The Peter Attia Drive - #28 - Mark and Chris Bell： steroids, powerlifting, addiction, diet, training, helping others, documentaries, and living your best life

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atiyah Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah.

00:00:10.140 The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking,

00:00:15.600 along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with

00:00:19.840 some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast

00:00:23.620 is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality,

00:00:28.360 more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode

00:00:33.000 and other topics at peteratiyahmd.com.

00:00:41.520 Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. This week I had two guests. This was a

00:00:47.060 first. I've never interviewed two people simultaneously, which is not to say it's

00:00:51.420 rocket science. I think a monkey can figure it out and I'm at least as good as a monkey,

00:00:55.100 so I was able to figure it out. But it did stress me out a little bit because I was trying to figure

00:00:59.040 out how do you keep two people engaged. But it seems like we did a pretty good job and I think

00:01:02.300 you'll enjoy this episode. My guests were two guys who I just refer to as the Brothers Bell,

00:01:08.800 but they're obviously known more commonly by their actual names, Mark Bell and Chris Bell.

00:01:14.460 Some of you may recognize these guys, especially if you're interested in powerlifting or if you've

00:01:20.400 ever paid attention to some really interesting documentaries in particular, Bigger, Stronger,

00:01:27.100 Faster, which was sort of the breakout performance for Chris Bell. That is, I believe, a documentary

00:01:33.460 that if you look at all of its downloads on Netflix, would certainly put it in kind of the top 10 docs

00:01:39.320 of the last decade. I could be wrong on that, but I feel like I remember reading that somewhere.

00:01:43.200 Prescription Thugs was also a follow-up documentary and there were a number of others,

00:01:47.400 including one that is in the works at the time of this recording that we'll link to as well.

00:01:53.020 His brother, Mark Bell, his younger brother, is an absolute legend in the world of powerlifting

00:01:59.460 and he owns a number of records, all of which are staggering and we'll get into those during the

00:02:06.260 episode. This was also a bit of a first for me in that it was the first time I interviewed

00:02:10.660 people I didn't know personally. So obviously I'd communicated with Mark and Chris through email

00:02:16.640 a bunch leading up to this, but I didn't have a rapport with them in the way that I've had with

00:02:21.160 every person I've interviewed to date, which actually is a little harder. You have to pay a

00:02:25.100 bit more attention when you're doing your homework. So I hope that doesn't come across as being

00:02:28.700 strained. I don't think it did. I think we were definitely getting along well and having fun.

00:02:33.100 The other thing that may or may not come across here is we were exhausted. We did this interview up at

00:02:38.100 a place that Mark Bell was renting for the month up in Malibu. And so I went up there and they

00:02:45.100 interviewed me for their documentary slash podcast. And it took about three hours and 15 minutes.

00:02:52.420 We took about 45 minutes off to play patty cakes and grab ass and eat. And then I proceeded to

00:02:58.800 interview them for about two hours. So I think by the end of that two hours, we were all collectively

00:03:03.320 exhausted. So that may or may not come across. Anyway, all those caveats aside, this was a super

00:03:09.460 interesting podcast because what I really wanted to talk about was not just their stories and their

00:03:14.820 lives, which I think are very interesting and touch on so many of these themes that I've become quite

00:03:20.700 interested in. If you've seen either bigger, stronger, faster, or prescription thugs, you'll know

00:03:26.980 that their older brother, Mike died. And they talk about that quite openly in this podcast. And it's

00:03:32.900 actually quite, it's quite touching and it's actually quite emotional. Chris gets kind of

00:03:36.460 emotional at one point during this. And it's sort of palpable in the room as we're talking about it.

00:03:40.760 They talk a lot about their parents, their upbringing. I obviously am completely fascinated

00:03:45.140 as to what kind of upbringing could produce such remarkable human specimens. And they are

00:03:51.680 remarkable human specimens. Let's make no mistake about that. I also get into some of the details about

00:03:57.880 like their training and very fascinating to understand like how relatively low volume their training

00:04:02.760 was and yet how it produced such remarkable achievements. So I guess I would say the

00:04:07.740 following. If you've never heard of these guys and you're not that interested in power lifting

00:04:11.740 or strength training, I still think you will find this interesting, though there may be some parts

00:04:16.700 you want to fast forward through once we get into the technical details of some of their lifts.

00:04:20.920 If you have any interest in strength training, you're going to want to get to know a lot about

00:04:24.720 these guys. And one of the things I actually learned in the interview, I hadn't even done enough

00:04:28.780 homework before the interview to know this, is the YouTube channel that Mark Bell has, which I've

00:04:34.640 since looked at. And it's an incredible resource for someone who is trying to learn how to do the

00:04:40.600 major lifts correctly. So without further ado, here is my interview with Mark and Chris Bell.

00:04:46.900 Mark, Chris, thank you so much for making time to talk to me about this kind of stuff today.

00:04:55.260 Thank you. You know, this is kind of unusual for me. It's two firsts. It's the first time I've

00:04:59.000 interviewed two people simultaneously and also interviewed people that I don't know much prior

00:05:03.440 to this. But I kind of feel like I know you guys. I'll clear something up for you.

00:05:06.400 Please do. You can only interview one person at a time.

00:05:10.060 You've learned this during the documentary, I'm sure, right?

00:05:12.480 It's just the way it is. So if we both talked at the exact same time, then this would not work.

00:05:19.320 It could be trouble.

00:05:20.300 We will try to keep that in mind. But I do feel like I kind of know you guys,

00:05:24.740 which is weird. That's, I'm sure, something that you guys have experienced before when

00:05:28.940 someone's watched one of your films or seen a documentary that you've been in or a part of,

00:05:33.300 and it's sort of like they meet you and they sort of think they know something about you,

00:05:35.960 right? You're like, well, I know what this guy's all about because he said X, Y, Z.

00:05:39.600 And so I'll try to free myself up from that.

00:05:42.520 I get a lot of hugs because of it. People are like, I feel like I know you. Can I give you a hug?

00:05:46.680 Yeah.

00:05:46.880 So it just depends on who it is, whether or not I like that or not.

00:05:50.280 When people do that, what are they thanking you for? Because I'm sure people do thank you a lot.

00:05:54.460 It's a really bizarre thing. I never thought anybody would thank me for making a movie,

00:05:58.200 but I guess it's had a profound effect on their life. So they say, thank you for making that.

00:06:02.700 With my film Prescription Thugs, for example, a lot of people will see that and realize,

00:06:06.520 oh, I have an opioid problem, I have a drug problem, and they'll go do something about it.

00:06:11.640 So I think with Bigger, Stronger, Faster, it was like more getting off your ass and going to do

00:06:15.600 something with your life and wanting to be somebody. That's something that I think is

00:06:19.280 really important to a lot of people, trying to prove that you're not just another bum from

00:06:23.220 the neighborhood.

00:06:24.000 The thing about Bigger, Stronger, Faster that I found so appealing and surprising, and I think

00:06:28.180 that's, I would guess, at least part of the reason why 10 years later, it's still endured,

00:06:33.220 is the vulnerability of it. You didn't hide your own issues, your family's struggles.

00:06:39.740 I'm sure I'm not the first person to say this, but your parents come across as like the two most

00:06:43.600 lovable people on the planet. Like I actually didn't have the urge to hug you, but if I walked

00:06:48.600 in here and saw your mom, I would absolutely have to give her a big hug. You know what I mean?

00:06:53.320 Yeah, absolutely.

00:06:54.420 Was that designed or did you, that just happened by accident that you realized, hey, I'm just going

00:06:57.940 to show my family?

00:06:58.660 It was really weird. When we did the movie, we had a lot of great people helping out.

00:07:02.820 My philosophy is like, go find the best people and do it. So like, if you're going to make

00:07:06.380 a documentary, I was like, who's a good documentary filmmaker? Oh, Michael Moore, he won an Oscar

00:07:11.460 for Bowling for Columbine. I thought Bowling for Columbine was one of the best, whether you

00:07:15.480 agree with the politics of it or not, that's not the point. The point is, it's one of the

00:07:18.560 best written documentaries I've ever seen. And I actually won an Academy Award for the writing

00:07:23.920 of it and it really inspired me. And I just said, I want to make a movie about steroids.

00:07:28.140 So I want to adopt the same style. So I watched Bowling for Columbine. I literally wrote out

00:07:33.200 every scene from Bowling for Columbine and then tried to define what that would be if it

00:07:38.460 was about steroids, like what that particular scene would be. And in doing that developed

00:07:43.240 like this style. And then I actually brought people in that worked on that movie. So the editor

00:07:47.780 of Bowling for Columbine was an editor and a help on our movie as well. And that's sort

00:07:54.440 of how I got into making the movie about steroids. That's how I approached it was getting the

00:07:59.700 best people and putting them in the right spot. So I had learned a lot like in the course

00:08:03.980 of making the movie as well.

00:08:05.060 Well, he directed the cameras at us once he started to get into some of the basics of the

00:08:10.720 film. I think for a long time you were kicking around the idea of he knew that there's something

00:08:14.900 magical about Gold's Gym Venice. And he knew something was magical about a lot of the things

00:08:18.700 that we're doing, the environment we're in. But it wasn't until he got into some of the

00:08:23.620 actual ideas of what the film ended up becoming to where he started running through these different

00:08:29.120 scenarios with his producers. And he's like, yeah, you know, my brother's, you know, my brother

00:08:34.500 Mark does this, my brother Mike, you know, he was doing that. And, you know, I did this and

00:08:38.820 they were like, wait, hold on a second. Your brothers are taking steroids right now. And he's

00:08:44.220 like, yeah. And he's like, they're like, that's, we need to, we need to get that on film.

00:08:47.620 Yeah. And the point I was getting to is those people that worked on these other great movies

00:08:52.220 were the ones that define that to me. So when I was on the phone with my producer, Alex

00:08:57.280 Bono, I was like, Hey, you know, uh, you know, my brother's Mark's on steroids and Mike's

00:09:02.200 on steroids and I'm in the middle and I'm just trying to figure it out. And as soon as

00:09:05.800 I said that, he was like, that's the movie right there. That's exactly what the movie

00:09:09.620 is. It's like, you're the middle brother and you're conflicted whether or not you should

00:09:13.060 take these drugs or not, regardless of whether you've tried them in the past, you tried them

00:09:17.080 once you felt a little guilty. Let's just tell that story. And what I found is in making

00:09:20.960 films, just being honest and telling the actual real story that's going on is the best place

00:09:26.200 to be right now. We're embarking on a documentary about nutrition. And I keep going back to like,

00:09:31.220 keep trying to manufacture what the movie should be in my head. And I'm like, going back to it

00:09:36.120 should just be what is going on right now. What exactly is going on right now? I'm conflicted

00:09:41.240 about my diet. I don't know how I should eat. I'm trying to find answers. And that's really

00:09:45.540 what it should be. The most honest representation of that and not a representation of like, here's

00:09:50.780 what I think about the ketogenic diet and here's why you have to do it. And so by taking this

00:09:55.520 approach, I think it's allowed us to be pretty open-minded about the whole thing.

00:09:59.640 There's something about that movie also that I've watched it obviously probably half a dozen

00:10:04.020 times, if not more. And each time I see it, I'm struck by this feature, which is the empathy

00:10:09.600 with which you approach people. Even when I think the viewer can tell, like you don't necessarily

00:10:16.040 agree. So I'm blanking on the boy's name, but the high school kid who'd killed him.

00:10:19.660 Taylor Hooten.

00:10:20.500 Yeah, that's right. When you spoke with his father, that's a very touching scene. Because

00:10:25.620 if you're watching that purely through the lens of what the research and the data would say,

00:10:29.680 it's pretty clear that steroids probably had nothing to do with that tragedy. And that boy might

00:10:36.100 have ended up in that situation with or without steroids. But at the same time, I think, you know,

00:10:40.520 if I were doing that interview, I worry that I would have come across as condescending or like a

00:10:45.720 know-it-all. But I was very touched by the fact that that wasn't at all the case.

00:10:51.020 Yeah, he didn't press the issue at all. The guy just said it. The guy said steroids had nothing to

00:10:55.540 do with my son's death. And that was that. And I thought it was spectacular as well. When you're

00:11:00.320 watching it, like that interview right there, even though it's my brother, he had an opportunity to kind of

00:11:05.160 jump on that guy. Like, wait a second, how could you say that? But it never goes any further than

00:11:10.500 that. And it shouldn't.

00:11:11.700 And it didn't need to. That's the beauty. Because you were able to sort of, look, there are people

00:11:16.100 where you can cross-examine them. But you don't cross-examine the father who's lost his son. Like,

00:11:20.680 there's absolutely no role for that. And so there's a certain level of civility that I think...

00:11:25.800 There were other questions where I'm like, there's, I think, other ways to approach it, right?

00:11:29.780 Rather than go, I'm going to jump down his throat. Say, well, why don't I just pose a question to him

00:11:34.260 that is comparative? Saying like, hey, look, your son died from steroids. That's what you're saying.

00:11:40.100 That's what you're telling me. He died from steroids. But also like, you know, my brother

00:11:43.840 died in a sober living facility and drugs were involved. And so like, I'm trying to compare it.

00:11:49.260 In his case, I was like, well, hey, look, you know, you're going to have a steroid awareness night

00:11:52.640 in this baseball stadium where fathers are going with their four-year-old kid and they go and they

00:11:57.900 drink six beers and then they drive the kid home. And it's like, you know, what's the difference

00:12:01.520 there? Isn't that ironic? And so I was just trying to like figure out ways to not be mean-spirited

00:12:07.720 to the guy, but yet like sort of come across where it's like, just make some points to him and

00:12:12.620 hopefully like it'll sink in with them. I don't know if it ever did or not. I don't know if it

00:12:16.740 does or not, but that's sort of my approach is to like, not really go in there with a mindset of

00:12:21.600 like, I'm going to destroy this person because think about it all realistically. We are all human

00:12:25.900 beings. We're all in this big soup together. We're all here. We're all on this planet

00:12:30.200 together and we all have to function together. So like to pick a side and stand there just doesn't

00:12:35.100 seem to make any sense. And what makes more sense is like when this movie's over, that guy's still

00:12:40.760 a human being. He still has a family. He still has things going on, right? And so I'm not trying

00:12:45.300 to destroy that guy. I just want to try to figure out what his point is and move past it. And so I

00:12:51.520 think that that's, you know, my philosophy is to try to keep the peace so that after the film,

00:12:56.940 we can still continue to have a relevant and smart, intelligent conversation about the subject

00:13:01.840 matter. So I remember seeing the movie for the first time probably in 2009. And I really, I'm not

00:13:07.440 saying this just because you're sitting here, but I really do credit that documentary with being the

00:13:12.300 thin end of the wedge that got me to begin to revisit a set of beliefs that I had just taken

00:13:16.900 for granted. So one of the challenges of medicine is it's not necessarily a discipline that's full of

00:13:23.160 critical thought. And part of that is just the nature of you. There's too much stuff you got to

00:13:26.800 learn, you know, so you can't approach it through the lens of intellectual curiosity all the way.

00:13:32.160 It's just, these are a set of facts. Cholesterol causes heart disease. Well, maybe it turns out to

00:13:36.480 be the lipoproteins and inflammation and a few other things. But look, the zeroth order answer is,

00:13:41.180 and of course, one of those hugely dogmatic things is anabolic steroids. That's got to be like one of the

00:13:45.600 most dangerous things on the planet. And so all through my medical training, I'd never really given this

00:13:50.440 any thought. And I just sort of assumed that stuff's got to be bad. And I even remember as a kid when

00:13:56.060 Lyle Alzado died, I remember the cover of Sports Illustrated. I distinctly remember the day he died.

00:14:02.080 I had just come home from a run. It must have been the hottest day of the summer. And I remember like,

00:14:06.480 you know, reading the newspaper about it. And it was like, it was pretty clear, like Lyle Alzado died

00:14:10.780 because he took steroids. And I was in high school at the time. And it was like, steroids are bad.

00:14:15.920 Your movie comes along and I collect quotes, right? So I've got, I have a file of just my

00:14:22.340 favorite quotes. I'm going to read you one of my favorite quotes, which I think applies to so many

00:14:27.360 things we do. This was, John F. Kennedy said this, I believe at a Yale commencement in 1961.

00:14:32.460 For the greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived, and dishonest,

00:14:38.320 but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches,

00:14:45.680 of our forebearers. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations.

00:14:52.400 We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

00:14:56.540 That was before we got a man on the moon, huh?

00:14:58.280 Oh yeah. That was when the man on the moon was an idea.

00:15:00.900 All right.

00:15:01.820 So when I think about Bigger, Stronger, Faster through the lens of that, I realized that my

00:15:08.420 understanding of steroids was primarily the comfort I had of opinion. It was an opinion that had

00:15:15.600 been passed down, passed down, passed down, but I actually hadn't really submitted myself to the

00:15:20.140 discomfort of thought. And I don't think your movie is meant to necessarily make the case that,

00:15:25.160 hey, steroids are good, steroids are bad. I mean, that's also part of the beauty of the movie is

00:15:28.360 the way it ends with you, Mark, is actually a very powerful ending. Super powerful. Like the last

00:15:33.680 scene of that movie is one of the most powerful things ever because it deliberately doesn't try to

00:15:38.120 say, here's the answer. But what it did, at least for me, was it said, dude, like I don't actually

00:15:43.740 know jack about this topic. Yeah. So before I form an opinion, I might be wise to start thinking

00:15:49.400 about it. One of the interesting things about filmmaking is you come across these things by

00:15:53.060 accident. We were editing the movie and my editor like left the computer on one day and went back

00:16:00.680 to the computer and there's my dad and my mom and they're cheering. They're like, yeah. And they're

00:16:04.660 like, they're cheering after Mark won a thing. And we're kind of looking at it like, that's kind

00:16:08.600 of an awesome shot to kind of like end the movie on. Like it's like the family and we're like,

00:16:12.780 look at Mark, he's on steroids. Like he's awesome. You know, and, and that kind of feeling,

00:16:17.800 you know, and see him hit a few more dingers that part with the Simpsons. And so when you're making

00:16:21.960 a movie, there's a lot of happy accidents. Like people go, you're a brilliant for you went out and

00:16:26.520 got these day laborers and you brought them in your house and you guys made supplements in your

00:16:30.480 kitchen. Those guys worked outside my office. They were there every day. And

00:16:34.600 every day I joked, like, I'm going to just get these guys to make my supplements for me.

00:16:37.800 And I just joke around, like, is this a joke? Then when it came around at the time where

00:16:42.340 we have to shoot a scene, I'm like, why don't I hire those guys? They're, they're so cool every

00:16:47.040 day. I'd like to put some money in their pocket. So I paid them all a hundred bucks to come

00:16:50.500 make supplements with me for that. No idea what was going on. And I'm sure they're, they probably

00:16:55.780 still don't know that they're even in a movie, but they were, and they were, they were an awesome

00:16:59.560 part of it. It just shows you, it just shows you how wide open this, this industry is and

00:17:05.340 like how, uh, things aren't what they seem. You know, you think like, Oh, a supplement must

00:17:09.340 be made in some factory with everything's all through the FDA. And it's like, nah, it's not

00:17:13.020 the world's just not like that, you know?

00:17:15.120 So prescription thugs sort of carries on in the theme of the same type of investigation,

00:17:21.060 but also it's very, very personal.

00:17:24.100 Yeah. It's a little darker.

00:17:24.800 So, you know, I remember the first time I saw it, I was confused at the very beginning

00:17:30.940 because I was like, but wait, their brother died. Why is, did they film this earlier than

00:17:37.380 I thought? And then I realized, of course, no, that was B-roll. Basically that was, that

00:17:41.480 was film you had before you started making prescription thugs, right?

00:17:44.400 Yeah. And so, um, right off the bat in the beginning, I was like, I want to make this

00:17:48.560 movie. And I just remember I had this phone call with my dad and my dad's like, my dad

00:17:53.100 was crying and he doesn't cry that often. Mark will tell you, right? And you don't hear

00:17:56.920 him cry. He was kind of like choked up and he said, this is the legacy. This is it, Chris.

00:18:02.280 This is like, this is what your brother meant in bigger, stronger, faster. When he said, I

00:18:07.180 know there's something out there that for the world to hear, but I don't know what it

00:18:11.040 is. He's like, this is the message, the message that you don't need.

00:18:14.740 Drugs and blah, blah, blah. Right. And what was really fascinating about that is my dad

00:18:18.460 comes back around full circle again, uh, the point where, um, I was in trouble and I wasn't

00:18:23.500 doing too well. My dad called me and said, only time he's ever yelled at me and he said,

00:18:28.100 I don't know what's wrong with you, but you're a drug addict or an alcoholic or something.

00:18:32.120 There's something going on with you and I can't figure it out, but you're not right.

00:18:35.860 And I just cried for an hour afterwards, you know, just like, oh shit. I let my dad

00:18:41.980 down. Like, that's the worst feeling I'll get choked up now talking about. I was like

00:18:46.320 the worst feeling you could possibly have is like, you let your father down. And so for

00:18:50.000 me, he was very instrumental in just being there for me and being like for him to show

00:18:56.520 his anger just once, I think is what saved my life.

00:19:00.780 Do you remember that time, Mark?

00:19:02.720 When he was going through some stuff? Yeah, of course. Yeah, it was hard. You know, we

00:19:06.720 are, we already lost one. And, uh, you know, I, I guess one thing that's important to share

00:19:13.220 with everybody is that it's never over. People ask a lot of questions about success or getting

00:19:19.680 jacked or bench press and more weight. Uh, you could take steroids and you can do all

00:19:24.340 these different programs and you can do all these different diets, but it's never over.

00:19:28.440 You never, there's never a spot you get to and you're like, fuck yeah, this is perfect.

00:19:32.420 This is where I wanted to be. I'm going to hang out right here. Every once in a while you,

00:19:36.560 you catch glimpses of your own set of greatness, right? And it feels good. But with his battle,

00:19:43.200 it took so much support and it's still, it's still, it's still a lot of support. There's still

00:19:49.000 a lot of, he's come such a long way, but there's still a lot of healing that has to continue to

00:19:55.200 happen for his life to be as prosperous as it possibly can be. And for him to reach,

00:20:01.160 he has a lot of big goals, but he's not even halfway to some of these big goals because he's

00:20:06.400 still in the healing process and he's heading towards all those things now, which is amazing

00:20:10.380 to see after where he came from. But it was almost like his life kind of restarted at 40 years old

00:20:18.760 or so. And his girlfriend at the time called me and it was a weird number. I don't even really

00:20:24.820 answer my phone that often, but I was just like, this is a weird hour and night. It wasn't too late,

00:20:30.900 but most people don't really call me past like seven, eight o'clock. It was like nine, 10 o'clock.

00:20:36.880 And, you know, I hear this voice on the other side, just real frantic and really upset. And I was like,

00:20:43.180 didn't understand who it was. And then she started talking about Chris and I was like,

00:20:46.540 oh, it's Lauren. Okay. That's why phone numbers from the East coast and stuff like that. And so,

00:20:52.520 so then I said, okay, well, where, you know, where is he? What's going on? Can you calm down?

00:20:57.100 Can you tell me more? And I guess he was inside their apartment. She was outside the apartment

00:21:01.220 and she just didn't know how she was going to find him, like what condition he would be in.

00:21:06.200 And I said, well, as bad as it could possibly be, I was like, you're the only like family he has there.

00:21:12.940 I was like, I need you to go and check it out, you know, because if he's really sick or

00:21:17.980 if something happened, we need to figure out a way to try to handle it. And so I said,

00:21:23.320 make sure you just take his key, remove his keys from the house. That way he isn't going anywhere.

00:21:28.080 And I said, and call me back and let me know that he's still alive. You know? So she called me back.

00:21:33.080 She was still kind of hysterical. She was like, he's still alive, but he's passed out. I took his keys

00:21:37.740 and I talked to my wife, Andy, who just somehow always knows the right thing to do or the right

00:21:43.740 thing to say. And, uh, I talked to her about it. She goes, we're going to book him a flight.

00:21:48.720 We're going to get him up here. And, uh, we need to book Lauren a flight too, because if we don't

00:21:53.900 book both of them, he's not going to come. He probably won't be able to get to the airport

00:21:58.380 in the morning and he'll probably just figure out a way to miss the flight. And we're going to get him

00:22:03.720 here and we're going to safe proof everything around us. And we're going to figure out a way

00:22:08.280 to help him. And that's what we did. We flew him to Sacramento. I had a, a long time family friend

00:22:14.520 that was, uh, uh, an alcoholic herself. And she explained to me, you know, some of the things

00:22:19.940 that we're going to go through, through that process. She gave me the place, uh, to send them

00:22:24.520 for, what is that? Uh, where are you going to detox detox? There we go for like three or four days.

00:22:31.280 You know, they take your phone and they give you certain pills and it's very strict regimented

00:22:36.420 thing. You know, contact with anybody. And, uh, you know, that set everything in motion. But what I

00:22:42.240 always try to share with people, it's a very long process, even though that was only three days,

00:22:46.920 it then led into him going into rehab for another 60 or 70 days. And then it was just constant

00:22:53.960 communication, trying to figure out what he wants, what he needs. I think the coolest thing that came

00:22:58.540 from it all was sitting down with him. And we had kind of this intervention thing, which really

00:23:04.160 fucking pissed me off because he didn't remember any of it, but he did say some things in there that

00:23:09.440 were, that really helped a lot. It helped me a lot. And it helped everybody understand a lot better

00:23:14.380 of what was going on. And he said, I feel alone. And when he said that, I was like, I understand he's

00:23:21.560 in LA and he doesn't, you know, he kind of has a girlfriend, but he doesn't have us. We're not

00:23:27.580 there. He flies up here for Thanksgiving, but he doesn't have family. All he has is a bunch of fake

00:23:34.280 ass motherfuckers around him that are in Los Angeles. That's what Los Angeles is made of.

00:23:39.120 Sorry, LA. But LA is like that. People come and go in your life in a flash. I mean, they do in regular

00:23:46.600 life, no matter where you live. But you see that a lot in Los Angeles. You just meet a lot of people

00:23:50.800 that are striving to be actors, actresses, and you find out that most of these people are full of

00:23:56.000 shit. A lot of times. Every single day you meet the person that's going to change your life or

00:23:59.420 they have the deal for you, you know, every day. But, but anyway, you know, we were able to surround

00:24:03.880 him. My parents obviously played a huge role in all that. And we were able to, you know, have him here

00:24:10.580 still today, what, five years later, four years later, four years later. Yeah. It's weird. Cause even

00:24:15.400 thinking back to those times, like, that's just not the same person. You know, it's just a completely

00:24:20.440 different person. I was, I guess I was in that body, but I, I wasn't registered in that body.

00:24:26.700 You know, like now I feel like just a completely different human being altogether than I was a

00:24:33.220 couple of years ago. You know, I think that you have to go through some of these things to get,

00:24:37.860 like, if you want to, for me, there are certain things that I wanted in life and there was certain

00:24:42.660 things I had to go through to get it, you know, and I never wanted to be a drug addict or an

00:24:47.420 alcoholic, but I thank God for it because I think that it's helped me to, uh, really help other

00:24:53.480 people, you know, and that's sort of the bigger goal is like, well, how can I use all this to help

00:24:58.740 you? You know, how can I use it to help other people? Like all, all I'm doing, I was inspired when

00:25:04.380 I was a young kid to lift weights and do, you know, do these things. And, and so, um, when I got older

00:25:09.300 and, uh, realized that it was all bullshit, I made bigger, stronger, faster. You know,

00:25:14.340 I just wanted to help people. We have the coolest people in the world asking us questions all the

00:25:19.440 time. Joe Rogan's texting him, asking about the carnivore diet. Donald Trump Jr. is asking me

00:25:24.800 how to improve his squat. I mean, there's some crazy, I don't know if he's the coolest person

00:25:28.520 in the world, but there's some crazy weird shit going on though. Yeah. You know, that, that,

00:25:32.460 you know, who were kind of unlikely, uh, heroes, I guess, in some weird way. It's really crazy.

00:25:36.600 The kind of people, even, even being able to talk to you, it's like, you're somebody I've listened

00:25:41.560 to every podcast. We've been chasing him down for a long time. I've read everything. You know,

00:25:45.840 like I read all the blogs. I'm like, I, I just consume this stuff like crazy. So even to like,

00:25:50.640 be able to talk to you is to me amazing. And I think that that's something that if we can spread

00:25:56.020 that message to other people that, you know, look, get involved in something, be proactive about it,

00:26:01.800 be excited, get other people on your team and go for it in life. And it doesn't matter what you do.

00:26:08.640 But to me, that's what makes our life fun is like, now I have all this opportunity

00:26:12.300 to do all these, you know, fun things. Like Mark and I are going to go see Joe Rogan

00:26:16.060 perform tomorrow night. To me, that's amazing to be able to get invited to do something like that

00:26:20.960 from somebody like Joe. And he's like, Hey, you guys want to come? Of course we want to go,

00:26:24.760 you know? And, and that to me is what it's all about. And what it's all about is like,

00:26:28.740 I just told you about when we did prescription thugs. Well, my partner on prescription thugs

00:26:33.400 who's sitting right across the room is Greg Young, GB Young and Greg on prescription thugs

00:26:38.600 saved my life. He was the person who was able to communicate with the other producers that Chris

00:26:44.200 is in trouble. We have a man down, but he's not going to die. And he wants to save the movie.

00:26:50.700 So he could have easily went to the other producers who was actually Peter Billingsley,

00:26:54.700 who was the little kid in Christmas story, Ralphie. He was our producer, but he went to

00:27:00.240 Ralphie and he said, Hey, Chris is going to be okay, but he's in rehab and we got a man down and

00:27:05.060 this is serious business and we got to take care of it. And so because he did that obviously has this

00:27:11.420 loyalty to us. When it came around to make this film that we're making about nutrition, we brought

00:27:16.320 Greg on. Greg, when he started, it was about 330 pounds and now he weighs about 280. So he's already

00:27:23.220 lost about 50 pounds just doing like a keto diet and, and he comes and trains with us. And so to me,

00:27:28.340 that's what it's really all about is like getting in there and helping somebody else change your life

00:27:32.880 because I know Greg well, and I know what he's going to do is he's going to turn around. He's

00:27:36.920 already told the next three people that are going to tell the next three people until the next three

00:27:40.700 people. And all it is, is we're getting people on the side of being healthy. That's all we're trying

00:27:46.280 to do as mental health has improved big time. He's more determined. He's in the gym now. He's never been in the gym

00:27:51.120 before, which that takes a lot of courage to even work up the steps just to even get your butt in a

00:27:55.920 gym. And before he said he didn't even want to get up off the couch. And you know, the thing with,

00:28:00.540 with it is like, we're not really selling anything. We're just trying to, trying to help people with

00:28:04.420 their lifestyle. Mark sells products, obviously, and that, that allows us to be able to do these

00:28:09.240 things, which I think is a really cool way of approaching it. Yeah. Our, our X for everything is 10

00:28:12.480 minute walks, go lift some weights, stop being so fat, stop eating such gross foods, you know,

00:28:18.060 like that's, that's our prescription for everything. Yeah. But again, I think what's interesting is it

00:28:21.700 doesn't come across at least to me. And maybe that's because I've gotten to know you guys a

00:28:25.220 little bit since you first reached out to me, but it, it really doesn't come across as the way a lot

00:28:29.860 of people in the fitness space come across, which is again, I'm not going to name names, although I've

00:28:35.220 got a long list of people that I think are complete and total douchebags. Yeah. Occasionally my Twitter

00:28:41.080 account will release my criticisms of some such individuals, but you know, there's this sense of,

00:28:47.000 look, you just got to work harder, you know, without acknowledging, Hey man, if you're down in

00:28:51.440 the dumps, if you're 330 pounds and you're eating poorly and you're sitting on the couch, like it's

00:28:56.320 not just a matter of willpower. Like you have to make some other changes to at least get the inertia

00:29:00.960 to make these changes. And I, again, I just think it comes down to this. I suspect it comes down to

00:29:06.760 something you can only learn having suffered. You know, what's amazing to me is like, uh, through

00:29:11.100 doing this, like Greg's a guy that I work with, you become closer to the people too. And so you also,

00:29:16.160 you're drawing your friends in more right here rather than like pushing your friends out and

00:29:21.080 excluding them from things like you're sort of including them now and everything. And it's

00:29:25.400 easier to be friends with somebody that has the same dietary habits as you. It's easier to be

00:29:29.780 friends with somebody that does the same things as you has the same habits. And like, if I want to be

00:29:34.000 successful, I'm not going to let their bad habits sway me in a bad way. I'd rather let my good habits

00:29:40.000 sway them.

00:29:40.940 And building on that, I think it's also, I think people sort of don't realize that once you start

00:29:45.760 to let down sort of barriers and you can sort of communicate this vulnerability about your own

00:29:50.980 struggle in this case, it's amazing what that does for other people. Because I think many, many of

00:29:56.740 us kind of go around thinking we're the only ones struggling with problem X or problem Y. You know,

00:30:01.320 I've talked about David Foster Wallace a number of times. He's sort of someone I obviously never had

00:30:05.980 the luxury of meeting, but I love his work. And he's talked about this so eloquently, right? Which

00:30:10.040 is every single one of us is only experiencing the world from our own vantage point. We only know

00:30:15.060 what's in our head. We only know what we see. And it's so easy to think you are alone, which goes back

00:30:21.600 to what you said earlier, which is Chris is, he's breaking, he's falling apart because he feels alone.

00:30:28.140 Perspective is such a huge thing. And a lot of times it's easy to be judgmental, but I think about my

00:30:33.960 own life. And I think I had two, what I would consider perfect parents. Both my parents were

00:30:39.160 there for everything. My dad was like our baseball coach. And I can't remember my dad ever telling me

00:30:44.500 no, that he couldn't hang out with me or throw a football around with me or whatever. I can't

00:30:49.180 remember a time where my mom didn't cook dinner. Like, you know, they were just, just around. There

00:30:53.860 was no shortage of, we can't complain, no shortage of like resources, basketballs, weights, money,

00:30:59.620 no shortage of hugs, no shortage of love, no shortage of encouragement. So when somebody

00:31:05.080 asked me certain questions about whether it's my lifting or whatever, my lifting, you know, I,

00:31:11.520 I started out in a way different spot than maybe somebody else. Maybe somebody else grew up with

00:31:17.740 abusive parents. Maybe they didn't even find fitness until they were 40. Whereas I found it at 12

00:31:24.280 because we had it in our basement because I was privileged enough to have parents that were

00:31:29.540 always heading in the right direction, always trying to do right by the family. And we're really

00:31:34.180 trying to, you know, build, build towards something. Whereas there's other people that

00:31:37.460 maybe their dad wasn't around, maybe their mom wasn't around, maybe they're alcoholics,

00:31:41.120 maybe they're being abused or who, who knows the list of things is unbelievable. But your starting

00:31:46.620 point is, is a big factor in where you start to end up.

00:31:49.880 And Mark talks about that a lot. And I think that that's the, you know, he said, he says,

00:31:53.660 not everybody starts at the same spot. And so we can't really compare ourselves to other people.

00:31:59.560 Mark and I right now are training with Michael Hearn. Michael Hearn's a freak ever since he was 14

00:32:03.820 years old. He looked like a professional bodybuilder, right? So he's known as having the worst transformation

00:32:08.720 in the history of the world. Cause at 14 or actually more like 16 or 17, he looks the same as he does now

00:32:15.220 at 48. Yeah. So he's always been jacked. So he's exactly. And so, you know, we, for us, we're like,

00:32:21.040 man, we, if we were to compare ourselves to him, we'd just feel like crap every day. If I compare

00:32:25.840 myself to Mark, I'm going to feel like crap every day. Cause he's bigger than me and stronger than me

00:32:30.440 and leaner than me right now. He's, he's getting ready to do a bodybuilding show. But you know,

00:32:35.020 in my head, my goal is to try to beat him, you know, like we're, we're still brothers. So in my,

00:32:40.720 in my head, I'm starting way back from him and I'm not comparing myself to him, but I still

00:32:45.200 in, in some weird way go like, man, I hope I surpass him somehow. I hope I can sneak in.

00:32:51.240 I'm hoping he, you know, after his bodybuilding show, he has one too many days of, uh, cheating,

00:32:56.960 you know, and I can still beat him in something. But, uh, you know, I used to always beat him in

00:33:00.900 powerlifting. I used to tell him emphatically, you will never be as strong as me. I would, I would tell

00:33:06.420 him, you'll, you won't even get in within a hundred pounds of my bench press. And for a while,

00:33:10.560 that was like so true. And then now I'm not even close to him. So it's like, it's funny how

00:33:15.460 those things happen and can reverse. Never say never. Yeah. Never say never is right.

00:33:20.200 To me, the journey is kind of everything. My brother, he has a more eloquent way of saying

00:33:24.140 it and I don't, I'll sort of bastardize it. But the gist of it is you don't judge a man by where

00:33:28.560 he stands. You judge him by how far he's traveled to get there. And, uh, yeah, I always thought of

00:33:33.460 that. I mean, I, and he said this even when we were young and I remember, I think I just always

00:33:37.300 grew up with such a chip on my shoulder that whenever I sort of felt myself being compared

00:33:42.220 to someone who was better than me, or I would assume was more privileged than me, I would not

00:33:48.380 necessarily verbalize it, but internally I would think, well, screw them. I've traveled way, I might

00:33:53.760 not be where they are, but I've traveled way further to get here. And you know, I've always been

00:33:59.560 negative energy. It doesn't help your situation. Totally. Totally. Right. And I've always, I'm still

00:34:03.740 kind of, um, you know, completely fascinated by whatever it is that motivated the three of you

00:34:09.440 as brothers to be, you know, trying to be anything other than ordinary. And again, I don't think

00:34:15.180 anybody just wakes up and says I'm programmed to be ordinary, but you know, you guys have

00:34:19.180 accomplished kind of remarkable things. I mean, I want to come back and talk about the physical

00:34:22.680 stuff because it is, I'd like to be able to put some of that in perspective for people who,

00:34:27.400 who don't really fully understand what some of these lifts mean. And so we'll, we'll certainly

00:34:31.160 come to that, but it's interesting because it's not the story I would have expected, right? What

00:34:34.980 I would have expected is something in childhood wounded you guys, you know, and it's like your

00:34:40.660 entire adult life has been a way to cope with some pain and that's been channeled into mostly positive

00:34:46.520 things, but then sometimes it's gone off the rails. Like that's the narrative I would construct if I

00:34:51.100 didn't have any background. I really honestly, when I, when I said January 23rd, 1984, it was a day that

00:34:57.000 changed my life forever. I meant it. I really meant it. When Hulk Hogan beat the Iron Sheik,

00:35:02.800 we were, we were fanatics. We were nuts, man. We were like, we loved it so much. And we wanted to

00:35:07.840 be part of that without all we could see as ourselves inside of a wrestling ring.

00:35:11.660 We had the ability to dream because our dad provided and mom provided that for us. That's

00:35:15.900 all we had to worry about as kids was to dream big. That's it. That was the only thing. When I

00:35:20.140 remember like the smell, I remember, I remember everything about like getting our first Nintendo,

00:35:24.820 you know what I mean? I remember all these different things. I remember watching that

00:35:28.940 match, you know, I don't know how old I was. Yeah. Seven. I don't know. There's just such a

00:35:33.540 difference. I really remember those. Those are really strong memories for us. And I don't know.

00:35:38.420 There's, there's just such a difference from when we got involved in watching wrestling to before it.

00:35:43.800 Like I don't, I don't remember anything before it. I just remember the, I actually don't even

00:35:47.740 remember to tell you the truth. Not even January 23rd. It was before that January 23rd was the big

00:35:53.500 day where Hulk Hogan pin the cheek. But before that, this was WrestleMania one, correct? That

00:35:58.300 was before that even this was 1984. WrestleMania one was 87 or 85, 85, 85 WrestleMania one was

00:36:05.960 WrestleMania one with Hulk Hogan and Mr. T. It was the year after. Yeah. It was after he

00:36:09.860 had a belt for you or whatever. But yeah, before that Mark and I were watching wrestling and Mark

00:36:15.100 used to have to hold the clothes hanger. We had a metal clothes hanger that was attached to

00:36:19.580 the antenna so that we could get, you know, so that the TV coming, I can't really watch

00:36:23.600 it. I could kind of be like, he had to like hold it, but he was only like five. Seriously,

00:36:26.380 he was like five or six years old. And Mike was two years older than you. Yeah. A year

00:36:29.780 and a half older than me. You're four years older than Mark. Yeah. So he was like a little

00:36:33.480 kid. He's like five, maybe I'm 10. Right. And, um, Mad Dog's like 12 and we're watching

00:36:38.600 wrestling and we're watching this, uh, body slam challenge. Every time big John stud would

00:36:44.220 come out and they'd hold up the bag full of money and they'd be like, we're going to $25,000 body

00:36:49.300 slam challenge. Smallest bag for some reason. Yeah. Tiny little bag. And, um, dollars in

00:36:54.840 there too. Not even hundreds. And we're, we're like excited. Like who's going to try it this

00:36:58.660 week? And we know the guy's never going to get them and body slam them. Who's going to

00:37:02.380 get them this week? And it's like chief J strongbow. So we're kind of bummed out. Like

00:37:06.160 God, chief J strong, but he's not going to do shit, you know? So chief J strongbow like

00:37:10.120 walks out and he's standing there and he just starts shaking his head. Like, no, he's

00:37:13.140 like got his hands crossed. He's like, no. And he turns around and Andre the giant

00:37:17.160 walks out behind him and we're like, Oh my God, it's Andre. And we were so excited. We thought

00:37:21.800 Andre was going to come down and slam them and take the money, but it was even better

00:37:24.940 because Andre came down and tried to slam them. And then the manager smashed them in

00:37:28.740 the back and Andre took the money and threw it out to the whole crowd to us. Like those

00:37:32.640 moments were like bigger than life. They were the hugest things that happened to us. Like

00:37:36.960 so much to where we would, my dad would always, you know, say, Hey, if you guys want

00:37:40.740 to do something special, I'll do one, one thing a year. And it was always like, let's

00:37:45.200 go to Madison square garden and watch wrestling. Let's go to WrestleMania. You know, it was

00:37:49.020 always something to do with, uh, wrestling. So for us, it was a huge influence on our lives.

00:37:54.680 We're just like what we saw in the movies and on TV and I, and we lived in, I do think

00:38:00.240 seeing our dad being a suit and tie every day was not anything that we wanted for ourselves

00:38:05.420 either. And he worked for IBM and he poured so much into that job. Uh, he would do anything

00:38:10.160 for that company and he, he worked there for nearly 20 years. I think right around the

00:38:14.440 time he got to a point where he would get some, uh, privileged things, uh, upon retiring

00:38:20.640 like around 19 years or so, uh, is when they let him go. And it was like, wait, what? Like

00:38:26.360 all this, this work that you put all this time into, you're just out the door. And he realized

00:38:30.920 it himself. Like that was a huge lesson for us. Well, he hadn't, he said he, um, you know,

00:38:34.600 later he told us he had no ownership of anything. He's like, I didn't own the fucking stapler.

00:38:38.660 I didn't own the paper that they had. I didn't own. He's like, all I owned was myself. So,

00:38:43.700 and after that he, I think he had like a knee surgery and some things. So he went through his

00:38:48.980 own, uh, process, but went through probably a lot of personal development, which maybe he didn't

00:38:54.080 even really realize that he needed to go through because he was stuck in corporate America. He was

00:38:58.680 like frozen. His brain was frozen in time where it was corporate American family, corporate

00:39:03.900 American family and go back and forth between those two things. It didn't leave time for anything

00:39:09.020 else. But when he lost his job, I think he paused for a minute, took a breath and said,

00:39:14.280 I'm actually really smart. I'm going to be an accountant. He was already doing some of that.

00:39:19.300 I'm going to go into real estate. He picked back up. I think within three years, he was not only making

00:39:24.480 the money he was making at IBM, but he was doing it. And then some, our grandfather was an

00:39:28.940 entrepreneur. Our grandfather could tinker and fix anything. He had a used car lot. And I think

00:39:34.240 a lot of our creativity in their own backyard. Yeah. Yeah. And his own, yeah. So his own yard,

00:39:39.640 uh, he built his own home, you know? So when I, when, when I look at my grandpa and I look at my dad,

00:39:45.920 like I feel like he and I are giant steps backwards compared to what those two are able to accomplish.

00:39:51.140 Well, there's something you said that I find really quite, quite powerful, which is despite the

00:39:56.420 fact that your dad was working for the man busting his ass, he'd give anything for IBM. He still gave

00:40:00.820 you guys everything. You know, you said, absolutely. You never were without a hug. You never, there was

00:40:05.620 never a moment when you wanted to play with your dad and he wasn't there. And so my guess is that

00:40:10.580 would make it a lot more palatable when you get shit on by the man, because can you imagine the guilt

00:40:16.260 that would rest upon you if you're doing all this stuff in service of your family, right? You're

00:40:22.020 working this hard to provide for your family, obviously, but in the process you're, you got

00:40:26.900 to make these hard sacrifices to not spend time with your family. And then in the end you get the

00:40:32.000 shafts. That's where my mom came in. She had the strength to pull him aside one day and say,

00:40:35.860 you're not here enough. And he was like, what? He was like, I'm trying to be, she's like, yeah,

00:40:41.160 you keep getting these promotions. You keep making more money, but you're not here. And he was like,

00:40:45.140 oh my God, I didn't like, he almost, he got lost in it. He didn't know. And so my mom pulled him

00:40:49.300 back in and, and that, that really helped. Were your parents athletic when they were growing up?

00:40:53.740 No. Our mom was. My mom was slightly, but she, she came from a family, a big family. And she was

00:41:01.820 the babysitter. You know, she had a lot of responsibility as a young woman. Like literally

00:41:06.240 raised. Yeah. She raised, you know, seven other kids, basically. You know, my grandmother at the

00:41:11.520 time, my grandmother was going through alcoholism as well. And same with our grandfather. So our

00:41:16.560 grandfather was a chief of police on my mom's side in the family. And he was dealing with

00:41:20.840 alcoholism and he dealt with that up until he died. My grandmother got sober and she'd been sober

00:41:26.420 for what, like 30 something years. I think when she passed away, which was like last year, maybe

00:41:31.440 our grandparents lived down the street from each other. And we would go, we didn't realize the

00:41:35.360 dynamics of that until we got older that my dad and mom met on the bus. And my dad like winked at my

00:41:40.280 mom or something when they were like 13, but they were literally like just a few neighbors,

00:41:45.280 a few football fields away from each other. But when we go to my mom's side of the family,

00:41:51.140 the house was real dark and you didn't want to hang out there as a kid. It smelled like alcohol.

00:41:56.140 It smelled like cigarettes and it just had unease just sitting, just like fogging through the whole

00:42:00.880 household. You just knew you didn't want to be there. You didn't know why,

00:42:04.280 but you knew you didn't want to be there. No one was mean really, but just.

00:42:08.360 It was like kind of like the movie, The Fighter, where everything was like,

00:42:11.100 the house is just depressing. It's like, ugh. But then we'd go to my dad's side of the family

00:42:16.420 and everything was like bright and everything was wide open. And somebody's dressed up as Santa

00:42:20.120 Claus on Christmas. Somebody's swinging around in an axe randomly for some reason,

00:42:24.900 some unsupervised kid. And then someone's got a tennis ball and someone's got a wiffle ball bat.

00:42:30.460 Our grandfather would pull stunts. So he would pull stunts like he'd blow out his birthday candles

00:42:35.000 and the cake would fall through the table. He would, he would just do crazy.

00:42:38.240 And he'd film it. He'd blow the filmmaker. Yeah, he was a filmmaker. He would blow.

00:42:41.600 He filmed everything. He'd blow his candles and then the cake would go flying across the room

00:42:45.120 and smash into the wall. And as kids were like, oh my God. He'd film it and he thought it was funny.

00:42:49.060 Because he would do things like he'd put like a little pulley and a string underneath. And he's

00:42:51.960 like, when I blow out the candles, I'm going to make the cake fly across the room. The kids are

00:42:54.900 going to go nuts. And it was always, my grandfather, every single year, every single year,

00:43:00.040 and they still do it in our family, you pull the rope because he will always put the trap for Santa Claus.

00:43:05.280 So the day after Christmas, you pull the rope and you always get Santa Claus's boot and it's full

00:43:09.640 of candy. And that's what the kids do every single year. And they still do it in our family because

00:43:13.720 my grandfather started those traditions. So we've always been.

00:43:16.380 It's so great when you're like 14, you're like this stupid.

00:43:18.900 Yeah. You know what I mean? You're like, I got to still pull the rope.

00:43:21.920 Come on, grandpa.

00:43:23.100 But that's, I think those things that like are ingrained in us, we had a great life growing up.

00:43:28.340 We had a fun life growing up. We used to go fishing with our grandfather and

00:43:31.800 things like that. And we just grew up close.

00:43:34.220 When did you realize just from the standpoint of strength, you guys weren't normal?

00:43:41.420 I was in 11th grade and I had, so my knees were really bad. And when I was in, I was in 10th grade.

00:43:50.000 Yeah. And my, my knees were really, they just always hurt. And I didn't, I had no idea why.

00:43:54.260 And so I went to the doctor and the doctor's like, oh, you got these bone spurs in your,

00:43:57.660 in your knees. We got to remove them. So he did this like arthroscopic knee surgery.

00:44:00.860 And I was, I had to be off my feet for, you know, a couple of weeks or whatever.

00:44:05.620 And I, and I did that, but I was always in pain. I didn't really know why it's because I had

00:44:09.540 arthritis, but I had no idea when I was younger and nobody diagnosed me with it at all. So I was

00:44:15.020 playing football at the time. And I went to see this chiropractor who was also our strength coach

00:44:19.000 and he taught me how to squat. And so it just started out where mad dog was going to the gym

00:44:23.940 all the time. He was playing football and he was really good and he could squat like 400 pounds or

00:44:28.860 something. I just remember what age he was, uh, 16. Yeah, he was strong. It was pretty strong.

00:44:34.480 And I was like, man, mad dog's pretty strong. And then by the time he was like 18, you know,

00:44:38.580 he was even a little bit stronger. And my chiropractor, this guy who was trying to help

00:44:43.760 me, uh, fix my knees said, well, you know, to fix your knees, you need to squat. And I said,

00:44:48.400 oh no, I I've been reading the bodybuilding magazines. That's the last thing you want to do.

00:44:52.200 It's bad for your knees and it hurts your knees. He's like, no, it doesn't. I've been a power

00:44:55.480 lifter forever. Just trust me to squat. And I was barely into even like working out. So I started

00:45:00.340 with a broomstick and I just prided myself and going back to that doctor every day, every time,

00:45:05.440 not every day, but like once a week saying like, Hey, now I did a hundred pounds. Now I did 110

00:45:10.440 pounds. And you're how old here? Like 12, 16, 16, 16 at this point. Yeah. And this guy squatted 700

00:45:15.760 pounds at around weighing around 16 years old, turning 17 about shit. And I started squatting a broomstick

00:45:22.280 and within six months I'm squatting 315 for like eight reps. People are like, what is going on with

00:45:27.900 this guy? You know, people in my school were going like, this is weird. And when you say that you are

00:45:32.260 at this point, are you doing like top of the thighs are breaking parallel? Like these are power lifting

00:45:36.900 squats pretty much. There were power lifting squats. There was nobody really, uh, just training at the

00:45:42.040 time. But, but then pretty soon I was up over 500 pounds, like in high school, squatting over 500 pounds

00:45:47.400 and squatting over 500 pounds for working out, doing reps. We responded really well to,

00:45:52.280 to not doing a whole lot. So we'd go in the gym and we do one heavy lift and we would leave.

00:45:57.320 I'd leave. And our coach, we had like a guy that was trying to coach us. And he was like,

00:46:01.540 bell brothers, just squat and leave. He's like, you don't even do any assistance work. We're like,

00:46:04.700 yeah, that's all we need. And he ended up squatting six 75 that way at around 18 or 19 years old.

00:46:10.040 Yeah. So I don't, so we were like, no, we think it's working. Yeah. I mean, I think I, I, you know,

00:46:14.640 I think the fact that, um, less training stimulus helped and we were like really into Mike Menser.

00:46:19.680 We were just talking about him before and Mike Menser was our uncle's favorite bodybuilder.

00:46:23.940 And he was all about like doing less and getting away with like just going in and working really

00:46:28.080 hard for a short amount of time. And we took, you know, took those lessons, but we realized that

00:46:32.660 we were strong early on. But for Mark, what was insane was there was this day. It's like,

00:46:37.220 this is sort of the day lifting started, like the day lifting began like for the whole world.

00:46:42.120 Go into like a Rocky montage. If this was the movie of Mark's life, there's this day where

00:46:47.220 my cousin, Steven came over to visit. Steven's like, ah, I can't, I know I can't bench as much

00:46:52.860 as you, but I know I can probably. Steven's his age. Yeah. Steven's my age. He's like,

00:46:56.080 I'll kill Mark. And I'm like, I don't think you will. And he's like, no, I'll kill Mark and bench.

00:47:01.020 I can bench like 205. Yeah. I'll kill Smelly and bench. And so, um, they get on the bench,

00:47:06.260 they start going. It's like 135, 145, 155. We just keep going up and up. And I'm like,

00:47:11.400 I'm thinking Mark is really getting strong. Like whatever we've been doing, it's been working.

00:47:15.960 We get up to around 205. Doesn't have any idea how strong I am because he's only had me do sets

00:47:20.300 of like, uh, six to 10 reps usually. And as we were going up in weight, we just kept adding fives

00:47:26.020 and tens and five and 10, five and 10. I got him on this bench off with my cousin. My cousin fails

00:47:32.140 at like, I don't know what he failed at, but then like 205 or something. And Mark did like 240 or

00:47:37.420 250 pounds. At what age? He was probably like 13, 13, maybe 12 or 13, like young, like,

00:47:44.300 like what the hell is going on here? I definitely didn't look like I could do that.

00:47:47.620 My mom actually on the same day, my mom benched 135 and she had never lifted in her life.

00:47:52.120 She just picked it up off the floor. And it was weird too. Cause she, she just was like,

00:47:56.080 like this. And she started laughing all in like sinking into her boobs and everything.

00:48:00.180 And it's like, boom. And she just like smashed it out. And we're like, Oh my God.

00:48:04.720 Yeah. You guys remind me of a family I grew up with, which is just, and it's actually the sad

00:48:11.060 thing is it's an equally tragic story. So not that anyone listening to this will ever, I don't know

00:48:15.240 if they'll ever hear this, but their name was the Stu Perricks. So there was Rob, Matt, Russ,

00:48:22.720 and there was one other Stu Perrick and they were from another planet in terms of strength. So,

00:48:31.780 you know, even though boxing was my thing, like I found a great place to lift weights,

00:48:36.140 which was this dungy little gym at the university of Toronto that was mostly just grown men power

00:48:41.460 lifting. And then there was me and my best friend from high school who were like, you know,

00:48:46.560 they hated the fact that we were there, but by the end they grew to respect us because they

00:48:50.680 basically got us into power lift. And it's so funny. Everything you say reminds me exactly of

00:48:55.300 the Stu Perricks, which were, they literally only benched or squatted or deadlift, nothing else.

00:49:01.800 And their strength was redonkulous. I remember, I think it was Rob at a weight of 185. He had hurt

00:49:10.780 his shoulder so bad that he could only narrow grip bench and he's narrow gripping 385 for 10,

00:49:17.360 like here. It's like, cause my shoulder hurts. So I gotta go narrow, you know,

00:49:21.980 transmit more this to my tries. Yeah. And, um, the, these guys were freaks of nature and I don't

00:49:27.560 know if any of this shit was true, but the rumor was that they were, you know, they came from Viking

00:49:31.300 stock and their mom could apparently bury any one of their friends in an arm wrestle. If they brought

00:49:37.120 a friend home, that's great. Like you want to arm wrestle their mom, you're going through the table.

00:49:41.160 Yeah. It's like, it's funny cause we were like that, but we weren't even the strongest kids in

00:49:45.960 our high school or we weren't even the strongest kids in our area. I mean, in Poughkeepsie, I think

00:49:50.120 it's like in the water or something. I mean, there was, there were people, we were the strongest.

00:49:54.300 We were by far, we'd kill people in strength, but, um, we had dudes that were huge in high school

00:49:59.840 that were just like monsters. We went to a pretty big high school. I mean, when I went to school, I was,

00:50:04.480 but you, you were, you were just smaller. Yeah. Well, a lot of people did steroids in Poughkeepsie. So when I

00:50:08.840 grew up in Poughkeepsie, I had a belt that said, Royd sucked on it. It says Royd suck. And it would

00:50:14.420 make everybody in the gym mad because everybody was on the juice and I was stronger than all of

00:50:19.140 them. And they would get so pissed because they'd see me coming in and squat 600 pounds that were

00:50:22.820 on steroids then too. And they'd see the belt, Royd sucks. And I'm like, Oh, you're, you know,

00:50:26.900 you're on shit. Oh, I think everybody would always say that I was on stuff and I just never was,

00:50:31.040 you know, I just, it just didn't happen. So to me all growing up, it was funny that we,

00:50:35.480 I ended up making bigger, stronger, faster. Cause I have that, I had that written in big

00:50:39.820 block letters across the back of my belt. Royd suck. And I ended up making this movie about

00:50:43.860 steroids and talking about how they, maybe they're not that bad. So how old were you,

00:50:48.500 Chris, when you peaked and what, give me, just give me, well, first of all, let's take a step back.

00:50:52.120 Can one of you guys explain, you're done. It's all downhill. One of you guys want to take the

00:50:57.280 liberty of explaining to the listeners what powerlifting is, what Olympic lifting is,

00:51:02.920 why those are sports in and of themselves. We'll let Mark do that. He's the expert.

00:51:06.500 All right, Mark, tell us what they are. So Olympic lifting is what you might see

00:51:10.440 on TV when the Olympics come around. Powerlifting is not an Olympic sport. Olympic weightlifting

00:51:15.860 is a clean and jerk and the snatch. Those are the exercises that you do basically involves taking

00:51:21.820 the weight from the floor and figuring out some way to get it over your head. There's different

00:51:25.420 rules in both of them, but that's the gist of it. You get three attempts on both of those lifts

00:51:30.220 and the accumulation of both of those lifts is called your total. So in powerlifting,

00:51:36.060 you do a squat in this order, bench press, and then a deadlift, and you get three attempts at each

00:51:42.240 one of those. And the accumulation of those, that goes into what is called a total. Powerlifting is

00:51:49.200 really difficult because it's hard to have leverage on all three of those movements. Olympic lifting is

00:51:54.500 very difficult, but it requires a whole different skill set. Mobility becomes a big factor. Speed

00:52:00.540 becomes a big factor. You're trying to basically move your body around the barbell, whereas power

00:52:07.160 lifting is not even like a good... You're moving the bar. Yeah, power lifting. It's just not even a good

00:52:11.580 term for it because it's not really a definition of power. Right. Power has a speed component to it.

00:52:17.520 Yeah. Right. Yeah. Which just seems more... And you are doing it as fast as you can, but it's so heavy,

00:52:22.500 it doesn't look fast. Yep. Yeah. But yeah, in powerlifting, you know, for the squat, we're

00:52:27.140 required to try to get our hip crease below where the knee is, which is always in controversy because

00:52:33.060 the human body can't process looking in two places at once. So that rule should have been changed a long

00:52:39.820 time ago, but it never has been. So that's the squat. When it comes to the bench press, you need to pause

00:52:44.440 the weight on your chest for a moment. The referee will say, press. You press the weight back up to

00:52:49.000 full lockout. And the deadlift is pretty simple. You just pick the damn thing up from the ground

00:52:53.020 until you're able to stand up with it fully erect, as they say. And then they just give you a down

00:52:59.340 signal and that's powerlifting. And you alluded to something earlier, which your numbers are actually

00:53:04.640 quite interesting. So I was not a particularly good powerlifter. I just did it as sort of ancillary

00:53:09.260 training for boxing. Let's say numbers. Yeah. So I weighed 158, 160. My bench was my weakest. I

00:53:16.820 think my best was 270 or 275. It's respectable. Let's just say 275. Okay. So my squat was about

00:53:26.260 495. I think pound for pound, that was my best lift. And my deadlift was about 505.

00:53:34.200 This is an honest man here. He didn't even give himself the five pound bump on the squat.

00:53:37.800 So you would agree though, that I was more of a squat deadlift guy than a bench guy. I was a

00:53:42.600 pretty weak bench guy actually. I was the weakest guy in the gym. You see that a lot though. Like

00:53:45.880 Mark said, you can only be good at one. And we were really good at bench press. That was our main

00:53:50.700 thing. Yeah. Sometimes you're good at two. And sometimes like somebody might be somewhere in

00:53:54.700 the middle of the road on all three, and then they're able to raise up all three over years and

00:53:58.300 years. But your PRs, Mark, are remarkable. I don't have them here, but if I recall, you actually benched

00:54:04.620 more than you deadlifted at a PR. So give me your PRs. First of all, there's kind of two parts to

00:54:10.020 my lifting career, or maybe even three parts. But I guess to make it more simple, I used powerlifting

00:54:15.540 gear, which is a supportive gear that gives you assistance that allows you to lift more weight.

00:54:20.360 It started out being protective, and then the companies made things more and more extreme.

00:54:25.580 And so therefore, you're able to actually lift more weight. I did 1,080 squat,

00:54:29.420 an 854-pound bench press, and a 766-pound deadlift. And that's all in equipped powerlifting.

00:54:38.720 When it comes to rawlifting, in the gym, I've squatted 700 pounds raw before. I benched 578 in

00:54:44.540 competition. And I think my best deadlift might be like 715, I believe, somewhere in that range.

00:54:51.820 So right now, that's an interesting distinction. To be clear, raw means no knee wrap?

00:54:56.940 Yeah. So the raw powerlifting that I did was no knee wraps, no squat suits.

00:55:02.560 So belt only.

00:55:03.420 Belt only. Yeah. Belt wrist wraps. That would be it. Sometimes people still consider knee wraps being

00:55:08.880 raw just because you're not wearing like a squat suit or a bench shirt. But yeah, those were the

00:55:13.180 numbers. At that time, I was so locked into what I was doing. I did every and anything that I could

00:55:19.080 to be stronger. You know, I've made the statement before, and it might sound arrogant, but I just said,

00:55:25.620 you know, if you met me at that time, I would have been the most savage powerlifter you would have

00:55:29.860 ever met. Not because of my strength. I wasn't the strongest guy in the world. Although I posted

00:55:36.180 numbers that rivaled some of the strongest guys in the world for that time, I was as strong as I could

00:55:42.640 be. I don't think I could have squeezed any more out of that. I pushed it as hard as I could. I got as

00:55:47.880 big and as heavy as I could. I tried eating healthy to get big. I've tried eating disgustingly gross

00:55:54.120 to get big. I've tried to do all kinds of different things. And I think I pushed

00:55:58.320 that envelope pretty good. I think maybe the one thing that could have been a little bit better is

00:56:04.100 I could have slept a little bit better looking back at it. But I was just so big, it was hard to

00:56:08.820 sleep. I think he's right on that. I mean, I know we know a lot of people in powerlifting and he just

00:56:14.240 put everything into it. You know, there was times where just like even the amount of food he would eat

00:56:19.600 and stuff and I would say like, aren't you worried about this or that? He's like, I'm just worried

00:56:23.720 about winning. You know, like he wasn't worried about any, like everything was so laser focused

00:56:28.700 in on these big lifts and these big weights and the amount of energy and the amount of seriousness

00:56:34.680 like it was. And it was so dead serious in the gym all the time because like kind of was life or

00:56:39.660 death. When you're squatting a thousand pounds, there'd be like a lot of fights and arguments and in the

00:56:44.160 old super training because it was highly competitive and people would, you know, like somebody would

00:56:49.440 mess up, like just get in the rack. Somebody would go to racket and they wouldn't put the monolift down

00:56:54.760 the wrong way or whatever. Yeah, you yell at each other and get into a fight and it was just so

00:56:58.780 aggressive and crazy. A lot of intensity. It's sort of where you had to go to get there in the sport of

00:57:05.860 powerlifting. So what were your PRs assisted? So I did like 675 squat. I never did raw powerlifting,

00:57:13.240 never came into the fray, like as far as I was there, but I was actually there. It's not

00:57:18.060 interesting. I was there before the equipment was really good, but not when it went raw. So

00:57:24.000 really like a single ply squat suit. I did like 675 squat. I did a 472 bench in competition, but

00:57:30.900 in bigger, stronger, faster in just a bench competition, I did 501 in a bench shirt. I think the best I ever

00:57:37.160 did in the gym was like 585. That's where the shirt, the best I ever did, I think raw in the gym

00:57:44.300 is, is 500, but you know, now I blew out my shoulder and those things don't work like that anymore.

00:57:49.300 To give some people perspective, you know, everything in my gym is specialized. The plates

00:57:54.340 are specialized. The barbells are specialized at the time when we, when I was lifting those big weights,

00:57:59.720 we had a bar, which is called the iron wolf bar. And this, this thing is so has so much crazy

00:58:06.180 knurling on it. It's like a cheese grater that it kind of ruined the inside shape of our squat rack.

00:58:13.940 Because when you try to move the weight around or roll it at all, it would sheer metal off of there.

00:58:19.140 And if you went to duck underneath it to do a squat, it would tomahawk you. It would, it would just

00:58:24.160 fricking cut the top of your, your hair right off. I could just boom, like a, like a razor.

00:58:29.340 So everything in there is specialized and that bar was designed that way. So it stays sturdy on your

00:58:33.720 back and it was a extra thick so that there was no whip when you're trying to squat. Because when

00:58:38.880 you have that much weight on your back, if the weights are flopping around, it's going to be really

00:58:43.220 hard to try to stabilize it. And you're going to end up probably falling on the ground. And then also we

00:58:48.260 had, you know, we use kilo plates, which are super, super thin, or we had to always buy

00:58:53.400 you know, thinner 45 pound plates. And to give people an idea of what some of this stuff looked

00:58:58.260 like. I mean, it'd be very common to walk into super training gym on a Tuesday or on a Thursday

00:59:03.580 night. Tuesday was a big squat night. Thursday was a big bench night. And you would see six,

00:59:09.460 seven, eight, nine, 45s on each side of the bar. One time just to do it, just because I wanted to try

00:59:16.400 it. I could have easily used our kilo plates and stuff, but I was doing some math and I was like,

00:59:21.240 holy crap, I can bench press 20, 45 pound plates. I'm like, I'm going to fucking try that tomorrow.

00:59:28.020 And so it was 10, 45 pound plates on each side. If you can envision that.

00:59:31.940 How much is that?

00:59:32.480 And now that's a special bar too, because it has an extra sleeve.

00:59:35.160 That's 900 pounds plus the bar, 945.

00:59:37.180 Yeah. It's like, yeah, right.

00:59:38.660 Damn.

00:59:39.060 Yeah. And, uh, you know, I did it off of boards and stuff in context for people. Like for me,

00:59:44.700 I understand these numbers because I just know, like, even just like, I remember this,

00:59:50.040 like I was never even able to get to 25 for 10. I could never quite get there, which I always

00:59:55.580 thought was like, until you can do to 25 for 10, you're not actually benching. And I remember like,

01:00:00.280 I could only get to about eight. And so I was just such a pathetic bench presser,

01:00:03.980 but I also know like how heavy that is. So when the numbers you guys are talking about,

01:00:07.900 like, I don't even understand what eight 57 bench press means. Like, how do we,

01:00:12.480 I'm just trying to think like you could bench press the back of a car. You could lay under a car

01:00:16.780 and at least get the car out of its suspension.

01:00:21.520 Right. You know, I don't know an easy way to, uh, try to explain something that's a little bit

01:00:26.620 complicated to people that might not understand it. All I know is that typically when you go into a

01:00:33.100 commercial gym, somebody might be moving around a plate, two plates, maybe three plates and the

01:00:37.620 strongest guy at some of these commercial gyms, sometimes they're pretty strong, but usually

01:00:41.340 going to see somebody use 405, you know, four plates on each side. It was very common that weekend

01:00:47.280 and week out at my gym and still is very common to where there's groups of people, you know,

01:00:52.240 one after another, I guess where you can make a comparison is a friend of mine was a collegiate

01:00:57.520 wrestler and he ended up being an alternate on the Olympic team. And when he went to train at the

01:01:04.260 Olympic training center, he said, he remembered there was some guys there after he was there for a

01:01:09.200 while. There's some guys there that would brag and they're like, Oh, I'm an all American from this

01:01:12.540 place or that place. Or, um, you know, all state from this college or whatever, whatever, whatever

01:01:17.800 their thing was, whatever their championship was. And he was just like, we all are, you know,

01:01:23.860 what's special about you? You're not a special snowflake, you know? And so inside the walls

01:01:28.340 of the gym, as we were building up and making ourselves a lot stronger, that's what we'd see

01:01:33.200 day in and day out. It was just commonplace to see somebody squat 700 pounds, 800 pounds,

01:01:38.320 deadlift, 800 pounds, things like that. I think that was sort of, I took it for granted as a kid

01:01:41.880 that from my first exposure, lifting weights, which was starting at 13 till 19, I only knew that one

01:01:47.820 gym. Yeah. So I only knew exactly what you're describing, which is we were the weakest, you know,

01:01:52.660 me and my friend were like the little babies there, but you'd see these guys who were simply

01:01:57.440 from another planet and everything was only counted in plates, right? It was like, is it six

01:02:01.860 places at seven places, eight plates. And of course, you know, this was such a crappy gym that the bars

01:02:06.560 were all bent. Like, you know, you had to know how to position yourself under the bar to squat

01:02:11.740 because the bar was permanently deformed. Dangerous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just crazy. And now,

01:02:16.980 as you said, I go into like crunch, which is where I lift weights when I'm in New York.

01:02:20.880 And it's like, you don't see anybody really going above two or three plates typically. And look,

01:02:26.140 they're still strong dudes, but what you're describing is a different world.

01:02:28.940 Looking back on it, I wish I knew more when I was doing it. Looking back on it, we tried to learn

01:02:34.000 as much as we can as we were doing it. But along the way, I've gotten injured and being hurt is

01:02:39.020 worse. Like to me now it sucks because I'm hurt. I can't fix it. So I got hurt from, I tore my tricep

01:02:46.100 just from pushing things too hard, pushing, pushing too much, too hard three years ago,

01:02:50.520 maybe, or what? It was like five years ago and it just never healed. Right. And it never,

01:02:55.400 when I went to the doctor to see if I needed to get it reattached, it's like, it's torn,

01:03:00.360 but it'll probably heal pretty good and blah, blah, blah. And like, you know, so I just didn't get it

01:03:05.240 reattached. And also it was right before I went to rehab. So I wasn't in a good state of mind to go get

01:03:09.720 it reattached or whatever. And it just never came back. And so I wish I knew more now, but what's

01:03:16.360 nice about now coming back around is a lot of the things that are injured, I've been able to rehab

01:03:21.520 and been able to fix as well. So I'm still lifting pretty heavy, but I just wish we had that knowledge

01:03:27.540 back then of like, you know, not getting hurt. So knowing what you know, and you guys have heard

01:03:32.580 me talk about the importance of weight training, I, it's probably the only thing that for me is

01:03:38.400 never compromised. My life sort of revolves around weight training. So I have to get in the gym three

01:03:44.600 days a week and my hotels when I'm on the road are planned around where those lifts are going to be

01:03:50.460 and when and blah, blah, blah. And yet it doesn't mean that every week I can squat and deadlift and do

01:03:55.360 all the things that matter, but almost without exception. So this stuff's important. But the other thing

01:03:59.720 I'm sort of fond of saying is look, rule number one is don't get hurt. So if someone's listening

01:04:04.660 to this and either like, you know, these numbers don't mean anything or whatever, but they still

01:04:09.240 get the gist of it, which is, Hey, I probably ought to be lifting weights. And let's say they're

01:04:12.780 thinking, Hey, I want to be able to squat and deadlift and bench. I want from each of you guys a

01:04:17.640 really, you know, sort of the most important thing that you know, after all of your years of both

01:04:23.400 watching, coaching and experiencing that you would pass on to somebody. So let's start with you.

01:04:28.600 Yeah. The hard part is rule. Number one is to challenge yourself. Rule number two is to not

01:04:34.380 hurt yourself. So that's where things get to be a little difficult as we get older. A lot of times

01:04:38.460 that shifts, right? But in the beginning you, you need to get hurt. It sounds foolish to mention that,

01:04:45.120 but we've all been hurt in the gym and we've all learned a lot from it. And I'm not saying that you

01:04:49.480 should haphazardly jump in there and not warm up and stuff. But the truth is we could sit here and

01:04:53.940 promote warmup and stretching and stuff and no one's still going to do it.

01:04:57.140 Well, but hang on, but let's talk about it. You guys are big on warming up the glute mead. You've

01:05:03.080 got, you, you sell a thing that one of the things I'm hoping you either have here or I'll have to buy

01:05:06.900 it on the website, but I like your little hip circle, your hip circle. So, I mean, that was one

01:05:12.180 of the most important insights of my life was you can't squat or deadlift until your glute mead,

01:05:18.280 your TFL are working. It's foolish to, it's foolish to start a workout without warming up.

01:05:23.100 You got to move around. If you're going to do any sort of upper body stuff, you got to get the elbow

01:05:27.080 joint warm. You got to get the shoulders warm and there doesn't have to be any science to it. There's

01:05:32.340 not to be anything in particular to it. If you're going to squat, you throw on something like a hip

01:05:36.160 circle, you walk forward, you walk backwards, you walk side to side, and maybe you do some sort of

01:05:41.100 bending exercise where you're, you're picking up barbell or plate, you know, and just bending from the

01:05:46.340 hips basically. But you have to warm up for your workouts. But if you're not challenging yourself,

01:05:52.180 then you're missing out on a big piece of the puzzle because you're never going to get the

01:05:56.820 results that you're looking for. People always think that when they look at other people on social

01:06:02.700 media, when they look at Jeff Bezos, the guy that owns Amazon, or if they look at Elon Musk, or they

01:06:09.260 look at The Rock, people are like, man, that's so cool. Like, that would be awesome to be them. Like,

01:06:14.200 must be easy. Like, must be easier because they're them, because they have that money,

01:06:19.260 because they have that freedom. It is 10, 20, 30, 100,000 times harder to be them. It gets to be

01:06:28.900 harder and harder to be yourself as you continue to grow in fitness. And so that's the reason why

01:06:33.620 you have to challenge yourself each and every day. You have to figure out a way, how can I be better

01:06:39.240 than I was yesterday? Doesn't always mean that you have to do more weight, but you have to

01:06:44.080 challenge yourself in something. There has to be progress. Without progress, I don't believe

01:06:49.240 you can even have happiness. And so the progress is going to be very, very motivating to you as

01:06:54.980 well. And it's going to be something that will help keep you on track.

01:06:57.460 Before I go to you, Chris, I want to follow up more on that. Talk to me about some of the ways

01:07:01.860 that you would monitor progress when you're already at the level of the world's best, which you were.

01:07:07.540 The days are long gone where there's a PR every day in the gym. You PR once a year,

01:07:12.080 that's a good year. So what are you doing to motivate yourself day in and day out when you're

01:07:16.860 still benching every week and still squatting and still deadlifting? Like, how are you finding out

01:07:21.040 what are these incremental goals? As you chase one thing, something else starts to fall apart

01:07:26.000 and there'll be tipping point. You want to be really strong? Well, maybe, maybe you run into an

01:07:33.000 injury just because like, sometimes we're sitting there and trying to think about it. We're like,

01:07:36.220 well, you know, I don't know. Maybe your, your hips are tighter. Maybe it's like,

01:07:39.800 how about it's just, you try to lift up 700 pounds and you've been doing it for the last

01:07:43.220 three or four weeks. And that's just that, like, that's just the way the body is going to be. So

01:07:46.980 there's always something to work on. There's always something to improve.

01:07:50.960 You always have that kind of white belt mentality where you're like, I don't know everything.

01:07:55.720 I don't pretend to know everything. There's still so much to learn and expand upon.

01:08:00.040 And when you look around, you're like, are there other people that are better than me

01:08:04.000 in this lift? Are there other people that are stronger than me? Of course there is.

01:08:07.440 Are there other people who've gone further than me? Of course there is. So that means I have a lot

01:08:13.120 to work on. There's always a PR to chase. There's always something to chase. It might not be on that

01:08:17.720 lift. It just might look like something different. One of the magical things that I've learned in the

01:08:24.280 gym, and it's one of my favorite things is just, and I share this with everybody. Do you know a way to

01:08:31.180 get a PR every single time you step foot into a gym?

01:08:33.420 Low standards. Start low.

01:08:35.460 Well, that's my life right there. I have low standards.

01:08:39.120 Yeah, right.

01:08:39.840 No, to try something you've never done before. What's your max set of seven with incline dumbbell

01:08:46.700 press? You have no clue, right? What's your max set of three sets of seven with one minute rest on

01:08:54.420 incline dumbbell press? You have no idea. Or machine, or like you can get excited and you kind of make it

01:08:59.220 anything. And you can start to kind of make it into a little bit of a game. And that's where it

01:09:03.200 gets to be really fun. Oh yeah, last time I tried this, I did, I think I only did 95 pounds. I'm

01:09:08.420 going to try a hundred pounds. I'm going to try a hundred and five pounds. And at first, a lot of

01:09:12.540 those things will go up and up and up and up. And after a while they will dissipate, but you can

01:09:16.880 always think of, well, maybe I'm going to try sets of 25 today just because I've never done it before.

01:09:21.180 So what, what about you, Chris, all the hard knocks you've learned? What's the, what's the

01:09:26.440 advice for the person listening to this who like wants to get stronger and doesn't want to be

01:09:30.180 intimidated when they walk in the weight room? Yeah. The number one thing for me that really

01:09:35.060 changed my life altogether is my diet. You know, like what I put in my mouth affected what I did

01:09:39.900 in the gym. And I didn't, never saw that correlation when I was younger because I just ate like crazy and

01:09:44.940 was a power lifter. But I can really see now that every competition that I won once I moved to

01:09:50.100 California. So I explained to you before we were even on the podcast, I was telling you when I moved

01:09:55.500 to California in 1993, I met up with a group of power lifters. One of them was Mike O'Hearn. Another

01:10:01.900 one was my friend, Ron Fedko, who is a, a maniac. And he was a, so Ron Fedko was a power lifter. He was

01:10:09.640 getting his degree in applied mathematics at UCLA, getting his PhD. And now he's the head of the

01:10:14.900 computer science department at Stanford. This guy would bench press, he bench pressed 526 with a

01:10:20.760 no bench shirt. He squatted 804, something like that. And deadlifted like close to eight, something

01:10:26.300 like that at 198. And when he met me, he said to me, you're too fat. You need to lose weight. Like,

01:10:32.720 like one of the first things he said to me when I was like, Hey, you know, I want to really weird

01:10:36.160 stuff too. And you were like, I said, I remember he told us about like the mitochondria and stuff.

01:10:40.100 Oh yeah. Way back. It was like my red blood cells are way off. I should be able to press

01:10:43.840 that for more reps. We were like, what? Yeah. He's always like, but he benched 225 for 64 reps.

01:10:49.620 Yeah. He was just a maniac. So anyway, he told me one of the first things he said was like,

01:10:54.240 you're, you know, you're just too fat to be a good power lifter. Like he just had no, uh,

01:10:59.460 he was rough around the edges. Yeah. He was rough around the edges, but he's like, you know,

01:11:03.340 but if you lost weight, you'd be pretty good. And I'm like, well, I have no idea how to like really

01:11:07.560 lose weight. I've been, I've been trying to lose weight. That's why I'm in the gym. The entire

01:11:11.480 time from the day I stepped in the gym, my goal was to lose weight. And I'd never been able to

01:11:16.080 until I figured out this keto diet, you know, where you, so you, you talk about how you were

01:11:20.640 chubby as a kid, Chris Mark, were you chubby as a kid? I was fat too. I got fat around, I got fat

01:11:27.400 around 13 and continued to build because we didn't know anything about eating. Everything we ate was

01:11:32.940 snack wells and granola bars, you know, wait, is that bad? Yeah. Oh, okay. I was a little bit more

01:11:38.040 in the middle, I guess, but like, you know, by around 16 years old, I was like 240 pounds,

01:11:42.800 but I was like, kind of, kind of big, kind of big and fat. And then, you know, I started to learn

01:11:47.860 more because he was picking up stuff, relaying information to me. And then I started to kind

01:11:52.560 of slim down and get in better shape. But when I met Ron in 93 and I, the very first thing he said

01:11:57.960 was like, Hey, go get a piece of paper and write down everything I said. So I ran and did it.

01:12:01.840 And I got the paper. I was all excited. I'm 23 years old and getting information from this

01:12:06.880 great power lifter. And he just says red meat and water. And I write it down. I'm going, okay. And

01:12:11.660 what else? That's it. That's your diet, red meat and water. I don't even want to see you

01:12:15.440 chewing a stick of gum. And I was kind of scared of Ron. So of course I didn't even chew a stick of gum.

01:12:21.620 And I went for like two or three weeks on no carbs, just literally ground beef. This is before

01:12:27.820 grass fed beef was even a thing. I don't even think you'd be able to find it if you had to.

01:12:31.840 It was those big fat tubes going around back then. Yeah. Those big fat tubes of, uh,

01:12:37.080 you know, the beef, the five pounders. And I would just cook those up. And I did that for a couple

01:12:43.580 of weeks and, um, lost like over 20 pounds, won the power lifting competition that I went into

01:12:49.840 and then continue to do that down to like one 98 weight class. And the next meet after that,

01:12:54.720 I'd started around two 40 and got all the way down under one 98.

01:12:58.400 And how much strength did you lose? And when you lost 40 pounds, you actually got stronger,

01:13:02.400 way stronger. Yeah. Yeah. Way stronger. And the thing is, so I, cause I lost weight. I was able

01:13:06.480 to grab the bar. Now I was able to squat better. Right. I was able to get down to the bar. And so

01:13:11.080 it was hard doing like losing the weight and getting there. But once I got there, I was,

01:13:15.640 I stayed relatively strong. But my biggest problem was that for some reason, uh, there wasn't any

01:13:22.320 research on a keto diet back then. There wasn't any research at all on a, uh, there was research,

01:13:27.260 but I didn't know how to get to it. You know, especially the internet wasn't even around

01:13:30.360 1993. Right. So barely around what I did was I, um, I stopped doing it because I was, I was afraid

01:13:36.840 that the diet, I didn't know anything about it. I thought we needed carbohydrates. I thought we needed.

01:13:42.060 So for me, the biggest lesson I learned was that I should have never got off the original,

01:13:47.020 you know, keto slash carnivore diet that worked really well for me. I'd gotten off of it for like

01:13:52.060 10 or 15 years until getting back on it more recently in the past two years. But I feel like

01:13:58.060 those years in between were lost. I feel like I ruined them. I feel like because I wasn't optimizing

01:14:04.400 my training along with my diet that I kind of wasted those years. You know,

01:14:09.460 if someone said to you, Hey, I want to learn how to squat, but I can't come to you and your gym.

01:14:14.300 What, what do you point them to? I mean, I typically point people to videos that Mark

01:14:17.940 Ripito makes. Yeah. Like who, who are you liking on YouTube? Do you, do you have instructional stuff

01:14:22.160 on there? He's got a lot. Yeah. I have over 3000 videos on YouTube. So we, you know, we have a whole

01:14:26.940 media team and we, we pump out a lot of, a lot of information. The most exciting thing is that he's

01:14:31.260 got videos from Ed Cohn on there. Ed Cohn's best squatter ever, you know, and, um, videos from Stan

01:14:36.700 Efferding, strongest raw power lifter ever. You know, one thing that Mark Ripito did really well is,

01:14:41.820 and people will bash him cause they don't like, there's a lot of people that don't like the way

01:14:46.160 that he squats, but really what he's trying to do is he's trying to show you a universal way to

01:14:50.940 squat and people are like, Oh, and a very safe way to squat. Yeah. Yeah. Biomechanical. Yeah. It is

01:14:56.140 very safe. A lot of people will say, Oh, he's leaning over way too much. Well, most people can't squat

01:15:00.640 in an upright position. They just don't have the ankle mobility, the hamstring mobility. He's just

01:15:05.180 trying to, he's trying to, in a five minute segment, tell everyone how to squat. And that's, I think people

01:15:11.040 lose, lose sight of people, the benefit of the doubt. CrossFit is a great place for people to

01:15:15.220 start. You know, that's interesting because, because there's some people that argue the

01:15:18.480 opposite, right? Which is CrossFit tries to take relatively untrained people and get them to do

01:15:22.720 Olympic lifting. And even when you look at Olympic lifters, they don't do that much Olympic lifting.

01:15:28.040 I'll say this, there has never in the history of the world has there been a better fitness program

01:15:33.640 than what CrossFit puts out. Nobody spends more time and more money on what they put together.

01:15:38.300 I know because I've been on the, on the back end of it. I've seen, I've seen what they do.

01:15:43.920 I've seen what they do with their website. I've seen what they do with all the different things.

01:15:47.640 I'm not even a CrossFit nut. I don't even care about CrossFit really, to be honest with you.

01:15:52.180 One thing I don't like that they do is the gymnastics element with adults is kind of a weird thing just

01:15:57.660 because it's so hard to learn as you're older, but so what? It's a deeper and stronger challenge,

01:16:01.880 right? But when you start to learn that they spend millions and millions of dollars,

01:16:06.960 obviously they make millions and millions of dollars, but when they spend millions and millions

01:16:10.020 of dollars setting up a fitness contest that has over 200,000 participants and it narrows it down

01:16:19.760 to the number one man and number one female in the world, I think that that's fucking awesome.

01:16:27.100 And that's one of the coolest human studies that's going on. They also teach a lot about nutrition.

01:16:31.900 That's important. When you go on the back end of their website, if you try to take one of those

01:16:35.560 coaching courses, you will get absolutely slaughtered. I don't care how much you know

01:16:39.600 about fitness. You'll get destroyed in that. It is so hard to try to figure out how to referee some

01:16:45.520 of these things or how to even answer some of these questions that are on there. They have done

01:16:49.920 an amazing job. And I know that they're reaching out to a lot of leading researchers when it comes to

01:16:55.540 the nutrition aspect. I know they used to have Rob Wolf and they kind of have moved around a little

01:16:59.680 bit. I'm not sure if you ever spoke with them, but I know some others that have, and they do a good

01:17:05.320 job of investigating and poking around and finding the right thing. I'm not saying it's the answer for

01:17:10.900 everybody, but if you are somebody that just has no clue on where to start, I'd recommend try a

01:17:18.240 CrossFit box because they're everywhere. They're all over the place. Also understand that your first

01:17:23.280 experience may not be great. Just like if you went to a therapist or you went to a healthcare

01:17:28.780 professional, like they might suck, right? So what? Go and try another spot. Go and try somewhere

01:17:34.420 else. You should typically find that they're very encouraging. The environment is very encouraging.

01:17:40.200 They want you to exercise. They want you to get better. Their business model isn't that of a huge

01:17:46.220 chain gym where they're like, we just want you to sign up for 20 bucks and never see you again. So

01:17:50.520 I think CrossFit offers a lot, teaches people how to squat, teaches people how to deadlift.

01:17:55.540 I do wish that they paid a little bit more attention to people trying to gain muscle,

01:18:02.220 a little bit more, like a little bit more bodybuilding stuff, but they keep evolving and

01:18:06.800 they keep moving with the times. Let's actually talk a little bit about that because you're in

01:18:11.740 the process of doing exactly what you just described. You're training for a bodybuilding

01:18:15.320 competition. That's probably by the time this podcast come out, the bodybuilding competition

01:18:18.940 will have already taken place because it's in a few weeks. But I was saying before we started this,

01:18:22.820 I think you and I, Chris, we were just playing patty cakes in the kitchen and I was like,

01:18:25.960 I was like, there are a few things I know less about than bodybuilding. Now, which isn't to say

01:18:32.320 that growing up, I wasn't obsessed with it, right? Like I fricking had every copy of every magazine.

01:18:37.200 I had pictures of Lee Haney all over my wall. Obviously I know every single line of pumping iron,

01:18:43.340 including all the outtakes. So you know enough. No, no. I mean, I know that, but the point is,

01:18:47.100 I don't know anything about how to like make a person bigger. Like if someone came to me and said,

01:18:50.580 Peter, I want to get jacked, what should I do? My answer would be, I have no clue. Like,

01:18:55.180 I don't know. I think it involves what you eat and how you lift, but that's about all I know.

01:18:59.540 So to me, this is like a super interesting art. So what have you guys learned about this? And I

01:19:05.040 want to specifically hear what you're doing. First things first, I would say a lot of

01:19:09.320 bodybuilders, a lot of people that are into bodybuilding get their start because they start

01:19:14.300 lifting for football or baseball or boxing or whatever else they're doing. They start like

01:19:18.940 lifting weights for to get prepared for something else. And then they get bit by the bodybuilding

01:19:24.100 bug. So I think a powerlifting is a great place to start for most people. And I think it's where

01:19:28.620 most people do start is sort of like start, I started benching for football and then I started

01:19:32.960 squatting and then I, you know, next thing you know, I was into bodybuilding. So I think like

01:19:36.620 a great way to just dive in and, and get started is, um, through some sort of lifting program that

01:19:42.600 might aid something else that you're trying to do. That way you're also killing two birds with one

01:19:47.560 stone. You're getting better at what you're trying to do. And then, you know, who knows,

01:19:51.820 this might be something that you enjoy and want to pursue.

01:19:54.280 And then powerlifting to me is, I don't think I'd ever let my kids box. I just, I feel fortunate

01:20:00.080 that I got out of it alive minus the IQ points I don't have, but I would love it if each of my kids

01:20:06.820 at least spend some time powerlifting because whatever you go to do later in life, you will have

01:20:11.840 correctly learned the mechanics of the most important movements in the human body, which

01:20:17.180 primarily come down. There's a guy down in your area, San Diego. Uh, is his name Jeff Martin?

01:20:21.920 Oh yeah. Yeah. CrossFit kids. Okay. He's, he started that like dissolve the name of, yeah.

01:20:27.640 Now it's called X brand X something. But anyway, so yeah, his thing is awesome. He's got all these

01:20:33.820 kids involved in powerlifting, right? So I went Mark. That's awesome. Mark's company slingshot.

01:20:39.300 They sent me down to San Diego with a camera and said, go film this powerlifting meet for kids.

01:20:44.260 And it was all kids from like, I think ages like seven or eight up to like 15. And out of everything

01:20:51.420 we've done on that channel, out of everything we did with Mark's YouTube channel, that was the most

01:20:55.780 fun I've ever had. Just hanging out with kids that were like, you know, between the ages of eight and

01:21:00.740 15 and having them say, Mark Bell changed my life. He wasn't able to make it. He had like something else

01:21:05.880 going on that day at the gym, but to go there and be able to interview those kids. And I would say,

01:21:10.180 Oh, I'm Mark's brother. They would get so excited that I was Mark's brother. It's like, no way,

01:21:15.020 you know, Mark. I'm like, yeah, he's my brother. Like, no way you grew up with him. And to me,

01:21:19.100 it's like the joy of seeing these kids get involved in powerlifting was just exciting.

01:21:23.760 You know, I did a seminar there and it was incredible to see the way these kids can move.

01:21:27.160 I was like, Oh my God, I was like really apprehensive about doing the seminar. Cause I was like,

01:21:30.920 what is that going to look like? I go to all these CrossFit boxes and I get asked to come in and teach

01:21:36.580 a seminar on how to squat bench and deadlift. And it takes me hours and hours on end because it's

01:21:41.200 very, very difficult to teach people how to squat. Meaning to teach adults how to squat who haven't,

01:21:46.340 who are tight in the hips. Who are, yeah, tight in the hips. Maybe they don't have a lot of experience

01:21:50.340 lifting or they just have bad experience lifting and they haven't learned enough yet. Getting with

01:21:56.300 these kids was crazy though. I was so shocked. Their form on everything was impeccable. I was

01:22:01.420 like, Holy shit. Cause he runs a tight ship down there. He, he has the kids. The first thing that

01:22:06.560 you see when you walk in is first of all, it says, parents, please wait outside for your child.

01:22:12.040 They don't allow the parents to hang out in there. If you want to come in and check the place out for a

01:22:15.880 minute to make sure there's not a bunch of creepers around you, obviously you can, but they want you to

01:22:21.320 drop your kid off there. The, and the second thing that you see is there's a room where kids go and

01:22:27.180 they do their homework. And so it sends a message like, you know, you're, you're stopping here first.

01:22:31.880 You're going to do your homework first. We're going to check in with you, make sure you got all your

01:22:34.780 stuff done. Then we're going to go lift weights. I have a feeling his kids are going to end up at

01:22:40.480 this gym. So when I, um, I remember when I saw my boy who, so I have a one-year-old and a four-year-old

01:22:49.300 and then I, who are both boys. And then I got a 10 year old girl or almost 10 year old. And the,

01:22:53.580 um, boy who's four, because he still isn't in school, meaning he's only in like, you know,

01:22:57.680 whatever, like goof off school. Um, he doesn't actually, he never sits in a chair. So anytime I

01:23:03.560 watch him squat to pick something up, I go, Oh, stop there. I got to get a picture. Yeah. Cause

01:23:08.560 it's like form is great. The form is, it's ridiculous. Here's heels are down. Knees are open. Oh my God.

01:23:14.300 It's like her. It's like, he looks like a little power. He looks like a little Hercules. And then

01:23:19.500 conversely, my daughter who used to be able to do that now, you know, she's whatever, just finished

01:23:23.140 fourth grade. Her squats worse than mine. Like her form is horrible. When I say, Olivia, get down and

01:23:28.160 squat for me. That's something I look at all the time. And I say, how do we, how do we maintain that

01:23:32.700 in our children? Like how, I wish I could have maintained that. And I think that that's something

01:23:36.980 that somebody needs to figure out. Well, I mean, I think the answer is we're born with it is the first.

01:23:40.760 We are all born knowing how to hip hinge. And I would argue that sitting is the thing that cripples

01:23:46.820 us. It's a big part. And so how do you maintain it? Well, you can't eliminate sitting, but you can

01:23:51.800 minimize it. Right. So if every kid had a standing desk in school, for example, that's a step in the

01:23:56.540 right direction. Cause most of that sitting comes at school. And then secondly, it's like how you teach

01:24:00.680 people the types of exercises to do. There's people working on the standing desk thing. Our friend

01:24:05.480 Kelly Sturette is leading that charge. Kelly and Juliette Sturette. Yeah. Leading the charge to have kids

01:24:10.500 have standup desks and they're doing programs where they're raising money to make that happen.

01:24:16.140 Do you know Kelly Sturette, Mobility Wad? He's a CrossFit guy and they've, they've had great success.

01:24:21.560 They find that kids do better in school when they stand too, you know, so they've been.

01:24:24.580 Another big element of, you know, having children progress with some of those things rather than go

01:24:30.140 backwards would be to simply have the physical education, you know, have a little bit more

01:24:35.160 emphasis than it does. It used to a real physical education and that, and now you can't really do

01:24:40.140 it anymore. Kids can't do pull-ups or pushups or run a mile. And everyone should remember the

01:24:45.680 president should be able to do some version of that. I'm not saying everyone should be like super

01:24:49.780 proficient at it, but you know, when you start in kindergarten, you learn your ABCs, you start to

01:24:55.340 learn some math. And as you keep progressing, your English progresses, your math progresses, you learn

01:25:00.720 more stuff about history, starts out with like George Washington and you progress to learn more

01:25:05.500 about American history and so on. But when it comes to the physical education, not much really

01:25:10.700 changes. It's like, it just is like playing and then it goes into like a little bit more stuff and

01:25:15.840 it just completely fizzles out. And now it's a lot of times not even in school anymore.

01:25:19.840 And we used to have that presidential physical fitness thing, right? And it actually was like a

01:25:24.440 program that made sense, but then they just completely like discontinued that kind of stuff.

01:25:28.500 And I think that like getting kids to be active, they're at school all day. And then like gym

01:25:33.780 class is like, nobody wants to get dressed for gym class and nobody does anything.

01:25:37.820 A lot of times kids want to move.

01:25:39.580 Take the kids out for a walk or something, you know?

01:25:42.640 I mean, I don't know what to do.

01:25:43.500 Throw a ball around with a kid or kick a ball around with a kid. I mean, if they're five, six,

01:25:47.340 seven, they're not going to turn that down.

01:25:49.840 With my daughter, when she comes in the gym with me in the morning, because in San Diego, I just work out at

01:25:54.520 home. And one of the things I've got her doing, which is a competition is what's her

01:25:58.160 how long can she dead hang in a chin up? And she's, you know, I forget what her record is now,

01:26:03.920 but it's like, you know, the first time she did it, she could only hold 17 seconds or something

01:26:07.380 like that. And now she's like over two minutes dead hanging.

01:26:10.340 Really?

01:26:10.780 Yeah.

01:26:11.320 She's a savage.

01:26:12.280 That's pretty good.

01:26:12.960 And, you know, she's light as a feather.

01:26:14.600 Yeah, but that's still pretty cool.

01:26:16.280 Right. So now it's like-

01:26:17.820 I can't hang for two minutes. I die after 30 seconds.

01:26:19.600 Well, the fact that she's getting an idea of what that's doing too, you know?

01:26:22.240 Well, and the funny thing that I love about doing it is explaining to her the mental fitness.

01:26:26.120 So that time she failed at 17 seconds, she just went from hanging to failing. And I was

01:26:30.840 like, Olivia, I didn't even see you shaking. I didn't see you suffering. What the hell is

01:26:34.980 going on here? Like, yeah, yeah. Like, I don't think you understand the purpose of this

01:26:38.780 exercise. You are trying to test the limit of what you're capable of. By definition, that

01:26:44.120 is going to hurt. And the other thing is, oh, this is funny. Maybe I was wrong.

01:26:47.560 That actually is interesting. A kid doesn't register.

01:26:49.640 Yeah. Super healthy, though, too. Because sometimes in competition, a kid may be more

01:26:55.360 discouraged to swim next to the other kid next to them because they're like, I just think

01:26:59.260 if I try harder, I'm not going to get any further ahead. The kid's still going to whoop my ass.

01:27:03.460 In this, it's just her versus her, which is cool.

01:27:05.820 Yeah. And then I even, once she started to get the bug in her and she wanted to do it every

01:27:10.100 day, she would go in and do it. And I was like, look, Olivia, you got to take a couple days

01:27:13.260 off. Like, if you really want to hit this, you need to rest and recover a little bit. And we'll

01:27:17.720 start planking and doing all those other things. So, you know, I hope we can maintain it.

01:27:21.460 Look, Olivia, you need your electrolytes and we need to get you on some BCAAs.

01:27:23.880 Olivia, how many egg yolks have you had today?

01:27:26.720 Olivia, if you really want to do this, we're going to push it. You're going to be the Olympic

01:27:29.560 hanging champion.

01:27:30.740 So, Mark, your first experience with bodybuilding was when?

01:27:33.620 Now.

01:27:34.000 Right now.

01:27:34.340 This is it. This is your first.

01:27:35.360 Yeah, 41 years old.

01:27:36.760 So, I'm dying to know. Like, can I not look like a pathetic guy? Like, what would I need to

01:27:42.800 do if I wanted to be half as jacked as you?

01:27:45.800 Bodybuilding is amazing. You can make

01:27:47.480 changes really, really rapidly. You can make changes really, really fast. For me, I'm very

01:27:52.720 fortunate. I'm around a lot of people that have a lot of great information. And so, I

01:27:57.000 have the ability to have some accelerated success with the amount of people that are surrounding

01:28:02.800 me in this effort. But the diet is interesting. The cardio is interesting. We're in a country

01:28:09.180 that's so fat that there's, like, studies that show that cardiovascular training is bad

01:28:13.420 for you. It shows that, like, it increases your estrogen and your cortisol so much you

01:28:18.120 can't release fat. I mean, just some of these things are, it's really crazy to think that

01:28:24.980 people are trying to even study something like that. When you look at bodybuilding, bodybuilders

01:28:30.340 for years have done these certain things very specific ways. And it works time and time and

01:28:36.940 time again. It just continues to work every single time. Bodybuilders are, you know, partially

01:28:42.800 responsible or probably largely responsible for a ketogenic diet even sticking around in

01:28:47.820 the first place because they will always introduce some form of low-carbohydrate living. That's

01:28:52.800 how I learned about it many years ago. But the discipline to do all the things that you don't

01:29:00.820 want to do when you normally don't want to do them is really, really powerful. Stopping

01:29:06.560 yourself from eating extra. Jake Cutler came into our gym recently. He's a four-time

01:29:12.260 Mr. Olympian. He said on a podcast that he...

01:29:14.720 Can you explain to people what the difference is between Mr. Olympia and any other bodybuilding

01:29:18.580 contest?

01:29:18.880 Yeah. The Mr. Olympia contest is the biggest one.

01:29:21.400 It's the Super Bowl.

01:29:22.340 Yeah. That's what Arnold...

01:29:23.180 That's what Arnold Schwarzenegger was seven times.

01:29:25.060 That's what he was famous for, Dorian Yates and those guys. So, you know, this isn't just

01:29:29.920 some schmuck. This is a...

01:29:31.200 This is the world's best bodybuilder for four years.

01:29:33.900 Yeah. He said he ate seven times a day. And I just sat there and went, wow, that's a lot

01:29:39.960 of dedication to eat seven times a day. It means, you know, all your meals are prepped

01:29:43.740 and everything. And he said he ate the same food at the same time every single day. He

01:29:48.700 did his cardio at the same time. He did his weightlifting at the same time. He would go

01:29:53.080 tanning at the same time. He would get in a hot tub, get a massage and so on and go to

01:29:57.800 sleep. All, you know, all these things were regimented out. So that way he never skipped a beat

01:30:02.700 and that way he could be precise and that way he could be the best. As he was talking about all

01:30:07.180 these things, I kept kind of dwelling on that seven meal thing because I've tinkered with some

01:30:12.840 intermittent fasting and I've teetered with some different things, but I was fixated on that. I'm

01:30:18.520 like, as I got into this bodybuilding stuff, I started asking some other guys. I'm like, well,

01:30:23.760 can you do this and can you do that? They're like, no. I'm like, well, I can have like,

01:30:29.720 I'm supposed to have like 150 carbs a day, 65 grams of fat, 350 grams of protein. I'm like,

01:30:36.260 can I just have like a hundred grams of protein in one shot and have like a big steak meal? They're

01:30:40.700 like, no. And I'm like trying to figure out all these loopholes. They're like, there's no loopholes.

01:30:46.620 This is the way it's got to be. It's 50 grams of protein at every meal for seven meals. That's

01:30:52.080 350 grams of protein. That's what you're supposed to do. And so I finally got it through my fat head

01:30:57.440 that that's what I'm supposed to do. But these things are lined up in a very specific manner.

01:31:01.720 Now, when I went and started to try to look and poke around and figure out how many times a day

01:31:06.320 the average person eats, it was 15 times a day. Because there's so much snacking.

01:31:12.980 Yeah. Because there's so much snacking. And I just never, I never even thought about it,

01:31:17.120 but I'm like, I'm on a diet all the time. I'm always trying to lose weight. And boy,

01:31:25.340 do I sabotage the fuck out of myself? Because I do that all the time. I'll grab,

01:31:30.120 you know, and it's stuff that's, you know, within this reasonable, healthy menu.

01:31:33.920 Sure, sure. It's a handful of almonds or whatever it is.

01:31:36.560 Yeah. Oh, a cheese stick. And you think you're so hungry and you think you need it to recover and

01:31:40.120 you think you need it to be jacked, but you just don't. You can actually handle eating a lot less

01:31:45.480 than you're currently eating is one thing to know. And you can actually handle a lot more training.

01:31:49.860 Now, I'm not trying to suggest that you just get in this crazy mode of overtraining and develop,

01:31:56.640 you know, body dysmorphia and all these things. But I do think you could probably push yourself a

01:32:02.040 lot further than you know, currently. And when you, if you go from not implementing bodybuilding stuff

01:32:09.380 to implementing bodybuilding stuff, it makes a huge difference. I know you've been on Joe Rogan's

01:32:14.900 podcast. We've been fortunate enough to be on this podcast as well.

01:32:18.200 Well, he's the perfect example. He takes somebody like that already has a good structure or yourself.

01:32:23.780 And you mentioned kettlebell training and mentioned some different things.

01:32:27.420 You know, you were speaking with Daniel Rego and telling him some of the things that you've been

01:32:31.500 doing. I know, and Daniel knows, because we trained with Michael Hearn, that if you implemented

01:32:36.500 some bodybuilding stuff, or not even some bodybuilding stuff, if you, if you just embraced

01:32:41.060 bodybuilding period, you'd be able to look so much different four weeks from right now.

01:32:45.620 So give me an example, like a practical example, because I'm probably up your, probably up your

01:32:49.200 protein too. That's usually one, I don't know what it is now. So I can't really say that,

01:32:53.180 but right now I'm in ketosis. So my protein's pretty low. It's probably about a hundred grams

01:32:57.220 a day. You probably want more like 1.7. So the, the science that I've heard, you know,

01:33:02.860 1.7 grams per kilogram of body weight will elicit muscle growth, right? So we need at least that much

01:33:09.160 for me, it's 135 grams. So I think it's just like finding that number, sticking to that number.

01:33:14.940 And like Mark said, incorporating some bodybuilding stuff. For me, the changes with extra protein

01:33:19.940 happened immediately. And like he'll tell you, it just changed. It was like one day I was skinny

01:33:25.420 fat and next day I was muscular. And it was kind of, kind of like that by just flipping.

01:33:29.160 But is this rule of 50 grams per meal times the seven meals? I mean, presumably that's because

01:33:35.920 amino acids have a relatively short residence and you've got to kind of keep the exposure to those

01:33:40.640 things high for a longer period of time to at least get the hypertrophy, right?

01:33:44.700 Right. And that's specifically for me. That's for my body weight. That's for the energy expenditure.

01:33:49.260 That's for my age with a general understanding of, you know, what I can do in the gym.

01:33:54.380 I mean, maybe taking a step back because I don't know enough about this.

01:33:56.500 I weigh 230 pounds.

01:33:57.560 But you're getting close to competition. So as you want to show up at the competition weighing what?

01:34:02.480 You personally?

01:34:02.960 I'm just going to kind of end up where I end up, but I would imagine it would be another 10.

01:34:06.940 There'd probably be another eight to 10 pounds of actual weight loss before now and then.

01:34:13.200 And there'll probably be another five to 10 pounds of water weight that's dropped. I don't really know

01:34:18.420 what they have in store for me, but I guess.

01:34:19.760 What would you estimate your body fat percent will be on the day of competition?

01:34:22.920 Oh, I don't have any idea, but I think I'll probably weigh about 215 pounds or 210 pounds. I think

01:34:27.760 actually really the lower, the lower that I weigh, I feel like the bigger that I'll probably

01:34:32.760 look without getting, you know, I'll getting out of hand with that. Cause I'll, then I'll

01:34:36.360 start to look small.

01:34:37.320 And at the peak of your building phase before you began this taper, how much did you weigh?

01:34:41.600 I didn't have one because I was just kind of.

01:34:43.680 You just came straight out of power lifting and.

01:34:45.520 Yeah. I just kind of got shoved into it cause I was, I was dropping some weight, but I was

01:34:49.380 probably about 240, 245. So that's, that's what I'm talking about is the difference has only

01:34:54.580 been, it's only been about 10 pounds, but it's crazy. Cause like even just on my YouTube

01:35:00.680 channel, we posted a video a few days ago, but it's from about three, about two, three

01:35:06.220 weeks ago when I started all this and it's me working on some posing. I just flat out

01:35:11.000 look fat, you know, compared to now, obviously not fat, but it's just fat flat out look fat.

01:35:16.060 Yeah. Mark is like you said, he's got, he's in a position where he can talk to some of the

01:35:21.140 best people in the world about training diet and nutrition. And what he was doing was a podcast

01:35:25.960 with a Hany Rombad, who is the nutritionist for Phil Heath, who's a seven. Did Phil ween will

01:35:32.820 win last year? Yeah. So he's now won seven consecutive and he's going for eight. And how

01:35:37.860 many did Ronnie Coleman win? Eight, eight. That's the most. Have you seen Ronnie Coleman's

01:35:41.660 documentary? I, I, I know that it exists. I haven't mentioned that cause it was a really

01:35:45.420 great story as well. I thought he won seven. Oh, did Lee win eight? You're right. 84 to 91. And

01:35:50.980 then Yates won like six or both those guys won eight. Yeah. So Mark's working with

01:35:55.980 Hany Rombad, who's helping them do his diet and stuff, which I think is amazing to be able

01:36:00.940 to have access to like the top people in the world. And he was working the other day with

01:36:05.180 Charles Glass doing posing and Charles is known as the godfather of bodybuilding. He's at Gold's

01:36:10.700 gym every day. He trained Dexter Jackson for the 2008, you know, Mr. Olympia contest as well

01:36:15.700 as like a ton of other. Michael Hearn's an amazing person too. You know, he's been helping us

01:36:19.580 both a lot. You hear different things about the guy, but he just, he trains at four o'clock

01:36:24.100 in the morning. He wakes up at about two 30. He eats at three. He makes sure he gets his ass to the

01:36:29.540 gym. When he gets, when he gets to the gym, he's not full of like motivational talk or anything like

01:36:34.620 that. But a lot of times one of his first questions will be, what'd you eat this morning?

01:36:38.240 And if somebody says they didn't eat anything, he's just kind of, he doesn't even really say

01:36:43.720 anything. He just kind of like walks off, but he's just kind of, it's, it's almost like, oh,

01:36:48.040 I guess you're not all in, you know, I guess you're not, I guess you're not as into this as I thought,

01:36:52.280 because this is, this is the method that we're, we're going to use.

01:36:56.300 So the nutrition is clearly important. And, and I mean, if there's one thing that's clear in

01:37:00.500 everything you're saying, it's just how empirically wise this, this sport is, right?

01:37:06.760 I can't even eat at a restaurant because I can't afford to have any oil or can't, I mean,

01:37:11.660 there cannot be, I can't have a day where I have 120 grams of fat. It's, I'm supposed to have,

01:37:16.700 you know, 65 grams of fat in a day. And if for some reason something was off and I had

01:37:21.580 70 or 80, it wouldn't be the end of the world, but I'm supposed to be within this range.

01:37:26.880 What percentage of macro, what percentage of your calories are protein, fat, carbohydrate right

01:37:31.620 now?

01:37:31.900 I don't really know that. Daniel would have to run the math over there, but.

01:37:35.280 Daniel, can you run those numbers for us, man?

01:37:36.900 350 in protein, 65 grams of fat and 150 grams of carbohydrates. Sometimes the carbohydrates are

01:37:44.160 up a little bit from there, but the fats are 65.

01:37:48.260 And you said the carbs 135?

01:37:50.640 150.

01:37:52.140 I'll have some math going on.

01:37:53.260 But, uh, you know, it's like I said, it's very specific and, and carbohydrates just to try to

01:37:59.880 clear everything up for people that are listening. Cause I know you're a keto proponent and we love

01:38:03.360 the ketogenic diet. Ketogenic diet has always worked really well for me because it's allowed me to

01:38:09.080 keep control over the amount of food that I eat. It's one of the few things that has burned off

01:38:14.620 my hunger. It's one of the few things that have burned off my cravings. It's, it's the only thing

01:38:21.760 that has ever done that before. We're in the bodybuilding cycle.

01:38:25.660 Tell us what it, oh, hang on one second.

01:38:27.240 2,600 calories. What's the percentages, the macros? We're getting some information from

01:38:31.380 Daniel Arrego off screen here for those that are interested. Oh yeah. What's the, uh, Peter

01:38:37.460 want to know the macros for the, the fats probably, I'm going to guess 15.

01:38:40.840 So it's 2,600 calories is what you're saying? Not a whole lot of calories, but you know,

01:38:45.260 one thing on that is I don't feel deprived at all. I feel like I'm eating cause I'm eating

01:38:49.720 every two and a half, three hours and everyone keeps talking about how brutal it is and how hard

01:38:54.540 it is. And I know that it'll get worse cause you do start to calorie restrict and they,

01:39:00.020 you know, everyone says like the last two weeks kind of feel like a zombie, but I've been feeling

01:39:03.820 really good. And as I mentioned earlier, the progress is the motivation is every day I see

01:39:09.020 something new or different on me and I'm like, wow, I just didn't even have any idea I could do any

01:39:13.280 of this. I've tore both my biceps. I tore my pec three times. I tore my hamstring. I've torn a bunch

01:39:19.500 of stuff. And I never tried to consider to really bodybuild because I was like, man, if I dieted

01:39:26.000 down, I'd look weird because I've torn all that shit off my body. People kept asking them for years,

01:39:31.300 when are you going to do a show? You should get, you know, you're getting lean. I kind of thought

01:39:34.180 I was done. I was done powerlifting. I didn't have a lot of direction and wasn't sure what I was

01:39:38.100 going to do next. And so this challenge came, uh, it came at a perfect time. And I don't,

01:39:43.280 the challenge came from a podcast with honey, right? Yeah. He was like,

01:39:47.640 he was on his podcast and he said, well, why don't you do a show? You look great.

01:39:51.140 Well, he said, he said, he said it even more than that. He was like, I signed you up for

01:39:54.840 one. Yeah. You're doing it. So where does the ketogenic diet make sense for the bodybuilder?

01:40:01.380 What phase of, you know, is it when they're trying to get leaner? Yeah. I see. So for,

01:40:07.320 for, for, for some of the like pro bodybuilder guys, the ketogenic diet probably doesn't play

01:40:14.240 into anything they really want to mess around with unless they've been destructive for a while

01:40:20.900 with their behavior. Like if they, if they have eaten, if they've gone way off the rails and eaten,

01:40:27.300 but a pro doesn't do that professional bodybuilder, somebody who's being serious, who's trying to win

01:40:32.320 money at these shows, they would not be somebody that would be doing that. So they wouldn't even need

01:40:37.480 to utilize a ketogenic diet where a ketogenic diet would play into where it would really help.

01:40:42.980 Even somebody like myself, former fat kid is it will help me to kind of continue to tighten up and

01:40:49.540 it will also give me some mental freedom. I think one of the worst things you can ever do, whether

01:40:54.480 it's business or any aspect of your life lifting is get stuck in one thing. Cause you, a lot of times

01:41:00.600 you're, you're focused in on that one thing and you can't see anything else. And so if you were

01:41:05.560 always just doing a bodybuilding diet and if you were always utilizing cardio for 45 minutes every

01:41:10.740 day, all these things would become less effective. So where the ketogenic diet can come in, you could

01:41:16.740 utilize the ketogenic diet to become technically, uh, it works out pretty good on paper, but I don't

01:41:22.820 know how it works in theory would be, you could become more sensitive to carbohydrates by dumping in

01:41:29.040 a ketogenic diet at certain points and changing up the style of exercise that you do for a while.

01:41:33.760 The bodybuilding competitions, obviously Olympia is not a drug regulated competition, correct?

01:41:39.100 So you can't compete at that level without lots of drugs. What about at the level outside of

01:41:44.820 Olympia? So like this competition you're doing, is it a, is it considered a drug free competition?

01:41:49.280 I don't even know much about, I've never even been to a bodybuilding show. So this is all very new to

01:41:55.340 me. I I've only caught the tail end of a bodybuilding show at the Arnold classic where, you know,

01:42:01.760 I went to go see Brian Shaw and some of the bodybuilding stuff was finishing up and it was,

01:42:06.120 it was impressive. I mean, it was, it was pretty crazy to see those guys. Cause those,

01:42:09.380 there's some of the best, uh, that's effectively the Olympic level. That's, that's Olympia level

01:42:13.840 bodybuilding. You got Dexter Jackson up there who's 51 or 52 years old. I mean, there's some real

01:42:18.900 savages there, but, uh, yeah, I don't even know, like I, I know the posing I've been working on that,

01:42:24.240 but I don't know like the categories and I barely know, uh, so for this competition,

01:42:29.680 are you using anabolic steroids or diuretics or any of the other sort of aids that one would

01:42:34.480 use? You know, as, as in bigger, stronger, faster, you know, I talked about utilizing

01:42:38.860 them from the time I was 25 and I've been using them. I, you know, I've been, I say in the movie,

01:42:43.760 uh, I'm going to probably be on and off them the rest of my life. And that's what I believe.

01:42:48.900 It's direction. I chose when you choose a certain thing and you like the result of it.

01:42:54.680 Like, I don't feel like there's any reason to go back. And for me for now as well, you know,

01:42:59.600 I get it prescribed, which is a kind of added bonus to making sure that it's like, I guess,

01:43:04.420 more on the up and up. But to me, it doesn't really make any difference whether you grab it

01:43:08.400 from some dude at the gym or whether you get it from a doctor. I actually think that the,

01:43:12.180 I think that, uh, you know, there's, they're not going to be all that regulated anyway,

01:43:16.400 no matter, no matter how you slice it. But, but what are the, again, I don't know anything

01:43:20.720 about how bodybuilders use steroids. What are the, what are the, you know, body mass is the main

01:43:27.340 thing. So people get confused about what they actually do. People get confused about what

01:43:31.160 steroids do. I think people think that, that steroids automatically make you strong and they

01:43:37.480 don't necessarily automatically make you strong. What they do in most cases is they allow people to

01:43:43.080 gain more weight. Now there's some cases where people don't gain a whole lot of weight and

01:43:46.320 they do gain strength. But if you don't continue to gain weight at some point, that strength will

01:43:52.040 only level up so much. So when you introduce steroids, steroids don't multiply on top of

01:43:58.440 themselves. They only work to a certain level. So you're, you're on level one with your lifting

01:44:04.380 and you progress and your genetics and everything allow you to get to level four. You take steroids

01:44:09.480 and maybe over a period of time, you get to like level six, but you're still not going to be able

01:44:12.620 to get to level eight, nine or 10 where these guys like Jay Cutler and some of these mammoth

01:44:17.580 people are because of their genetics, because of their environment as children, because of X, Y, and

01:44:23.240 Z, you're probably just never going to be able to level up to their potential. But, which is an

01:44:28.680 important distinction because I think a lot of people, your starting point. Yeah. Well, a lot of

01:44:31.860 people look at, you know, let's just pick Phil Heath because he's the best in the world today. And

01:44:35.660 you're just going to think it's all drugs. It's all drugs. But I don't think people understand,

01:44:38.840 like I could inject a human being with every anabolic steroid period. Like let's get the world's

01:44:44.660 supply of anabolic steroids and inject it into me. Yeah. I couldn't look one 10th of what that guy

01:44:50.400 looks like. Right. And the best coaching and the best, whatever. People like to make things easy

01:44:55.200 and simplify it. And they can't come close to Phil Heath. They can't even, you know, come close even

01:45:00.440 with a ton of drugs. So they just want to say, oh, it's just steroids. It's not, it's not like, oh,

01:45:04.580 this guy works harder. This guy's better. And I do think that steroids cloud the sport.

01:45:08.660 I do, I do think that if there was a way to get steroids out of the sport,

01:45:12.960 that it could be more popular across the mainstream. However, well, it's part of the

01:45:17.300 reason why it has become more popular because they do have like men's physique and they got

01:45:21.320 some of these different categories now where you're seeing, you're seeing more men and women.

01:45:24.960 It's gone more, more mainstream with some of that stuff. The body types don't look as crazy,

01:45:30.040 right? And now there's a category called classic physique. And it's like, it's interesting

01:45:34.900 because like in the very first year of classic physique, my friend, Danny Hester,

01:45:39.280 he won Mr. Olympia classic physique. He's about 190 pounds. He looks awesome. He's always,

01:45:45.640 he always looks awesome. He's about my height, 190 jacked shred. It looks amazing. And then the

01:45:50.780 next year, the guy that wins, it's like 240. You know what I mean? You're like, this is not

01:45:54.140 classic physique anymore. Like, yeah. Like what happened to the little guys that were in great shape,

01:45:58.940 you know? And the guy that won looked, he looked amazing, but it's, and it's a different look than

01:46:04.100 the bigger bodybuilders, but it's not like, it's not yet a natural thing. It's not like one guy's

01:46:09.960 natural and one guy's on. It's like, they're just on different levels, right? Yeah. So classic doesn't

01:46:14.620 mean drug free. It means you're trying to produce a phenotype that is, you're trying to look like

01:46:18.640 Arnold Schwarzenegger is like, what's funny is like, now they have a category. Arnold Schwarzenegger was

01:46:23.480 Mr. Olympia seven times. He was considered in the Guinness book of world record, the greatest male

01:46:27.680 physique, which is just a title that gave him. He couldn't win a California bodybuilder. That's

01:46:31.680 what I'm saying. He can't win anymore. Like it. So, so they, if you look like Arnold, you'd

01:46:35.800 win classic physique now, which is kind of crazy. So who's your favorite seventies, eighties

01:46:40.720 bodybuilder? Frank Zane, Mike Menser, Mike Menser. Yeah. And Arnold, Arnold's a really big,

01:46:46.220 uh, influence. Huge fan of Dorian Yates too. You know, we blood and guts. A lot of that was

01:46:51.220 Mike. He was, he was later, right? Um, nineties. Oh yeah. And Menser and Yates actually have

01:46:56.320 quite a bit in common philosophically. They trained, they trained together too. And, um,

01:47:00.180 I trained with Mike Menser when I first came out here, when I moved out here in 93, like

01:47:04.300 you see people at the gym and you're a meathead. Uh, first thing I did was like, I'm training

01:47:08.660 with Mike Menser. You know, I don't care. He blew out my knee because he had me do these

01:47:12.260 crazy squats in the squat machine. And it messed up my knee for like six months, but it's, I

01:47:16.700 still had got to train with him that, which was cool. But at the time I got to train with

01:47:21.140 him, I showed up at the gym and he was outside smoking a cigarette and he's all fat. And there

01:47:25.920 was just like, Oh, this is Mike Menser. Now this is what he is. You know? And it's

01:47:29.140 like, you know, you, a lot of times in life, especially me, I've met all my heroes and

01:47:34.100 pretty much everybody's let me down. So it's just the way life is, I guess.

01:47:37.840 Have you ever met a hero that where they exceeded your expectation?

01:47:41.920 Um, I don't know. Let me see. Have we?

01:47:45.240 Yeah, we have many times.

01:47:46.860 I'm sure. I'm sure we have.

01:47:48.120 Ed Cohn.

01:47:48.980 Yeah. Ed Cohn.

01:47:50.060 Jake Cutler.

01:47:50.760 Stone Cold Steve Austin's one of my favorite people in the entire world.

01:47:53.920 He's so intelligent. Joe Rogan's fucking cool.

01:47:56.260 He's so well researched. Like he just, he's just awesome to be around. Like there's, there's

01:48:00.800 people like that. I think where we, the rock, the rock is an amazing dude. Like when you

01:48:05.660 meet the rock, you're like, well, it's all probably just an act, but the rock will look

01:48:10.580 you in the eye, shake your hand and say, how's your mom doing? Like, and he means it, you

01:48:14.640 know? And you could, you could feel that he means it. And, uh, and that's important, especially

01:48:19.380 when you're that big of a celebrity and stuff like that, you know?

01:48:21.440 One of the things I struggle with, and I was actually talking about this a little bit

01:48:24.540 when I was on Joe Rogan's show, I've been pretty vocal and open about my view that once

01:48:30.280 I really spent like five years learning everything there was to learn about anabolic steroids,

01:48:35.180 I came to the conclusion that, well, I can't speak to what happens in bodybuilding because

01:48:39.580 I think that takes it to a different level, but certainly within the level of how they're

01:48:43.980 used in cycling or, you know, more physiologic levels of use, I can't see any evidence of

01:48:50.740 harm. Now, EPO is different. You can certainly take too much EPO and cause problems. But once

01:48:55.700 you start talking about testosterone, stenozolol, oxandrolone, these drugs that are typically used

01:49:01.140 in sports, again, I was having a very hard case.

01:49:03.440 I'll give you, I'll show you right here, my tricep. It's torn. I was bench pressing 455.

01:49:08.900 After it, my triceps hurt a little bit. They were sore. And then I popped my tricep. I've

01:49:14.420 never been hurt lifting in my entire life. At the time, I was on a ton of juice.

01:49:18.220 So your argument would be that you just didn't have the tendon strength necessarily.

01:49:21.940 Yeah. And I attribute that to steroid use for sure. 100%. So to say that there's no

01:49:27.220 ill effects of them or no side effects or no.

01:49:29.560 Yeah. I guess I'm thinking more of the cardiometabolic stuff.

01:49:31.820 Yeah. Liver, kidney, cardio. No. But can you injure yourself? You know, Joey Diaz,

01:49:36.900 one of my favorite people in the world. He's hilarious.

01:49:38.900 He says, he's like, you see these guys in the gym and they're like 50 years old and

01:49:42.160 they used to take steroids. And now, now that it's like, like a bag of shit, you know,

01:49:45.400 it's like, I kind of agree with that statement too, that there are a lot of people that have

01:49:49.660 taken steroids and abused them and gotten really crappy skin and crappy, like just, you know,

01:49:55.680 things that, uh, that don't look good, not necessarily aesthetic and probably not healthy.

01:50:00.540 I'm sure that they've driven a lot of people's blood in a bad direction, which could,

01:50:04.680 which could lead to other things possibly. Right. But, but not definitely.

01:50:08.900 Yeah. So I think that's where we're looking at like the detrimental effects of steroids would be

01:50:13.160 among, it's like among the users that are losers, if that makes sense. It's like, it's among the

01:50:18.920 users that, that aren't paying attention to everything else. Yeah. And I guess under medical

01:50:23.100 supervision though, when you're again, doing these things within physiologic doses, which is pretty

01:50:28.020 different than what the average person is doing. We're talking like something that a doctor would

01:50:32.680 prescribe. Yeah. When it's like, yeah, it's like you, well, you know, for example, you take somebody

01:50:36.700 whose testosterone is like two standard deviations below the mean and you revert them back to the

01:50:42.700 mean or median level of testosterone. If we're going in that respect, I would have to go back and say

01:50:47.640 that you're a hundred percent right. I haven't seen anything like even a muscle tear on a normal dose,

01:50:53.300 but I was, I was using pretty good doses. How much were you taking? Well, I was, at the time I was

01:50:57.940 using Trenbolone and I was using testosterone together. And then I was taking some other oral

01:51:03.200 stuff. It was like right after I got out of rehab, I'm like, I got to get jacked, you know? And like,

01:51:07.180 and it's funny cause they tell you in AA that if you're on steroids, it affects you from the neck up

01:51:11.760 and you're not allowed to take them. So people got on my case about- And how much testosterone were you

01:51:16.320 taking? Just 200 milligrams a week. I've always stuck to the 200 milligrams. I never really went

01:51:22.040 above that because I never wanted to get like puffy, you know? Which is interesting because I

01:51:26.100 don't think I've, if I've ever replaced a person's testosterone, which I've done many times

01:51:30.520 exogenously for patients who are low, I've never had a patient that high. And 200 is not high from a

01:51:36.380 performance standpoint. I've seen guys show up- What is it usually, a hundred? I mean, yeah,

01:51:41.120 if I'm going to start a patient, again, I'm, I have, it's much more complicated. I need to know

01:51:44.320 their sexymal binding globulin, their estrogen, their free testosterone is really what we're

01:51:48.100 trying to fix. But, uh, very unusual that I would ever start a patient, anything more than 50

01:51:53.320 milligrams twice a week. It's interesting cause, uh, everybody I know is on the same,

01:51:57.700 goes to the same doctor, has the same dose. So it's, it's just the- Well, and again,

01:52:01.560 it's a very different, it's a very different thing where I'm trying to optimize for. I mean,

01:52:04.320 my interest in replacing testosterone is resolving insulin resistance, preserving muscle mass. Like

01:52:09.340 it's, it's a bunch of other things. It's interesting that you say that and it actually

01:52:12.180 gives me a lot more confidence in going to somebody, talking to somebody like you. It's

01:52:16.500 like, I just know almost everybody that's on testosterone, they all take 200 milligrams.

01:52:21.240 Like, I don't think I've, I think I might only, I think I've once had a patient take a hundred

01:52:27.680 twice a week. So I think it was pretty high. I think when you're saying it, it's like, oh,

01:52:31.760 wow, you actually, you actually don't give everybody the same dose. You know, that's kind of

01:52:35.300 Well, first of all, I don't even like, I mean, most, most patients that I need to replace

01:52:39.060 testosterone in, which is still a minority of patients, I'm not using testosterone,

01:52:44.020 right? My first goal is, can you get them to endogenously make testosterone? So, you know,

01:52:50.340 the way I have a- And what are you utilizing to do that?

01:52:52.580 Yeah. So I start with the final thing I care about is free testosterone. So free testosterone

01:52:56.740 is low. And I define low as somewhere between one and two standard deviations below the mean

01:53:01.880 of our reference range in the lab and symptomatic. So you have to have these two things in my opinion.

01:53:07.100 So if the number is low, but I see no evidence of symptom, meaning they're not having a difficult

01:53:12.380 time maintaining muscle mass, they don't have too much adipose tissue, they're not insulin resistant,

01:53:16.040 libido's fine, all of these things, then I don't believe in fixing the number. But let's assume you

01:53:20.260 have someone who's symptomatic and who's low. So free testosterone is low. The next question is,

01:53:24.600 is free testosterone low because testosterone is low or because sex and we're binding globulin is high?

01:53:30.040 Because free testosterone, which is what matters, is proportional to testosterone and

01:53:33.720 inversely proportional to sex and we're binding globulin. So once you answer that question,

01:53:37.600 if sex and we're binding globulin is too high, you have to investigate why. And there are really

01:53:41.000 only four reasons for it. Insulin, thyroid hormone, estrogen, and genetics. So you do your

01:53:48.120 investigation, you figure out what's going on. If testosterone is too low, the next question is,

01:53:52.780 is it too low because you're siphoning too much of your testosterone into either

01:53:56.260 dihydrotestosterone, DHT, or estradiol? Yes or no? If yes, you can block both of those, right? You

01:54:02.620 have five alpha reductase inhibitors, you have aromatase inhibitors. If it's low, not because

01:54:06.820 you're siphoning too much away, then the question is, are you not producing enough? And if you aren't

01:54:11.200 producing enough, are you not producing enough because you don't have enough DHEA, which is a

01:54:14.700 substrate? Or do you not have the pituitary signal? Is your FSH and LH too low? So there are actually

01:54:20.200 nine steps in understanding someone's testosterone and free testosterone level. And we can actually

01:54:26.080 impact every single one of those steps pharmacologically if we're trying to put this in

01:54:31.800 service. So yeah, it's a much different approach when you're doing it for medical management.

01:54:35.380 This kind of blows my mind too because I'm going like, wow, there's now, so this is like, you know,

01:54:40.500 you learn something new every day. It's like, I'm just used to people taking 200 milligrams of

01:54:44.700 testosterone. Now you just turn me on to nine different ways that I can increase things. You know,

01:54:49.360 it's like- Right. You can give a person LH, you can give them something that stimulates LH or FSH

01:54:54.180 production. So there's a pre-hormone that's a synthetic hormone that mimics, well, it mimics

01:54:59.740 basically an estrogen molecule at the hypothalamus that then tells the pituitary to make more FSH and

01:55:04.460 LH. That in many ways is- And now you're putting this in the practice clinically and you're seeing

01:55:08.800 awesome results with it. Yeah. And this is funny. This is one of those things that we learned sort

01:55:13.100 of from people who were doing this, but it's now actually become, I mean, I would hesitate to say

01:55:17.440 mainstream because I don't think people are fully mainstream in understanding this, but now you're seeing

01:55:22.220 this stuff published in medical literature that says, hey, there are really reasonable, safe ways

01:55:27.040 to increase a person's testosterone without even giving them testosterone. Well, you can also start

01:55:31.420 with- I'd be more interested in that. Well, even, even without supplementation, right? There could be

01:55:36.080 certain foods, right? There could be certain foods to avoid. Maybe, maybe somebody doesn't have a sound

01:55:40.440 diet. I mean, a sound diet has to, has to throw you out. To me, the first step in evaluating a male

01:55:45.340 for hypogonadism, which is just the technical term for low testosterone, especially if the- So,

01:55:50.260 this is a not uncommon finding. The guy has low free testosterone, but his estradiol is not too

01:55:56.260 high. His sexism and binding globulin is not too high. His DHT is not too high. His DHEA is not too

01:56:01.380 low. He's not making enough testosterone, but his FSH and LH are also low. So what does this mean in

01:56:08.780 English? This means this guy's brain isn't making the signal to tell his body to make more testosterone

01:56:15.740 despite the fact that his testosterone is low. So that tells you where the problem is. The problem

01:56:20.540 is in the brain. And the number one diagnosis for that is sleep deprivation. So when I finished

01:56:27.240 residency, my, I don't, I didn't measure free testosterone. I only knew my total testosterone,

01:56:32.320 but it was 220. That was on a scale where two standard deviations below the mean was 350.

01:56:41.040 Yeah. Two standard deviations above the mean was 1200 and I'm 220. Yeah. After my hip replacement,

01:56:47.420 I was 49. That's where, that's when I got on it. Yeah. 49. You, I mean, most women have a higher

01:56:52.820 testosterone. My doctor just said, I don't know how you get out of bed. Yeah. I don't know. I just do.

01:56:56.840 Yeah. So in my case, I, my testosterone went from 220 to about 650 by just sleeping. Once I went from not

01:57:05.000 sleeping four hours a night, boom, that improved. A lot of Americans are not sleeping because they're

01:57:09.860 obese because they're heavy. So if they could figure out a way to get momentum, get the diet

01:57:14.420 straightened out, get the sleep a little bit better, they can start heading in the right

01:57:18.520 direction too. Yeah. And the other thing is cortisol. So if you have hypercortisolemia,

01:57:24.280 that is going to negatively impact testosterone production directly and indirectly.

01:57:29.240 What is hypercortisolemia? High levels of cortisol.

01:57:32.440 That's all it is? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In medicine,

01:57:34.660 we have to come up with fancy ways to say things because it makes us feel smarter. So if you have too

01:57:38.200 much cortisol, one, you have a, you have a shunt, right? You have something called a

01:57:41.340 pregnenolone shunt or steel, where you start to steal precursors of testosterone to make more

01:57:46.500 cortisol. So that's depleting you of substrate to make this. But the, I think perhaps the more,

01:57:51.760 the more sinister issue is these high levels of cortisol impair you from entering what's called

01:57:57.580 delta wave sleep, which is where you make the FSH and LH to make the testosterone. You only make this

01:58:02.680 stuff when you're sleeping. What about, you know, there's a lot of doctors that are like,

01:58:05.760 are prescribing stuff to people and they'll prescribe some of these cholesterol, you know,

01:58:11.240 medications. Statins. These statins, yeah, they're, they're probably damaging, right? I mean,

01:58:15.620 some of these things are probably damaging towards just a natural male testosterone and,

01:58:21.420 and even with the females and stuff. Aren't the, aren't these things kind of plaguing us a little

01:58:27.340 bit too? In theory, you could make an argument that says if you take a statin, which is inhibiting

01:58:32.060 cholesterol synthesis and given that you need cholesterol to make sex hormones, that should

01:58:37.960 be depleting them. But we don't actually see that in the data. So even though it's a, no,

01:58:42.600 you don't actually see that. Now that doesn't mean that at extreme levels, it won't show up.

01:58:46.340 I think I've been saying that for years. Well, like it blocks your cholesterol and then that's

01:58:49.760 what makes your hormones. Yeah. It turns out that's probably overly simplistic. The body is more

01:58:53.500 complicated and more rigorous than we give it credit for. So the body will prioritize its use of

01:58:59.420 cholesterol for two things above all else, which is forming cellular membranes because cholesterol is

01:59:04.660 what gives a cell its fluidity, membrane fluidity, and then hormone production. So particularly

01:59:10.580 glucocorticoids and sex hormones. So does that mean that you couldn't statinize a person into the next

01:59:17.600 millennium, end up suppressing? No, it doesn't. You probably could. But I think at the levels that most

01:59:23.560 people are taking them, the evidence would not actually suggest that we're inhibiting endogenous

01:59:28.520 testosterone production. And I think like with what I do, you know, I was made the movie

01:59:32.020 prescription thugs. And then all of a sudden I'm like, statins are bad. Like stay away. Right. And

01:59:36.100 then I listened to you talk and you had a really intelligent conversation with a Dr.

01:59:41.360 Ron Krause, Ron Krause. Right. And then the guys are all talking about statins the whole time. Like,

01:59:46.360 wait a second, these guys don't know that they're bad. And I'm like, well, these are the guys that

01:59:49.480 actually know what they're talking about. They treat people every day. And so it kind of opened my mind

01:59:54.260 back up to statins. So I think like a lot of times when we're doing research or we're trying

01:59:58.920 to find out the truth or whatever, like I was like, oh, statins are all bad. And I just think

02:00:04.180 all one way. And I'm trying to not think that way about things like where I'm thinking nothing's

02:00:09.100 all bad. Nothing's all good. And that's kind of the way to bring this thing full circle as we

02:00:13.040 probably wrap up so we can let you guys get back to your day. At the outside, I said, you kind of in

02:00:17.440 many ways opened my eyes to revisiting something that I just took for, I just assumed was dogma.

02:00:22.520 Steroids are bad. If you have one milligram of testosterone cypionate injected into a human

02:00:26.980 being, you will kill them. That was my view. And then I come away from bigger, stronger, faster.

02:00:31.300 And I'm like, I don't, maybe I got to rethink this. Now it's not to say I have any understanding

02:00:37.000 or expertise of how steroids are used in bodybuilding or things like that, where I suspect they can still

02:00:41.360 be harmful if abused, but certainly within, you know, medical, physiologic levels.

02:00:45.440 Yeah, where is it relative to your life and to your patients?

02:00:47.640 I now, I honestly believe that anabolic steroids when used at physiologic levels are safer than

02:00:54.160 Tylenol.

02:00:54.760 Yeah, absolutely.

02:00:55.980 You know, are far less toxic and frankly, you know, far less likely to lead into morbidity.

02:01:02.040 And so similarly, maybe you'll leave this discussion thinking, okay, maybe it's not statins are all

02:01:07.680 bad. Maybe the idea is they got to have a time and a place.

02:01:10.040 The overall overarching thing I've learned from making this movie about nutrition that

02:01:15.580 Mark and I are working on right now is that nothing is all good and nothing is all bad.

02:01:19.180 And Mark has been really illustrating that to me as we go through, he goes, see carbs are

02:01:24.140 all bad, right? See, they're all bad. And it's like, well, no, now I can see how you can use them

02:01:27.760 as a tool, right? And then statins are all bad. No, no. Now we can see how we can use them as a tool

02:01:32.320 and we can keep people alive longer. And certain people, you might need this tool only for a couple

02:01:37.020 weeks to get you to this point and then you can get off of it or whatever. Like it's, it's allowed

02:01:41.620 me to think more openly about everything that we put in our bodies and everything that we do to

02:01:46.840 try to be better.

02:01:47.720 Yeah. That, that, when we were inhaling some food before this and you shared your salmon with me,

02:01:52.060 which was fantastic by the way, especially with that Himalayan sea salt, that was damn good.

02:01:56.920 I can't take credit.

02:01:57.740 He traveled all the way to the Himalayas for that.

02:01:59.580 Yeah. The wife, he cooked that up too. So I can't take credit.

02:02:01.980 No, that was wonderful. But that was a great example of, I mean, again, I know you're in the

02:02:05.620 midst of a bodybuilding competition prep, but it was beautiful to just see how regimented it's

02:02:09.340 like, I'm going to have this many grams of salmon. I'm going to have this many Japanese

02:02:12.340 sweet potatoes. And it's like, you know what? In this moment, these molecules are the tool

02:02:17.860 I need. And I think that's the takeaway to me is a statin, a carbohydrate or whatever,

02:02:23.300 it's a tool. And, and the key to me, if you want to be a great carpenter in life, which

02:02:28.200 I think is, should be our, all of us should want to be the best carpenters in life is have

02:02:32.860 the most tools, know how to use each tool and know when to use each tool. And when I

02:02:38.080 have patients say to me, doctor, I am morally against fill in the blank. I am morally against

02:02:44.140 statins. I am morally against supplements. I am morally against XYZ. I say, okay, I'll

02:02:50.380 never force you or try to talk you into doing anything, but that's sort of like a contractor

02:02:54.500 coming to my house to rebuild it. And me saying, I just don't want you using the Phillips

02:02:59.460 screwdriver or the saw. You can do anything else, but don't use those two. That's straight.

02:03:04.300 Can he still build the house? Of course. But I've just taken away two tools and in the hands

02:03:10.440 of a good carpenter that, that, you know, that seems like a bad idea. So you guys have

02:03:15.700 opened my mind up to a set of tools known as steroids. And, uh, you opened our minds up.

02:03:22.060 Well, very well.

02:03:23.300 Open your mind.

02:03:24.400 Guys, where, so, so tell me when, when's the doc going to come out?

02:03:27.580 So we don't know. I mean, the one question I should just say, a lot of people ask us,

02:03:32.140 when's it going to come out? And they also ask us like exactly what it's going to be about or what

02:03:36.260 we're trying to say. And I can tell you, I don't know either answer at all. I have no idea. So

02:03:41.760 every film that I do is a journey. I never know when it's going to end. It makes a lot of people

02:03:46.700 that work with me mad. And I just say, well, like, that's just how I do it. Like if you go, okay,

02:03:51.760 we're going to make this movie, we're going to film for six months and we're going to edit for three

02:03:54.960 months and then we're done. And you, you can do that. That's like a way to, uh, to do it.

02:04:00.640 But I feel that for example, Mark and I started this movie, he had no idea he was going to do a

02:04:05.460 bodybuilding show. So, but that's gotta be in the movie. That's awesome. That's like a really cool

02:04:10.260 thing that's actually happening. So what if I just decided like in the beginning of the movie,

02:04:15.120 when we first started filming, I decided I only want to film this. Then we wouldn't have this whole

02:04:20.280 bodybuilding thing, which could end up being what adds a layer to it that makes it connect

02:04:25.960 all the dots for people or whatever. Right. So we don't really know, but I would say that in

02:04:31.780 general, we're planning on it just coming out next year because we're not worried about it for this

02:04:35.400 year. And we're, um, just planning on making the best thing that we can. And so, um, we'd like to

02:04:41.800 encourage everybody, like people send me a lot of information and people give me a lot of tips and

02:04:46.860 I'm open to all of it. I listen, I listen and read all my comments and everything because

02:04:51.000 I'm open to whatever's going to make the best film. I'm not trying to set out to make one

02:04:56.240 specific thing. So between when this comes out and when this film comes out, what is the best

02:05:01.380 way for people to reach you, Chris? They can just find me on Instagram at big, strong, fast. That's

02:05:06.260 kind of the one thing that I check all the time. So, okay. And what about you, Mark? Twitter too.

02:05:11.160 Uh, you can't get ahold of me because I've got too much shit to do, but one thing I want to

02:05:15.220 encourage everybody to do is really simple because nobody ever knows where to start.

02:05:19.460 And, uh, we don't get a lot of answers because people that are smart don't give you definitive

02:05:23.400 answers because that's just the way it goes. Just try to start walking. You know, almost

02:05:28.620 all of us are lucky enough to have the ability to put one foot in front of the other. Try

02:05:33.220 to go for a 10 minute walk every day. Talk to your, your son, your daughter, your mom, your

02:05:38.240 dad, if they live close by, or if you can get a second with them, do it after lunch, do it

02:05:44.120 after dinner. Uh, preferably it'd be great if you can do it more than once, once a day, but it's

02:05:49.160 just a great place to start. A great way to clear your mind. There's a lot of shit going on nowadays.

02:05:53.300 If you have an hour and a half or whatever it might be to be on Instagram all day, you certainly

02:05:59.020 can carve out 10 minutes for yourself every day to go on a walk. Really, really simple, easy thing

02:06:03.900 to do. And because people aren't going to be able to reach out to you directly, they want to be able

02:06:07.300 to take advantage of the amazing stuff you've already done. What's your YouTube channel?

02:06:10.460 Yeah. It's a, the YouTube channel is super training. Oh six. Um, you can also check out

02:06:15.280 my Instagram, which is at Mark's Millie bell. And you can also check out my website, which

02:06:20.220 has all my products, a slingshot, the hip circle, some of the stuff you've seen, uh, which

02:06:24.660 is Mark bell slingshot.com. And I also have my own podcast as well. One thing that we, we

02:06:29.820 haven't talked about, but it'll leave it up to people to go watch it is my new film, a

02:06:34.140 leaf of faith, which is about Kratom. That's right. We didn't even get to that. Well, we didn't

02:06:37.880 really get to it, but I'll, I'll explain it really quick. Kratom is a plant that comes

02:06:42.320 from Southeast Asia that a lot of people are using to get off of opioids. And they're

02:06:47.080 also using it just to feel better. Like for me, every day I use it as a pre-workout just

02:06:51.960 makes me feel great before I get in the gym. I've gotten a lot stronger because of it.

02:06:56.340 I've gotten in better shape because I can focus better. So a leaf of faith is available

02:07:00.660 on iTunes. It's available on a Google play, uh, YouTube and Amazon. It's not on Netflix

02:07:06.900 yet. It's on Netflix on August 27th. And then when it comes out August 27th, I think that's

02:07:12.640 going to be sort of the real launching point for it because with all my movies, I put them

02:07:16.600 on iTunes and they go around when it gets to Netflix, that's when people start talking

02:07:20.760 about it. So I'm excited. That's a good segue into, uh, he and I have created a product

02:07:24.640 together because we believe in Kratom so much. It's helped us so much. It's helped us manage

02:07:29.980 pain. It's helped us to continue on our diets. Even sometimes in life, you just need something

02:07:35.820 else to do. You need your mind to be a little bit, uh, distracted from your day to day grind.

02:07:40.740 And it's a great product. It gives you some euphoria. It's helped me with creativity and

02:07:45.280 business and stuff like that. And the product's going to be called mind bullet and you'll be

02:07:48.900 able to get it at mindbullet.com. All right. So we're going to link in the show notes to

02:07:53.040 where people can find you Chris on social, where they can see all the stuff you've put out.

02:07:57.580 I'm actually really excited to hear. I didn't even realize I'm embarrassed

02:07:59.880 to say that you had this YouTube channel with all of these videos. Cause I'm always

02:08:03.040 looking for ways. If I can't plug one of my patients into a trainer that I trust to teach

02:08:08.080 them the correct mechanics, I actually don't want them to just learn to squat on their own.

02:08:11.800 You know, I kind of want them to be able to see how it's done. So this will be a great

02:08:14.740 reference as somebody that's contributed content to Mark's YouTube page. I can say that he puts

02:08:20.040 in more effort and time than a lot of people that I see that are putting out videos. They put

02:08:25.580 out almost, uh, is it a video a day? Are you still like, uh, they crank it like a breakneck

02:08:30.920 speed to like, it's like a movie studio over there. So he's just constantly cranking stuff

02:08:35.460 out. And it always features like all these people from the fitness industry that people

02:08:39.940 love to see. And he's always got great information. So I commend him as a filmmaker. I'm giving my

02:08:45.720 brother props for having a great, we spend probably over a quarter million dollars a year just

02:08:49.640 on our YouTube channels just to get information out there. Obviously it promotes the brand, promotes

02:08:54.720 the product, but it's, I really love trying to get that information out there to arm people,

02:09:00.280 give people, you know, give people information that they need. Anybody listening to this podcast

02:09:04.420 ever wants to come check out super training gym, super training gym is free. I can't always

02:09:08.640 guarantee that I'm there, but if you want to look up that Instagram, it's at super training

02:09:12.540 gym as well. Hit up, uh, whoever answers questions on there and, uh, they will, uh, let you know

02:09:18.660 if, if, and when I'm around and, and when you can come in, but the gym's free in and of

02:09:22.340 itself, that is just an unbelievable service guys. I want to thank you both, not just for

02:09:26.260 your generosity and time today, but obviously more importantly for all the work you guys have

02:09:30.740 been doing over the past decade plus to share what you learned with not just me. So I'm personally

02:09:37.280 grateful for that, but obviously by extension, many more people. So we're personally grateful

02:09:42.320 as well. We're huge fans right back at you. And, um, I love your podcast. So I'm, I'm excited

02:09:47.940 to be on it and be part of it. Well, you guys are part of the inaugural set. And if the podcast

02:09:51.900 ends up sucking, you guys will know that you were, you managed to be in that exclusive set.

02:09:55.860 We're in good company of sucking.

02:09:57.520 You're sucking podcast, right? All right. Thanks guys.

02:09:59.400 Awesome. Thank you. Thanks, Peter.

02:10:02.460 You can find all of this information and more at peteratiamd.com forward slash podcast.

02:10:07.700 There you'll find the show notes, readings, and links related to this episode.

02:10:11.820 You can also find my blog and the nerd safari at peteratiamd.com. What's a nerd safari you ask?

02:10:17.940 Just click on the link at the top of the site to learn more.

02:10:20.400 Maybe the simplest thing to do is to sign up for my subjectively non lame once a week email,

02:10:25.140 where I'll update you on what I've been up to the most interesting papers I've read and all things

02:10:29.660 related to longevity, science, performance, sleep, et cetera. On social, you can find me on Twitter,

02:10:35.240 Instagram, and Facebook all with the ID peteratiamd. But usually Twitter is the best way to reach me to

02:10:40.940 share your questions and comments. Now for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general

02:10:45.620 informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other

02:10:50.180 professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice. And note, no doctor

02:10:55.660 patient relationship is formed. The use of this information and the materials linked to the

02:11:00.500 podcast is at the user's own risk. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for

02:11:05.460 professional medical advice, diagnoses, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in

02:11:10.720 obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they have and should seek the assistance of their

02:11:15.280 healthcare professionals for any such conditions. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take

02:11:20.780 conflicts of interest very seriously. For all of my disclosures, the companies I invest in and or

02:11:25.740 advise, please visit peteratiamd.com forward slash about.

The Peter Attia Drive - November 12, 2018

#28 - Mark and Chris Bell： steroids, powerlifting, addiction, diet, training, helping others, documentaries, and living your best life

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