Full Transcript: MOTM #550: In Memory of Bud Jeffries

[Transcript starts at 3:03]

Hey guys, Maestro here, coming at you live with another episode of Maestro on the Mic. Today I have with me someone you might not know, depending on how far into the depth of social media you go. I don't know, maybe you do, maybe you don't know him. Uh, he goes by the name of Bud Jeffries. Uh, same name on Instagram.

He's part time Professional strongman, part time massage therapist, and full time 100 percent badass. I'm gonna skip the rest of the intros, I'm gonna let him do it. This guy, I had to bring him on. You can hear the excitement in my voice. This episode's gonna be good. Without further ado, my friends, welcome to the show.

Mr. Bud Jeffries.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for having me. So I guess this is the part where I introduce myself and tell people what kind of psychopath I actually am, what kind of crazy I am. All right. So introducing myself, uh, I am a, like she said, this wonderful, nice lady who is considered to interview this crazy man who does things and lives in a far away state and is lucky the cops don't come to his yard every week.

Uh, I am a half professional strong man, half massage therapist, at least in my, uh, how I make money in the living and do the things that have to play with the rest of the nice little people in the world. That thing. Uh, so let me tell you how that one, that came about. I went to school at the University of Florida.

I was playing football there, uh, and had a career ending football injury that just wrecked my shoulder, actually broke my shoulder socket and left there. I had no idea what I was going to do and was conned into going to massage therapy school with, they sort of tell you this, that whole thing as a, you know, you're going to be, it's like a military.

You're going to meet interesting people and make money. Yeah, that's a lot. That's not true. You're not gonna, but you do learn some awesome things, and I actually am very, very glad because I've been able to help a ton of people along the way, and at least I sort of look like I'm not an actual, like, time traveling barbarian who's in the wrong century, when I have sort of a professional sometimes look about me, and I actually did go to school and get a certification in some things, and um, That kind of stuff.

But, so how that happened was I, I went to school for that and, and then sort of found out that really in the massage therapy world, unless you just happen to catch on in a sports thing, if you're not a pretty lady, you don't make nearly as much money. And I certainly did not qualify in that way, especially in the place I'm at.

Uh, it's, you know, very, very rural, or at least it was 20 years ago when I went to school. So, uh, they just really wasn't a lot of, there wasn't a lot of economic opportunity. And so, in that meantime, I had the opportunity to work as a professional strongman. Now, I did a lot of strongman competition, but I also started doing really the old time strongman feats.

And started to speak in churches and schools and that kind of thing, and that's really a lot of how I made my living over the years, and then in expanding that, I wrote, uh, sort of, I was encouraged to, you know, sort of join the internet age and, uh, get a website, which my lovely wife built, because I can barely turn a computer on.

I can carry it around really well, but I can't turn it on very good. And, uh, so she built this website for me and I wrote, uh, started writing a book. I wrote several books. I've actually written seven books on strength and conditioning and then sort of expanded in some other areas and produced geez, 50, 60 video sets on everything crazy you can possibly do with anything that's heavy at all.

How to train with a badger, how to wrestle crocodile, that kind of thing. You know, just crazy. Actually, that's not true, but just all kinds of stuff. Uh, Unique implements and physical movements and that kind of thing. And so in an attempt to do that in the professional strongman area, I either do live shows or make money by informational materials with books and videos, eBooks, that kind of thing.

Um, which is why I have a social media presence, because again, like I said, without my wife, I'd be living in a cave somewhere, you know, huddled around a fire, hunting for food. And, you know, just sort of a thousand years ago where I probably should be instead of playing with a nice developed civilization that we have today.

Uh, I, uh, I got started in athletics really as a kid and, and, and how I got started in really in my life story is what brought me in, in a really as a professional strongman. And I believe that we all have something special to share with the world. And so like twice, I've been hit by a car and should never have survived.

And I, doctor said, I wouldn't walk again. Wouldn't talk again. Uh, doctors predicted I would never be born in the first place. And I believe that God puts us all where we're supposed to be and what we're supposed to do. And I had the ability to show people that. No matter what's happened to you, no matter how crazy it is, you can do some pretty amazing things.

Cause the doctor said my hips had never functioned, but I was able to squat a thousand pounds. And yeah, so you can do some pretty amazing stuff. And then I competed for 16 years in powerlifting. I won world championships at some world records. Uh, then I did everything crazy you can possibly do. And along the way I got a chance to speak to, you know, like a thousand schools in a three year period.

And I got a chance to speak to a ton of kids live. And then a few years ago, I. I kind of moved away from performing as much. Uh, I still do. In fact, I got performances this week to do. But I, I, um, I was traveling. So I'm at the, at the end of where I really, really wanted to go and performing as an old time strongman and that kind of thing.

I was traveling 270 days a year and I did 300 schools, three row, 300 schools per year. In a three year period, I literally was in schools in 44 states. And, um, so, yeah, at the end of that, I was a little bit off of, you know, that's enough travel for a while. Like, it's awesome, but like, you know, that's where you really get used to it.

Yeah, well, you get the whole idea of like where, you know, rock musicians write these songs about being on the road. Yeah, yeah, you get that. Like hotels, you know, every hotel in the planet looks the same, and towns look the same. And, you know, so I had a chance to kind of come home for a while and just be, and I love to travel, but not that much, you know, not that, that way.

Um, I had a chance to come home and I really kind of moved back into, we're doing a real, uh, real, you know, professional massage. And I always had a hand in it, but I, I kind of moved back into a really doing that more full time. So I really just sort of switched. Emphasis while I was really full time and in professional strongman for a long time and then sort of part time massage Well now I'm very full time in massage And then I just do some strongman when people call me and say hey bud come and do something crazy for these kids and or I'm gonna do something, you know crazy for these adults or whoever else you want me to entertain and Possibly scare away from your house if they're bothering you or whatever else you guys out

there gotta You gotta check out his social media, because I feel like it's a little bit out of context.

So listen to the whole episode first, but when you're done, you gotta check out this man's Instagram. That's one of the reasons I brought him on. He is literally doing things that his neighbors have to, I guess at this point they're used to it, but I feel like in the beginning They're like, uh, should we call the police?

Or should we watch more? Or like, what is happening?

That's the general emphasis of what's going on in my neighborhood. Like, this is the most interesting thing in the world. Or I don't know if I should call the cops or Well, you know, what I've gotten into is this. The human body is capable of things that are so far above and beyond what most of us are capable, are told is possible.

And there are so many combinations of strength and endurance and physical movement. And coordination, and timing, and balance, and, and, and all of those things together. And there's so much to explore. And it can be such an entertaining thing. Like, the one thing I have committed to, you know, doing is I'm going to be strong.

I'm going to be enduring. I'm going to be the best I can be at every possible layer of physical ability, but I'm never going to be boring. I just don't believe in that. Exercise, there's too much to do. There's too much to be, and that doesn't mean doing things just purely for the gimmicky. Like, you know, I get, I get people who do.

Uh, I don't want to be, you know, first of all, I don't look like an Instagram model under any circumstances. I look like, I literally look like I should be wearing bear skins and coming out of a forest somewhere. But, um, that or a hell's angel. I kind of look like those two. But, I, and I don't do things like people say, oh, you just do that just to be a clown.

No, I don't do that. I am legitimately, everything I do is well thought out. Physical purpose behind it. I'm training some particular physical parameter, but what I'm not doing is training it the way that other people do, so I don't do eight sets of eight just to get a pump in my biceps. You know, I do things that combine multiple layers of physical ability, and Possible pyromania, which is, you know, I have a tendency to like light things on fire and throw stuff at it and that kind of thing.

But I, I, I literally do, I kind of come from that background and a lot of time, you know, and actually doing the live shows. So being entertaining people is fun to me, but also there's a ton to teach. There's a ton to learn about how we move, how, what's possible. Um, and there's so much to explore and so many avenues that I don't feel like people have, I feel like people have barely scratched the surface of so many things and especially the combination.

Of, of multiple high levels of, because almost everything we do in the modern era, which is actually the old time Strongman kind of came from a different era, where it was way less specialization. Uh, but now everything is specialized. You're, you're this, you're that, you're this, you know, you're other thing.

Well, I don't want to, I want to be able to walk into anybody's room. And competently play, so if I, you know, I haven't competed in powerlifting for years, but if you stuck me in a powerlifting competition tomorrow, I could hold my own. Or a strongman competition, or, you know, I might get killed at CrossFit because there's a few things they do that I really don't play with, but, you know, if you stuck me in a shooting competition, or if you stuck me in somewhere I had to, in the wilderness to survive, or if I had to, uh, um, anything you can physically do, I want to at least try.

So, let's give it a shot and see what's possible. The thing is, if you have the right preparation, you really can be so much better than most people. You don't have to be a specialist. You can be a generalist and still be high level at lots of

stuff. I think in following you and listening to the podcast you've been on, that's one of my favorite things to hear you talk about is this concept of moving and training, I don't even want to say training, but experimenting, learning for life preparation.

Like, yeah, okay, maybe I can't go into this specialized paradigm and be the best at it, but. For real world scenarios, which is at the end of the day, honestly, the most important thing, having the broadest skillset is undoubtedly the, the, the way to make yourself the most resilient, most robust, anti fragile, whatever word that, you know, people, uh, people want to use.

Right, now the one thing I have to admit about that is that I, I think people, I think people let themselves off the hook when they start talking about that, in that, well, I want to be kind of, I want to be okay at everything. I don't want to be okay at everything. I want to be really good at everything.

What I don't necessarily care to do is And I think with the, with moderate to low volumes of lots of different training with very, very focused efforts in specific areas, really by sifting out the, what's the real pay, I'm using kind of an Occam's razor paradigm where it's the, the 20 percent really pays that, you know, 20 percent of your, your effort pays off 80 percent of your dividends.

Well, sift that out through about a dozen different physical paradigms and put that all together, because what you can't do is take. Eight different training programs and try to run them all concurrently because number one You only have 24 hours in a day and there's other things to do like, you know Eat and sleep and have sex and all that.

There's lots of other stuff to do versus uh I don't want to train all the time all day. So but What I want to do is I don't want to just be okay. I want to be good to possibly world class at lots of stuff, but the last ten percent of anything that's world class Is where you have to drop the rest of everything you do and specialize and give up and sacrifice and your whole But you can be, you know, you can be in, in a, you can be close enough to a world record that you make the world champions nervous Dude, I love it Without having to live 24 hours a day, you know what I'm saying?

And there's actually where I think is a big thing That people do because the problem I think in generalist training that has always been the case is that so what you got was somebody who was just sort of mediocre at everything but not good enough to be dominant anywhere. Um, you can be that though.

You can be, you know, you, you know, you, the true opposite ends of the spectrum. Okay. You may have little issues like, uh, uh, you talking to me about and prepping for the podcast. I know you listen to some of my hours and know I have kind of a crazy set of goals where I want to squat 800 pounds and run miles in a day or that kind of run 30 to 50 miles or do that kind of thing or whatever.

Okay. Nobody who runs 50 miles in a day is even breaking a sweat worrying about me catching them. You see what I'm having there? So there is one, there is a few things that you probably are, you know what I'm saying, uh, like, uh, now I can squat 700 800 pounds pretty much any day of the week. So that's not a more, but so nobody who is, you know, a super ultra endurance in that way.

Most of whom are literally half my body weight or less. They're not even worried about me breaking. Oh God, that's coming to the ultra running world. Nobody's even thinking about that. Nobody's thinking about even at a 5k pace. I am NOT a fast runner or that kind of thing. So some of that is more about how specialized do you want to be?

So could I become a really competent ultra runner? Yeah. If I lost a hundred more pounds body weight and decided that I was going to give up, but can I finish the distance, which for most humans is about what that is about anyway, it's not so much about how fast you can do. It's how, and can I finish the distance and still be as strong and still be, you know, to be the, so, you know, a lot of my world does come from a strength slant along with other things.

Um, which actually is a very misrepresented thing because you're going to hear a lot of people, I used to get this in the college level coaching stuff, you get, um, Oh, you're strong enough. Well, I mean, yeah, maybe, yeah, what is really what that means is I don't want to try to learn. to push you any harder.

Uh, I'm scared that stub your toe or I'm scared that there might be another thing, you know, or I don't want, I mean, there is an intelligence about how much training energy you put towards something if you're already great at it and you need to develop other attributes. And that's, I have no qualm about that.

And that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that this, if you get on a playing athletic field. And everybody is basically equal in their technical abilities and their other stuff. Anything that you allow to be a low level is going to become a weakness is going to be a problem. So if you're in the physical confrontation sport like fighting or football or whatever or anything along that line Everybody at the top level has good technique.

Everybody at the top level is fast. Everybody at the top level is enduring. At some point, strength becomes a big deal. It's not just, am I kind of strong? It's am I really strong enough to impose my will on another fast, strong, athletic human being, which is a whole nother. situation and you open the door to what kind of strength are we talking about and am I strong in a gym?

Am I strong walking around outside or you know strong there are people who are not terribly amazing in a gym who can beat you to death on a wrestling mat and I suppose and and some of that has to do with individuality for instance a seven foot tall guy may be an incredible Wrestler and a lousy bench presser because his arms are four foot long But for the distance he has to move for his personal structure, a not impressive number on a bench press may actually translate into very impressive strength in other possible areas.

So, so much of this is individuality and figuring out things, you know, and going to all the possible directions there.

No, this is so good. This is why I brought you on. You guys listening, one, listen to the excitement in this man's voice. He loves what he's doing. He loves what he's talking about. And he knows what he's talking about.

A few things to unpack, a few things that I'm going to ask him afterwards, uh, but one of the overarching underlying themes here is what some people may consider extremism. And that's, I think, because we all, people tend to really live in this really kind of tunnel vision, safe space and settling. I don't wanna say settling for mediocrity, but settling for this and saying, okay, well, this is strong.

You're strong enough, or, you know, you know, jack of all trades, master of none. And when you have someone. Like you, you're, you know, and DJ, uh, Strong Camp is another great example. It comes in and shakes it up. It's really worth listening to what these people have to say. And we're in a time right now where books like The Rise of Superman, talking about flow states and, you know, learning about what the body is truly capable of.

That's, that's like, everyone's talking about it right now. So one of the reasons I wanted to bring Bud on the show is because he's living it. And he's been living it for. His whole life honestly, I don't even want to say that, you know, however many years his whole life from you know Proving these doctors wrong and I'm gonna actually have him tell you his back story, too to what he's doing now in terms of how he's training and you know, looking at doing something like lifting 800 pounds and Running an ultra marathon in the same day.

This is this is This is 100 percent why I brought you on the show. If you could, my friend, talk to the folks about you as a young child and your kind of, uh, early disenchantment with rehabilitation, I guess is the way I would describe it. Wow.

Okay. Well, early, early lack of. So, so you've got to kind of know about my life and my, and my whole thing.

And this is really why I had a chance to speak to people so much because I was able to do stuff and, and it's, you know, it's interesting, but you can find a lot of world champions at stuff that are, well, what you can find is a lot of strong people. What you can't find is a lot of articulate people or what you can't find is a lot of strong people and they really don't have anything that's educational to share other than the fact that they're strong.

Okay, well, you know, the average person doesn't care very much about this. They care about how you're going to affect their life. Then they care about what they can take away and what they can teach their kids or what they can make their life better and that kind of thing. And, and I actually do think that sharing strength itself, um, is a big thing because I honestly, I think in, you're talking about in the rehab.

Set up or whatever and I think you would get rid of 50 percent of the pain that people are experiencing and 50 percent of the immobility if everybody in America or the planet or whatever was 50 percent stronger. Yes, I totally agree. Which is going to be a crazy. I think most of the immobility, most of the lack of, of, uh, is from both lack of movement, but it is also from lack of strength because what happens is the body starts self protecting and I'm not strong enough to not fall, therefore I don't walk, or therefore my balance goes bad, or therefore I get weak in every other direction, or I'm not strong enough to live my life, and with a mistake, and this is something I kind of criticize that world about or whatever, is most American physical therapy, and you know, God bless you for all the wonderful work they do, but from an age standpoint, from a hospital standpoint, a lot of what you're doing, and I realize that people are hamstrung in me and in by what they're told to do in a clinical setting, and there's so many things that are a problem there.

Well, I don't happen to be hamstrung in that setting. I can kind of do whatever I want. And what they do is they get people just good enough to get out of the hospital and back to the couch. Yeah. And that's not good enough. That's not, that's, that's why people go to therapy for a couple of years and don't really ever get better.

And, and it's because we're so incredibly concerned with safety on things that, and I get that we need to be concerned with people's safety and the techniques of how they lift things and all the other stuff and all that stuff. You know, but we sort of got the cart before the horse there in that if you can make large gross motor movements with some significant strength, a lot of your small motor movement stuff is going to start to take care of itself and you're going to get people who can.

So, okay, I'll get into this more. I think this will really interest you. So I'm training a bunch of women right now, didn't intend to do this. I just started doing it to help a friend and then they all just sort of piled in and evidently dudes want to come work out with me and they never show up. They all say, dude, I want to work out with you.

Okay. Come at this time. Never show. Women who are, you know, most of who the ladies who I'm training who are like crippled basically by something there. They literally, when you hear some of the stories, you're like, Oh my God, how are these people walking? Uh, guess what? Get them to deadlift body weight, or body weight and a half, or double body weight, even if it's a partial, and hmm, they don't need to do a million little leg rotations.

Now they need to do things for movement, and I'm not saying that, but what I'm saying, get them to do that, and guess what, they can suddenly stand up out of a chair where they used to have trouble with it. Yes. Get them to, and get them to do it, and here's something that I'm going to do, like I actually was speaking to a guy about this yesterday, uh, what I'm doing with him is the dead opposite paradigm of normal physical therapy.

We're starting with large gross motor movements instead of finite movements. We're starting with absolutely low reps instead of high rep stuff and and do it and but here's why the low rep stuff that they're doing Doesn't make them sore or they all had massive amounts of inflammation and soreness just walking around and living daily life And that's something, a point I want to talk about that in rehabilitation and other stuff is most people they, when they go to therapy, when they go to things, well, you need to get stronger.

Okay. But the paradigm of stronger is very limited. Okay. If you can, you know, stretching a band overhead with your shoulders may make your shoulders feel wonderful for three sets of 20. It's not going to help you pick up a box out of a shelf and not hurt your shoulders. It's not the right kind of strength.

And when I say add to their strength, I'm not talking about, okay. You used to be able to lift 30 pounds, now you can lift 50 pounds. That's not going to do it for getting them strong enough to tolerate life. For making them anti fragile, being the word that, you know, came up earlier. So, here's how I came out of this whole thing.

Actually, I'm going to start at the very, very, you know, let's start at the beginning. Uh, my mom, and here's why I have this, and maybe this is, okay, you're talking about some of the books that, that relevant, that, uh, you know, are dealing with mindset now. There's a thing about babies that have to fight to live, having a better, a different mindset as adults.

Well, maybe I have, and that's why I have some of them. So my mom. Yeah, maybe. Died in the concussions over the years. I've possibly broken the part of my brain, you know, to things, which is probably true. I literally have, you know, taken my idea of risk out of the equation. I don't have the ability to process that, but.

So, here's what happened. My mom and dad tried to have children for 12 years, and they were never able to have a baby, and my mom finally got pregnant. She was working as a nurse. She was exposed to the measles, and which is dangerous to a developing fetus, very dangerous. In fact, the doctors at the, at the hospital she was at told her that I'd be born blind or deaf or stillborn.

And they tried to get her to have an abortion, and she didn't believe in that. She said no to that. She said, and she said very specific, they said, you know, listen, you're gonna have a handicapped child. And she said, I believe God gave me this child one way or the other. I don't care whether he's handicapped or not.

I'm going to do everything I can to support this and to help this. So she said no. And which I know is a, you know, an unpopular thing for people to talk about, but hey, listen, this is my life story. You got to do what you got to do. So actually my heart rate stopped as I was about to be, I was the first baby in the hospital I was born in that they used a fetal heart monitor on.

And I'm going and everything's cool there. I'm good. She's there to have the baby and my heart disappears. No heart rate anymore. So I'm literally the birth. When that happened to the time, I actually, when they finished the C section and put my time on the birth certificate is 19 minutes. Wow. No heart. So the thing you don't know about that is do I not have a heartbeat for 19 minutes?

I can tell you this. They were worried about it enough. They dragged her out of that. My mom said they were so close on when they cut her to give the, uh, the C section to her to have the emergency birth. That she could feel the coldness of the betadine being put on her skin seconds before they cut her.

That's how close they were with the anesthesia. Wow. So I start out that and, but I'm, but okay, here's the thing, doctor's predictions don't mean squat because they said I'd be born blind, deaf, or crippled or in any, I'm not. They were wrong. Yeah. And I was okay. And everything is cool. And, and, and I got that.

You know, maybe that's the start of the mindset. And my parents began to instill a mindset. And I tried to do this later on with my kid that. You're capable. You can do anything. It's possible. It doesn't matter what it is. And I, you know, at that time, I was too young to even see that. But later on, I really do see that they encourage that.

And that's such a huge thing, man. You believe it's possible? It's possible. I've talked about the group of women I'm training. We have a running joke about that, that when they ask me how much something weighs, everything in my yard, whether it weighs 10 pounds or 500 pounds. Everything in my yard weighs 25 pounds.

I started them with the simplest exercise I could find, which was kettlebell deadlifts, just basic straight, regular deadlift done with a kettlebell. And I did that for two reasons. Number one, that's the simplest way to learn to deadlift. It's way simpler than a barbell. And number two, they couldn't read the key, the kilos

on my kettlebell.

Ah, they didn't know. Yes. That's right. They didn't know.

All they could see is that one was bigger than the other. And I just flat lied to them about what's that weigh? Oh, what's that one weigh? 25 pounds. That one looks bigger than the other one. It just looks that way. It just looks like that. But here's why.

Here's why. They didn't believe they were strong. They didn't believe it was possible. And then, after the workout, I'd say, you know, uh, they'd be like, wow, some of that was a little bit heavy. I'm like, you know, you actually lifted 90 pounds today. They're like, what? I couldn't, how was that possible? I can't believe it.

Because you didn't know, you couldn't do it, and I told you you could. Yes. And so I'm going along, everything's cool, I'm five years old, I have a car accident, I'm walking down the street to my grandmother's house with my mom, I'm carrying this puppy, he jumps out of my arms, runs across the street, I dart after him, when I do I step right in front of a van, a van hits me, hits me, throws me to the front of the van, it crushes my right hip, it fractures my skull, the guy skids to a stop, it throws me off, um, so I, I, you know, everybody thinks I'm dead, the whole thing, you know, my mom goes and they get me in an ambulance, um, I spend a month in the hospital, and Uh, I spend three plus months in a body cast, uh, completely immobile from, from the chest down.

Uh, and, and you, so the therapy thing, so I can, you know, I can vividly remember this, man. I'm a kid. I'm like, I'm at first, this is Florida back in the seventies. Okay. There was three channels on TV and cartoons like for five minutes a day. Like it was like being in prison. It was like a gulag situation.

There was no, you know. And so I'm, they cut this cast off me and I'm thinking, well, thank God I can finally run and play. And they stand me up and I collapse, man. I can't, I couldn't move at all. I couldn't do it. I had to completely start over, walk again. And I don't remember any, they didn't, I remember this.

They sent us home with a bottle of some weird lotion and said, all right, rub this on his skin a few times a day and make him move around. That was therapy. That was it. There was little to no organized therapy. There was no, it's not like today where if you sprain your fingernail, you have seven months of therapy and you do the whole, it's not like that.

It doesn't work that way. So they sent me home and, and just in the normal, and so my mom was, you know, was, was religious about doing things and she moved my legs around and made me do stuff and that kind of, you know, and it wasn't long before I'm walking again because I'm desperate as a child and I don't know I can't and I got to go outside and play because this is killing me.

So we're going to, I'm motivated. Uh, to do that. Evidently, and I don't remember this because again, the head injury from it was pretty serious. Uh, evidently I had some deficits and some things still about a year later. And my mom happens to run into the meatiest guy who owns a taekwondo school. And he's, and she's, you know, and he says, she kind of explains the situation, she says, well, I can help him get more flexible and I can help get moving and doing things or whatever.

And so I kind of, that sort of developed some of my ideas later on because what I talked about before in, um, and people ask me this now, well, how is it you're able to do these crazy things? Without being a specialist in those things. You know what? I just set out to do them and I allow the body to educate itself.

If that makes sense. Sure. Um, just by learning the movement, by attempting to make the movement. I think sometimes we so break down the minutiae of things that we, that we confuse things. Yes. Versus, if you tell a baby, a baby automatically, you don't have to tell a baby to learn to crawl, a baby just starts to move.

You don't have to tell a baby to walk, a baby just begins to do it. Um, I think in therapy, we over simplify things, we over complicate them by trying to over break them down. Yes. Whereas, let's start with the simple things you can do and go from there and we'll, we'll adjust the gaps as necessary versus let's start with the, you know, um, Okay.

If you are coming out of a cast, well, can you move your leg? All right, let's move your leg, but let's not start with, can you move your toe if you can move your leg, you see what I mean? And, you know, and so this guy basically was, and they started with me with, you know, we started with just the basics of stuff.

And, and I learned for, you know, so there's, I had a couple of years of real steady Taekwondo, which developed a real. Uh, flexibility thing for me, systematic flexibility, systematic movement, learning to not go from just not just walking, but let's move athletically, let's, let's step softly, let's control our footsteps, let's jump, let's spin, let's do the, the basic things that we all ought to be doing no matter what age we are at whatever level is capable of.

And the thing is, you're more capable of it, it's just, you know, okay, I have 65 year old women who've never done an athletic thing in their life, spinning. And doing some of the, and I don't mean by on a bike, I mean literally doing spinning foot drills. Yes. Because they don't know they shouldn't be able to do that.

Exactly. That's huge. It's totally impossible. Huge. Yeah, they just don't know. So that put me into the therapy world by accident. And then later on, I got into powerlifting and I really began to learn about how to physically make the body strong and the technical abilities of movements. And here's one of the big things I learned about that that I think will be helpful from a therapeutic standpoint to the people listening.

Everybody isn't supposed to do things the same way. Yes. Say it, bud. You watch everybody. Okay. Everybody isn't supposed to do everything exactly the same way. When you're coaching somebody, don't try to remake them into whoever the world champion you think is cool is or whoever you're, you don't make somebody squat in your stance.

You make them squat in the stance that works for them because their hips are different than yours. Their thigh bones are different from yours. Their athletic background, their injury background is all different from yours. So it has to be adjusted to. The width, the toe turn, the hip position, where your movement starts, all of those things needs to be individually adjusted for every movement on the planet.

And if you look at the breadth of the best lifters on the planet, and people say, well, I'm not trying to be a lifter, but you know what? The best lifters on the planet know the best about how to make the body strong. And they know the best about the biomechanics of how to actually use the human body.

Okay, so why study? That's like saying, I want to learn to drive. Well, would you rather learn to drive from your local driving instructor or would you rather learn to drive from a NASCAR driver? Uh, you'd rather learn to drive from a NASCAR driver because you can learn some stuff that makes you absolutely amazing.

You're learning from the best people on the planet. Yeah, you may not be ready to drive 500 laps at 200 miles an hour, but you'd be a lot more better than, you'd be a lot better than just learning how to parallel park from somebody who doesn't care what they're doing. You see what I mean? Learn from the best.

And what you learn is this, there is no single way. There is no single way to be the best at something. There is no single training pla platform. And there is no single biomechanical way till you move the human body. Everybody doesn't copy everybody else. Um, you know the difference in a five foot, 112 pound, uh, female lifter in a six foot 4, 350 pound super heavyweight is gonna be fairly ridiculous in the, the, the way they stand, the way they move, the way they do, it's gonna be huge.

But good biomechanics is always good biomechanics. Yes. So it doesn't matter, so the little difference, huge payoffs in how your clients are capable and able to do things, but the biomechanics are always

going to be the same. Absolutely. I think people, especially the social media age that we live in, people love those.

Those eye catching images with the red X's and the green check marks and it's like, you cannot put movement into a box like this. You have to look at the person who is in front of you.

And to listen to some of the armchair theorists and some of the median level coaches who have, you know, there's a thing about listening to people who are in the middle of their game.

They're learning, they're doing awesome, they're trying. They also have just enough knowledge to be dangerous. Not enough knowledge to give you, they can't see the broad spectrum of things, which is the big issue in therapy and strength and all this stuff is not being able to step back and look at the whole of the world of the thing or not having the influences of, you know, like, so I've studied everybody from the 1850s forward.

Okay, I got an idea of what all the major strength systems did, and why, and what they do, and what the theory behind it is, and here's what I've seen. People got strong doing wildly divergent things, doing wildly divergent, both technical styles, as well as, um, implements that they lift, and volumes of training, and frequencies of training, and it's all over the map.

Um, And you can't pigeonhole one particular thing, and I'll tell you what you can't, if you look at, you were talking about the red X's and all that stuff, you can't look at some of the greatest lifts that ever happened on the planet, and if you put them through that red X test of, is it hypermechanics, it won't, it won't pass.

I'm talking about guys who did it with 900 pounds, and it, but if you look at, oh no, that guy's hips were a little too high, or his upper back bent a little bit, it doesn't work that way. The reality of human movement, it cannot be pigeonholed into one particular thing. Within the exception, uh, within the idea that, okay, uh, the basics are still the basics.

There are still some things that are never going to work biomechanically. But lots of things work biomechanically. Little tiny cars drive and so do big trucks. Uh, it's still the basic mechanics. Same thing. Um, it's just, you have to find, and, and individuality is a very big thing, man. Individuality is a, is a, once you've established what good biomechanics are, You have to make the tweaks, you need some experience.

You've got to make the tweaks for the individual person of, okay, that doesn't really look comfortable, that's not working well for you, or that particular stance or hand grip or, or that particular turn is moving you into a place of bad biomechanics. Therefore, we'll make an adjustment, and let's put our foot two foot inches wider, or let's turn our toes a little in or a little out, or let's try this, let's make this adjustment, move your head position, move your back position, move your butt position, whatever.

The tweaks. And here's the thing. That's right. Those little tweaks. But here's the thing. People will often auto tweak themselves. Yes. Just little, and, and don't try to teach the whole world at one time, man. Don't try to teach the 700 step. Listen, give them something stupid, simple to do and begin sorting it out a moment at a time.

And here's the thing that's going on with real high level lifters. High level lifters are constantly technique refining. They're constantly asking questions. They're constantly asking their training partners. How did that look? What did I do? Did I do everything perfect? You're talking about guys who are the world champions of the best in the world who've been with them for 30 years.

Okay, there's still technique refining 30 years later. Yeah. So now they know they got it, okay, they're not doing, you know, everything else they've done is auto ingrained, but the human body wants to be strong. It doesn't want to be weak, it will learn, it will push itself into biomechanically contagious positions once you just give it the nudge of, this is probably the best way to do this.

And then. Little things sort themselves out and they will over a period of time. I

couldn't agree more, man. I love the, the approach that you're talking about and that is ideal is that original strength approach to rehab or movement where work on these foundational patterns, like look at how children are, how they move, what they're doing.

You don't learn like these little fine things first, like go off to this big stuff and give people this basic level of strength. I think one of the problems is people don't realize when they try and they do compare to kids and children. They don't actually realize how incredibly strong kids are they view them as very fragile when in actuality I'm like that child just held a plank for like Four minutes over there and they're able to deadlift they can go and pick that thing up that thing weighs more than them Like we don't actually realize if you were to actually take the strength of a child and make it proportional to an adult you would See exactly like you said, but the majority of the world is grossly Too.

Too weak. Weak. Like just way,

way too weak. Way, way too weak. That's why we have back pain. That's why we have knee problems. That's why we have hip problems for the most part. Yeah, exactly. You know, we, we 90, you know, we live in the easiest technological moment on the, the easiest way to live, the easiest time in the history of human beings to live.

'cause really all you need to live in a developed country. Now, you know, other countries are a different situation, but, but in America, all you need is thumbs. Yeah. If you have thumbs, you can live. You're good. You're right. Or even just fingers, because you can, you can order anything over a smartphone, no matter what it is.

You don't need anything to actually live, but to thrive, you still need to think a thousand years ago. That's why 40 year old dudes, uh, uh, can't get off the couch when they should be crushing life instead of falling away from life. We're hurting because we're not moving, because we're not strong, not because, you know, and we do the opposite.

Oh, you hurt your back? Oh, don't ever lift anything heavy

again. Exactly.

And what that sets you up for is the lifetime of back problems, not a short term issue. Listen, if you don't make those muscles strong, you will have pain and problems forever. Yeah. And it really doesn't matter where the other damage comes from.

You got a broken bone. Let it heal Now. Make it strong. I love it. You got a damaged disc? Let it do some things to make it heal. Now, make it strong. You got a joint replacement, guess what? Guess what I'm gonna tell you. Let it heal now. Make it strong. There you go. Don't you know whatever. And let me tell you this, you dig ditches for a living, get strong.

You sit at a desk for a living, get strong. Because those two people end up at the same thing. I don't care if you have the hardest physical job in the world, at the end of life, if you haven't done the things to keep things strong, to keep things mobile, to undo the pain that and inflammation that general living or your job creates.

You and the guy who sat at a desk for 40 years and didn't move very much and had no strength to begin with are going to end up in the same set of physical problems. Exactly. So, do the smart things to get stronger, to be mobile, to And here's the thing. There's a problem, and what we talked about, and we're sort of circling back around to the thing, we talked about being a generalist and having the, you know, being good at everything.

Here's the thing. You know what? People don't even know this, but one of the best powerlifters ever, actually several, and especially a lot of the old time strongmen, they got strong doing one rep sets a few times a week. You're talking about Marc Chalet, squatted 1, 000 pounds and deadlifted, I think, 800 pounds, doing five single reps of squats a week and five single reps of deadlifts a week.

That was the entirety of his squat and deadlift program, okay? And here's what I mean by that, and the reason I'm referencing those things, okay? You see a lot of what you try to make programs complicated, you try to make the people do, uh, we have a more is better, uh, thing, and more strength is better, but more work to get there is not.

Okay, uh, meaning this, you got to recover from life, okay, and I talked about starting these women who are, you know, uh, one of, one of whom has had 25 surgeries in her lifetime, has had four, has had cancer four separate times, and she's about to turn 60 years old, has had Literally 25 times had surgery, most of which related to cancer over her life.

She's had the legal limit of radiation you can give a human being in America in her lifetime. One lady has a destroyed ankle. The other lady has a destroyed hip. The other lady is my mom who is 74, who's never done much of anything, but was in a car accident a couple of years ago and has some back and wrist issues and stuff from that.

And the same program that worked for some of the best lifters and the best all time strongman on the planet, Is working for them. And the reason is this, do the most you can while creating the least problem, creating the least inflammation. So if I went and took these women and took them to, uh, the average gym, they would take them in and put them through a 25 set workout all around, around 10 repetitions.

And they would have so much delayed onset muscle soreness. So much extra inflammation on the inflammation they already had, they would want to die and they would never come back and work out again. But if I made them come in and do a warm up set of a few reps, warm their body up by moving around, walking a little bit.

We do a lot of tire pulling because it's super light and simple and hard to do wrong. And then we do just five one rep sets. Okay, I'll give you this. In a two and a half month period, nearly everybody, and this is the women involved, has added 40 to 60 pounds to their deadlift just by doing that twice a week.

And this is people who are, are, who are at a place where they shouldn't, literally my one lady, her doctor told her. You are too physically damaged to ever change what's possible. Your BMI will always be what it is. You'll never be able to get stronger. You'll never be able to, yeah. Listen to this crowd.

This makes me so proud. This makes me so happy about this. This lady, for the first time in six years, her inflammation markers went down. For the first time in years, her BMI dropped. She lost 15 inches overall. She lost 7 pounds. Her BMI dropped to 35. And all her inflammation markers went down, and for the first time in six years, she was able to stand up off the ground by herself.

Look at that, changing

her life, man. Saving her life, but changing her life.

By the simplest, most people would say, that's the most ridiculous, singles never work, you're just going to kill these people. No, I'm making an educated decision from a different vantage point about what's possible and capable and smart for these people.

And if you change their strength, you can change their life. You can make a difference in what they're, our average so far in a three month total trial period of this whole thing. And this just. Man, I didn't even intend to do this. I didn't want to train anybody. I just, like, my one lady was hurt so bad.

I'm like, I got it. All right, I'll help you. And then the other way, well, can I come? Okay, you can come. Well, you, uh, can I bring my friend? All right. Can I bring seven friends? Okay. I didn't want to do that. I'm gonna, all right, I'll do it or whatever. We're gonna do it. Yeah, we've averaged between 20 Well, the best, the most weight loss we've had in a three month period, and this is just goofing off this.

I'm not messing with their diets. I'm not doing anything else. One lady's lost 40 pounds and several other have lost 25. Everybody's lost 40 to 60 pounds to their deadlift. Everybody's a dude. You're, this is people who doctors have told them, and I'm just, you're not the only one, just the one lady, their doctors tell, no, you're not going to be, no, you're too old.

You can't, you can't get stronger. You can't do. Yeah. Uh, you absolutely can. Much stronger of life can be amazing. And that's a big thing. You really can.

Absolutely. My, my providers out here that you guys are listening to this, you know, I, I don't know a hundred percent, every listener obviously that checks this out, but I, I just want to interject because I know that sometimes when people hear things that are so perhaps radically different from what they're doing, instead of embracing it, they may get a little bit scared or turn the podcast off or be like, no way, that's just too crazy.

He's telling you, that's what happens, right? He's telling you. Anecdotal, 100 percent true things that he's seeing. And the reason I do this podcast and actually Bud echoed this inside of this so that you guys can take a step back and see the bigger picture. One of the main things, right? If you want to say, okay, I'm too scared to load someone that much.

All right. But. The number one thing that Bud has echoed this whole time is this concept of empowering people and not telling them what they cannot do, but showing them that they can do and helping them realize and understand that they can do anything. There's a lot of, you know, tricks that may be involved with that for, you know, a better clinician or what makes a better coach because they, you know, the fact that Bud went and used kettlebells, not only because biomechanically it's, it's a, Easier movement, but because it says kilograms on it.

And so mentally for that person, they're not already like, Oh, that says 50 pounds. I can't do it to them. They don't know. And, and bud, that's a great code to coaching strategy. The bigger picture there being that we need to, as coaches, clinicians, friends, family, whatever, look to start. Helping people up and telling them, yeah, you can do this.

Fuck yeah, you can do this. Go and get stronger. You broke that. Okay. Heals and go and get stronger. That needs to rest. Okay. Rest. And then not, we have to go and get stronger. It doesn't matter what field you're in, you know, what movement background you're coming from. We're all working with humans, understand their individuality.

And that's how you tailor things. And that one, you know, separates, uh, especially at that highest level of things. But. Man, realize that we're working with these incredible beings and empower them and speak to them as such.

Well and we treat people from a clinical standpoint as if they're going to forever be damaged.

But the human body wants to heal itself. And that's not true. It wants to heal itself. Now you, okay, you may have something that you carry forever. So what? Dude, there are people, you know, uh, doing marathons with no legs. Uh, you got a herniated disc? You can get through it. You can, you know, I mean, it's not, and here's the thing.

Why can't you be the exceptional story? Why can't you be that? You absolutely can't be that. Because what we see, we see all, we see everything as outliers when you have the potential to be an outlier. We see somebody who, and they're going to say, Oh, these are just exceptional people. I ain't picking these people.

I ain't picking that. You got the worst injury, but the best potential to do that. These are just people. And here's the thing, you can be an outlier. You have no idea what you're genetically capable of until you try. And when I say try, I don't mean the first time you tried it and it didn't work great.

That means if you spend a year, and guess what? The more years, the more time, the more effort, the smarter you work. The better your genetics suddenly came, then people are going to be talking about, Oh, you just had the genetics to do that. No, I just did the work. Somebody believed in me and somebody made You are not there to be damaged forever.

You, you are not, you know, but, and, but if people believe they are, that's why they give people that. You pull the muscle in your back, your back's never going to be strong again. Bull crap. You know how many power lifters? Okay. One of the major exercises I use on the, I use with these people is a reverse hyperextension.

I do that because One of the smartest ways to make those muscles strong and traction in the back at the same time without creating damage, without doing a problem, and most, makes most everybody's back feel better. The guy who pushes that, one of the greatest powerlifting coaches to ever live, the intelligent guy, there's a guy named Louie Simmons, guess what?

Louie broke his spine twice and came back to Multiple elite totals, multiple elite classes, and squatted like 900 pounds at like 60 years old. Uh,

dude. We're worried about a little back strain. Oh god, I'm gonna be crippled forever.

That's right. Did Louis just happen to magically No! He was smart and he wouldn't quit.

And there's the thing, we're taught, we're teaching people, there's the thing that we, we radically do, we teach people to quit instead of teaching people to work. We teach people that you're going to be damaged forever. No, you're not going to be damaged forever. You can be the outlier, you can be the one who came back from that injury instead of, you know, instead of just for, I was for, oh, I broke my toe one time, I can't walk.

No, not going to work that way if you make it happen. I mean, and here's the thing, most of the best athletes on the planet have had a serious injury. And come back from it to become the best at what they do. So why can't you do it? There's no difference in you and them realistically, other than that, you know, maybe they're a professional at what they do.

And yeah, they have genetic gifts for their thing, but you know what? You still got two eyes, two arms, two legs. You're still basically a human being. So what if this case if they're capable of it, you're capable of some significant approximation of the same thing

my man You say all I want to tease that out a little bit Because I was like I said, I was listening to your podcast about and you were talking about the day you went in and squatted a thousand pounds and you The mindset that you said where you're like, I'm either squatting it or I'm leaving in an ambulance And the, the, for me, that was one of the biggest, most poignant moments of that podcast was look at the mindset that this, this person went into this thing with, and this is why they succeeded because this, and you know, obviously years into a training all other and everything else, but the mindset portion of that, could you speak some more to that?

Like I had a bunch of other stuff I wanted to talk about today, but I love that you've taken this in such a, the mental component of things. Well, my,

dude, your mind drives everything. Your mind, no one is strong without mental strength. No one is physically strong without mental strength. And physical strength, or physical training, is probably the greatest way to build mental strength.

Because it's certainly the way to, the best way to build physical and mental concentration. Nothing on the planet will force you to drop every other thought out of your mind and focus intently like a laser on something and putting the heaviest weight you can possibly hold in your hands or on your back.

And I'm talking about taking you from, you know, you can meditate 20 minutes a day for 6 months or I can give you 30 seconds with a barbell on your back and get to the same place. And here's the thing, mental success and physical success is repeated patterns and repeated habits. The more you believe, the more you do on a regular basis, the more you're going to get there.

So that night we were talking about. I didn't go in thinking I would fail. It was not a question in my mind. It was that I was absolutely convinced I would succeed. And I had a lifetime of training to build up to that. So I'm not just a nutcase who says, I'm doing this or die. I had 16 focused training to get to a pinnacle point of a particular thing that had been a goal of mine forever and that was the night that goal was going to happen.

Now, that's out of the wheelhouse of most people therapeutically and most people are never going to get to the place of absolute crazy where I'm doing this or I'm going to the hospital. But Approximating just some percentage of that in your life. Why are we, because we're taught to quit all the time. Oh, it's a little hard, I can't, no I won't do it.

So what? Um, I really think if we could live in a mindset on a day to day basis of hard doesn't mean you quit. Tough doesn't mean you quit. And rearrange our mindset completely of what pain is. I don't see physical exercise, no matter how painful it is, as pain. Physical exercise is effort. Effort is sometimes comfortable, but that is not pain.

You know, pain is when an alligator really does bite you on the leg. That's dead. That's okay. That's pain. I'll give you that. No problem. But, but you did, you know, a hundred squats. Yeah. You're sore. You breathe hard. Simple effort. That is not pain. Restructuring your mindset and those things in what effort is and what pain is and when I quit and when I stopped myself in how far I'm willing to go is the difference in life.

And death is the difference in how you age, it's the difference in how you function, it's the difference in your marriage, in your children, in your business success. All of that stuff is key to your mind. And the simplest way to train your mind is to train your body physically hard. If the, okay, if it gets tough to answer questions in the middle of the day or it gets up, but if I know that before I got to that interview or before I got to that business meeting, I put myself through things on a regular basis that would scare the crap out of my competition.

I fear nothing or next to nothing. I have rational intelligence about what to do, okay? I go into that without, again, I'm trained to do what I do. I didn't go into that without a rational thought process, but I went into it with, okay, what most people would consider an irrational level of motivation and an irrational expectation of success.

Now, realistically, and I think, I think we're wasting our lives. We're, I think we're doing everything. Are meant for so much more than the average person gets out of it. And if they simply changed the way they thought if they simply believed in themselves if they simply were willing to do the work They could do amazing things.

And it all starts with how you think. I can demonstrate, I can, I have literally over my course of training and career and, and, and between strongman stuff and massage and the martial arts, I have hundreds of examples I could call back of what you think dictates how strong you are. What you think dictates how strong you can be.

Do you think it's possible? And here's the thing. People can change their thoughts. People can change their mindset. The more success you put them through in that, the more they believe it's possible. The more they take that first step after their leg was broken, the more they're going to believe they can take multiple steps and they can walk again.

The more they lift Five pounds more than they did last week. The more they're going to think, well, by God, I could lift a couple of hundred pounds, or maybe it's possible, or maybe I didn't think it was ever possible for me to lift more than 50 pounds. And that crazy guy with a backyard on fire, who's throwing axes at stuff, tricked me into lifting a hundred pounds.

And my God, now I am capable of, you are capable, but you have to believe you are capable. You need to surround yourself with people who believe they are, who are willing to work as hard as you. And you need to see that hard work and a tough mind. Doesn't make you a jerk and isn't going to kill you. We're conditioned to believe we're conditioned to believe that if you work to the edge of your capacity, you're going to get hurt.

Okay. I am the outlier example of that one particular thing in that, yeah, I have a 25 or 30 year career of weightlifting and I've had some injuries along the way, although never really bad ones from lifting of any kind, more from sports type stuff or whatever. I am, I'm a drag racer. Okay. If you drive a car at 300 miles an hour, you're going to occasionally blow a tire.

But you can away with, you know, you're occasionally you're going to get a ding on the fender, okay, it's gonna happen. That's the way I've lived, that's the way I've done. And I regret absolutely none of that. But the average person can approximate just a level of that, not the whole thing. You don't have to be as crazy as I'm doing.

You don't gotta light your backyard on fire, but you can be 10, 20, 50% stronger than you are safely. Without the problems without any little ding on the fender Actually, you're what you're going to do is you're going to actually upgrade your whole system Mentally and physically in a relatively safe way.

That's actually safer than being weak It's certainly safer than the route of I was hurt and I just babied myself after that because you know what? Okay, so what happens after that? So I had a bad back. Not me, but just in the, uh, in the analogy of what we're doing here, okay? I'm four years old, I have some young kids, I have a bad back, I can barely walk, we live next to a lake, and my three year old darts for the water and he can't swim, and I'm too hurt to save him.

Because, two years ago, when I hurt my back, they told me, don't ever lift anything heavy again, just baby it, you'll probably have problems forever. Yeah, stop living. That's what they told you die. That's the wrong thing. And that mindset carries over into every other area. I believe I can write a book because I've trained myself since I, or because I started, was training with people at six and eight and 10 years old.

And later when I was 14, 15, people taught me that you can do that. You can do that. It's possible. And I saw repeated success over and over and over and over again. And because I saw repeated success over and over again, I believe I can do it in other areas. Well, I was a pretty good powerlifter. Can I be a strongman?

Mmmm. I think I can. But now, here's the thing. I have so much positivity directed in that particular area, I'm probably going to answer that question yes to whatever. Could you be an astronaut? Yeah, I could do it. Can you be a But here's the thing. Why can't you? Okay, I realize that, you know, that's an extreme example, but it But it actually is possible.

And I'm also a believer of, you know what? Shoot for the moon. If you miss and hit the stars, you're okay.

Exactly. You're good either way. Clinicians out there listening to this, man, I hope you take what he's saying and, and apply it to, to what you're doing, especially because he's showing the, uh, what is that what I'm saying?

The, the bi directionality of this, where you. When someone feels something, they can change their, their belief system. We know that the mind dictates, dictates and governs everything. The thoughts dictate and govern everything, but our experiences, our feeling, our movement can actually dictate what or change how we think.

Right? So we see this bidirectionality there. And that's one of the, one of the reasons that as a physical therapist, chiropractors. Personal trainers, ATCs, whatever you guys are, you have the ability to change someone's life because you have the ability to affect their movement. You change someone's movement.

You can change their perspective, change their belief, and you can absolutely change.

That's funny, it's funny, I was literally talking to a client about four hours ago about that particular thing, about using physical movement to change your mindset. About using physical, you know, I have a friend who, so this particular person has had three major catastrophes in their life and when you talk to them and a lot of their life reference is based out of, that's my timeline, this happened and therefore I had these problems after that.

And that's a very, very human thing to do. And here's what happened. The intensity of the experience molded your mindset. And then you got years of practice being negative or being sad or being damaged by this particular thing. But what if you took that two or three workouts a week and you use the miniature anchors you build every time you do something physically hard and you forced yourself before you do something physically hard to step back and say, I'm happy, I'm fulfilled.

My purpose is amazing. I'm a good person. I'm whatever it is you need to fix mentally, whatever it is. I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. Or if you did that and connected it with happiness, every time you did the hardest thing you do every week. Well, now you begin to view the mindset that you have problems with because you got a thousand reps in of being sad over and over and over again because you had this one explosion in your life.

Well, what if you took these little mini explosions of every time you had the hardest effort, you pulled a big deadlift, you did your sled dragging from my, you threw an axe and so whatever in my, but what if every time you did it you use it as a mental prep to undo? To practice reps and reps and reps of positivity and reps and reps and reps of happiness and reps and reps and reps of, I can, I am capable.

I am good enough. I am valuable. All those things over and over and over again. You use that physical movement as an anchor and it's a much more powerful ankle anchor than just simply saying it to yourself. Convincing yourself is one thing, but tie that to a physical movement, tie it to a success. I am good enough.

And then go lift five pounds more than you did last time. Well, maybe I'm right. By God, I have the evidence to experience it. I have the evidence to say it. I have, you know, and these crazy people are pushing me on. I got around these positive people, and now suddenly, I've started to get happy, and I've started to get, think that I am capable of that, and now I'm a better human, and I'm a better grandma, and I walk better, and I function better, all because I believe that I can if somebody told me I could do.

That's it.

One person told me I could change someone's life, but I want to tease out because you're, uh, the ties you have here, you are also a massage therapist. So can you talk to me about, I mean, we talked about a little bit before, uh, you know, through DMS and stuff. Can you talk to me a little about, you know, mindset movement?

Uh, you called it bio cooperation between the practitioner and the patient, myofascial unwinding. Yeah. Talk to

me, bud. Okay. Well, that's one, you know, so, you know, massage therapists are, uh, I tell people this all the time. Most people walk into a place and they ask for deep tissue massage if they're looking for therapeutic massage.

Okay. They're looking, so massage comes in two, two big flavors and about a hundred sub flavors. So let me tell you what that means. That means, uh, there's relaxation massage, which is just the basics of what they call Swedish massage or different Asian massage, depending on where you come from. And that's basically just to get the body to relax and just, that's just, you know, this is fun to have somebody touch me and rub me and I'm just going to chill out for an hour.

And then there's therapeutic massage, which is about fixing problems. Okay. Now what people don't know is that therapeutic massage comes in like 25 different varieties, man. There's a ton of stuff. Stuff you've never even heard of and stuff that runs the gamut from super heavy deep tissue that's so painful you want to die from it to stuff where you barely even touch somebody and you're, and what it is is 25 different doors or in the same room, 25 different roads to the same place, all with the idea of making your, your tissue better, your movement better, fixing a problem, undoing pain.

Um, and it goes from everything between, uh, okay, deep tissue is, uh, when I give an analogy like this, deep tissue is like using a rolling pin on dough. It is biomechanical pressure that takes the lumps out or literally undoes a knot in a muscle by pressure to literally force it. So if you made a fist and I walked over and grabbed your fist and squoze, squeezed your hand as hard as I could until your hand just, your fist gave up and.

It's called Deep Tissue Massage, which is awesome. Deep tissue is like a hammer. It works every time on everything, but it may not be the best tool all the time. And what I got into later on, especially when I got back into full time massage, is I learned that Using a smarter tool is the best way, not necessarily the, the crush it approach.

Okay. And a lot of people can't tolerate. So individual reaction is huge. So what one person can tolerate, the other person cannot tolerate. And everybody is living with some level of inflammation. Okay. Depending on how high that level of inflammation is, depending on the individual response, if you hammer somebody with deep tissue, You can, instead of throwing gasoline on their personal forest fire, or instead of throwing water on their forest fire, you just threw gasoline on it.

You just made it worse. And it's difficult to separate, especially about one of the last places I, when I got back in full time, was a little exercise place. And they're really targeted toward, I mean, seniors in the 70 to 90 range. And 92 year old women, for the most part, do not tolerate heavy handed fire.

Deep tissue massage. Uh, and I, I began to experiment with gentler ways to do things and gentler ways to do stuff. And, and over a period, I came to some ideas about, uh, using some of the techniques I learned in massage to self regulate, um, both energetic blocks, but to self regulate mobility. Okay, so that gives you to one of the, uh, one of the therapeutic styles.

So one of the therapeutic styles that I use occasionally and that, uh, you know, is, is fairly common amongst knowledgeable therapists is a thing called myofascial unwinding. So the fascia, fascia, however you want to say it, I don't care how you pronounce crap, don't matter to me, it's, it's all good, okay, is the covering.

If you ever cut a steak open and see that big white thing in there, that's tendon, that's what fascia that looks like a big clear white sheet of. of hard stuff, gristle or whatever, every tissue in your body has the aphasia. Aphasia is the tendinous covering that separates everything. So if you cut through the skin into the muscle, you're going to cut through that white layer of stuff.

And it surrounds every tissue in the muscle, every bone, everywhere, you've got it everywhere. And the theory behind this is that that fascia essentially is a movement record. That fascia is super connected to your nerves. So we're thinking of like the whole body as brain instead of the central, as a, instead of a central brain and your whole body functions together in a nerve and energetic pathways and that whole thing.

And every movement you made is sort of recorded, but what's really recorded in those fascias is the repetitive movements you make. Um, and I can demonstrate this with somebody in, in their mobility and demonstrate this and have been able to see it multiple times in massage. Okay. So if I'm going to do some deep tissue work, I can warm your body up and then push hard on that spot and it'll hurt to a certain extent.

And it may be a seven on a scale of one to 10 of how bad it hurts. But if I do some myofascial unwinding, which is a bio cooperation, which I'll explain in a second, if I do that and push that same spot with that same line of pressure, usually that pain level drops from seven to five. Before I ever do any of the harder work, so my professional unwinding is based on this If I ask the body if I ask your body without ever speaking to you If I just simply grab you if you're on my table and I work on your neck or whatever And if you ever watch me do it You'll see me kind of lift somebody's head and just move it around and it looks like I'm just simply moving it with my hands But that's not what I'm doing what I'm doing is concentrating on the connection between my body and theirs and what I'm saying is I Want you?

I'm literally speaking to their body mentally, I want you to fix yourself. I want you to move in the ways that you need to move to fix yourself. I want you to unwind yourself. I want you to literally, and the idea is that those movements almost create wrinkles. In the fascia, and as you unwind, the fascia moves out like it ought to be.

And literally what I'll do is, as I pick their head up, and it looks like I'm, if you're, to the untrained eye, it would look like I'm shifting their head around. I'm just doing it. I'm not. All I'm doing is giving their body the impetus to move, and then supporting the joint. So that it can move freely without much restriction or without much whatever, and I'm more following their movement with my hands versus creating it by pushing it.

And in doing that, what happens is that fascia begins to undo itself. And what you will notice is Okay, if I begin to just move them around, now I could just randomly move and, you know, whatever, but most of the time, if you pick somebody up and move them around, what you'll do is a pattern, okay? You'll do it in circles, or you'll move it in figure eights, or you'll move to the left a bunch, or to the right, or whatever.

But if you let them do it on your own, you'll find they'll work through their own individual sets of patterns. Okay, they'll work through, and you'll notice, and if you talk to them, somebody who holds their phone on the left hand side of their face will often, if you're doing this, their neck will automatically go to that a dozen times in letting it undo itself.

What it is, is the movement itself, your body is literally unwrinkling itself, it's fixing itself as it goes, and your pain gets less, your movement gets better, it's actually usually a very relaxing thing because you're talking about a whole body, nerve, muscle, everything stimulus together. Um, and in doing that, what I've begun to apply in other things, that's one of the techniques I like to use.

I got the idea one time of why can't, if I can do this to other people, why can't I do it to myself? Mm hmm. Yes. Please. And myself do that. Okay. And so when you watch most people do joint mobility, all they do is move through a set of predisposed patterns. Okay. Well, what if circles for your ankle, which is a great thing to do.

Okay, but what if circles for your ankle or your knee or your hip or whatever isn't the perfect Movement for your body, but what if you could literally tell your body and be by being sensitive to how it feels What if you could literally say, okay fix yourself move However, you need to move and if you just sort of close your eyes and melt away from it and get get away from It in a way that you're super focusing, but just allow it to happen What if your ankle as you begin to do circles for mobility or whatever else?

What if it simply started to move in the pattern that it needed to do because you always walk Twisted to one side, and therefore your ankle's a little jacked to that side, or you have a previous injury, or you, you know, um You know, for whatever reason, your ankle moves to the left always instead of the right.

And so what if you, instead of making mobility general, made it super specific to you by simply telling your body to make it to mobilize itself by fixing itself. And if you were paying attention enough to what's going on inside you to simply follow the movements and let them happen in whatever they might be, whatever flexion they might look like.

And sometimes it's this real weirdly graceful. Set of movements and sometimes it's very spastic and static looking just depending on what you and what if you started at the toes and worked the entire way up your body and instead of just I'm going to work on circles and I'm going to do work on this pattern or that kind of pattern, we just simply allowed the body a piece at a time.

To fix itself, to create its own mobility, to remove any block of the flow of nerve conduction, of energy, of circulation, or whatever, by moving in whatever pattern it needed to do. And, in the tests I've done with, I taught this at a seminar once, and in working with other people, it's been pretty doggone successful with letting, uh, I can tell you, I feel a ton better now.

You know, maybe it's just movement and, and, What we begin with, but I, I feel a difference in that than if I just simply use a basic set of movement. Uh, because that's what is bio specific to you. Yes. There you go. Not general, you know, okay. So everybody ought to be able to move their ankle in a circle. But you need to move your ankle in a circle with a figure eight and a little twist to the left and a whole, you see what I mean?

To optimally, your thing work better versus just using the basic pattern. And why can't we do that? Well, we can do that, we just need somebody to coach us through it and give some specifics on, on what you need. And we need to get, we gotta get sensitive to our own feeling. There you go, that's a big thing there, bud.

We gotta get connected to our own body. We gotta get, we gotta get um, Like I had a dental surgery one time and this is where I get this idea. Not where I got this idea, but with the analogy I'm about to tell you. I had a dental surgery one time and my friend had had it before and uh, I said, well, how bad did you feel?

How, how off your game were you, um, after that, the recovery, you know, for a couple of days or whatever. And he's like, I have no idea. I don't know how to answer that question. And if you, you know, I can tell you very specifically if I squatted to max yesterday, Uh, at the, uh, you know, tomorrow I might only be at 80 or 90 percent of my game on that particular play.

You see what I mean? Yes. I'm very connected to my body. Yes. I know exactly what the thing was. Versus like, if you ask me that question, I'll give you a, I'll give you a roundabout answer of, I don't know, yeah, this is going to give me about a 10, 20 percent deficit or this may help. This way, that way, whatever.

Well, most people have no idea. They have no connection. They know something hurts. They don't have any specifics about it. That's all they know. If you're real connected to your body, you absolutely can be. And so I found that that's something, and I started teaching that to just rank amateurs to experiment with it.

And they're able to get it as well. Now it takes some time. to learn the concentration, but the higher level athlete you are, the higher, the more connected to your body you are. If you're somebody who really spends some time thinking and practicing, you know, like yoga type practitioners or martial arts practitioners can usually pick that up like really fast because they're very connected.

Um, but why can't we all be connected? Why aren't we connected that way? If we were more connected, we would be a lot more predisposed to living as amazing as we could. So why?

I think that's a huge thing.

That's kind of its own topic and I have other massage topics, but that's kind of its own thing. And so I'd love to hear your, you know, your thought or whatever on that because that's a very, that's like unexplored territory for the most part. I

mean, I think that I bring people on and we talk about this all the time and, you know, clinicians again out there, when you're listening to this, I think people come in, they're so driven by the science and they're.

They're so quick to pass judgment, and, you know, I say this because I feel like, just, just knowing how people are, I love that you said, fascia, aphasia, whatever you want to call it, like, people are so like, oh, if they didn't say it right, then this is wrong, they don't know anything, like, just take a step back, listen to this person's experience, and, and, you know, what, what he's saying, and what, what, what he's found, The big thing that I hear when I, no matter who I bring on is this concept of connecting yourself to the actual experience that, and listen, feel, listen, think, instead of trying to impart, people come in and they're just like, as a clinician, I'm going to fix you.

I'm going to do this to your system. You need to listen, listen to this person's body and this person. Also needs to listen to what they're feeling. Because like you said earlier, actually the body wants to heal. The body wants to be strong. The body doesn't want to be in this dysfunctional position. It will remember these other things, these patterns, but if you give it the space to listen, to feel, things will get better.

And I love that you've not only applied it to your patients, your clients, whatever you call them, but to yourself, I buy into that. A hundred percent, you know, whatever, whatever the mechanisms of action, you know, there's clearly a neurological piece to that. How much mechanical is, it doesn't really concern me.

The fact of the matter is one, it works. And two, it's something that you can do on yourself, which means that. Your clients can do on themselves too. This is another tie back to that empowerment thing. You can get better. You are not broken That's

right. Well, and I and i'll tell you I don't believe okay. I believe in science.

I believe it's not I have no qualms. I believe in science until science conflicts the real world uh progress of humanity, okay, because science moves ahead in a slow process and real training of human beings Is more art than science. It is science. Don't get me wrong, but getting the best out of each other is From a healing perspective from a performance perspective Is as much or more the art of learning and seeing that person and seeing what adjustment needs to be made for the individuality You tell me And science is wonderful, but science is limiting.

At one time, the scientists of the world thought it was flat. At one time, it was impossible to do this. At one time, it was impossible to do that. No, it's only impossible until somebody does it. It only, it only doesn't exist in science until somebody happens to prove. And maybe we do or don't have the ability to prove it with current technology, but we can certainly prove it anecdotally.

And science doesn't often, science often, because science moves so slowly, which again, no problem with science, science can only test a limited number of hypotheses at one time, whereas humans represent a system that is so complex, it is nearly impossible unless you're testing a gross, um, um, A gross, uh, hypothesis.

Yeah. It is so complex, it is nearly impossible to prove a single anecdote with on a sh to prove a single theorem beyond a shadow of a doubt universally. It's impossible. Okay? think whether or not poison kills human beings, that is a gross, possible to prove theory. If you give enough of it to any human being, it will kill them 100%, period.

But if you're testing whether low reps, or high reps, or stretch bands, or flexibility, or massage, or regular PT, or water therapy, or cold, or hot, works universally, you cannot prove this. It cannot be proved because somewhere in the system And what you can't prove is that it'll work on the same person multiple times the same way.

Factors change. So look at the complication of tendon, bone, ligament, mindset, cell, nutrition, uh, injury, uh, uh, multiple levels of strength, flexibility, uh, tone, um, dysfunction or whatever. Just those parameters. In testing a human system without talking about cellular stuff, which again adds another million complexities of what's going on.

How can you possibly prove that any one thing is going to work 100 percent all the time for any body? You can prove some generalities here and there, but you can't prove that it's going to situationally be perfect. That's why as a therapist of any kind or as a coach. You need the broadest possible spectrum of knowledge because if you're bag of tools to use because that tool might be the perfect thing for the one person at this time, but not that time, how many of you have done an exercise or even a therapy on some person where it worked for somebody for a while?

And then it just didn't work very good anymore. I got my, you know, my arms got way bigger from doing this for six months. And then they just didn't get much bigger anymore. I didn't get much stronger, and I needed to change. I needed to, well, they got, you know, their flexibility got better and better and better and better, and then it And it wasn't good enough for me to be considered imperfect, but it needed to get better.

But what I was doing wasn't working. Why? You need a different tool. You need a different thing. You need a different change. And you need the ability to look at things from a, from a, A wide variety of what's possible view. That's why I think the strength world has so much to teach. Even the massage world has so much to teach.

Because if you Okay, I have seen people get better in the real world. Whether you can prove it in a lab or not. But I can see people get better from completely divergent therapies. Absolutely. From completely divergent strength. Um, training styles and they both worked for different people and sometimes even for the same people at different times in their life.

So maybe there is no absolute absolutes about any of this. There is the right thing at the right and there's the art in therapy and the art and coaching or the art in creating yourself. You have to have enough confidence and knowledge to make the right decision, to be brave enough to try different things, to try new things, or whatever.

I had a lady come, this lady is a super close friend of mine, she's 72 years old, two years ago she had a bad accident, she fell off a set of stairs, and uh, down nearly two flights of stairs. Jeez. And. The big real problem, she broke her wrist, but she was real beat up from it. It wasn't, it didn't really break anything, which is a miracle.

No, she didn't die. But the big problem she's had lasting from that is they, you know, she was short of breath and they thought she was just beat up. Okay. They thought she was just, um, you know, that you're, oh, you're just, you know, physically damaged, but you'll be okay. But six months later, she ended up in the hospital again, still short of breath.

They couldn't figure out why. They didn't catch this in the first medical set of scans. And something in what happened to her, not a damage, they couldn't find anything in her back, couldn't find anything in her whatever, in the ability to scan that they had to do, something in her, in her, her body was damaged during that fall to the point that it paralyzed one side of her diaphragm.

Ah. So the left, left lung would not inflate. So no wonder she was short of breath. Short of breath, yeah. And, and sick from it for a while, and couldn't find anybody to figure out, and the doctors were like, Well, we'll cut you open and just pin your diaphragm back, and we'll figure it out when we get in there, and she's like, Uh, hell no.

That's actually not okay, nope. That's really not an okay thing to say, well, we'll just figure it out when we get in there. Dude, we're, and we're talking about doing a massive, we're not talking about doing something laparoscopic, Where it's one little pill of gold, they want a third half, and, and then, oh, we'll just put you back together when we get, dude.

You've got to have a better convincing story than that. She started training with us purely because she's a friend and she wants to, you know, she's at an age in life where she wants to get out of a wheelchair and she wants to be functional and she's super active to begin with. And I said, you know what?

Come and try it and let me see if I can figure out something for that lung. Let me see if we can figure something out about that. And I really had talked to a bunch of friends and nobody really had anything diaphragmatic massage wise that seemed like it was working or, or didn't have a lot of, you know, whatever.

And here's what I'm saying about having a big bag of tools and not being afraid to experiment. Okay. So what I started doing with her is I said, I noticed you're better when you breathe more. Let's do some just basic exercise. Let's pull the tire a little bit, squats and everything. Something that will force you to deep breathe because even if it doesn't inflate, we can start making it do a little more or we can, we can change your oxidative capacity a little bit or make the other lung stronger.

Maybe we can do something about it. And what I decided to do was, was have her do old school bodybuilding from like the fifties. Pullovers. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, bench pullover. And so what we're doing is, she gets across, lay basically across the bench, and we have her do it with like a ten pound plate.

And what they would do is like the old time 20 rep squat routine, is you do 20 reps of squats. You're breathing super heavy. And the idea was rib cage expansion. So the idea is you build a bigger chest by building a bigger box for your chest to sit on. And so what she would, you know, what they would do is do these, you know, 20 rep sets of super deep breathing pullovers.

And you can really literally see in some of the photographs of people where their rib cage legitimately did expand. And so I'm like, you know what? Let's give this a shot. Maybe it'll happen. And I got to working with her. And got to messing with it. So I'm like, I don't know if I can't hurt you. I'm not going to do anything wrong.

I can't, I can't make it worse. So I'm not going to. So let's try that. And I do some diaphragmatic massage. I'm just trying to, and I'm literally physically kind of pulling at her ribs and trying to force things open and massaging in some different places and just getting away and forcing her to just hold the breath in certain ways and deep breathing.

And I actually talked to a friend, Garren Bader. Who's a vocalist, for some breath coach, he's a super amazing guy, world class pianist, also a magician, physical guy, does a ton, you actually got to talk to him because he does a ton with connecting sound to motion. Love it. Which is amazing. Alright. I told him about, you know, let's try to breathe a certain way and force the diaphragm to move.

And, lo and behold, she's breathing better just from an exercise from 50 years ago that almost nobody does. Or from 70 years ago that almost nobody does. But, you know, see what I mean about having a good bag of tools? Absolutely. And let's think about this, that don't just follow the one book you learned from.

There's more out there. There's more dreamed of than is in your philosophy, Horatio, to quote Shakespeare, I think, or whatever, you know. There's more out there. There's a ton out there. And the reason I have an issue, like I was talking about the science thing of that, if you, whatever you prove to me that would work in science, If you give me a few minutes, if I don't already know the example off the top of my head, if you, whatever you tell me, this is the end all be all of building a stronger human body.

This is the common, it's the perfect combination. No one can ever do better. You get super, you get three gold stars, and you get extra free pancakes at IHOP when you use this combination. And whatever that combination is, I can give you somebody who did the exact opposite, who also got big and strong.

Absolutely. This is his life. Everybody's different. So, have an open mind. And have an open mind about what's possible for yourself, what's, dude, there's so much more possible. There you think. I'm doing stuff today that I couldn't, I just turned, I had my birthday the other day, I just turned 45 years old, I am physically doing stuff today that 20 years ago I could not do and 20 years ago they were telling me is physiologically impossible to do.

And look. In at the same time. Uh, it's because I just was crazy enough to not believe it, and crazy enough to try it, and crazy enough to build a little systemic way to make it happen. Uh, it's, it's totally possible if you just believe and do the right stuff and think and get around crazy people and get around people who open your mind and, you know, believe in yourself.

You're probably going to have to light the backyard on fire a couple of times and the cops might come. It's okay, just don't burn it down. Get it done. It's all

good. That's why you guys listen. That's why I brought, but honest, you expand that toolkit. We know the bigger, that bag of tools or whatever, that, whatever you want to call it, a toolbox, whatever you want to call it, the bigger that is.

And the better you are at knowing how to use each tool, the more people you can help when you understand that individuality exists, then you say, all right, I have this one thing that maybe I've never used before, but this could fit for you in this. Particular scenario, and we're not just tied to any one paradigm and this is the only way, understand that there's a reason that chiropractic, massage, PT, acupuncture, red cord, whatever, that it's all out there, because it all works for someone.

Your best bet is to go and expose yourself to it, figure out how it works, this way you understand the concept, not a specific singular technique, and you can apply it however you want. But I want to ask you one last thing, because I see where we're at with time. I want to ask you one last thing, just keeping in mind with this idea of, uh, tools for the toolbox, you introduced a really cool concept in one of the other podcasts I listened to of, um, I'm trying to remember exactly what you called it, progressive distance training.

Is that what you called it? Um, so for you guys listening, we're not talking about running progressively longer distances and then doing an ultra. It's actually talking about, uh, lifting, uh, could you talk about that? But I think it's, it's fascinating and to, to, you know, counter the judges out there, the instant judges.

Well, and, and here's the thing that where this may actually, I use this quite a bit on this group of people who've showed up to my house who were the walking wounded. I actually use this on, I use this on myself. This is how I got to my all time best squat, my all time best deadlift. And this is also how I have gotten them.

to build confidence as well as build structural integrity and move to some very heavy weights even when they're, or heavy for them, when they're damaged, you know, when they're physically damaged. And so what the idea of this is, most of the time in strength, what people want to use is a linear progression.

Okay, but this will actually make a lot of sense to your PTs Because what this is is progression in range of motion not progression in Load, okay So meaning that they're staying most linear most training is linear in that when I can do ten Repetitions of a particular thing or however, you want to judge is the strongest you need to be at a particular thing I therefore then add five pounds to my deal and then move up Okay, so if I can lift 100 pound dumbbells, when I can do 10 reps of bench presses with them or whatever, I'll do 105s or I'll do whatever.

When I can squat 300 pounds, next week I gotta try 305 pounds. Which is the idea of, progression is the entire idea of strength or PT. It doesn't matter, or even, really even massage, flexibility, chiropractic, it should always be progressing towards something, it should, you know, there are, now there is a maintenance of, you know, certain things at certain times, or whatever, but, especially when you're seeing somebody who's damaged, your idea is to get them to a place of maintenance, so you gotta progress toward that to begin with.

So in strength, and this is an old technique, and I picked it up from old time strongman, or whatever, and really picked it up from Paul Anderson, who I have, who was 1956 Olympic medalist from the US, and, Really sort of the original godfather to American powerlifting, to modern powerlifting, was one of the first Olympic lifters to ever concentrate on the squat as a big strength builder.

And then moved after that to becoming a professional strongman, and really was squatting. You know, okay, depending on what people believe about different lifts and whatever, but this guy was squatting 1, 000 pounds when the best guy in the world was squatting 700 pounds. Uh, you see what I mean? This guy was, uh, I'm talking about raw with no other, I'm talking about in the late or in the middle 60s.

Okay. You're talking about early, early to middle 60s is when this guy was doing this. Okay. And so nothing. Uh, this guy was, this guy, this was a routine thing in the first organized meets. So this guy was so far ahead of everybody else in the squat. What he would do is whatever the last squat of the day was, uh, maybe 600 pounds or whatever.

So whatever the heaviest, biggest guy, the biggest last squat of the day was that he would come in and perform at the meet. And when he would come in and perform, he would take whatever the bow was loaded with, and with no warm up, do like 10 reps with whatever the other guy did was the last lift of the day.

I mean, he was that far ahead of everybody else as far as squats and everything. I mean, your guy was just an absolute monster as far as that kind of strength. And one of his favorite techniques, and he picked this up from a gentleman named Bob Peoples, and this, that's why I think it's important to know the history of your craft, okay?

And I do a lot of stuff. That, you know, okay, you were talking about the insta judges and all that stuff. I do a lot of stuff that, so far out of their paradigm, they think I'm stupid. What it is, is they don't have the historical knowledge to understand why I'm doing it. I'm not just making it up. I mean, some things I'm making up just for, you know, Yesterday I threw an axe behind my back.

I saw it, it was great.

I loved it. I love that.

Training that we're doing is legitimately historical background or, or is an experiment that, you know, so here's what he would do. Okay. So he would take say, uh, and these guys, this is how this training works. He would take say a hundred pounds above his max.

Okay, and do a very short partial range lift with it. Okay, so you're talking about say if you could squat 600 pounds you might take 700 pounds and instead of Lifting it the entire full way to parallel or whatever you call full range of motion Which is actually you want to stir some scrap up. Let me talk about full range of motion

Just to stir some crap up because it's a noise the crap out of me, okay What we consider full range of motion in normal lifting is not full range of motion. What we consider full range of motion is normal, usable range of motion. Full range of motion constitutes legitimately the longest possible movement you can make for that individual movement, which is going to consist with a stretch into a deep position.

Pretty much every movement that cannot be done with most normal implements, You cannot bench press full range of motion, true full range of motion with a bar. It has to be dumbbells, or bands, or something like that. So, that's right, you have to go past, beyond those things. And true range of motion is rarely even safe to train with any kind of heavy load.

Now what we do is And what we consider full range of motion and what we insta judge each other on about is whether it's full range of motion, but what we don't take into account is individual biomechanical build. What we don't take into account is individual purpose for training, individual level of flexibility at the moment, etc.

And we totally skip other ranges of motion, which that actually plays into what we're talking about as far as partial lifts. We totally skip other ranges of motion that are as practical, if not even more practical, for most people in their athletic or real daily life, than what we consider full range of motion, which is actually only usable normal range of motion.

I'll give you for instance on that. You don't jump for a rebound on a basketball court by dropping into a full, full range squat. Ass to grass squat. That's right. You don't do that. What do you do? You rebound only a couple of inches, load the thighs at their strongest possible range of motion, then jump from there and exhort from there.

So, doesn't it then make sense to train in the ranges of motion that you're legitimately going to use? As well as the fullest range of motion, uh, so I actually classify range of motion in true full range of motion, which is a stretched load. Usable normal range of motion, which is your normal lifting.

Partial ranges of motion, okay, which is where your body actually functions most of the time. Uh, if you Wrestle people or you're a football lineman or you're a boxer or you're you don't stretch into the lowest possible position you can do and then coil onto somebody you go from whatever position you're at which is usually a partial extension.

of the body. Okay. And then I actually, this is actually isn't even a range of motion, but it is a type of strength, which is an isometric at different range of emotion. Okay. That people don't even think about training, but if you want to get as strong and as stable and as bulletproof as possible through every possible place you can move your body, you've got to train those four or five levels of motion.

So, so I just kicked a, you know, a real Holy cow right there in the face by talking to range of motion. Absolutely. People need to know it. We're talking about the progressive distance. What I need to do is start with a short range of motion, say only 4 inches. And if you can lift 600 pounds, lifting 700 pounds at the top or 3 or 4 inches is not going to feel very heavy.

Especially once you get used to the idea of an overloaded movement, which is heavier than your normal movement. But you're going to easily be able to lift it. You have a ton of, um, of leverage at that point. You have much greater leverage. But here's what you get. By doing this, your tendons, ligaments, bones, and muscles are getting used to a load above your normal load.

And so instead of trying to go from 600 as your max to 605 the next week, what you're going to do is take that 700 pounds, and instead of moving it three inches. This week, you moved it 3 inches last week, when you move down this week, you're going to move it 4 inches, or 5 inches, or 6 inches, or whatever it does.

And what you're going to do is, so say the total range of motion of your particular squat, uh, depending on how tall you are and what stance you're in, is 20 inches, just as an abstract number. And you start with 3 inches, and then you go to 5, then you go to 7, then you go to, you know, 8 or 9, or whatever, you're moving a little bit.

And over a 10 week period or so, you're moving from the entire range, your entire range of motion. Uh, 100 pounds heavier than your normal load. And what's happened is your body has gotten used to and completely conditioned the gold guy, tendon, organ, reflex, the strength, the tendons, the ligaments, the core.

Your mental confidence has conditioned that 700 pounds isn't that heavy because I've been handling it every week for weeks on end. And I totally can move this and I can move a piece and here's what you'll find as you go. One of the really interesting things with this, everybody has a strength curve, meaning uh, everybody has a sticking point.

Okay, meaning you're, if you're full squat, you may be fairly strong out of the bottom and then somewhere in the middle your leverages are changing and that's where you're kind of weak and maybe you have a muscle that isn't as strong as it needs to be to be fully strong and then you get past that sticky point and you go up.

So if you curve that out on a graph, that's where you're, you're hard. Point is, well, what's happening as you're going for a progressive range of motion, you're finding that point, you're finding exactly where you're sticking point, and what you're finding is the most biomechanically advantageous position to lift in in everything, and you're modifying that into your fuller range technique.

Okay, so one of the criticisms people have with partials is, well, you're just using a biomechanically advantageous position that's not a duplication of your full range, and that may be true. Okay, uh, you, there are times when it's the right thing to do to use the most leveraged position, and there are times when it's the right thing to do to use the most mimicking of your full range position because the diminution may be slightly different.

But over a course of time, what's happening is those positions are going to get close to each other. So you're finding your greatest leverages, you're finding your weak and strong points, you're, and you're evening them out. So on a graph, instead of a curve, now it's a straight line. And where it should be, as you come off the bottom of the lift, every time you come closer to your full lockout, your leverage should be getting greater and greater and greater and greater.

Instead of greater, greater, greater, and then it's less, less, less, and then it's greater, greater, greater again. Yes. And doing that, you can add quickly, much quicker than trying to progress. Five pounds a week. Okay. Now, uh, No progression once you get to the advanced level is truly linear, but let's just add it up that way So say your maximum lift is 600 pounds and you got to add five pounds a week to get to 700 weeks of not missing a lift doing everything to get there Let's say it takes you 10 weeks to add two inches at a time to get to your full on max to add a hundred pounds.

See what I mean? That's half the time. Maybe it doesn't work that way. Maybe you only add 70 pounds instead of 100. But you still added faster progression. You're still going through every And for me, that's also about working every possible range of motion, okay? So Uh, I want to know exactly how strong I am if I'm only moving the bar 3 inches, if I'm moving it 10 inches, if I'm moving it 20 inches.

I want to know where I'm at. I want to know that every spot in that range of motion over the long haul of a set of training cycles has been trained so that my body knows that at each position it's very strong. Not that I'm kind of strong and then I'm weak and then I'm kind of strong again. It's not. I want to, I want to fix those issues.

And now there's a bunch of ways to do that. Okay. For instance, Anderson actually would do it. Um, by adding, by only going a little bit above his max. So let's say, you know, at 600 pounds, going to 700 is not that much, it's only like 100 pounds. So that's actually 15 percent or so above your, you know, your maximum, but your true maximum on that is going to be actually more like, for most people, it's a, it's a big percentage jump.

I'll give you an example for me. Okay, so when I could squat a thousand pounds, when I could full range or full range for me, so before everybody talks about whatever, you know, full range for what I count as a full range squat, squat a thousand pounds, I could quarter squat, which is three or less inches.

Now there's another thing too, okay. That's a big hashtag, corner squat gang, and that's what

people are making fun of. People go so crazy about everything. That's

people making fun of other people's range of motion when they don't know what they're talking about is what that is, okay? A true quarter squat in the historical sense of how that was termed in training is a top end support with three to six inches range of motion.

Okay. It is not literal. So what they call a quarter squat is if you're used to using an Olympic lifter ass to grasp paradigm for squats, you'll call a power lifter only going to parallel, but not going to, you know, To the absolute range, you'll call that a core squat. That's not a core cross. The real terminology is a top end support.

Okay? When I could squat a thousand pounds, I could do a three inch range of motion with 1, 800 pounds. So, and here's what I mean by that. There's a ton of unexplored strength there. Okay. So reality is you can squat 600 pounds and you try to max your, your, and some people are going to be good at it immediately.

And some people are going to need to, if you try to match your core squat, you might get 750 or 800, but you actually might be capable of 900 or a thousand pounds body to unleash that strength. Yeah. Okay. So there's a bunch of ways to do that. I experimented with everything from, I maxed my quarter squat, then I add two inches and I maxed that way.

I added a max that every parallel down, I added. two inches. I added four inches. I added half an inch at a time over a long period of time, but that took me, that kind of work took me from a seven to 800 pound squat over a several year period to a thousand pound squat. Um, and, and you're talking about that's progress.

That's not, you know, beginner level progress. Uh, and it's a way to, from a therapeutic standpoint to work people into some strength. So the body doesn't hurt itself very much. If you only ask people to lift, uh, uh, two or three inches. Yeah. Okay. And, and it begins to desensitize to load. So I did, I literally just did this with this whole group of women.

Okay. So the biggest kettlebell I've got is 150 pounds. And for, for the women who are older, and who have never trained very much, that is an insurmountable amount of, I can't, no, no one could have, no one on the planet could ever lift 150 pounds. It's, you know, I mean, the paradigm is. It is an impossibility, but if I block that, if I put some blocks underneath that kettlebell and I don't tell them how much it weighs and they're able to deadlift a 70 to a 90 or maybe a hundred pound kettlebell full off the floor and I say, don't look at this, just do exactly what I tell you to step up to this thing and you're only going to lift it about two inches at the top and they say, okay, if you think I can do it, okay, and they can pick up 150 pounds.

And a couple of weeks of doing that. And now we're picking it up. Not just two inches. We're picking it up three or four or five, or we're doing or whatever. I had a lady who at the beginning of the summer, the max she could do max was 88 pounds. Last week, she lifted that 150 pound kettlebell for the first time.

And she never even thought about it would be possible would never be in the wheelhouse of her ability, 60 plus pounds. Addition per lift. This is a 60-year-old woman with a damaged hip and multiple nerve problems. And a and a, uh, prior knee surgery? Yes. Is now dead lifting a 150 pound kettlebell on a regular basis because.

She was able to literally sneak up on it, destroy the mental barriers, the doesn't feel crazy anymore, and now she's able to do something she never even thought was possible. Because of a slightly different training technique. So, okay, so maybe you're, somebody has a damaged knee, and they can't use any appreciable load at all through a full range of motion, and you still need to work that full range of motion.

But maybe you're only have, maybe you only have a partial range of motion. Guess what? The stronger you make that, even in a partial range of motion, the more likely you are to get a deeper range of motion because the body will cease to protect itself because it views itself as strong. Mm hmm. And that's just one of the options there.

There's multiple applications of this over a, you know, over a lot of lifts, over a lot of training purposes, both therapeutically and strength and all kind of. Uh, kind of stuff. And here's something I believe that's that I like if I had to pick one lift for women to do as well as kids to do ever, it would be that partial deadlift because it's a massive confidence builder.

It builds, it'll activate once you get to the load right. And once you get the simple technique, cause it's almost impossible to do wrong. There's the other thing about it. It's hard to hurt yourself. It's almost impossible to do wrong. Okay. Once you, and because it's hard to hurt yourself and it's impossible to do wrong and it's super simple, they can access a level of strength that doesn't require thought that connects them to themselves in a way that a full range lift does.

Because you can watch them. They're thinking about everything they should be doing right. When they only have to lift it two inches, three inches. They don't think. They just lift. That's it. Because it's so simple. And because of that, they begin to access a deeper, more primal level of what's going on. And once you get to a little bit of weight, you've activated everything head to toe.

Well, what activates to that, that women need more than anything else on the planet? Bone density activates to load. So if you can get a 70 year old woman, and I've got a couple of them that are doing partial deadlifts now with a barbell that are lifting, I had a lady at a hundred. She's 50, 50 something, 50 some five or whatever.

She's 110 pounds, do a 280 pound partial deadlift, um, the other day. Okay, why? Specifically because I want all to load, to build bone density. I want that to be a big, so what happens if, you know what? I only have to lift this thing a couple inches, but guess what? Every bone in my body is loaded. It's loaded in a way that starts to promote greater calcification, starts to promote the right stuff, and suddenly my core is pretty doggone strong, and I'm walking better and moving better, all because I lifted something three inches, which is the dead opposite of what everybody on the planet told you.

Oh my god, you didn't do a full range! Die! Your dog will get sick. You'll have a bad tax return. The next time you get a haircut, you're going to get a bad haircut because you didn't do full range. Dude, the body works in a lot of ranges. Work in all the ranges. Learn to be smart. Learn to be, you know, learn that there's more to this than, than the simple way.

It's not, whatever your favorite Instagram model does, it's not the only way to do stuff. There

you go. Individuality. I love it. I love it, man. Bud, you shared so much and my favorite. Is that you give us the bigger picture, which is what the podcast is all about. Just. knowledge bombs so many. One, you guys listening, go and look at his Instagram.

The, for me, I just love that listening to you, the knowledge you have, the passion you have for this, and then just watch the crazy shit that he does, which he said in the beginning, there is a rhyme and a reason for this. Like, he's not just doing this because. But the, there's another side of that where he also realizes that, yeah, this is also on a social media platform and it's sometimes fun to have fun.

So you get a, you get a human, it's not just, you know, a, a face on, on social media there, you got an incredibly smart human who has unpacked a ton of stuff for us with, I think one of the biggest take homes being. This concept of the mind of mindset, believe that you can do something like my, this podcast is about pushing forward, expanding your, your, your, what you think are your limits, your boundaries, taking leaps, and no matter whether it's a physical feat or why trying to, trying to leave your career or, you know, lift a thousand pounds, it's all about mindset there.

And if you believe you can do it. You can, you don't believe you can do it, you won't do it. So listen to this man that is lifting all the things. He's huge. Listen to him. He's going to come and shake you if, if you don't, but my man, before, before we, uh, wrap it up here, if, if they want to find you. How can you do

that?

Okay. So a couple of things, uh, if you want to find me on just basic social media, just use my name. Okay. I use personal accounts. I don't use the other crap. I, and I don't hide behind a, you know, no, and you're not doing that. Your name is very descriptive to you, but like, I don't say the buffest dude ever is my app.

I don't use it. You know, yours is extremely descriptive to what you do. I just went back because I'm again, technological caveman. So I just went by my name. So Jeff. Yes. You can find me directly on Facebook, Instagram, uh, there as Bud Jeffries. And then, you know, and then, uh, if you want to look at my website, okay, so my personal website is an unconventional life.

com. Okay. So that, and I start with one L, so an, an unconventional, not two Ls dot com. Uh, which that is our basic website that has all our books and videos and all the other stuff or whatever. And then also we have a, uh, charitable website called Noah's Army and we'll see a lot of our stuff on there. And that's our 501c3 in which we raise money for scholarships for first responders and for music programs for children and, uh, abused women and basically anybody who needs help, we're going to help them.

Uh, so we're going to have events for that. We actually have a, uh, we're going to have a running event. A running and lifting event for that. We're gonna have a shooting event next year for that. We'll have a motorcycle and classic car event. We'll also have a bass fishing tournament. If we're gonna do that, dude, we'll do everything.

It doesn't matter. You wanna have ballet? We'll do that. I don't care. We're just going to make money to help people and do amazing stuff and live as much life as we can. Um, those are the easiest ways to find me. If you want the products, go to Ununconventional Life. And if you want to see the crazy stuff, go to Instagram and Facebook.

And, um, if you hit me on Facebook, because I do have a personal account, you'll have to probably follow me. I don't know if I have, I've totally, I've maxed out the friends thing. And then, uh, Instagram, you can see, you know, whatever the crazy I do. And you'll see what she's talking about, about the insanity of, you know, um, It's good stuff.

But you know what I'm saying, dude? Uh, life is Too short not to be having fun with and I feel like most people spend all their life in a gym and they build this big powerful car to have a body to drive around. They never take it out and drive it. Well, I take mine out. I want to see what it could do. I want to see.

I love it. So that's juggling kettlebells in the ocean and then through throwing hatchets and then opening up cans of soda. And I love it. I love it. I love it, man. Cool. Bustin Cat Cook Hands. I love it. But, is there anything else you'd like to leave the folks with? Any parting words or anything like that?

Um, you know what? God loves you. No matter what happens, whatever you think is going on, God loves you. I believe that. I believe that beyond a shadow of a doubt. People love you. You can be an amazing human being. Um, you know, I believe in Jesus. I, you believe in whatever you want, but I believe in that. I believe that'll help you.

I also believe from the shadow of doubt that you are meant to have joyful, powerful life. You're meant to be physically strong, mentally strong and happy. He just got to work for it. So do whatever you need to do to do that.

But that is amazing. I thank you, dude, this was an awesome, awesome episode. I thank you endlessly for, uh, For taking time, man, this is a lot of time, so thank you.

And sharing this with, with the audience, my audience, my people, so thank you for that. Oh,

you, you're so welcome. Enjoyed it and if, if you want me to come back, I'll come back where

we Oh, it'll happen. It'll happen. I'm certain of

that. Cool. This is great. And we just scratch the surface. We haven't even talked about how to properly light your hatchets on fire to at your Exactly.

I was thinking that we haven't even was like, we haven't gotten already the crazy stuff. So that will definitely be. A part two because life is all about connection. So you guys out there, thank you so much also for listening. I know you could have been doing anything and you chose to listen to us. And honestly, thank you for that.

If you guys liked the episode, if you love the episode, don't worry about subscribing. Don't worry about liking it. I want you to head over to, uh, it's actually, the website is actually official. Noah's army. com. It is something that is, I want you to check out. I want you to go and read through, uh, and do what you want after that.

But if you liked the episode, love the episode, head on over to that website. I'll link it in the bio official Noah's army. com and look to make, give back a little bit. All right. Until next time, my friends, Bud Jeffries and maestro out.

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