'll let them pull on my arms, pull my arms back behind my body. I'll let the bands go way up over my head and I'll let them pull on my, my arms, pull my arms back behind my body. I'll let the band sit into my hands, which will pull my wrist and it'll help stretch my forearms. I have extremely tight forearms and elbows and just, I got different stuff pulling on different things and in a bunch of different directions. One of my favorite warmups, I don't do a ton of warm-ups for squatting, but for whatever reason, I just basically come in and start squatting a lot of times.

Starting point is 00:43:53 I will sometimes use my hip circle to warm up for a few minutes. Hip circles like fire hydrant type stuff on the ground? Hip circle is a product that I have from how much bench time. Ah, there we go. Throw it up over your knees and you just start walking with it you can use a band as well some people will take a band they'll make a circle out of a band and they'll walk forward and sideways like the monster walks or whatever exactly yeah just trying to just trying to walk around move around get the hips ready get everything fired up before you start your workout uh you're kind of asking your

Starting point is 00:44:23 body a lot is the main thing to kind of recognize that if you were working all day and now you're just going to come in the gym and you just think you're going to perform great without really warming up, you got another thing coming usually. So you want to do something that's realistic for you to do the second you get out of your car. You can hop on an Aerodyne bike or some sort of stationary bike. There's a lot of different things you can do. You can have a treadmill. You can even go an Aerodyne bike or some sort of stationary bike. There's a lot of different things you can do. You can have a treadmill. You can even go for a walk before you go to the gym or walk to the gym or ride your bike to the gym. There's a lot of different options you can do, but you want your body temperature to be up.

Starting point is 00:44:55 My favorite thing to do, though, in the gym, which I can show you in a little while, is a bench press where you just take the barbell and you just move the barbell around in a bunch of funky different positions. So let's say you have one pinky on one of the power rings of the bar. You take your other hand and you put it as close as you can. I guess right where the knurling is about to end. On the inside. On the inside, right. So you have one hand out really wide, basically, and one hand's in a lot closer. Take the weight down and let the weight push your shoulder down in position. You can even actually have a little bit of barbell weight on here if you're really stuck together the way I am sometimes.

Starting point is 00:45:39 And what you're trying to do is you're trying to get the shoulder to drop back down in position and to open up. And you're trying to get the shoulder to drop back down in position and to open up. And you're trying to get the barbell to touch your rib cage. So you're doing some internal rotation with that. Doing a lot of very intense internal rotation. And what it ended up looking like is it ended up looking like you're doing like some sort of weird paddling like row type thing with a barbell. So one side of the barbell is down. It's almost hitting the ground.

Starting point is 00:46:06 The other side of the barbell is in full locked out position to where it's almost up over the rack. It ends up looking very strange. But we do that warmup in here pretty much all the time. And we'll take some video of that, guys, and put it in the show notes at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. So that'll be in the show notes also. We will also just take the bar and hold it in position and we'll like typewriter it back and

Starting point is 00:46:31 forth. That's just made up that term. That was pretty good, huh? But basically just kind of like you're moving it back and forth sideways. Yeah. Just moving it back and forth sideways. Just anything to get those shoulders open up. But when I, when I show you, especially how tight I am after bench pressing, uh, you're going to laugh because the barbell is going to be several inches from my chest or stomach or wherever I bring the bar down to. Uh, but after I start to move like that, the bar will cleanly touch my body. Well, I'll laugh at your mobility and you can laugh at my strength. That seems to be the only way this is going to continue developing our relationship. That's right. So I want to shift gears just a little bit. Actually, one question before I do, and this is a question from Twitter, which is actually

Starting point is 00:47:14 posted by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, NN Taleb, who wrote The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, two great books. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So what is the max deadlift for a non-competitive flaneur? I mean, that is just a non-competitive lifter like himself, adjusted by age group that would be considered decent. So let's just say you have a 40-year-old guy, non-athlete, recreational lifter. What would you consider? I'm just going to make up some numbers. So 180 pounds,

Starting point is 00:47:45 maybe 15% body fat. Going towards a multiple body weight deadlift is a great place to start. So in this case, the guy weighed, what, 180? Yeah, let's just say 180. Yeah, like a 360 or a 405 deadlift would be really, you know, getting like four plates on there would be an awesome goal. I think, you know, a lot of times people think because I power lift, they sometimes will tell me, oh, I don't lift like you, man. I'll say, oh, no, what do you lift, you know? And then they'll say, oh, you know, my best bench is like, it's only like 225. And, you know, I deadlifted like 350. And I'm the first person to be like, well, what did you do when you started? And they'll say, well, when I first started, like, I think I benched 95 pounds.

Starting point is 00:48:30 And then I'll be like, well, what you're doing now is fucking awesome. What are you talking about? Why are you beating yourself up so bad for, you know, in the sport of power of thing, the commitment to gaining size and the commitment to the nutrition and the commitment to sleeping and the commitment to the nutrition and the commitment to sleeping and the commitment to even performance enhancing drugs. There's just so many levels of commitment that competitive power lifters take that your average person doesn't care to go there. So the fact that they can lift 200, 300, 400 is still really impressive. Really what we're trying to do as power lifters, and

Starting point is 00:49:06 sometimes we get very carried away with it, just as you can with any other sport, we just end up taking it to that next level. And we're trying to do the same thing you're trying to do. We're trying to, it's just about self-improvement. However, our definition of success, our definition of self-improvement gets to be really swayed after a while because we're really trying to push the envelope and if you guys want to see examples of that you can watch the uh the bigger stronger faster with footage of some of the west side lifters including yourself where you have guys with like blood shooting out of their noses at the bottom of competitive squats yeah and whatnot uh you know some people like who would desire to do that? And there's other people like, fuck

Starting point is 00:49:46 yeah, man. That's great. I love that. So you had a period of time when you were doing pro wrestling and that was a real focus for you. I want to talk about a video that I saw. We're just going to talk about I want to get into a couple of stories.

Starting point is 00:50:02 So there were a bunch of things that popped up on social media when I mentioned that you were going to be on the show. And I asked people what I should ask you about. And we're not going to go directly to this. This is going to be step two. First, I want to ask you about the fuck your elbow piece. We're going to get to that. But then there were all these questions or requests to ask you about poop stories.

Starting point is 00:50:23 And I don't know what the context is there. Maybe you have some background that I don't. But can you explain for people the background on the fuck your elbow shenanigans? What happened there and how does it tie into professional wrestling? Yeah, so I did professional wrestling for about five years. My oldest brother, Mad Dog Mike Bell, he passed away several years ago now. But he was big into wrestling, and me and my brothers as kids loved pro wrestling. I was asked one day randomly by a guy at Gold's Gym if I ever

Starting point is 00:50:53 thought about pro wrestling, and I said, I think about it all the time. I watch it all the time. I love it, and he's like, well, how would you like to try out for some wrestling, and I was like, okay, sounds cool to me. I'll give it a shot. You know, long story short, I ended up doing pro wrestling for about five years. I progressed pretty well. I ended up wrestling in the WWE kind of training grounds, which was in Louisville, Kentucky, just, uh, kind of ran out of, uh, ran out of juice there in terms of my desire to continue to do it. I had a kid at the time and my son, Jake, who's now 12. So it was a while back. But, you know, at the time, you know, I was pretty hungry to do it. And once I had my kid and stuff and I was like, well, I don't really know what I'm doing because now if I was assigned

Starting point is 00:51:35 with, you know, if I did something with wrestling, I'd be traveling all the time and it just wouldn't create a great family environment. So anyway, that ended, but I learned a lot from pro wrestling. I learned how to do wrestling promos. You know, they'd put you on the spot and they'd say, Hey, you're wrestling Tim Ferriss, July 31st. You got 30 seconds smelly, go ahead. You know? And so then I would go and I would say, smelly is my nickname. My two older brothers gave me. So that was the name I used when I was wrestling as well. But they, they, they do all kinds of things like that. They, they'd swerve you and they'd throw things at you. And you'd have to improvise.

Starting point is 00:52:05 Yeah. Improvise. I didn't even say like, you know, Hey, you're going to do an ad for this bar soap. You know, you got to.

Starting point is 00:52:11 And then, so I'd be like, Oh, well, you know, I'm not smelling anymore after using this bar soap or something. So you just had to go through it. Right. Cause there's like 50 other wrestlers watching you too.

Starting point is 00:52:20 And so, you know, you felt like an idiot, but after a while you start to have fun with it and you become more comfortable with it and you started to really learn i have many haters on the internet as i'm sure you have acquired a few yourself oh yes it's a it's it's the tax you pay for being on the on the internet and for some reason it's our singular focus rather than the people that love us tell us what a great job we do and how inspiring we are. We always focus on the negative, right? That's just the way it goes. So anyway, this guy was, you know, he said, I can't believe, you know, you tell people not to worry about their central nervous system

Starting point is 00:52:54 and that they're using that as an excuse to not train and this and that. And just at the time, stuff about the nervous system kept popping up over and over again. And I was just getting tired of hearing people use these excuses about how they need to like auto-regulate their training and they need special programming and all this shit. And so I was like, you know, I'm just going to cut a wrestling promo on this guy. I'm just going to give it to him straight. And so I went on to kind of say, you know what, here's the truth. We're all going to die one day. day we're all gonna be in a lot of pain we're all heading there it's inevitable death is a part of life and thinking of that and knowing that the time that you spend on this earth you might as well live it as a fucking savage and

Starting point is 00:53:36 train and do whatever the fuck you want and so when i said fuck you and fuck your elbow i meant it fuck you and fuck your elbow and so once he was complaining about his elbow as well or or yeah yeah once so once that um because i think in the video that i talked shit about the central nervous system or something i said well maybe you're using an excuse because your elbow hurts or something while i say fuck your elbow just go in there and train don't worry about you know uh you know what do they say a violent attack today is better than a well-planned attack tomorrow. That's kind of the mindset is like, just, just go get the fucking work done. I don't care about the complaints. I don't care about your fucking excuses. It's kind of like, you know, you want certain work to be done. You have certain jobs that you want to be done from your camera

Starting point is 00:54:20 crew. That's right here. You don't want to hear them saying that their lower back hurts or whatever. There's this job, there's this fucking work to do, right? There's stuff to right here. You don't want to hear them saying that their lower back hurts or whatever. There's this job. There's this fucking work to do, right? There's stuff to get done. You don't care. Obviously, you do care if they don't feel good, right? But at the same time, there's shit to get done. And so that's just the way I kind of view that.

Starting point is 00:54:41 And the old wrestler in me kind of popped out for that moment and attacked that guy. So you've done a couple of wrestling promos that have traveled pretty well as a result on the interwebs. Yeah, a more recent one was with, well, I don't even know if he's a long-term friend anymore, but I don't know what happened, but it's with Mike O'Hearn. You know who Mike O'Hearn is? I know who he is, yeah. Well, maybe you could tell people who do not know who he is.

Starting point is 00:55:03 Yeah, so Mike O' a uh has been on the cover of 500 magazines or so according to himself of course i don't know if there's any real data to back that up but michael hearn has been on the cover of about 500 magazines uh he's a fitness model he's been around for 25 plus years or so. He's always been in great shape. He's probably 6'2 or 6'3. He's probably 250, 260. He's always claimed to be natural. And so when he used- Natural meaning drug-free. Natural meaning drug-free.

Starting point is 00:55:38 And before the internet came around, when he would say drug-free and stuff, everyone was just like, oh yeah, no one really cared. As the internet progressed and as YouTube became popular, you saw a lot of these drug tested lifters and a lot of drug-free natural bodybuilders become insanely popular to the point where they have 300, 400, 500, 800,000 followers. And those people started saying, you know what? Some of these people are full of shit saying they're natural. Who is this guy over here and who's that guy over there?

Starting point is 00:56:11 And so that's kind of the stuff that's happened with Mike O'Hearn. All the way to the point where they gave him a new name. His name is now Mike O'Tren. For Trenbolone? For Trenbolone, yeah, there you go. Trenbolone is an androgenic anabolic steroid that is particularly popular among power. Use the code Tim Ferriss for 30% off your next Tremble-on order from China. Quality not guaranteed.

Starting point is 00:56:39 I'm kidding, folks. I don't know. But Tremble-on, people used to take tablets that were used to inject into cows. Yeah, right. And then reconstitute or basically. Right. Not that I would know anything about that, but continue. So, yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:52 So anyway, Mike has been a friend of mine for a long time. We used to train together. We used to power together. And so he made a video, very short, kind of lame-ish video on Instagram where he called me out and he said, I didn't really mind it too much. I mean, still, it doesn't really bug me much. But the one thing that I didn't like is he said he's coming after my numbers. And so I was like, you know what? Your PRs?

Starting point is 00:57:22 Yeah, just to protect power power lifting to protect the sport like i'm not going to tell him i'm going to go up and uh do a pose down with him in my underwear and that's not that's not what i'm good at that's not what i know how to do he's won a lot of competitions he'd whoop my ass in that so so i was like you know what i'm just gonna do i asked my brother and asked a couple other people like should i do like a wrestling promo on him and they're like oh fuck yeah that'll be funny and so i did a whole promo you can kind of watch you can watch on my youtube youtube.com backslash super training 06 uh where i said mike otren you're no longer my friend or something like that as the title of it you guys will get a kick out of it

Starting point is 00:57:59 it was all for fun and uh anyway mike retracted like whatever he put up i haven't talked to him since then so i don't really know i don't really know where his mind is at with that but uh i got him with a couple good hard-hitting uh things on there what have you learned from some of the lifters you've interacted with like uh ed cone for instance i mean the man the myth yeah not really the myth the man the legend i mean almost mythological though. Of mythological proportions. Yeah. What are, there's a book by Marty Gallagher that.

Starting point is 00:58:33 I got it right here. Oh, you do? It's a great book. It's right here. This is hard to find. It's the Bible. It's my Bible. It's so good.

Starting point is 00:58:39 There it is. Okay. So this, the cone. The man, the myth, the method. The lifetimes and training of the greatest power lifter of all time written by Marty Gallagher. This is a fucking great book. It's unbelievable. It's so, so this, yeah, Cone, The Man, the Myth, the Method, the Lifetimes and Training of the Greatest Powerlifter of All Time, written by Marty Gallagher. This is a fucking great book. It's unbelievable.

Starting point is 00:58:48 It's so, so good. It documents all his different contests and stuff like that. It's unbelievable. So can you give people just a little bit of background on Ed and why people revere him so much? Ed Cone is the greatest powerlifter of all time. He's regarded as the greatest power lifter of all time because he competed in the 220-pound weight class.

Starting point is 00:59:10 There's a lot of different weight classes in powerlifting. But from Ed Cohn's standpoint, competing at 220 and 242, there's also the 275-pound weight class. There's a 308 weight class. And then there's super heavies, which the super heavyweights are. There's a 308 weight class, and then there's super heavies, which, you know, the super heavyweights are guys that weigh over 308, some of them weighing 350 and stuff like that. Ed was so strong that he was able to topple Bill Kazmaier from back in the day. Kazmaier totaled a little bit over 2,400 pounds and Ed was able to surpass him. It was kind of

Starting point is 00:59:42 a lifelong journey for him. I think it was like 1991 or so was around the time that he did it. He also, the, the style that he did it, the way that he did stuff was always super impressive. And Bill Kazmaier, for people who don't know, number one, they might recognize the name from world's strongest man competitions. Uh, just a beast. Oh, Bill Kazmaier was a a savage there's no question i mean the way the guy was built was extremely impressive he was he was very lean for how heavy he was um but you know when it comes to american strongman competitors he's he's a legend there's no doubt about it uh even just in the history of strongman period american or otherwise he's a legend so i interrupted you though you're saying his uh you're talking about Cone and his method or his technique? It's not just what Ed Cone did,

Starting point is 01:00:30 it's how he did it a lot of times as well. He's not a guy that cut corners. He's a guy that kind of used old school methods. He uses hard work. He's a tough bastard. He's a tough guy. And he's not going to let anything hinder, not going to let anything get in the way of him being the best. And so on his quest to topple this all-time world record, he would hit these huge squats, he'd hit a big bench press, and then a lot of times it would come down to the deadlift. Now, anybody who knows Ed Cohn, he's one of the greatest deadlifters of all time. He did a 901-pound sumo deadlift at one point at 220 pounds, a record that still stands to this day.

Starting point is 01:01:10 Mind-boggling. He just had a belt on for that lift. Ed struggled a little bit in the bench press, though. So for him to try to beat Bill Kazmaier, by the way, had the world record in the bench press for a long time. He benched 661 pounds, 300 kilos, which is just another mind-boggling feat. What gear or lack thereof at the time was... I don't think just... Kazmaier wore a bench shirt.

Starting point is 01:01:34 Just like a singlet and a belt. I think the 661 bench press that Bill Kazmaier did, I could be wrong, but I think it was just in a T-shirt. Bill Kazmaier also squatted like in the mid eights with a, with a single ply suit, which was basically like a, a ramped up singlet of some sort. It didn't do a whole lot for you, some cheap knee wraps, and they would just go at it, you know? And then Bill also was able to pull over 800 pounds. So if Cone had to make up a lot of ground in the squat and the deadlift, because he couldn't bench as much as Bill Kazmaier did.

Starting point is 01:02:07 But this one particular meet that he did down in Texas, it came down to the deadlift and Ed Cone injured himself in training. He couldn't, he couldn't pull sumo. So he gets down to his last deadlift and he's got to pull 887 pounds conventional. So sumo is wider stance, hands inside the legs. Conventional is kind of the opposite, right? Legs closer together, hands inside the legs. Conventional is kind of the opposite, right? Legs closer together, arms on the outside. Correct. And so there goes Ed Cohn, he goes up to the bar and he's 887 pounds. And just like the true professional that he was, rips the weight up off the ground, locks it out. And it's kind of the only time you'll ever see

Starting point is 01:02:41 him celebrate. You can find that video on YouTube. It's really neat to kind of watch because he doesn't really celebrate. He's usually very stoic whenever he does a lift. So you can see him get really fired up and, um, just a passionate guy has, um, the one time, the time that he did come out here and the time that we spent with him here at super training, we shot some videos with him. We podcasted with him. And when he, when he left that day, I told the rest of the guys in the gym, I'm like, well, that's it. Like there's never, that's it. That's, that's the goat. That's the greatest of all time. There'll never be another Ed Cohn walking through the door. So I was like, it's all just downhill from here with any other lifter that we get.

Starting point is 01:03:18 And everybody's laughing, but, but everybody now understands why I said it because he's a great person off the platform. He's a great, he's a great person either way, you know? So he's, he's somebody that I look up to in lifting and in life. He's super awesome guy to be around. He's always very happy. He's always very energetic. He loves sharing information. He loves helping people. He's going to be the first guy. He's going to be the first guy to help you. He's also going to be the first guy to brag that he helped you, which I think is funny. He brags to me all the time. So this day about how he helped this guy with that and he helped that guy with that. And he's so excited about it. And it's just great to see. Um, but something I learned,

Starting point is 01:03:57 the main thing I learned from him, I guess two things when it comes to lifting, what I learned from him is that he likes to just do one set because he built up so he acquired so much strength uh that he really only needed the stimulus from like one main set one main work set one main working set but he would have warm-ups of course of course and uh warm-ups whatever i don't even know what you would even call them because it's 700 pounds then it's 730 pounds and then 760 pounds and then it's 700 pounds and it's 730 pounds and it's 760 pounds and then it's 800 pounds and it just goes on forever and ever. So, but, but yeah, they're warmups. They're very easy for him to do. You know, there's 70% for him, 80%. Well, one thing that struck me reading this book way

Starting point is 01:04:36 back in the day, I've had it for ages, is that his training regimen is actually very similar to the training regimen of Dorian Yates when Yates was in his prime. I mean, the programming was very similar. Yeah, there's kind of one and done. Yeah, yeah. They get that main lift in there. The other thing I learned from him, which is this is really hard to do. I would advise anybody to try to practice this.

Starting point is 01:04:59 I challenge anybody to be able to actually be able to follow through with this because it's really hard to do. But this is advice from Ed Cohn, the greatest power of all time. He said, be nice to those who are nice to you and that's it. Don't do anything else. And I always took that as like a challenge. That's really hard to do in life. You get somebody being mean or nasty to you. The only thing you can think of is like, how do I retaliate? How do I get this person's attention so I can get back to him? How do I get them to stop? How do I, you know, cut them off or I want to punch them in the face or whatever it might

Starting point is 01:05:31 be. And, you know, that advice from him to me was, was, was critical and it came at a really good time. I was having some issues with a old member of the gym and stuff like that. And so it just kind of, it kind of relieved me of that tension. I was like, you know what? He's absolutely right. Why don't I just, you know, why don't I just concentrate on what I'm doing, concentrate on the positive, great things I have going on and just be nice to the people who are nice to you and then ignore the rest. Ignore the rest.

Starting point is 01:05:56 Are there any other lifters, for instance, you've interviewed some, some just phenomenal athletes. And of course you have a ton of them here at the gym. But a few names that come to mind because they're just, like you put it, mind-boggling. Dmitry Klokov, Konstantin Konstantinov, is that the name right? That guy, good Lord. I mean, there's a video you guys can see.

Starting point is 01:06:21 What's the, what was it, 945, 985 with just a belt? No, it was no belt. Yeah, no belt. No belt. Have you taken anything away from these guys? And Dmitry Klokov is just an absolute mutant of Olympic lifting. Have you taken anything from those guys you've tested or incorporated in your own training or otherwise? You know, sometimes when you look at some of these guys, you do have to recognize that there's just different species among us.

Starting point is 01:06:54 You know, there's some people that are just different. There's, you know, there's the guy in high school who's 6'4", who's really lean, who gets all the chicks, right? I mean, there's some people that you just sometimes can't keep up with, for lack of a better term. You don't know how to compete with them. And some of these guys are like that. Like, you're truly and honestly just not ever going to be able to compete with them

Starting point is 01:07:14 at some of the stuff they do. We have a lifter here for a long time, lifted us. He was a PhD in mathematics. And he said, I think it was like second or third grade. They put some equations in front of them for multiplication and division. And they're like, we're going to be going over this the next month. And, you know, we're going to review this and you guys will know this like the back of your hand. And he was like, I already know all the answers, you know? And there's, there's people that are just like that. There's people that walk in here. I just told you a story

Starting point is 01:07:40 today about in SEMA, one of the lifters that we have in here, he did a 715 pound deadlift. I've been working my whole life. Double, double overhand grip, double overhand grip with no belt. Uh, it was a hook grip, you know, double overhand would be almost impossible with that kind of weight. I don't know if there's anybody that can do that. So hook grip, just for people listening who don't know, this is with the four fingers of your hand on top of the thumb, correct? Could not hurt any worse. Yeah. I can't. Anyway't anyway i mean not that i'm trying to be part of the conversation to feel like one of the boys but i mean obviously i can't even i can freaking hold the water bottle for you guys but uh so i've never been comfortable trying to help oh you know it

Starting point is 01:08:18 hurts like hell uh so i guess my point is is that sometimes some of these guys are on such another level, it's hard to really learn much from them at all. I guess like Dimitri Klokoff, this is like going to sound ridiculous as saying it, but like one thing that he really preaches to other Olympic lifters is to get stronger. As funny as that may sound, I think that what he's referring to is like, hey, you know what, stop worrying about like, you know, becoming more mobile and stop worrying so much about your technique and your form. He's like, it's not all these different things. It's just that you're a pussy and you're not strong enough. So work on being stronger.

Starting point is 01:08:54 A lot of things can be really solved through deadlifting and squatting. And so his point was, hey, you know what? Let's just get more weight on your back. Let's have that be the focus rather than you spending 10 hours a day on your technique and the snatch or something like that. Well, you have a big mural in the gym that says strength is never a weakness. And one of the guests I've had on the podcast, Pavel Tsatsoulin, who popularized kettlebell in the US really, would also say strength first. That is sort of the foundational skill. And then you can build everything else on top of it. That's true.

Starting point is 01:09:23 I would go so far as to say with say Constantine who is not from latvia right he doesn't he doesn't get really he's from russia but he lives in latvia and he's like let's get something clear like yeah yeah yeah he gets yeah he gets all pretty pretty fired up yeah yeah the it's interesting in interviewing him his the text that came back was like so like harsh that when we started to edit on our end i was like oh no we need to leave someone in there i like how he's like he's kind of like he's kind of like a really blunt and he was also kind of mean too towards americans like americans are weak and russians are strong and tough and i was like we're leaving that in there like that sounds that sounds great

Starting point is 01:09:59 i love this guy it was a good interview i mean i read the whole thing and i actually underlined quite a lot but what i was going to say is that in some cases, it seems to me dangerous to emulate some of the habits of people who are in the top 0.001% because they've already built such a foundation of strength training that they can then break the rules right so he actually he initiates a lot of his record breaking deadlifts with a rounded back right but if you take someone who's just doing say 2x body weight and want to get to three times body weight and they're like oh now i should lift to the rounded back it's like well let's not put the carpet for the horse yeah a great a great analogy for that would be you know you've done some mma type stuff you've done some martial arts and stuff like that imagine just learning a few weeks of martial arts and being like, okay, I want to, I want to start doing some stuff like bones Jones. And, and where you try that is in the UFC

Starting point is 01:10:54 against another, you know, against a professional fighter when you, when you've had no experience with that. So sometimes you got to just leave some of the things up to the pros and recognize that they're going to look different when they do things. Konstantin Konstantinov, it appears that he lifts with a rounded back, but is his back rounded or are his erectors so dense that when he goes to bend down, his spine just kind of looks that way? It's hard to really tell. I mean, the guy's so damn jacked. It's hard to really reference much of anything. The thing to learn from him, though, is the explosiveness and the intent. He's not out there to like, to win a balloon or a

Starting point is 01:11:31 lollipop. You know, he's trying to like break stuff. He's trying to be very violent with the weights. He's trying to rip the weight off the ground as fast and as explosively as he possibly can. So that's something you could, that's a good take home message for people. And then also realize he built up his deadlift by utilizing, by doing a lot of repetitions. I remember in the, in the article, he said he used to do sets 10 and 15 routinely. You don't see that that often in the deadlift. It's a reminds me also, although, you know, Pavel and Dan, John, a lot of you guys would, would, if they're looking at what they would call easy strength they're probably doing fewer repetitions per set but you know pavel has said to if you want to press a lot you have to press a lot yeah yeah work on that that skill and the technique of it hang out in

Starting point is 01:12:16 those positions for the positions that you're bad and hang out in those positions for a long time uh as you've gotten older what have you added to your regimen, if anything, to try to minimize the likelihood of injury or spinal issues? I know one fan of mine had mentioned, and I don't know if this is accurate, but that Ronnie Coleman's had a number of back surgeries. Of course, Ed Cohn has had double hip replacements. How do you think about addressing that as you get older? Because you're not just a powerlifter now, right? I mean, you're also an entrepreneur and you also, you have a lot of other projects and responsibilities.

Starting point is 01:12:53 How do you think about that? I don't, you know, I can't be, I can't be that worried about tomorrow. If I'm going to do the things that I, that I really truly want now, uh, now it would be irresponsible not to think about it at all. So there are some things that I added, but, uh, when I say them, you'll laugh because it just sounds silly to even say out loud, but adding in more food has been a big part of it. Eating more food, eating more food. Yeah. Uh, more fuel, you know, you're going to need more fuel for the tasks that you need to be able to complete. And that's not to say like that doesn't go along with getting older. Probably less food goes more along with getting older than anything else. But in order for me to be competitive, in order for me to stay strong, I'm going to need to add food into what I'm doing. So food is going to be a big part of it. And the sleep regimen is going to be a big part of it. As ridiculous as that sounds, Jesse Burdick and I laugh all the time. We wanted to start a website called RestWOD. It's just all about snoozing, all about sleeping. So I like hanging out with Jesse because he has as large a head as I do.

Starting point is 01:13:58 Oh my, he's got a hell of a cranium, doesn't he? It's incredible. How would you, so Jesse also- He's got those pockets like on the side. Oh yeah, it's great. It's kind of like a pit bull. When you see a pit bull like chewing on something, you're like, oh my God, what are those muscles? It's impressive. So, but Jesse is also, I mean, he can pull a lot of weight.

Starting point is 01:14:14 Yeah. And this is a real athlete. How much can it be? Now, I, my first real like hands-on interaction with Jesse was getting ART from Jesse. Oh no. I'm going to come back to that in a second. But like, what does Jesse pull? Do you have any idea?

Starting point is 01:14:26 His best deadlift in competition, I think, is 821, 821 pounds. He's a strong unit. Very strong. Thick-handed young man. And I met him because I was having lower back and hip-related pain. So active release technique, for those people who are not familiar, I'll try to give a very oversimplified definition and then just a short story on jesse oh my god so the idea the basic idea and this is

Starting point is 01:14:52 going to be super oversimplified is that if you have tissues let's just say that are have developed scar tissue and adhesions and their adjacent tissues that you can have someone effectively stick their fingers deep in between them and then have you go through different like gliding motions to tear it apart i mean this is yeah roughly what it's like now if you don't know where your psoas is imagine uh basically a millimeter next to your your junk your genitals uh either either gender and it travels up kind of through the hip and attaches to the lower back and so people who sit down a lot get very tight iliopsoas and hip flexors and

Starting point is 01:15:30 then they stand up and it pulls in the lower back ouch ouch and so i decided to go see jesse burdick at one point and he had me lay down on a table with kind of my legs dangling off and he said okay safe word is brisket. That's how he started. How much is Jesse White? Two, I don't know. He's probably 280 or so. 280. Basically, imagine making like a ridge hand,

Starting point is 01:15:55 like you're going to sort of Austin Powers judo chop someone. And it felt like he stuck his hand kind of up to like the second knuckle into my groin and then move my leg around like a marionette. It was a memorable day. it was uh it was a memorable day i felt like i was i don't know it's like welcome to rikers i don't know yeah i've had something similar done before and for some reason even though their hand is on your stomach it feels like someone's fist is going up your ass yeah i don't know what that's about but it's like weird feeling you're like what just happened yeah or they're like my virginity tickling your spine from the front i mean it's it's a very uncomfortable experience.

Starting point is 01:16:25 Yeah, you're like, I don't know what's happening at this point. Usually you have to go to a funky club in the middle of nowhere at 3 in the morning with blue lights to get that service. If you buy Jesse Burdick flowers, I mean, he'll be willing to do it all the time for you. Restwad. So what else? The other element of staying healthy as you get older is just to make sure that there's no stone unturned in your training. And make sure you're not doing that stupid stuff at the end of your workout that's going to compromise. You know, at the end of your workout, you always have, you got the angel and the devil on your shoulder. And the angel is always telling you, hey, you should go home.

Starting point is 01:17:03 You should probably just rest. You should take today as a win, buddy, and just relax. And you got the devil telling you, no, you should do another set. You need to be more jacked. And so when you have that sensation of wanting to do more stuff, you probably shouldn't, especially if you're already cooled down. There's other days to train. There's other days to get the job done. And it's a long, long process to get stronger. It's a long process to be fit. It's a long process to stay in shape. So view it as that.

Starting point is 01:17:34 Make sure you're getting in. Make sure you're hydrated. Make sure you're sleeping well. And even if need be, then take a nap. All these things are going to be crucial in your, in your journey towards succeeding at whatever it is that your goals are. And the simple stuff, it's so funny how often, and I've, I've found myself succumbing to this often. It's like, you're not getting proper sleep and yet you're going to obsess on like the minute details of some tiny variation of some exercise.

Starting point is 01:18:05 And it's like, no, you dumbass. You just need to actually get your sleep or take a 20 minute nap or whatever it might be. And what you just said echoes true across a couple of different fields. Because, for instance, in surfing, you know, that like just one more wave is like always when people get hurt. So people like Laird Hamilton will say like, never allowed to say that. Then you have people like Tim O'Neill, who's I think a six time national champion in rally car racing. And it's like at the end of the day, four 30, like the witching hour, that's when everybody

Starting point is 01:18:38 fucks up and drives into a tree or has some type of accidents. Like your mind's not connected to anything anymore. That's what you call it. And, um, you know, coach, uh, summer, the former national team gymnastics coach for men's gymnastics has put it to me because I'm also inclined to push it too hard. And, uh, particularly with connective tissue, I get muscularly stronger quite quickly, but then my connective tissue lags and I get injured. And he said, look, if you, if you, you can always push harder the next training cycle or in the next workout, but if you overdo it today, you might be out for two or three weeks. Yeah. And everyone's always trying to have all these crazy recovery methods and foam rolling and doing all these other things. And all those

Starting point is 01:19:19 things are great and they can, they can really help a lot. lot. But if you just don't train like an idiot, then you don't need it as much. Need less of it. Let's hit just a couple of rapid fire question here. And then we can get back into the gym and we can demo some of these exercises. The first one is one of my most common questions. That is when you hear the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind for you and why? My pops, my dad. Yeah. All five foot four of them. You know, I got a Bo Jackson rookie card sitting right here on this desk that we're at right now. And you know, when I was a kid, I probably would have viewed that as like success. But, you know, what I've learned over the years

Starting point is 01:20:07 is that, um, the success that we embrace as Americans and the success that we, um, that people are judged by can actually be quite maddening to even ever reach. Um, and it's, uh, not always all that obtainable. Uh, You want to think about success and you want to think about what it means to be successful. I don't know if people really truly think about what the term means to them. That's the most important thing. Like, what does it actually mean to you? If you think being successful is being in movies, then look at any issue of People Magazine and see how many divorces and see how many problems a lot of these people have had that we would normally put up on a

Starting point is 01:20:49 pedestal and say they're successful. They have all the same problems a lot of regular people have, but they're amplified and their lives spin out of control very often through alcohol and all other kinds of problems. As kind of pointed out in Prescription Thugs, those types of things become very real to the rich and famous. And so success to me is defined by the simple act of being good for a long period of time and doing the right thing over and over and over again. People want a fast way to success. People want a fast way to getting better or self-improvement. And people often talk, times talk about like, you know, a steroid or this and that's going to get me here faster. Well, the ultimate pill that you could

Starting point is 01:21:38 take is again, the act of doing the right thing as often as you possibly can. It's hard because we have a lot of self-doubt in our body. We talk ourselves out of stuff every day. We have naysayers. We have people that tell us that we can't. So sometimes that sneaks in and they're like, oh yeah, you know what? They're probably right. I'm probably right.

Starting point is 01:21:59 I probably can't do that. I probably shouldn't be doing that. And so to me, success is the ability to continually get a lot of stuff done, whatever it is your goals may be, to continually make the right decision day in and day out. And it's the act of being good for a very, very long period of time because being successful and being great is not something that can happen just in one particular day or one particular month. I've talked before about Michael Jordan and talked before about Muhammad Ali. These are not people that were good on just a given day. They were good for a long period of time. They did the right thing

Starting point is 01:22:39 for a long period of time and that prepared them to be great when the time was right. And they stood the test of time. To me, that's the ultimate form of success is to be able to stand the test of time. I remember as a kid, as I started getting more and more into girls and stuff like that, watching my dad and seeing him as an example, I remember a couple of times I'm like, there's no way that my dad is not going to look at this girl. It's impossible. There's no way this girl has too little clothes on for him to not turn his head and not look at this girl when she walks by. I don't care how in love with mommy is. There's no way. It's not possible. My dad would never look. And to me, that's the definition of greatness. Somebody who's that disciplined and somebody

Starting point is 01:23:18 who can make that sort of commitment. I would just add also that one thing I've admired about what I've seen of your path and, and, and admirable is that you don't take yourself too seriously. And I think that like life, life can be really short. It can be cut short. It can also be really, really, or feel really, really long. And so I think that the act of not taking yourself too seriously has allowed you to accomplish a lot of really serious things. And that that's an asset. There's no question about it. Be, you know, having fun. How, how can having fun not be part of your success? Uh, having, and I've, I, at the same time, uh, you know, um, if you're not kicking ass, not getting ahead, it's harder to have fun, you know, make no mistake about it. Like,

Starting point is 01:24:23 like I'm a driven person. I want to kick as much ass as next person, but at the same time, I don't, I'm not going to, I'm not going to sacrifice my training or I'm not going to sacrifice. I'm not such a serious person that I think everything's going to be diminished or, or interfered with. If I have a couple of laughs before I go do a lift now, obviously before I load up the bar with 600 pounds, I'm not going to be like the source of entertainment for everybody for those 15, 20, 30 seconds before I go and do my lift. As soon as it's done, though, you break back to your normal self, having a good time. I just have learned over a period of time that it's not a, it's not a great thing to, to be so self-indulged in what you're doing. It can really, as I mentioned earlier, it can be maddening when you're trying to chase after certain numbers and certain things. It can,

Starting point is 01:25:16 it can really make or break you. And so I'd rather do it. If I can't have fun and chase at the same time, I'd rather fall a little bit short and have fun along the way. What, uh, $100 or less purchase has most positively impacted your life recently? Oh man. Positively. I was going to, initially I was going to say a pair of Groucho Marx glasses that I bought in Japan. I got a lot of legs out of those Groucho Marx glasses. Yeah. They were, they were about, I can't remember how much they cost, but they were like in US dollars,

Starting point is 01:25:51 they were like two bucks. But for some reason, everybody wanted to take a picture of me with them. They instantly made me famous somehow. I don't know how that happened, but there's like hundreds of people. In Japan? Yeah, in Japan.

Starting point is 01:26:01 Well, that makes sense. You're a fucking mountain of a human being wearing Groucho Marx glasses. Oh, my God yeah we're like the most japanese comic book thing i was also wearing a purple jacket a ribera steakhouse purple jacket uh satin nonetheless to make matters even better um well let's see uh hundred dollar purchases um that has done what exactly just positively impacted your life. It could be any purchase really I'm just looking for something that's not like well my new Escalade because yeah people aren't just gonna run out and buy You know what the wife he does so many of the purchases around the house that

Starting point is 01:26:39 Okay, I can rephrase it. Yeah, what is a piece of gear? That that you're extremely happy with that people might not be familiar with? You showed me one, the Triad. Is that what it's called? Yeah, yeah. Which is pretty cool. I saw another weird device which looked like some modified type of pull-down grip for lat pull-downs. I wish I could remember the name of that thing.

Starting point is 01:26:59 Yeah. That thing's pretty. We will take video of that. That thing's pretty. We will take video of that. That thing's pretty badass. In terms of the lifting equipment in the gym, man, I really like we have, you know, we have, well, everything in there is so expensive. So it's, you know, there's nothing in there. But it's okay. Expensive. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:27:16 There's what's called the Duffalo Bar, which is a bar that is specifically bent a certain way. So it's less stress on your elbows and shoulders when you go to squat. I like that piece a lot. And then we have something in the gym that I'll introduce you to that you'll really like. It's also by Chris Duffin. It's called the Geisha. And this thing is, I believe that's how you say it it's 100 and it's 120 pounds of cement uh that is in the shape of a foam roller and you just roll it on your back and roll it on your legs

Starting point is 01:27:52 it feels terrible and magnificent i have seen a number of products from him so he also makes there's like the widow or the the widow maker or whatever all these different they're like weighted cylinders yeah yeah donnie thompson Thompson makes some of this stuff as well. I think they make some stuff in conjunction. And one of the things he makes is called the ex-wife, and it's like 150 pounds or something like that. And the triad's pretty cool as well, which is basically thick bar, or you could use it for thick bar training but it has three different yeah grips on each let's just call it well try it 20 pounds 40 pounds 60 pounds my friend my friend who makes

Starting point is 01:28:31 those is a huge fan of yours so he's if he listens to this he's gonna he's gonna his heart's just gonna stop well i was gonna ask you if i could buy a few of them actually so the name of the company's havoc if we can plug it he'll'll die. Havoc, yeah, fantastic. Yeah, so check it out, folks. If you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it that is not an advertisement, if you could just put like a phrase or anything on it, what would you put up there? I like the quote, you know, the quote that,

Starting point is 01:28:59 some of the quotes we have in the gym, but one of my favorite quotes of all time is either you're in or you're in the way. And there's, there's a little, little backstory on that. I won't go too long into it, but, uh, a friend of mine, um, I was, uh, I was single at the time and I was dating a few girls and, uh, was trying to find the right one was trying to find Mrs. Bell. And, uh, you know, I, I went on a few dates with my now wife, Andy and my friend at the time, uh, it's a little Italian guy, very fiery, very excited, Danny DeVito, like sort of guy, but then also super jacked and super ripped and built and talked a hundred miles an hour chain smoked like a motherfucker, but looked like a pro body

Starting point is 01:29:42 builder at the same time. It was weird combination of shit going on. His, uh, his name was, uh, his name was his, his nickname was Vinnie Goombots. He was so abrasive. And when he was talking to you, he always looked like he was like getting into a fight with you, but he's just telling you a story, but he's always moving his hands around so much. And he was so energetic and loud and stuff. He, he used to stay at our house a lot. My brother just let him stay at the house for a while. He was kind of down and out for a period of time. And my wife ended up seeing him out somewhere. And then they spent like a few hours together.

Starting point is 01:30:15 They hung out at the beach together and stuff like that while he's smoking and cursing up a storm at the beach. My wife thought he and I were really good friends. It was just more of an acquaintance than anything else. My wife was trying to just spend time with him and to get on my good side, basically. And so Vinny comes home and he tells me, he's like, hey, I saw Andy, you know, and we were hanging out. She's super sweet. She's a nice girl, blah, blah, blah. He's going on and on. And he's like, you know, he's like, you're a fucking idiot. I don't know why, you know,

Starting point is 01:30:42 you're with this girl, you're with that girl, you're complaining. He's like, you know, he's like, you're a fucking idiot. I don't know why, you know, you're with this girl, you're with that girl, and you're complaining. He's like, he goes, I got a saying. Either you're in or you're in the fucking way. He's like, and Andy, she's in. And so that speech right there led to Andy and I being married for 15 plus years now and having two children. Wow. Either you're in or you're in the way. I love it. Well, Mark, I tell you what, we could talk and talk and talk

Starting point is 01:31:05 and maybe we'll do a round two sometime. But I want to let you get back to training. We're going to film some stuff that people can see in the show notes. So we'll grab some video and probably also find some of your tirades, your professional wrestling challenge videos to put in the show notes.

Starting point is 01:31:21 But where can people find you? What would you like them to check out? How can they reach you or learn more about you on the interwebs, et cetera? Yeah. So Instagram, it's at Mark Smelly Bell on Instagram and Twitter. I have a website called howmuchyoubench.net, which has all my products, which is, they're all supportive gear to help you lift more weight, to help you lift more weight more safely. And then also you're going to want to check out my YouTube channel, which has tons and tons of great information on training. It's youtube.com backslash super training.

Starting point is 01:31:53 Oh, six. All right. Well, there we have it. Any parting comments, suggestions, things you'd like listeners of the podcast to consider just multiply your muscle and multiply your hustle. All right, Mark. Thanks so much. I really appreciate the time.

Starting point is 01:32:08 Thank you. Appreciate it. And everybody listening, as always, you can find links to everything we discussed and more resources, et cetera,

Starting point is 01:32:17 in the show notes for this episode and every other episode at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. And as always, until next time, thanks for listening. I'm available for more of these. If you need me, I can take over a little bit when you're not around.

Starting point is 01:32:30 Anything you need, buddy. Substitute host, Mark Bell. Thanks, guys. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered.

Starting point is 01:33:01 It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom. I have used LegalZoom myself for many of my businesses. And many of the icons on this podcast have actually used LegalZoom. For instance,

Starting point is 01:33:50 Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame, CEO of Automatic, which is now worth more than a billion dollars, first incorporated his company on LegalZoom. LegalZoom is a reliable resource that more than a million people have already trusted to help with their businesses. Whether that's setting up a will, doing a proper trademark search, forming an LLC, setting up a nonprofit, or finding simple cease and desist letter templates. Man, do I use a lot of those. LegalZoom is not a law firm, but they do have a network of independent attorneys available in most states. They can give you advice on the best way to get started, provide contract reviews, and otherwise help you run your business. And important, there are no surprises. LegalZoom provides complete transparency. That means upfront pricing, customer reviews, and a satisfaction guarantee. Check out LegalZoom.com today to see how they can make life better and easier for you

Starting point is 01:34:37 and your business. If you're pretending to be a lawyer on the internet, then you are asking for trouble. Put together the safety nets, get your T's crossed and your I's dotted. Enter promo code TIM, T-I-M, at LegalZoom.com to save 15%. That's T-I-M for 15% off. Check it out, LegalZoom.com. This episode is brought to you by 99designs. I've used 99designs for years for all sorts of graphic design needs. Whether you need a logo, website, book cover, or anything else, 99designs was created to make great designs accessible to everyone and to make the process of getting designs much, much easier. So when I first started out, for instance, testing prototype covers and getting prototype covers for the

Starting point is 01:35:21 4-Hour Body, I went the contest route. That is one option. This is a great solution if you're looking for fast, affordable design work and the ability to choose from dozens of options risk-free. Let's say you need something late night, quick turnaround. Well, people in other time zones, other countries can also help you solve that problem. Since then, I've worked with 99designs on a separate path or a different option, and that is the one-to-one project service. So in a number of cases, and I'll give you one example, when I wanted to create the cover for my audio book, The Tao of Seneca, this was a very important project to me. I decided to use their one-to-one project service. And with this service, you can invite a specific designer to your project, agree on a price, and then work together until you're satisfied.

Starting point is 01:36:05 And they allow you to iterate and provide feedback and all this stuff. And I haven't shared it yet, but we also got some incredibly good, really some of the best illustrations I've ever seen from using this one-to-one project service with a handful of different designers and illustrators. It blew my mind. 99designs makes this all very easy and efficient. So you can check out the Tao of Seneca design and other work that I and your fellow listeners, for that matter, have done on 99designs at 99designs.com forward slash Tim. And right now, you can get a free $99 upgrade on your first design. Again, that's 99designs.com forward slash Tim.

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #252: Inside the World of SuperTraining - Mark Bell

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.

Your Ad Here

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #252: Inside the World of SuperTraining - Mark Bell

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.