If you are bored with your workouts, you don't like working out or think that working out involves, you know, basically the same six exercises. You just need to squat and bench and depth of blah blah blah. Well, I've got news for you. There are many, many other ways and things that are super interesting, super unusual, super exciting and work for wherever you are, whatever age you are, including people like me who are 60 plus.
And we're going to be chatting with someone, well, more about that in just a moment. Welcome to the movement, podcast, the people who, for the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body where we break down the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes you have right myths that you've been told and lies that you've been told about what it takes to run walk, like, work out, do anything and do it enjoyably. And efficiently and effectively. Did I say enjoyably trick question?
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Hit the bell icon on your, you know, the gist. If you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. All right, let's get started, shall we? Nick Nelson, first of all, pleasure.
Secondly, tell people who you are, what you do and what you think you might be doing here. Well, I'm known as a bad scientist of muscle. I've been training in 35 years and basically that entire time I'm looking for new ways to accomplish the results that I want to get, like build muscle, build strength, that kind of thing. And I'm not satisfied with the normal way of doing things.
So basically from the very first time I started training, I've been looking for new and better ways to train to lift weights. Primarily, like I said, movement is a big one there too. But primarily I do things differently, not for the sake of just doing differently, but for trying to do better. And first of all, before anyone asks if you're watching the video, yes, Nick is not a whistle blower or in the Federal Witness Relocation program.
We have video issues and we figured screw it. Let's just do this without trying to fix the video issues because we want to get this out and have some fun. So I'm trying to think of my favorite way of doing this. So to be clear, I mean, when I think about you, I think you are the most creative person I've ever seen in terms of coming up with ways of doing exercise.
But it's not about just coming up with a new exercise. It's like, how does this body move in this way? And what can I do to optimize that? Sometimes if I have a limited set of resources at my disposal, if I don't have a home gym full of everything you could possibly want, if I don't even go to a gym, if I go to a gym that doesn't have anything other than the bare minimum, et cetera.
But you're not doing it just for the sake of going, hey, look at the crazy crap that I've come up with. But for a whole different reason, it's all based on understanding movement. Yeah, essentially, and with the old people on YouTube and Twitter and Instagram and all that, just doing crazy stuff for the sake of crazy stuff to get clicks and likes. That's not what I'm all about.
What I do is I don't even care if it looks crazy or not, if it works better, I'm going to do it. It may not even, some of the stuff I've done, you may not even notice the difference from regular stuff, it's just the intention of how you're doing it. That's different. You know, for example, I've got a trick for doing barbell bench press where when you're lowering the bar, instead of just lowering the bar, you actually try and bend the bar forward and out.
And that actually brings the lats down, locks in the shoulders and gives you a perfect position all the way down. So instead of just lowering the bar under control, you're actually getting a good negative on the chest and you're actually setting yourself up in perfect position to do bench press. But you wouldn't know it by looking at it because it looks exactly the same. But it's just instead of just holding the bar like that, you're trying to bend the bar up and forward like that.
Like you're trying to snap it half forward. Yeah, you're trying to basically, yeah, you're trying to make it upside down. You is the intention is this way. I can describe it sort of like that, but it started to strive actually.
Well, I mean, it's basically like imagine. Wait, are you doing so here? Let's do this way. So if we could bend the bar, if we were super man and bending the bar, so we're long in the bench, the bar is above us, basically straight over chest.
If we're going to be like super man and bend with the U shape that we're creating, the bottom of the U towards our head or towards the ceiling towards the ceiling. There you go. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Here's the difference though.
Most people when they recommend that you bend the bar down like that, right? That's what you're thinking. You're actually trying to hold here and bend the bar forward and up. Got it.
Got it. You're gripping the bar here and you're pushing up like that rather than bending down like that. So it's a very subtle difference. But the difference between that means you're kind of relaxing the chest, whereas that you're actually engaging the chest.
Got it. So very simple, very subtle. And you notice the difference by looking at anybody doing it at all. You can't see the motion because it's basically a metric.
So I want to back up a half step and say, so, you know, the extra as you come up with and even more of the workouts you come up with. And we want to talk about both. But they're designed for different purposes. And I want to say this just so people have a context for why they really no matter where they are in their fitness journey from been doing this forever to never pick up a weight in their life or never thought about doing anything other than whatever activity they currently do.
So you and I'll get the ball rolling. You feel like you do some things that are like metabolic conditioning, some things that are about strength, some things that are about hypertrophy building muscle. So do you want to kind of break down the types of things that you or the categories of things that you are thinking about when you're putting things together? Yeah.
I mean, when I'm doing exercise, especially workouts, like you said, the exercises are kind of building blocks and you put them into the specific workouts that are designed for very specific metabolic goals. Like so you got metabolic conditioning workouts, you've got strength stuff, you've got hypertrophy stuff, you've got physiological oriented stuff, you've got basically for people who've never trained before, one of the first things I always get them started with is core training, core workouts to stabilize the core, which that's where all your movement comes from. So that's kind of the most important thing to me is to strengthen that area. And then you can progress in multiple directions from there.
But in terms of metabolic conditioning, you're doing stuff with a strength focus, but with very little rest and with basically the idea of moving fatigue around your body. So like, for example, you're going from chest to legs to back. So you're kind of bouncing the workload around to different areas while you're still using relatively heavy weights and really stimulating the body for hypertrophy at the same time, but while still getting that metabolic conditioning effect. If you want to doing training for strength, you go in a very different direction.
You take long respurids, very low variety and very basic movements. And then with assistance exercises that support the weak points of those basic movements, hypertrophy training, another, it's a very different thing from the other two. So there's so many different directions you can go with this in terms of, you know, you don't just grab a weight and start working out. If you have a specific goal, you need a very specific plan to attack that goal, essentially.
And one of the things that also, I mean, I'm going to bounce around because when I think about the way you put stuff together, it feels very four dimensional chest to me. So there's kind of like different principles and then different exercises, different workouts and all these things. And you put them to make some match them together and really fast anyways. I'm going to just share the story of Mission DLS and we chatted.
You used to do a thing every Friday that was like a metabolic workout. And the office that we had in downtown Boulder or actually outside of downtown Boulder was right next to a gym. And I said, look, I'm just going to come in on Fridays at the end of my workday and just do something. I don't need any help.
I just, you know, can you really just let me do that. And they went in there. And you know, I had a long hard week. This is when I was working till two in the morning, a lot of time.
And the last thing I really needed to do on a Friday night was going to a workout. I really needed a nap, but I would go in and I, and these things would kick my butt and they made me so happy. And so, but it was also what was interesting. Some of the time we were working on just, and I want you to talk about this as this relates to your latest book, some of the things we're just working on building.
I know what this goes building the infrastructure we need for everything else to work, building the scaffolding thing we need for everything else to work and kind of work on the top of that. And when you say core, most people think, Oh, doing sit up some planks, but you got like a whole other way of framing that. So I know this is getting, I'm being kind of confused when I say this only because there's just so much I want to do and it's a Monday morning and I'm not awake yet. So can you talk about kind of again, there's the different goals, but then there's those things that allow for those goals, like capitalization, setter, setter, let you do those.
But also I don't want to forget when you talk about core, let's give some examples of the kind of stuff that you're talking about that are exercised that most people would never think of that are probably more effective than what they already been doing. Yeah. And we can let's start with the core stuff. The very simplest core thing that I have people do to start with is I have them sit at a desk.
I haven't put it on their desk and I have like the left elbow and I have them lift up their right leg. And then just push down as hard as you can with that left elbow. If you like core, deep core engaging right there. Yeah, just do that for 30 seconds.
Switch sides, do that for 30 seconds. That's hitting the core muscles and you can sit there looking like your board out of your mind. You just like working your car. No, I feel that transverse.
I'm dominant. I feel that. I mean, I feel that in a bunch of things basically from my ribs down to my thigh. I mean, it's like, yeah, that's literally it's like no equipment at all.
You can do that while you're sitting at your desk and you know, 30 seconds of that is going to be better than sit ups for flattening yourself. It's going to strengthen your core. I have a book on this stuff. It's like you can do this leaning against the post like waiting for the bus.
You know, there's your poster, leaning that stand on one foot and you're just kind of leaning and just that isometric. Everything contracts in that deep core because it's like I said, it's not just the six pack abs. It's all those deep muscles that go around your six pack abs and it's your lower back as well. Everything has to be worked and kind of conjunction with each other.
And there's another one that I don't think I'd ever heard it anywhere. It made sense as soon as you said it from some other things I did. And I do this when I'm taking my dog for a walk every morning. I just basically pull my belly button into my spine as much as I can.
And then I if I kind of bear down a little like I feel that really getting the transverse abdominis as well. And then just like how many breaths can I do while I'm really, really contracting all of that and sucking everything, aid to just kind of train those muscles about how to engage and love doing that. Yeah, it's literally starting with simple stuff like that. You know, you can do it while you're doing other things like when you're walking the dog, when you're sitting at your desk, when you're waiting in line, there's so many things you can do just without even any weights at all, just by body in positioning and stuff like that.
Well, and this is also true, not just doing core stuff. I mean, we can talk about weights versus body weight stuff and some of the creative things you've done there as well. But I'm going to back up to that other thing that I made when I was combining too many things at once of just body systems, if you will, and how those people don't think about those and how important they are for whatever your fitness goals are. Absolutely.
And that's one of the things I've noticed, especially for people as, you know, start getting into the 40s, 50s, 50s and stuff like that. These systems, these underlying systems that support your muscle mass, but they start to deteriorate, essentially. It's one of the reasons why you lose muscle as you get older. You mentioned the capillarization.
That's a big one. Circulation is everything as far as keeping your muscle mass because if your muscles don't get nutrients, they don't get oxygen. They don't get fed. They go away.
You know, so I've got training that's specifically designed to rebuild those capillaries and redevelop those systems. So you've got circulation, you've got connected tissue, which is your fascia, your cartilage, your tendons, ligaments, bones, all the structural stuff. I like to kind of liken it to a house where, you know, you can build a bigger, stronger house when you're using two by sixes versus two by fours or two by twos or whatever. As you get older, you know, those beams start to deteriorate so we can actually strengthen those beams and rebuild those beams.
We can redo the plumbing, which is your, you know, your circulatory system. We can redo the electrical, which is your nervous system, you know, make that more efficient. We can rebuild more muscle mass when you're losing muscle. You actually lose muscle fibers as you get older as well.
So, you know, I developed hyperplasia training, which is splitting muscle fibers into new muscle fibers, rather than just building the ones that you've got. You can, and it's always good to just build up the ones you've got, but you can actually develop new ones as well to kind of replace the ones that your body is losing as you get older. So there's so many different structural things that support basically your body's ability to carry a whole muscle mass and strength. And so, yes, and all of those are super interesting.
And the workouts are, again, things that you, many people have probably never seen. You want to give, actually, you want to give like an example of a something for each of those four components? Yeah, absolutely. The circulation system, the circulatory system, basically you want to do really high reps, for example, I call it angiostats, which is angiogenesis, which means creation of new blood vessels.
So to do that, we actually want to, it sounds awful, but you want to like rip new blood vessels into your body. You want to actually, it sounds awful, but that's the process on a very low level. You're basically forcing so much blood into the muscle that you're basically blowing those out and creating new pathways. So you're opening those suckers back up again.
So we put a lot of blood into that muscle with a very high rep set, very lightweight. Now, the weird thing is then you take a heavier weight and you do very low reps. So you do like 50 reps of a dumbbell bench press and then do two reps with a heavy weight, like three times the weight on a dumbbell bench press, which dramatically amps up the pressure in that muscle, which blows up the pressure. So essentially we're filling it up with blood and then we're squeezing the crap out of it and just blowing out those pathways and creating and forging new pathways.
And then you're doing it again, you repeat it for like four to six rounds of that. Now, what he described, the image that pops up in my mind and I imagine possibly others as well is that you end up looking like, you know, you've been beaten up, but you don't end up looking bruised. You don't end up, I mean, it's not, yes, it's not massive trauma. It's this very small level, single blood cell thick kind of micro trauma that.
And this is the thing that I think people really don't appreciate is that what's making your body change is mild traumatic events that you then heal and repair and recover from and become better. When you do that, when you organize that properly, you know, it's, I see people in the gym. It's like, I was actually, Lane and I were on a boat with some people and they had a gym on this boat and I watched some guy doing bench press stuff with like 20 pounds and he would do 10 reps and it's like, you know, do two of those. Like, I didn't do anything.
I mean, you could do that without breaking this without blinking without putting any effort. Nothing's actually being forced to change. And so, you know, this is part of part of what we're doing is finding these ways of forcing these specific changes. But yes, you don't end up looking like you were a bad barfite.
Yeah. You know, and beaten without two by four or anything like that. So it's micro circulation is really the tiny, tiny blood vessels that we're looking to open up. And yeah, literally a blood vessel.
Yeah. I mean, that's how those things work. OK, so on to the next one. So next we've got to connect to tissue training.
This is actually, you're going to look like you're not doing anything because essentially you're, for example, the best example is to go in a squat rack, put a bar on your back and stand up. But like 300, 400 pounds on the bar and just stand there for like a minute. And literally, that's all you're doing. You're just standing there with weight on your body.
It's squishing down all your connective tissue is squishing all the fluid out of all your connective tissue. Now, connective tissue has a notoriously poor blood supply. And as you get older, this connective tissue dries out so you get less fluid in there. So it's harder to heal injuries.
It's harder to build strength because of this. So what we're doing is we're putting that weight on and we're literally just, you know, one, two, three minutes. We're just letting everything kind of squeeze out because of that loading constant loading. We take the weight off and then we do it like a dead hang from a chin up bar.
So you're creating this effect where you're squeezing fluid out and then you're sucking it back in and you're creating a bellows effect. So you're actually pushing fluid out and then you're forcing the body to suck it back in. And you know, you put that with connective tissue nutrients like collagen vitamin C, you're forcing circulation and nutrients to repair the connective tissue in there when it's needed most and it's creating that circulation. And it's highly effective.
You can actually heal all injuries that have never healed before because that connective tissue so dried out. You're not getting that circulation and you're not getting the nutrients in. This actually forces the nutrients in and you can actually heal all the injuries that have people say that, you know, me injury from 20 years ago, I don't feel it anymore after doing this stuff. And it's literally from standing there with the weight on your back.
Interesting. Yeah. OK, number three. So this hyperplasia training hyperplasia hypertrophy, you probably familiar with that building muscle fibers.
Hyperplasia is splitting muscle fibers. So stretch, loaded stretching is what we're doing here. And this is loaded, resisted stretching. So you're not just taking like a dumbbell fly and you're holding the stress position passively.
You're actually saying you're taking a 60 pound dumbbells, you're holding that bottom of the dumbbell fly. You're coming up just a little out of that bottom stretch with 98% of the effort that would require to lift it. So you're actually trying to lift it, but just not enough to actually lift it. So that's the active, resistant stretch that we're looking for, not just passively letting the dumbbells come down and down and down, which can actually be tough on your connective tissue.
We don't want to do that. We actually want that active, resistant stretching at the bottom. It's that position that we're looking for. And that puts massive tension on those muscles and actually creates the stimulus for the body to basically split the muscle fibers and to use satellite cells, which are part of the process, to repair that with.
I've talked to Dr. Jose Antonio about this. He had studies on birds where they achieve a 300% muscle growth by doing this kind of low distretion. Well, this was interesting.
You've been talking about that type of training for much longer than the last nine to 12 months, where the whole idea of stretch media hypertrophy has become like what everyone is talking about. It's like that research and other research about the importance of the stretch phase is now what everyone's all, you know, giddy about. And you've been talking about this for ages. Oh, yeah.
I've been doing this for 20 years. So wait, so you feel vindicated or you feel like I can't believe you know, you know, people are just catching up. You know what? 20 years ago, people were talking about it too.
It literally goes in waves and cycles. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was a big thing for when years ago.
And now it's coming back around again. And then I'm sure Keto will come back around again. And you know, everything comes back around again. It's really funny how it works.
It's, you know, I always say that people say there's nothing new under the sun. It's like in a way that's true because a lot of it just kind of gets repackaged in the next generation. Finds out about it and wow, this is the best thing ever now. And it's like, it's the best thing ever.
I'm starting to wear bell bottoms again. Yeah. OK. So that was number three, number four.
So number four, we're looking at nervous system efficiency and activation. So when we get older, you actually do lose nerve cells. You lose the capability of your nervous system. So for example, most people are functioning about maybe 60% of their efficiency.
We use that as a guide. Elite athletes can go up to 85 to 90% is how they, you know, build strength without getting bigger. So if you're functioning about 60 to 70, the training I'm doing here allows you to amp that up. So instead of using 60% of your capacity, you're not using 70 or 75% of your efficiency and capacity.
So you're building strength just by using what you've got better. So one of the best methods I've found for doing that is a single rep cluster training where, for example, you take a weight, you can, that's about maybe 90 to 95% of your one rep max. So it's a pretty heavy weight. Something you could get made to get three to four reps with and you're going to do 20 reps with it, but in a very specific way, you're going to do one rep, rest 20 seconds, do one rep, rest 20 seconds and repeat that for 20 reps.
And what that does is when you're doing a set of more than one rep, your first rep is never your best rep. It's your second rep because your first rep is just kind of your body getting used to what it figuring out what it needs to do. Your second rep has already kind of put that pattern into the nervous system. So it's more efficient and it's technically better.
So what we're doing is a set of 20 second reps. So a bunch of good reps. Really high quality reps and with just enough rest in between to recharge your energy systems. So you can do those reps.
So you'll find what you can normally get three to four reps with. You can do a set of 20 reps like this. And it actually feels really good. Your best reps are going to be in like the, you know, on your 10 to 10 to 15 reps are going to be your best reps and you're going to feel strong all the way through that.
And it's, you know, I think that you just realized that if I had to describe one thing that I know that you do that I haven't seen other people do that I find because I found really fun, frankly, and very effective is variations of taking a weight that is some percentage of, you know, the one, what you do for one rep and doing different things with that, whether it's one rep, 20 seconds, one rep, 20 seconds, or I mean, just various things about time under tension in different ways where you're, you're modulating, mediating, changing variables that people don't think about how much rest between something or going up and down with the number of reps you're doing. And just like various combinations of time and effort in a way that lets you do things that you just frankly would never think to try or wouldn't realize what have the effect that they would have. I can't remember which thing I did. I just remember just about a year and a half ago, Elaine and I were on an anniversary vacation.
And I remember doing one thing, I can't remember which exercise it was or which system, which workout was the structure of it. But basically I was just doing chest press for 40 minutes straight with varying degrees of rest and varying degree. And what I've done, and I think it's probably the same weight, just different amounts of rest based on what I can do. And can you describe just philosophically what you're doing when you're describing one of the workouts and talk about philosophically, why that does what it does and some variations that kind of play with that whole game of what you can do over what amount of time.
Yeah, absolutely. And the way you're describing, I think it's my time volume training protocol, which essentially you're taking a weight that you can get for 10 reps and you do sets of three reps with it. So you're basically front loading the workload. This kind of training is all about how much work you're doing, not the intensity of the work that you're doing.
So it's actually a really good way to train when you're feeling a bit beaten up, feeling a bit more fatiguing of your nervous system isn't quite as you know, as it should be. So you can actually build muscle really effectively like this. And essentially you take like set a weight, you can do 10 reps, you do set a three reps with it, then you rest 10 seconds, and then you do another set of three, and then you rest 10 seconds, and then another set of three. So gradually you're kind of building up the fatigue.
When you get to the point where you can no longer get three reps, where you're on two and you know it would be tough to get three. Don't do that, don't even try that third rep. Set it down, rest 20 seconds and keep going on the three reps sets. And then you keep doing 20 seconds rest until again, you hit that point where you think you would have to really push it to get the third rep and then you rest 30 seconds and you keep doing that.
So you're basically doing more work up front while you're more fresh. And then as you get more fatigued, you extend the rest periods. So you're basically still allowing your body to function at a very high level with technique, perfect form. You're not going to be getting anywhere near any sort of injury level of loading on your body, but just building up that workload, you're kind of sneaking up on that fatigue point.
So you're hitting all of these muscle fibers that you don't normally get with intensity kind of training because if you're trying to hit all your muscle fibers at once, you're never going to achieve full fatigue on those muscle fibers. Whereas with this, you can kind of sneak up on it and you can kind of gradually require your body to activate more and more muscle fibers. So by the time you're done with that 40 minute workout, you've literally every muscle fiber you've just got. And it just occurred to me, there's another way of thinking of this where again, lately, people have been the research coming out, people have been talking about that, whether you're doing high weights, sorry, I got heavy weights and lower reps versus lighter weights and more reps, the important thing is getting closer to failure or as close to failure as you want to get.
So you're getting closer to failure without being put in your self in a position where you're going to get injured is really important. And with what you described, that time-vowing training, you're basically just doing that over and over and over. More than you do if you just did, you know, set up eight and that last one was hard, then a set of seven and the last one was hard, and then the next set is six and the last one was hard. It's like you're getting that way, way more often in a fixed period of time.
And again, like you said, it's not that the workout is easy, but it doesn't have that same kind of hit by do by four feeling except that you feel the effect without feeling the beaten up part that makes you, like I said before, if you're not having fun, you're not going to want to keep doing it. And to a certain extent, these can be difficult but enjoyable because it just doesn't have the same kind of stress inducing something that most people think of as a weight routine creates. Exactly. And that's one of the big things, the reason this technique works so well sometimes with a lot of people who've kind of over trained their nervous system, doing a lot of really heavy, really hard stuff.
They pull back to something like this, you're not getting that stress response, you're not getting that cortisol dump, you're not getting that adrenaline. You don't need to take a pre-workout for this. You don't even really need to hardly warm up for this because you're using a weight you can normally get 10 and you're doing three. Right.
And it's a very time efficient kind of training too because you don't need to spend 20 minutes warming up. You literally like put your, maybe just the bar on the bench, put your weight on and you start going and the workout is your warm up as you're doing it. And yet you're really more and more of your muscle fibers get to that point near failure when you do something like this, then like you're doing like you said one set of eight or one set of couple sets of eight. Especially if you're doing a couple sets of eight where you're not really not going to get to that failure point until the last set when you're really pushing because the first few you could have done more but it says you're supposed to do three by eight.
It's like, you're holding back on the first and the second, then you're pushing to the third. Yeah. So you're really getting very limited. Your fibers are getting a very limited exposure to that beautiful point, so to speak, whereas something like this, you're gradually bringing in, involving more and more of those muscle fibers in to get to that point.
So by the time you get, and you don't have to be 40 minutes, you can do blocks of 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, you're going to basically get to that point with more muscle fibers without the stress of, you know, the fear factor almost. Yeah. Well, no, to be clear, I did the 40 minute thing because a I got up, I got up about an hour and a half before laying a dove's eye time to kill and it's like, I wonder if I can do this. I wonder what it's like.
And that's another thing that I really enjoy. It's like you put these things together and they're intriguing. It's like, I wonder what that feels like, because I've never done anything like that before. Yeah.
And that's a very motivating thing of just the curiosity factor. Oh, yeah. That's what keeps me going for. I've been doing this three, five years and I keep coming up with stuff that I'm like, hmm, that's interesting.
I got to try that. Yeah. I'm guessing that you have recorded in some way every exercise or exercise variant or workout variant you've come up with. Am I correct?
Starting from about 2000, probably seven. Yeah. Everything before that was before, you know, before cell phones and cameras, but I've kind of, you know, gone through a lot of that. Well, I don't even record it like on video one.
I just mean, even on paper. In front paper. Yeah. I was 13, 200 page notebooks from when I started recording stuff.
I would write everything down in a notebook after, you know, if I learned something, I'd write it down. So let's do it. Let's just do exercise variants first. You have a number for how many you've come up with.
If I had to go over the top of my head, of the past 30 something years, at least it's got to be in over 10,000. Easy. And for anyone who thinks that's insane, I'm going to give you, again, coming to set you up. So imagine you want to work on your bicep, which is going to involve bending your arm at the elbow at the very least and possibly bending, you know, doing something with your shoulder as a bicep inserts around your shoulder as well as on your forearm.
So there are, if you think all you can do is a bicep curl, just for the fun of it, like pick a different angle, pick a different, I mean, like hang upside down, making shit up, but almost not. Hang upside down, hang sideways, go underwater, you don't do anything like that. I mean, it's like, if you start, I've almost tempted you to try to find a way to program some AI model with like the way you think about how to approach, how do I want to attack this muscle in some new way. I mean, I know that when I'm writing an ad, for example, if I'm going to write an ad saying zero, she's going to write, she's going to be worn, the next thing I'm going to write is going to be opposite.
I mean, I don't wear these things or else. I mean, there's a formula that I kind of go through in my head for coming up with things that are just creative ideas because I've just done it so long that I know there's 15 different things that I'm going to think about to see if I can make those work. And I'm guessing that you do something similar as you're coming up with something new. I do, yeah.
And a lot of the times I actually come up with some of my best stuff based on something that's completely unrelated to it. Like, I'll do an exercise where it's like a chest exercise, then all of a sudden, like, oh, I felt that in my calves. And then I go, I wish I could say I was getting, but that's sometimes that's how the process works. So what's your chest exercise that you felt in your calves?
I think it was incline barbell bench press. And I thought, let me put this up against the wall. Yeah. Oh, set my feet up on the wall.
And as I'm doing the bench press, I'm going to try and do a calf raise. I'm going to try and push. I'm going to try and slide my body up the bench as I'm doing the bench press to see if I get stronger activations by activating the legs of the core. And as I'm doing this, yeah, boom calf exercise.
Not a very good one, mind you. It didn't really work out to be something that I would actually recommend training. But it's like, that leads me in the direction of like, okay, now what can I do? Okay, that actually worked my calves to some degree.
Let me see how I can make that into a calf exercise. And I take that concept and I run with that. So it's like, you know, the other day I did a band curl where I'm hanging a kettlebell from a band, you know, between a bar kettlebell hanging from a band and then, you know, the handle on the other side. And that works so well for biceps.
I did it for chest and all of a sudden for chest. I'm like, I wonder if I do it for dead list and doing it for dead list was actually phenomenal because you pick it up off the ground, the kettlebell right when you're right below the knees. That's when the kettlebell comes off the ground, but it doesn't like suddenly come off the ground like gradually and then right at that sticking point where a lot of people fail right below the knees, it met as 90 pounds to your deadlift right there. So all of a sudden you're doing you on 225.
Now you're doing 315 right at your sticking point and it's phenomenal for forcing you to grind out that rep. And then the angle is perfect for the lockout as well. So you know, because the band is angled, you're coming back like that, your glutes and your lower back are fighting against that diagonal tension of the band to get hip extension. So it's like all these things based on throwing a kettlebell through a band through a kettlebell and seeing what happens.
Yeah, because that's something most people think about what I got some bands, I got some kind of those. You're sort of like, it's a Mickey Rooney Judy, Judy Garland movie. It's like, I got a barn, I got a sage. It's like I got a kettlebell.
I got a little band. What can I do with those two things? Anyway, because I totally love it. But you also done this on just on the body weight side.
I mean, one of the most recent things you put out was about doing push-ups in a way that are good for the upper chest. They've got rid of the one problem that pretty much no one ever thought of that gets in the way of doing upper chest based push-ups. Would you like to talk about that? I just cracked me up.
Oh, yeah. Basically when you're doing push-ups for your upper chest, you elevate your legs. So basically you're creating that angle like an incline bench press. Now the problem with your body position when you're doing that is your face.
Sorry. For yourself, Dick. Well, for me personally, my face gets in the way. So rather than digging a hole in the floor, you elevate your hands up onto a bench.
Elevate your feet onto a bar higher than that. So you're angled. But there's room for your face to not contact the floor because when you're doing it, it'll put elevate push-up on the floor to get flooring motion. You have to flatten your chest out.
So it basically makes it like a regular push-up again. You're getting some more resistance, of course, but you're not getting that angle for really hitting your upper chest. You need to basically take your face out of the equation. Yeah.
So by doing that, by putting your hands on the edge of a bench, flat bench, and angling your feet up on a bar, you're getting that perfect angle the entire time. And you can maintain it without changing your head position, without changing your neck position, and without flattening your torso without flattening yourself at the bottom. So you're actually hitting the upper chest. And it makes it big.
You get that big range of motion because you're not worried about smashing your face in the ground. You're just going to be a flashback. When I was a junior high in high school gymnast, we just did chair push-up. So chair under your hand, chair under your foot, and then we'd raise the chair.
So similar idea. But we make it wide enough so it kind of added a fly aspect to it because that's an important thing in gymnastics as well, having that kind of strength. And again, the difference there is if you push too hard, that last rep, you end up falling in your face. So yours is a safer version of what we were doing.
But then again, we were stupid children. So if you fell in your face, that was a badge of honor. It's like, you break your nose. Push-ups.
Cool. Yeah. Right on that. Yeah.
In fact, quick story for the thought of my gymnastic coach who was the junior high gym teacher. He was also a, I think, three-time world and five-time national tumbling champion. And just one of the greatest teachers of all sorts just happened to be gymnastics. Our first day at gymnastics practice, he hands us young boys, she did 10 of the Instagram paper, and says each one of those swears is 10 push-ups.
Whoever fills out the page first, front and back gets a coke. And five young men immediately dropped and did as many push-ups as we could. And it got to the point where we were just doing them throughout the day, we were just dropping to a set of how we were running. And the next day it would be, so how many did you yesterday?
A thousand. A thousand. A hundred. And then we would drop into a hundred.
And then the other guy would do a hundred. And then I'd have to do a hundred and fifty. We were literally doing a thousand plus push-ups a day. And it was just this super sneaky way to get us to do strength training by competing with each other because anyone who's going to show up for the gymnastic team, he knows it's just a competitive douche.
We were there for a number of reasons. One is we're competitive. And this is just one way of showing up. And it worked.
And I will tell the story and I'm not trying to throw any particular gender under the bus, but that's what it's going to sound like. Eventually they killed the men's gymnastics program in the county that I grew up in. And Jack started switching to coaching women, which he was brilliant at. In fact, after this one gymnast in the Olympics, I watched her floor extra team.
I think she might have won. It was Dominic Dawes. And I called Jack and I said, are you coaching Dominic Dawes? He goes, yeah, how'd you know?
Because that was my floor extra team with two moves that I can't do. And he goes, yep. But anyway, when they killed the men's gymnastics program, I said, so now you're coaching women. What's the difference?
He goes, remember that thing with a graph paper and a push-ups? I said, yeah, remember when I gave it to you guys, you just immediately started doing push-ups? I went, yeah, I gave it to them. They immediately started crying.
And just, you know, now that doesn't mean there aren't highly competitive women. There are. But just as a general group, you know, a bunch of 12-year-old boys versus a bunch of 12-year-old girls will have a different attitude about, you want me to do what? So.
Or says, I can't wait to do that. Yeah, absolutely. No. And again, if you're not having fun, don't do it.
And for me, and you know what, for the fun of saying it, I mean, it does really amaze me, frankly, that you are doing all of this effectively on your own, if you think of it that way, because having a partner or having someone walking you through it or having someone you're competing against, depending on where your mindset is such an important motivator. I mean, my friends that I race with on the track, every time we get together, we each say, I'm so glad you're here because it's so much harder to do on your own. And even if someone's not training with you personally, the fact that you are coming out with these things, it does give that feeling that you were part of the process. And I imagine, I mean, I haven't thought about this till now, but I'm wondering if you hear from people who just talk about how they're relating to you from the fact that you're just constantly putting out all this stuff for people to explore and experiment with and discover the effect of.
Yeah. And that really does help me a lot. Like, I'd be doing this regardless, but when I do put this stuff out and I get feedback from people on how it's inspiring them to do stuff similar to that, that's really driving me to give you an example, actually, just yesterday, a guy who messaged me and sent me a video of him doing a Zurture Carries, 315 pounds, walking back 10 feet, walking back into the rack 10 feet, 315, I think he weighs 160 pounds. So that's, you know, that's awesome.
Well, hold on, what's described what the Zurture Carries is because if someone hasn't seen it, just describing it will make it seem even crazier than it is. Yeah. So basically, your arms are kind of at your side. You have a bar across the inside of your elbows here, and you're carrying it like that.
You're not holding it in your body. So you're not holding it in your hands. You're holding it in the cokes of your arms, right in front of your stomach, essentially. So you're not, you know, it's not on your body.
It's supported by your arm. It doesn't hurt your biceps. You know, it's close, it's so close in that there's no chance of, you know, bad happening. But basically, the guy was taking all those doubles body weight and stepping back and stepping back into the rack.
And he was inspired by a video that I had posted showing me doing this with double my body weight. So I was about a hundred and ninety-something pounds at a time and I did it with 400 pounds. And I carried it, you know, 30 feet down my gym, turned around, carried it back. And I had these little squat stands.
These are 1950s, you've rested out your squat stands and using an easy crowbar because the easy crowbar is smaller and it's easier to turn with and it has the bends in it so that it actually fits perfectly for your elbows and doesn't roll forward. So you know, I over the course of a few different weeks, I gradually built up to see how much I could do with that exercise. So I worked up to over 400 pounds on this easy crowbar, walking down my gym, turn around and walking back. And that's the closest I've ever come to passing out while doing weight training.
I'm not even kidding about that. And that's even including the time that I squatted 315 pounds for 40 reps. Oh my God. Well, this is another thing you do that I wonder how many people actually take you up on.
I mean, like the exercise you come up with, the workouts you come up with, these are all doable really by anybody and under any condition. There's body weight stuff, there's weight stuff. If you have certain amount of equipment, you can find something. If you don't have that equipment, you can find something.
But then you do some, I think the technical term is crazy ass endurance shit. So I mean, just describe and talk about any of these and why you do them and what kind of response you get. And you know, if there's anybody who is trying to have a virtual competition with you on some of this. Yeah.
One of the things I'm actually training for is called the Inman Mile, which is the guy who created his name was Inman. He didn't accomplish it. Nobody in the world has ever accomplished it. He has not that nobody has claimed to have accomplished it.
There's tons of videos of people trying and they don't get anywhere close to it because the capability of doing this is very specialized. And I actually think I have a shot at doing this kind of one modification. So basically you're carrying 1.5 times your body weight on your back on a bar for a mile nonstop. So you got 300 pounds, you got 300 pounds like you're going to do a squat.
Exactly. Okay. So the goal is to do this nonstop without moving the bar without taking the bar off without setting it down anything. You know, that's what I'm training for right now.
And I was thinking to try and get this last year, but I didn't get anywhere close. I could see, you know, this was going to require a lot more training specific training for that. So right now, basically once a week, I'm doing very specific carry training for this goal. The modification I'm going to do is instead of using a straight bar, I'm going to use what's called a safety squat bar, specifically a Mars bar, which kind of sits on your body more like a backpack.
We're padding doesn't mess up your shoulders. I tested that long distance with actually a straight bar and I got about 400 or 500 yards with my body weight before my shoulders started really starting to hurt. And yeah, you know, within two days, I'm like, there's no way I can do this physically without breaking my shoulders. So it's like, I'm going to do this with this specialized kind of bar instead.
And right now I'm to the point where last week I did five sets of two minutes carrying 700 pounds. Oh my God. Yeah. So I literally inside my rack, I put 700 pounds on this bar and I'm just carrying it, stepping back and forth forward and backwards inside the rack for two minutes straight.
No break. Set the bar down, rest a couple minutes, do it again. So I did five sets of that with 700 pounds. And that's going to train those capacities, which actually as I'm getting stronger, those weak links are actually changing.
So at first, it was breathing capacity. Now it's kind of lower traps. And I'm to the point where I can literally have 500 pounds on my back and have a normal conversation with somebody without even literally, I shot a video on this a couple of weeks ago where I literally have 500 pounds on my back and I'm talking to the camera and I'm explaining what I'm doing is, and you wouldn't even know that this is real weight, but it's literally like 500 pounds on my body. So trip needs to say when you're ready to actually go for it, are you planning on calling the Guinness book or recording it so that they can note it?
Oh, yeah. It'll definitely be recorded. It's nobody will believe it. So in the never actually did it.
He just came up with this idea and somehow people decided, sure what the hell. Yeah, there was drinking involved as I understand it. But he just, yeah, he was in the Olympic weight left and said, you know, 100, 1.5 times body weight, let's see what happens. I think he got maybe 600 yards with 1.5 times by way.
So he made a good distance out of it. Well, but yeah. And it is interesting. If you think about doing it, I mean, most people think that it's the weight itself that's the problem.
But the first thing I thought is, yeah, I mean, just they're just holding a bar on your back that way in and of itself is difficult to stress. I mean, ironically, when you're actually squatting, you get to kind of relax your shoulders and your upper back a little bit because as you're going down, it's, you know, that vertical position where you're having to keep things and play. Alongside that. But with the goal of doing that exercise, that distance for that period of time.
It's the mental component of doing that. I mean, because you're getting into some very, for lack of that term, elevated spaces physically that, you know, I'm reminded as an event with a ultra running coach on someone's head to Tony, you know, I've run a 50 mile race. I want to train for 100 mile race. What do I need to do?
And Tony said nothing. It's not if you can do 50, you can do 100 physically. It's just all in your mind at that point. What are you experiencing when you're doing these endurance things that are really pushing the limits?
Essentially, you have to kind of separate yourself from your body in a lot of ways. I was talking to another guy. He does some stuff like this as well. And he said, the Navy SEALs call it a portholing where it's like you visualize your body yourself as being outside the porthole of the ship and looking in on what's happening.
So you're not actually like trying to experience the pain of it, but you're outside of it looking in on somebody else experiencing the pain of it essentially. And it does work. And you really have to kind of, you know, pull yourself back and out from that. It is totally mental though.
Like, probably, I could probably do this in the mile challenge right now, but mentally I'm not ready for it because, you know, I'm probably about 70% ready for it physically. That other 30% would be mental. I want to get closer to the point where I'm closer to 100% physically ready for it. So I'm within reach mentally of it.
If that makes sense. Do you think it does? I mean, sort of like, you know, I say on the track, no one's ever said a world record in training. It's the pressure of the competition, like adrenaline of the competition.
You know, you know, you know that you're, it's not like you're going to be running a 13 second hundred and suddenly running 9.9. But if you're running 10 low, there's a decent chance that in the right conditions, you know, you're going to do nine high. So how much do you think about when you're going to do it, what's going to make you feel, I mean, there's one way you feel ready because you've just done it 10 times. It's like, no one's watched, but now I can do it because it's easy.
But there's another where it's like, I'm close enough that in the right condition, I think I can do it. And it's scary shitless. I imagine. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. That's the element to fear right there. That's, you know, being having it within reach, but knowing that you haven't done it yet before, no one's really done it yet before, like that's what's kind of okay. Now it's time to put up our shut up.
This is time everything is kind of come together. Now I'm going to do it. And when I was telling you about that 315 squat for 40 reps, that's kind of what I did. And that's kind of what I'm basing the mental aspect of this on.
And I trained for that. I wanted to kind of develop that capacity. It was a Tom Platts program. You can believe that.
But if you know from another Tom Platts, he had legs the size of literal tree trunks. And no better. So Tom Platts is like five, two, five, three. And his legs were, I mean, it wasn't that even like 26, 27.
No, no, more than that. I mean, like, his legs were bigger than my waist. Yeah, his legs were just enormous. So this was a program that he had done right before.
I did this thing. I did a warm up set of 225 for 50. That was a warm up. And literally I just blew through that like it was a warm up and then rested seven minutes.
That was the rest of it was seven minutes. But at 350 on the bar, it was at my university gym. I went and told my weight room monitor there. If I'm on the floor, hold up on calling an ambulance, just come and see check in with me first because I'm going to be on the floor at the end of this.
So they were kind of keeping an eye on me as I would do in this. And so I start to get the bar off there. I rack and everything is dialed in right now. And I didn't have 40 as the goal.
I had 20 as the goal. I did 10 reps felt like nothing. I got to 20. Still actually felt pretty good.
So I'm like, I'm going to see how much I can do. That's when the whole different mindset really kicked in. And you know, the next 10 reps were tough. They were grind.
I hit 30 reps. I literally had an out of body experience where I didn't have any perception of anything else around me except the rep count in my head. That's it. It was the most zen thing I've ever experienced in my life.
It's literally 31, 32. And I was visualizing like flaming numbers in front of my face as these things as like, you know, everything like everything in my body is activated. And you know, on that last rep, all I could think was just 40, 40, 40, 40. It was just like that one thing.
Like there was no other existence except this number 40 that I had to finish. And then I'd rack away and I fell down and I couldn't get up for 10 minutes. I was going to say, did you rack it or just drop it? I'm going to roll it.
I mean, you know, you and I talked about it. I've been doing some work has lately where long time under tension, some other things. I mean, just let's just do abs. You know, so, okay, you're going to do v-sits or crunches.
It doesn't really make a difference. And you're going to do them for like, you know, a minute to two minutes. And the first, let's just do a minute. The first 30 seconds feels fine.
Then the next 10 seconds, this is hard. Then the 40 to 50 is like, okay, I really would like to stop. And the last 10 seconds, if you can make them, you know, you've slowed down by 50%. And it's just, why am I doing this?
And so, yeah, it is wacky when you do push for time. And for me, frankly, it's a 40 reps. I mean, what was your case? I'm guessing that was probably a good two minutes.
At least, yeah. It's the first 20 reps literally was like, you know, it was almost easy, almost easy. But those last 10 reps probably took as long as the first 20 reps, I'm sure. And I'm sure the last rep probably took as long as the last three or four reps.
Because it was literally, it was just like, and I'm not getting my say was out of body. Like, I remember the feeling, but I remember not having any perception of anything else around me other than just that number flaming in my face that I had to get. And yeah, it's always taught me that you always have more left than you. Because, you know, I would have normally stopped at probably like 25 in a normal set.
But I got another 15 reps out of that. And I'm like, you know, I've got nothing else to do after this. I'm, you know, I'm not doing anything after this. I'm just going to do as much as I possibly, humanly possible.
I'm not going to let my mind say no. And I just pushed until literally my body actually physically gave out. You know, and that's something you don't normally hit. So I know when I'm doing this long distance stuff, I know I've got that capacity there.
But it's just a question of, you know, is my mind ready to go there again? Yeah. And sometimes it is sometimes it isn't. Yeah.
What was the recovery like after that? So literally I could not get up for 10 minutes. I was just laying on the floor. I couldn't even raise my head.
I was just like laying on the floor just. You know, the weight reminder came over and she said, are you okay? I just got a thumbs up with my arm on the ground. And you know, there are other people around there like, dude, what happened?
So yeah, literally took me 10 minutes to be able to function like a human being. And then the worst part of it was is that Jim was actually located in the basement of the university. And they are. So you get where I'm going with this.
There's no way you're there. So it probably took me 10 minutes to climb that flight. I was there to get back out of Jim. The closest thing I have to that was over this past summer, we were at a European office and we were staying in a place where we were in Budapest, actually, and staying at the top of the hill.
It was the Castle District for anyone who's been there. And the closest gym I could find was at the bottom of the hill. And it was, I try to remember, it was something like a thousand steps to get to the gym. And the gym was in the basement.
And they had some great old school equipment. I mean, it was a dingy, dirty basement gym from like the turn of the century. It was delightful. But the guy I was working with, he put me through a workout that was like the hardest like workout I'd ever done.
And then I had to walk back up the thousand steps. And then Lane and I went, we were sightseeing and we went up the tower of this church. It was like 300 steps up and down. And by the next day, I couldn't, I mean, I couldn't walk.
I don't mean that figuratively. The only way I could move, I couldn't move my legs. I had to just swing my leg and kind of back to where I was. It was bad.
I've never had soreness like that in my entire life. And it occurred to me this was probably when I was doing it, this is probably not a good idea, but I felt kind of okay. Yeah. I can sympathize.
I actually had one workout for Caves where I got soreness before the workout. I thought it was done. Oh, that's not good. It was really not good.
I got to put this in context. The fact that you're willing to enable and showing that you're doing these things, it's not, wait, let me say differently. When we turn to people that we look to for advice or inspiration or help or whatever, on the one hand, you know, we kind of want to emulate them. Now on the other hand, sometimes it's not possible.
When you're seeing a bunch of these bodybuilders who are just jacked up on every steroid known to man, you're not going to be that. You can't do that workout. You're not going to look like that. Doug McGuff did a great video saying, I've done every workout known to man.
And what I can tell you is if you're not taking steroids, they're all the same. You're going to hit your genetic potential and that's it. And you don't know what that is. You might be someone who gets really big.
You might not. You might get really strong. You might not. But regardless, but the point is that to have someone who is pushing beyond where you are in a way that even like, I can't imagine doing what you're doing because it seems like so not fun to me.
I don't know where to begin, but there's an element of it that is inspiring because I get it. I understand. And it's not like it's superhuman. It's crazy human, but it's not, you know, it's not impossible, obviously, because you're demonstrating that.
And so I guess what I'm saying is you're doing these, you know, these abnormal things in a way that feels normal-ish, that makes it inspiring and not disappointing to pressing. Like I can never be that, do that, et cetera. You're not actually even doing it to say you should be like me. And that's one of the things that I really appreciate about what you do is just how accessible it is even when it's something that there's no way I'm going to be able to do anything remotely like that.
Because I guess part of it is you're giving, you're showing things that work for the gamut of people's skill, ability and intro is a sprinter who's all fast-witched and does not have that kind of endurance component. I like watching it. I like watching a basketball game or a car wreck. But I know I'm not going to do it.
But then I know the next day you're going to have something wrong and go, I can go do that. And it's hard to describe. Like seeing that thing that there's no way I can do, followed by the thing that I can do, makes the thing that I can do, seeing even more doable. I'll just say I do that on purpose.
I literally do that on purpose. I consciously do that when I'm putting out some of this crazy stuff. It's like, okay, this is crazy, but I'm doing it and I'm sure there are other advanced people who could do it. But the next time it's like, okay, now here's something that literally anybody can do.
You know, it's like, here's a variation of a dumbbell curl that you can maybe shift your hand over to one side so that you have more space on this side so you get some additional resistance on the supination. Yeah. Anybody can do that. You don't have to be advanced.
You can be a total beginner. And so I actually do post this crazy advanced stuff because some people may be able to do that or be inspired by it. And some people are like, that's not so far accident. But literally the next time it's like, okay, here's not something that you could do.
Total beginner. That's interesting. You know, I'll set my feet like this when I do curls and I'll feel better on my lower back. Well, I want to highlight the one that you said before that.
So if anybody does have a set of dumbbells at home, try this, you'll feel the subtle difference between the way you think you should do something the way Nick has identified kind of something where it's better. Where if you take dumbbells and you're going to do a curl and just imagine you've curled and said they're all the way up. So you've done the full curl and typically you've got your hands in the middle of the bar part of your dumbbell. And so instead shift your hand so it's as far out as it can go.