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promo code Tim T IM at legalzoom.com to save 15% that's t IM for 15% off check it out legalzoom.com Oh dodge aha this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show or it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types from business entertainment sports anything you can imagine really my guest today is Mark Bell at mark smelly bell hon Twitter who
is the founder of super training gym found in Sacramento which is oftentimes referred to as the strongest gym in the West prior to opening his own gym he spent years studying training under the legendary Louis Simmons and Westside barbell mark is no stranger to the iron at all his best geared lifts in competition include a 1025 pound squat that's a 465 kilos a 832 pound bench
press that's 377 kilos and a 738 pound deadlift that's 335 kilos mark is also the inventor of the patented slingshot a device utilized to assist a lifter in maintaining proper benchpress form while also allowing the lifter to use more weight or perform more reps he now has an entire line of products and has been spectacularly successful in this episode we cover a lot including his most
important lessons for building strength how to avoid injury and break down the lesser-known or some lesser-known training techniques that nearly everyone overlooks how he became a millionaire by offering his gym memberships for free which in and of itself is just an incredible story and much much more so we really dig into the audio we recorded this at his gym and while there we took a full tour of his facility
looking at some crazy equipment and custom mod of equipment that he has at the super training gym in Sacramento if you want to see that video you can and it is that Tim blog /super training all one word tim dot blog /super training and for links to everything in this episode as usual you can find the show notes at tim blog forward slash podcast so without further ado please enjoy mark
smelly bell mark welcome to the show thanks Tim I'm fired up to be here man this is gonna be fun yeah it's been a while since I have hung out among the goliaths here at super training gym this is my first time in the new location like I like the digs I'm glad we got you you know finally to the new spot here we're having a lot of fun here and it's uh you know this is a kind of a dream
come true this is ten years in the making super training gyms been around since 2006 and you know I started off in somebody else's gym and then I had my own spot for awhile where we were nearly among a funeral home where they were sacrificing all kinds of animals and [ __ ] like that that was really bizarre but to come to this and have be able to offer the gym the gym is free super trainings free and
it's just a dream come true to be able to share knowledge and my mission and goal in life is to make the world a better place to lift so explain the business model so how did you decide how does that work how does it work yeah no no honestly like what's how did you make that decision you know when I first did it one of my good friends asked me he said he said why why are you making the
gym free cuz if the gym wasn't always free the gym used to be 125 bucks a month I just kind of made that value up out of the four times a week that we get together and the amount of coaching and I was offering everybody to me it would have been valued at a lot more than that but power lifters typically don't have that kind of dough to shell out to 300 bucks a month so I made it 125 but when
I switched it to be free one of my good friends he was like why are you making the gym free and I said to become rich and famous and from that moment on that's when things started to really kick in and things started to really groove because thick because at that point everything started to make a lot more sense to me it was like neo and the matrix everything just kind of started
to come together one by one thing started to unfold my brother passed away kind of around that time and it was just a message to me it was very simple your life is short I don't give two [ __ ] about what other people think I need to get myself heading in the right direction and I need to do the things that I want to do and I need to follow through with my hopes and my dreams than be so fearful of stuff a lot of
people are fearful of kind of jumping in with two feet into stuff and I was like you know I can't have that mentality anymore it's just not gonna work it didn't work for my brother and it's not gonna work for me so I need to just forge forward and try to figure out a way to keep moving forward and to share the message I want to share and to do it my own way do the things my own way so
making the gym free was a byproduct of the slingshot being invented and the slingshot giving me the financial means to make the gym free but I knew that the gym being free was going to give me back everything tenfold and aside from that the or in addition to that rather the slingshot was made inside the walls of super training gym so I can never really repay super training gym what it's done
to me no matter how we slice it so the gym being free is uh just my way of paying back to the Powerton community did you make that decision in part because it was just consuming like 10% of your bandwidth having to keep track of membership payments and all the details that go along with that kind of profit and loss and by freeing it up it just made your focus on other things
more pure and what are the rules like can anybody show up anytime they want or what's the commitment that you look for if anything I like some of the words you just said there you mentioned the word pure I'm not a like the humanitarian of the [ __ ] decade or anything like that it's it's nothing it's nothing corny or weird like that because financial gain is on the front of my mind it's not in
the back of my mind it's on the front of my mind that's you know I'm a scoreboard driven person you know I'm trying to put points up on the scoreboard and as an adult how do you put points up on the scoreboard you put points up on the scoreboard by by making money right dollars and cents we're talking about right and so that's that's kind of the mission that's kind of the goal and so
by making the gym free it allowed it gave me a testing ground for a lot of the products that I have it really opened the doors for a lot of other financial gain that maybe when I first made a gym free I didn't recognize but once I made the gym free it was I kind of just started to think more in terms of okay like I literally own everything that's in here including the people now I basically purchased the
people in some weird way because they're no longer paying me for my services I'm allowing them to train here for free with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment that gym is so expensive to go over each piece of equipment every barbell is specialized every plate is specialized there's nothing in there as normal especially the people nothing in there it's normal
so everything's a little different in there and because of that it allowed me to kind of recognize that I have a place of real strong testing ground where I can test products and also I'm not a product company only I'm 50% products and 50% media without media social media without YouTube and without the magazine the magazine power magazine without all these different formats I'm a subscriber
there you go as you know yeah and you know without these different formats to get the message out there than what I am I you know so it's great to see that it's all working through the podcast and through other things trying to make the products popular trying to make the gym popular trying to make money all those things are definitely on the front of my mind you did mention how does a gym work
the way the gym works is is not that complicated but what we do is we do have an email address that's associated with the gym it's not plastered everywhere but if you do find it if you do work towards finding it and you're able to communicate back and forth with us then you're able to come here so it's not that complicated but we try not to advertise too much the sign that you saw
out front today doesn't say gym we don't make it super simple to get here and then once you get here we sort of make it a little bit confusing on what's the next step you know somebody's like hey I'm supposed to talk to Marcus I don't know what's going on I'm like I don't know what's going on either like I don't know Marcus I'm just I'm just a fly on the wall here I have no idea yeah
they're like they're like well don't you own the place I'm like yes sort of don't worry about it so we make it a little confusing goal if some heavy stuff will talk and a half-hour yeah and then you know when I see people in here working like if you're not sweating I'm not talking to you there's just no point we're not gonna have this it's about yes yeah intimidated by all you have fact that's
right there are some back there for sure but if I'm not seeing that you're working then there's there's no room for me to have conversation with you I'm not gonna help you out of nowhere and just start giving you a bunch of advice unless I see that you're hungry for it yeah and you have I observed because we're effectively in your recording portion of the office at super training gym and someone came in
earlier skew HQ to talk about the schedule so the schedule for the gym can you lay out the days of the week and what you do on them so the gym schedule is we get together every Tuesday and Thursday during the week from about 3:00 until approximately 7:00 and then Saturday Sunday is from 9:00 until about 1:00 in terms of like the training split it's pretty simple we do lower body once
a week we do upper body once a week I'm sorry we deadly deadlift and squat once a week so I guess would be lower body twice a week an upper body about once a week every Tuesday is deadlifts every Thursday is bench and every Saturday is squats after a while it starts to get kind of pre-programmed into your body and your body is kind of like today's a squat day today's rather than being
Tuesday it's dead lifting you know that's how meat heavy we get around here when you when you start just instinctively exploding off of the toilet into into like exploding on the toilet and into the bin you know you've had too much pre-workout stimulus number one and it's squat day that's right so first of all I want to recommend a couple of things first is and there's a poster here on the wall two
documentaries that I think offer a lot of insight into your background and your family and also your brother because I don't know if we'll have time to really dig into the details but bigger bigger stronger faster which is how we originally met I believe yeah because I saw the documentary I was really impressed it so the tagline is is it's still cheating if everyone is doing it
this is about performance and drugs it's a great dock which was made by your brother yeah and now it's kind of like it's kind of in that classic status yeah oh yes it's and and I liked it so much number one I reached out to try to find you and realized oh my god you're in Northern California and then travel to Sacramento to embarrass myself I was like who is a skinny guy who is this guy kicks at me
and stuff what's going here and then the other is prescription thugs right which is covers a lot of semi related topics but also goes very deep with your family so those are just two things on people to check out for further watching and resources that I would HIGHLY encourage checking out the training split could you talk about Lois Simmons and Westside and what are some
of the key lessons you learned yeah I trained at Lois Simmons for about a year also worked with him and coached under him for about an additional year beyond that and for people who don't know him could you just give them an overview yeah Lois Simmons is the owner of the pretty much the strongest gym in the history of lifting he created a community that was so competitive and so strong that thousand pound squats were
routine 800 pound benches were routine and 800 pound deadlift are very routine now keep in mind this is back a few years when geared power the thing was a little bit more acceptable now people have taken the power to think you're off the power of thing gear is very supportive and it adds additional pounds to what you can actually lift and for those people who who don't follow pound
lifting gear in this particular case referring to multi ply bench press shirts and deadlift suits and so that looks like a straightjacket type of feel that improves your leverage yeah proves your leverage but regardless of what people wore and didn't wear at the time that was the style lifting that was popular and Louie created the fastest most explosive strongest athletes in the game without question
and he would have what seemed like 10 15 guys at a time that were just crushing world records in some different weight classes and year by year you know the things would change a little bit in the gym and they'd get new guys in and he would still create you know monster after monster didn't matter just the only thing that would change in there was the names the numbers would go up a
little bit the names when there would change a little bit but it was still the same thing still him you know Westside barbell kicking the crap everybody Louie was a pioneer in a way of bands and chains being utilized in training the bands and chains helped to accommodate resistance the weights are lighter at the bottom and they're heavier the top as your body becomes in a more
advantageous position and more favorable position you're getting more weight on the bar as your body is in the least favorable position such as the bottom of a bench press or the bottom of a squat you have less chain weight or less resistance from the band and so it gives you an opportunity for a lot of things number one it help can help you produce more force which is great in any sport
it can also help you to just be faster be more dynamic the other thing that it's gonna do is going to allow you can help prevent injuries because as I mentioned when you're at the bottom of the lift there's less weight on you you have less overall weight on you so for example if you were to benchpress with some bands on the bar at the bottom of the lift if you had three plates on the
bar like I was using today it would be you know let's just say it's 50 pounds of bands total at the bottom with 315 and be about 365 pounds at the bottom and if it jumped up to a hundred pounds extra it'd be about four 15 at the top so as you can see again the weights are light at the bottom heavier at the top it allows for acceleration you can accelerate through the weights and allows for a kind of consistent tension
on those weights so Louis paired up speed training dynamic effort training as he calls it with maximal effort training so he basically attacked training from two different ways and there's a third way I'll talk about in a second but its main two ways that he attacked it from were from the perspective of if I can move faster if I could become more explosive I can move more weight because in some cases it
just becomes a race against the clock if you go to benchpress 300 pounds and it's gonna take you 12 seconds the odds of you making one rep last that long like that is probably probably not very good anybody out there that's listening in the show that can benchpress even 300 pounds take 200 pounds and try to try to go 5 seconds on the way down with a 5 second pause and 5 seconds on
the way up and you'll quickly realize that time management of those lifts is crucial you want to get underneath the weight and get it the hell over with as quickly as possible so the speed element in the speed aspect is crucial the other way that he recognized you know a just gaining strength was to simply just get stronger work on handling more weights and trying to figure out different ways and different
angles to handle more weights he came up a lot of new and creative and different ways of handling big weights so it wouldn't kill your central nervous system and so it wouldn't kill your knees and kill your elbows and things of that nature because he started used a lot of specialized barbells and specialized he would squat off of boxes back in the day and then he started
squatting off of foam he's even he's even put Springs inside a barbells to to create a different effect that's one barbell in particular had a spring in the middle and it kind of looked like the spring inside the rollover toilet paper or something on a shake weight but you would squeeze the barbell together it was like on a regular bar like for bench pressing you'd squeeze the bar
together and sure enough it blow that blow your chest up it would crush you so he had a lot of great innovative ways but those were the two main ways he thought of to increase strength one was to max out to go as heavy as possible max effort a max effort day and to choose different exercises each week that's kind of the basis of the conjugated system you might do a box squat one week you might do a regular
squat the next next week after that you might squat with chains the variety is both good and bad sometimes a variety got to be so large that you no longer knew what the hell you were doing anymore and sometimes the variety was a welcome change because you might be the season lifter that is just so tired of doing the same [ __ ] over and over again you can't even the other the
other huge advantage of changing things up is in a good way you kind of don't know where you stand which i think is kind of nice because being a competitive lifter and being a competitive athlete for so long you can get really frustrated and you and the ups and downs can be very very the Downs for sure can be very well the ups too they can all be very negative actually because you don't want a hat you want to
be kind of even keel as an athlete you don't want the highs and lows to ever be too great so they can kind of throw you for a loop when something unexpected does happen and the third way to increase strength is to have more muscle mass so Louis recognized just hypertrophied just some bodybuilding style training the repetition effort method as he would call it just simply
once you're done with some of the main movements you would do three sets eight four sets eight five sets of ten basically get in more work more volume with different exercises that would allow you to help build muscle mass so you'd get done with the main lift and the overall volume of the main lift may not be through the roof because there's only so much you can do with a barbell
you'd move into assistance exercises that's where you'd get your volume in and that's where you'd build muscle and if you look at a lot of these concepts whether it's the bands at the chains box squats board I don't know if they're not short presses we have I guess what what are they technically they're two by fours I think so yeah just sort of put together different heights so you can
stop the bar from in this case the chest at say form just a car range of motion functional range of motion have become very popular do you have a particular opinion about when people should incorporate versus not incorporate these things because you could go to I'm sure many different gyms or if somebody who is bench pressing 45 pounds and they have like 17 different accessories for
someone who is athletic but not a power lifter getting started focusing on these three lifts at what point would you introduce things like bands and chains and so on it's a great great question you know first of all I think that a little bit of lifting a little bit of training what we're doing when we're going to the gym is what I call artificial exercise we're making [ __ ] up because we don't have to do the same
tasks that we had to do hundreds hundred years ago we're not carrying buckets of water and we're not digging ditches and we're not building stuff as much as we were in the past and so you got to make [ __ ] up to to get to be muscular to even look manly you gotta like make stuff up to to kind of make up some ground for the girly [ __ ] that men do nowadays that's kind of where we're at I mean
seriously hanging out on a computer all day and all these different things were not really things that we were probably designed to do but anyway who long longer story for another day right Kelly Starrett in here and Epson behind he okay exactly let him go off yeah yeah yeah exactly exactly I think that uh one of the key components to kind of all of this is that when you're a newer lifter
that you just try to keep it simple and even as you advance anything seems too good to be true it is there's no tricks unfortunately there are some things that can help you use the term and I love the term accelerated learning that is probably the only trick that there really is like find somebody who knows what they're doing and rub elbows with them and try to find other people that
know what they're doing because that will actually accelerate you to the top faster than you can imagine much faster than finding like some secret fat burner or something like that finding people that know how to lose body fat finding people that know how to build strength and getting around those people is going to be a crucial element for newer lifters I always just suggest and even
even older listeners again five five exercises is about all that you need you don't need to be in the gym for hours on end if you feel good for the day and you want to do more exercises and then ride it out and go ahead and feel better and and do it but a real crucial thing to your training and this is something that has taken me a long time to learn your training should make you feel better and
not make you feel worse if you can kind of always keep that in mind your training should make you feel better and not make you feel worse think about that the next time you have some stupid idea to do something you're like oh I'm gonna try to run 12 miles and you haven't ran one mile in the last couple years yeah Tim Ferriss knows exactly what I'm talking about I do I still follow his
social meaning he's doing something crazy all the time yeah we both have spent we specialize in certain types of of gross indulgence yeah so you just want to be you want to be careful I mean if you haven't sprinted in a long time it's probably not a great idea to go do ten sets of two hundreds you know I don't attract some weary you got an easier way into stuff you got to take
your time you got to build up towards something and then once you build up towards something you can start to add and more stuff the bands and the chains and stuff are great anyone can use them I never I never want to tell and new person that they can't do something because why not let them enjoy themselves the same way or like let them have access to all the same stuff let
them use a slingshot let them use bands let them use boards or whatever they want to do but just kind of keep in mind the basics are gonna be the stuff that really gets you there people from the 70s didn't have any problem gaining strength and they didn't need any special tools back then it they had less stuff than we do now well and a lot of what Louie does is based on his reading of the Soviet research yes as I
understand it which was from I mean certainly those previous decades yeah Olympic weightlifting yeah and just as to underscore a couple things so the the speed or other time being your enemy I mean I've heard this from also Olympic lifting right same story it's like the less time you spent under the bar the better and that was from a guy named Jersey Greg rec who was a four-time
world champion in Olympic weightlifting the footnote that I placed in my head when you mentioned five exercises what would if you were picking five exercises for a novice or an intermediate right like let's say somebody who hypothetically was an athlete may be a baseball player I'm just making this up soccer player in college has a regular sort of physical practice but has not lifted per se has never had any
instruction what would the five exercises be this actually is very simple take the activity that you want to do and think about if you were to ask a hundred people if you asked a hunter if you got in front of a hundred people and said hey what five exercises you think would be good for a triathlete give or take there's going to be a couple things in the gym that that somebody might say one thing over
another but in general there's gonna be some sort of a press maybe two pressing movements maybe you have maybe one person's excited about incline bench and maybe one person's excited about overhead so you have two pressing movements maybe somebody in the room is a big fan of doing squats so you have a squat maybe somebody else rather see like a leg press maybe somebody else
trying to see like a deadlift go around the room and you're gonna you know you can kind of narrow it down maybe you end up with ten exercises total you can probably agree upon about five exercises right now take those five exercises and start to think about how do I build up these exercises through other exercises so for example assistant section yes for example we we have you know things like
a an overhead press what are some of the muscles involved in overhead press you don't have to be insanely and intelligent to be able to grasp some of this you know what just kind of think about what are some of the what are some of the muscles that you see flexing in the mirror when you do some of these movements your triceps are fire and right your shoulders are firing so can a
lateral raise help your overhead press I would think so gonna help build up your shoulders maybe help with stability would work in the back of your shoulder help make the entire shoulder more stable so you can press more weight sure well the triceps are involved heavily so you start to break things down in that sense and things start to become very very simple and they become a lot less
complicated when you think about that's one of the things I really loved about the Westside barbell approach is that's kind of where I started to really see that kind of stuff and my eyes became very open to the fact that you can kind of narrow everything down by what is gonna help me get to that what's gonna help make me better in a particular sport so if you're grappling maybe you want you know maybe you want more hips
so maybe you're gonna squat a little bit more maybe you're gonna do more sumo deadlifts maybe you can do more med ball throws maybe you're gonna do some more athletic stuff maybe some twisting of some kind you're gonna kind of think of a few exercises that you want to do on a regular basis and you want to try to figure out a way to overload those exercises and ways to become more
efficient those exercises and so from that standpoint it gets to be very simple you kind of think about just even building the muscles rather than thinking about I always hate the term like functional because I I don't understand what a non functional movement would be um the human body you know you see some people that are gifted at like dancing or figure skating or gymnastics or any I mean the human body
can do all kinds of crazy stuff so show me a non functional movement you know I don't know what that I don't know what that means versus a functional movement I mean I get the basis of it but anyway the point is is where we're made to move and we're made - we're made to move through these ranges of motion with these given exercises and just trying to associate them with what is going to
make those exercises improve to get stronger is gonna be probably the most functional and easiest way to get through these workouts so if we look at say three primary exercises we're looking at the bench press the squat so let's we I mean we could make it specific and say it's kind of a low bar wider squat maybe for power of thing and then deadlift and you could you could
pick conventional or sumo whichever you want to talk about what would be some lesser-known assistance exercises that you found valuable for each of those when it comes to both the deadlift and the squat and not that its lesser-known necessarily because some coaches really understand the value of it I love single leg stuff whenever you have an opportunity to do something standing or
whether you're whether and anytime you have the opportunity to do something with one leg or one arm I think you're you're better off so but not not because the main barbell movements are great we do so many of them already that's kind of the beauty of doing these single leg or unilateral exercises so think about lunges think about step ups anything like that is going to be give you a
different stimulus and it's also gonna kind of take you through a range of motion that's going to kind of dynamically stretch the opposite hip and stretch the opposite leg and it's gonna create a lot of motion a lot of times when we're lifting we're not really moving around a whole lot especially when it comes to the bench or comes to the squad or even comes to the deadlift
there's just not enough motion going on with those movements so my favorites for deadlifts aside from the unilateral stuff my favorite stuff for dead lifting is simply partial range of motion deadlifts which it would be you can deadlifts off of some blocks or deadlifts out of a rack and that can help build up the lower back help build up the upper back and therefore help with your overall dead lifting
performance one thing that people don't sometimes realize is that when you do a partial range of motion deadlift because it builds up your lower back you can build up your speed off the floor so sometimes I think people think oh I'll do a deficit deadlift which would be you increasing the range of motion of the deadlift by standing on top to the block or something yeah exactly but yeah by
standing on something or maybe instead of using 45 pound plates maybe only use your 35 pound plates or something smaller than a 45 pound plate and circumference so those are you know there's a lot of options when it comes to like how do I figure out how to get faster off the floor but anybody I've ever worked with they've gotten faster off the floor from getting stronger and
from handling more weight rather than handling less weight which sometimes the deficit pull can actually make you handle less weight so whenever you can kind of find something that's gonna allow you to handle more weight but still I don't want to say safe because none of this stuff is all that safe once we once you start really getting after it can be can be dangerous I don't want
to sell people on a bag of goods that's not true but once you start to handle some big weight so anytime you have an opportunity to do something safely and effectively you might as well go for it and in the case of say benchpress what are some movements as assistance exercises or warm-ups that that you've consistently usually that might not be obvious to just a recreational lifter benchpress I'll tell talking about
assistance movements first obviously I'm the inventor of sling shot so I'm always gonna back that thing up but the sling shot is not valuable for the reasons that people think it's valuable for a lot of times people want to just handle more weight with it they just want to load up a ton of weight and it can be used for that it can be used for that very effectively but here in my gym what
we do is we use it for more reps and more sets so once we're done with kind of our main lift for the day I want to also say we don't exclusively just use a sling shot all the time we do a lot of work without the sling shot on the sling shot makes up 20 or 30% of our overall bench pressing however if we're hurt it'll make up about half of what we do so we'll go through normal workout
anybody out there listening that's you know likes to do certain styles of training go ahead and do whatever that's ty is five to five or three sets of three once you're done with that I throw a slingshot on and do three extra sets three to four extra sets add about 20 pounds per set or add weight as needed each person's gonna be a little bit different and just follow through it the
same exact reps that you did with your raw work so you know this is a sample workout if I did three sets of three with 275 I would then put on 295 for three with the slingshot on 315 with the slingshot on for another set of three and then I'd finished with 335 for another set of three all three of those sets are sets I'd normally would have never been able to do without being able to throw the slingshot on the slingshot
it's going to give you it's gonna allow you to handle more weight it's gonna allow you to do more reps more sets handle more overall volume in your training and the method that's referred to when you talk about slingshot or reverse band training is called the future method you're getting your body ready for heavier weights that's gonna be able to handle in the future and for people who are familiar and please
correct me if this description doesn't do it justice but the slingshot in this particular use case because you can you can use different types of slingshots for different purposes right on the legs and otherwise in this case if people can imagine you lifting up your arms out in front of you like Frankenstein like Frankenstein and then if you were to tape take a thick but elastic fabric and
I'm not doing justice and wrap around you get near Apia like a knee wrap around your upper arms right and then lower a bar to your chest though that fabric that material would make contact with your chest in the lowest portion the weakest range of motion right and help you to accommodate that larger weight and I it goes without saying but knowing the Internet I'm gonna say it
anyway you guys have very good spotters here yes so you're not just walking into your garage and slapping on more than your max yeah you know one rep capacity and then open for the best yeah if you want if you want to see cautionary tales on that you should just look up benchpress accidents by male benchpress fail on youtube to give yourself nightmares the what about back work is there any
particular type of back work that is helpful are important to the bench press and I personally am number one not terribly good at the bench press it's not part of my regular regimen right now with focus on gymnastics but a lot of people are very interested in it I saw you doing for instance when we came in band polls of some right so I'd love for you to talk about maybe some warm-ups
that you use for it and secondly just as a as a note for people who are wondering when we came in you were just think in the process of getting warmed up and I said well when when you want to pick up doing the podcast you're like well I'm gonna start doing my workout and getting into it probably thirty five minutes and I said it's not like you're in the gym for four or five hours okay but could
you talk about the the warm-up and back work that's that's helpful just before we move on to some of the back stuff I just want to give you a couple exercises without the sling shot cuz I hate to be that guy that's over selling something close grip bench press very simple go go with a closer grip than what you're used to don't go with such a close grip that it crushes your elbows and it hurts
really bad whenever you're in pain you're probably doing something wrong or there's something from a long time ago that's bothering you there's other options so there's other ways of doing it but simply just go closer than whatever your normal grip is if you find that you're very strong with the close grip then try to go with a wider grip and again don't go out so wide that
you're feeling all this pain and your shoulders and stuff pain is a great indicator of like something ain't right it's kind of like it's kind of like if you pulled the food out of your fridge from a few days ago and you heated it up and stuff and you went to eat it and smells really bad and you decide just to eat it anyway well you might there's you might get sick right you might continue
to do more damage you might get hurt if you have pain while you're doing some of these some of these movements so if something's not something feels weird it's weird for a reason and you'll have to try to find something different to do another thing that can help the benchpress tremendously and it's the easiest thing to do is to do pause work take weights pause them on your chest
count for you know three Mississippi's or so you get a good three-second count in there and then press when you press the weight back up make sure you're not sinking the weight back into your body more make sure you staying tight the entire time you're trying to stay so connected to the bar that you're kind of zeroing the weight out but you're not zeroing the weight out by resting it on your
body you're just creating so much tension and so much tightness that you're literally just kind of holding the bar just just barely touching your t-shirt that'll build up a tremendous amount of strength and it will help a ton with your form I call it idiot proofing the bench press because sometimes you get some people that get excited they want to move really fast and explosively show you how strong they are
and they start going all haywire the left arms going and right arm using their ribcage as a trampoline yeah yeah they're going just buck wild right it's just cool it's great - it's great to be motivated but you know try doing some pause work you'd be surprised on how much it can really help your bench press moving into some back movements the movement that you saw that I was doing
here it's very simple we just had some bands attached to a machine and anything stationary that's bolted down or anything that's heavy in the gym height that won't it won't come shooting back at you when you when you put a band around it would be a good a good thing to use it's something you could do in your garage very easily as well you can do at home again making sure that whatever it is you hook it to is very
secure all it's doing is just you know pulling the bands towards me and you're pulling them sort of towards eye level yeah you know I there's no wrong a right way to do it you just pull wherever you want to pull - we have we have a very scientific thing in here that we talk about quite often somebody says hey Mark you know how many represent you I always tell them some for a few you know or the
old Muhammad Ali r.i.p Muhammad Ali saying of you know how many reps did you do when he did sit-ups and he said I only count I only counted reps once they started to hurt those are the only reps they count no pain no gain there's really no wrong or right way to do this all you're trying to do is you're trying to get the upper back kind of warmed up and what I'll do is I'll
pull and I'll hold for five seconds try to hold my I'll try to keep my my positioning of my ribcage upward and I'll pull really hard with pull my arms back behind my body as far I can which is not very good for Meeks my range of motion isn't it's fairly crappy but then from there I'll walk away from the rack and what that does is it put them put some more tension on the band's and then from there I'll just
move my elbows up and I move my your arms or bit my arms are bent right you're simulating in in a way the benchpress position yeah right right yeah and it's like a standing row or whatever you want to call it standing bench or whatever and so yeah what that does is it's kind of activating my lats it's getting my back kind of ready to go and I'll continue to kind of move my
arms around in different positions sometimes I'll find something that feels a little awkward it doesn't feel right and so I'll hang out and I'll move around in that position longer or I'll say oh [ __ ] that's a little bit weird maybe I should get on a foam roller and maybe I should figure out what is that back there what's going on in that spot you know something I didn't I maybe
didn't notice and maybe I didn't notice I slightly tweaked something at some other point in my training the warm-up is an evaluation of how you're doing for the day and so that's that's I agnostic cool right a hundred percent it's actually since since I saw you at the previous location and saw you doing sort of face I can what would you call it like its face pulls but you're using
cables and you're also using bands and I started doing that and I still do that yeah even at the beginning of my gymnastics routines and I have a stall bar you don't need to get one of these necessarily they're real pain in the ass to install it's like a gigantic ladder on the wall it's a real pain a non stall bar and but I'll do the the work with bands and whatnot like you said to
diagnose if there is an issue right before I put a lot of load on it and I'm like oh my left and infraspinatus is really grumpy today therefore I'm gonna lay down and like put a lacrosse ball underneath it and then do internal external rotation until it calms the [ __ ] down so I don't below it apart when I try to do something on the Rings yeah and it just it's also possible it's just
not in the cards for that data to do anything all that spectacular you start to move around you're like man I don't know what's going on and maybe something happen at home that you're pretty upset about maybe you're not feeling good and yada yada and all of a sudden you kind of got this downward spiral things that are kind of against you for the day and that maybe it's not in the car
for you to lift all that heavy for that particular day the other thing I do is I just turned back around the other way with the bands so I'll just turn facing away from the bands the setup you saw that I had I have two bands I have one band choked around the rack and then I have another band going through the other band so I so I have two basically handles for the bands where I can press
and pull and do whatever so I'll turn the opposite way and on bench press with the bands I'll let the bands go way up over my head and I'll let them pull on my my arms pull my arms back behind my body I'll let the band sit into my hands which will pull my wrist and I'll help stretch my forearms I have extremely tight forearms and elbows and just I gots different stuff pulling on different things and in a bunch of
different directions one of my favorite warm-ups I don't do a ton of warm-ups for squatting but for whatever reason I need a lot of one I just basically come in and start squatting a lot of times I will sometimes use my hip circle to warm up for a few minutes hip circles like fire hydrant type stuff on the ground or a hip circle is a product that I have from how much bench ah there we go throw
it up over your knees and you just start walking with it you can use a band as well some people take a band make a circle out of a band and I'll walk forward in sideways and I've got monster walks or whatever X well exactly yeah just trying to just trying to walk around move around get the hips ready get everything fired up before you start your workout you're kind of asking your
body a lot is the main thing to kind of recognize that if you're working all day and now you're just gonna come in the gym and you think they're to perform great without really warming up you got another thing coming usually so you you want to you want to do something that's realistic for you to do the second you get out of your car you can hop on an Aerodyne bike or some sort of some sort
of stationary bike there's a lot of different things you can do you get on a treadmill you can even go for a walk before you go to the gym or walk to the gym or ride your bikes to the gym there's a lot of different options you can do but you want your body temperature to be up my favorite thing to do though in the gym is a which I can show you in a little while is a bench
press where you just take the barbell and you just move the barbell around in a bunch of funky different positions so let's say you have one pinky pinky pinky on one of the power rings of the bar you take your other hand and you put it as close as you can I guess right where the knurling is about to end on the inside on the inside right so you have one hand out really wide basically in one hands ain't
a lot closer take the weight down and let the weight push your shoulder down in position you can even actually have a little bit of barbell weight on here if you're really stuck together the way I am sometimes and what you're trying to do is you're trying to get the shoulder to drop back down in position and to open up and you're trying to get the barbell to touch your rib cage so you're doing some
internal rotation with that doing a lot of very intense internal rotation and what you would end up looking like is end up looking like you're doing like some sort of weird funky chicken dance paddling like wrote head with with a barbell so one one side of the barbell is down it's almost hitting the ground the other side of the barbell is at full locked out position to where it's almost
up over the rack he ends up looking at Rosia very strange but we do that warm up in here pretty much all the time and we'll take some video of that guy's and put it in the show notes at 4-hour workweek comm forward slash podcasts so that'll be in the show notes also we will also just take the bar and hold it in position and will like typewriter it back and forth that's just made up that
term I was pretty good huh but basically just kind of like you're moving it back and forth sideways like yeah just moving it back and forth sideways just anything to get those shoulders open up but when I show you especially how tight I am after bench pressing you're gonna laugh because the barbell is going to be several inches from my chest or stomach or wherever I bring the bar down to but
after I start to move like that the bar will cleanly touch my body well I'll laugh at your mobility and you can laugh at my strength that's really the only way this is gonna continue or developing our relationships right so I want to shift gears just a little bit actually one question before I do and this is a question from from Twitter which is actually posted by Nassim
Nicholas Taleb NN Talib who wrote the Black Swan and fooled by randomness two great books really yeah yeah so what is the max deadlift for a non-competitive Flener I mean that is just a non-competitive lifter like himself adjusted by age group that would be considered decent so let's just say you have a 40 year old guy non-athlete recreational lifter what would you consider I'm just gonna make up some
numbers so 180 pounds right maybe 15 percent body fat you know get going towards a molt multiple body weight deadlift is a great place to start so you know this case the guy we'd what 180 yeah let's just say well yeah like a 360 or a 405 deadlift would be really you know getting like four plates on there would be a would be an awesome goal I think you know a lot of times people
think because I power lifts they sometimes will tell me oh yeah I don't lift like you man I'll say I don't know what do you lift you know and then they'll say oh you know my best bench is like that's only like 225 and you know I deadlift is like 350 and I'm I'm the first person to be like well what did you do when you started and they'll say well when I first started like I think I
benched 95 pounds and then I'll be like well what you're doing now is [ __ ] awesome what are you talking about why you beating yourself up so bad for you know in the sport of power of thing the commitment to gaining size and the commitment to the nutrition and the commitment to sleeping and the commitment to even performance-enhancing drugs there's just so many levels of commitment that competitive power
lifters take that your average person doesn't care to go there so the fact that they can lift 200 300 400 it's still really impressive really what we're trying to do as power lifters and sometimes we get very carried away with it just as you can with any other sport we just end up taking it to that next level and we're trying to do the same thing you're trying to do we're trying
to it's just about self-improvement however our definition of success our definition of self-improvement gets to be really swayed after a while because we're really trying to push the envelope and if you guys want to see examples of that you can watch the bigger stronger faster with footages on the west side lifters including yourself of guys with like blood shooting out of
their noses at the bottom of competitive squats yeah and whatnot yeah some people like who would desire to do that you know and there's other people like [ __ ] yeah I mean that's great I love that you know so you had you had a period of time when you were doing pro wrestling and that was a real focus for you I want to talk about a video that I saw oh we're just gonna talk about I want to I want to get
into a couple of stories so there are a bunch of things that popped up on social media and I when I mentioned that you're gonna be on the show and I asked people what I should ask you about and and we're not gonna go directly to this is gonna be stepped two first I want to ask you about the [ __ ] your elbow piece we're gonna get to that but then there were all these questions or requests to
ask you about hoop stories and I don't know what the context is there maybe you have some background that I don't but can you can you explain for people the background on the [ __ ] your elbow shenanigans what happened there and how does it tie into professional wrestling yeah so I did professional wrestling for about five years my oldest brother Mad Dog Mike Bell he passed away several
years ago now but he was big into wrestling and me and my brothers as kids loved pro wrestling I was asked one day randomly by a guy at Gold's Gym and forever thought about pro wrestling and I said I think about it all the time I watch it all the time I love it and he's like well how would you like to try out for some wrestling and I was like okay it sounds cool to me give it a shot you know long story short as I
ended up doing pro wrestling for about five years I progressed pretty well I ended up wrestling in the WWE kind of training grounds which was in Louisville Kentucky just kind of ran out of ran out of juice there in terms of my desire to continue to do it I had a kid at the time and my son Jake who's now 12 so a while back but you know at the time you know I was pretty hungry to do it and
once I had my kid and stuff and I was like well I don't really know what I'm doing because now if I was assigned with what you know if I did something with wrestling I'd be traveling all the time it just wouldn't create a great family environment so anyway that ended but I learned a lot from pro wrestling I learned how to do wrestling promos you need to put you on the spot and I'd say
hey you're wrestling tim ferriss july 31st you got 30 seconds smelly go ahead you know and so then I would go and I would say smelly is my nickname my two older brothers gave me so that was the name I used when I was wrestling as well but they do all kinds of things like that they'd swerve you and they throw things at you you'd have to improvise yeah it's improvised that you'd even say
like you know hey you're gonna do an ad for this bar soap you know you got and so I'd be like oh well you know I'm not smelling anymore after using this bar soap or something silly you decide to go through it right because there's like 50 other wrestlers watching you too and so yeah you know it felt like an idiot but after a while you start to have fun with it you become more comfortable with it
and you started to really learn I have many haters on the Internet as I'm sure you have acquired a few yourself oh yes it's the tax you pay for being on the mana and for some reason it's our singular focus rather than the people that love us tell us what a great job we do and how inspiring we are we always focus on the negative right that's the way it goes so anyway this guy was you
know he said I can't believe you know you tell people not to worry about their central nervous system and that they're using that as an excuse to not train and this and that just at the time stuff about the nervous system kept popping up over and over again and I was just getting tired of hearing people use these excuses about how they needed like auto regulate their training and they
need you need special programming and all this [ __ ] and so I was like you know I'm just gonna cut a wrestling promo on this guy I'm just gonna give it to him straight and so I went on to kind of say you know what here's the truth we we're all gonna die one day we're all gonna be in a lot of pain we're all heading there it's inevitable death is a part of life and was thinking of that and knowing
that the time that you spend on this earth you might as well live it as a [ __ ] savage and train and do whatever the [ __ ] you want and so when I said [ __ ] you and [ __ ] your elbow I meant it [ __ ] you and [ __ ] your elbow and so he was complaining about his elbow as well or yeah yeah once so once that um because I think in the video that I talked about the central nervous system
or something I said well maybe you're using an excuse because your elbow hurts or something well I say [ __ ] your elbow just go in there and train don't worry about you know you know what do they say a violent attack today is better than a well-planned attack tomorrow that's kind of the mindset it's like just go get the [ __ ] work done I don't care about the complaints I don't care about your
[ __ ] excuses it's kind of like you know you want certain work to be done you have certain jobs that you want to be done from your camera crew that's right here you don't want to hear them saying that their lower back hurts or whatever there's just job there's this [ __ ] work to do right there's stuff to get done you don't care obviously you do care if they're if they don't feel good right but at the same time there's
[ __ ] to get done and so that's just the way I kind of view that and the old wrestler and me kind of popped out for that moment and attack that guy so so you've done a couple of wrestling promos right that have traveled pretty well yeah result on the on the interwebs yeah a more recent one was with well I don't even know if he's a long-term friend anymore but I don't know what happened
with us with Mike O'Hearn you know who am I going to is yeah could you well maybe you could tell people who do not know who is yeah so Mike O'Hearn is a has been on the cover of 500 magazines or so according to himself of course I don't know if there's any real data to back that up but Michael Hernon has been on the cover of about 500 magazines he's a fitness model he's been around for 25 plus years
or so he's always been in great shape he's probably 6-2 or 63 he's probably 250 260 he's always claimed to be natural and so he when he's old meaning drug-free natural mean drug meaning drug-free and before the internet came around when he would say drug-free and stuff everyone's just like oh yeah know what no one really cared as the internet progressed and as YouTube
became popular you saw a lot of these drug tested lifters and a lot of drug free natural bodybuilders become insanely popular to the point where they have 300 400 500 800,000 followers and those people started saying you know what some of these people are full of [ __ ] sand their natural was who is this guy over here and who Zak over there and so that's kind of stuff that's happened with Mike O'Hearn all
the way to the point where they is they they gave him a new name his name is now Mike Oh trend it's for trembling you're a trend baloney oh there you go so shrimp alone is in an antigenic anabolic steroid that is particularly yeah particularly popular among power I use the code Tim Ferriss I'm kidding folks I don't know but Rempel of ely stick tablets that were used to inject and do
it yeah and then reconstitute or basically right not that I would know anything about that but continue so yeah so anyway friend mike has been a friend of mine for a long time we used to train together we used to power them together and so he made a video very short kind of lame ish video on Instagram where he called me out and he said I didn't really mind it too much I mean it still
it doesn't really bug me much but the one thing that I didn't like is he said he's coming after my numbers and so I was like you know what like just your let your PRS yeah just to protect powerlifting to protect the sport like I'm not gonna tell him I'm gonna go up and put it through a pose down with him in my underwear and that's not that's not what I'm good at that's not what I
know how does you he's won a lot of competitions he'd whup my ass in that so so I was like you know I'm just gonna do I asked my brother and ask couple their people like should I do like a wrestling promo on him and you're like oh [ __ ] yeah that would be funny and so I did a whole promo you can kind of watch if you watched on my youtube youtube.com backslash super training o6 where I said
my coat ran your no longer my friend or something like that isn't tight the title of it you guys will get a kick out of this all for fun and anyway Mike retracted like whatever he put up I haven't talked to him since then so I don't really know I don't really know where his mind is at with that but uh I got him with a couple of good hard-hitting things on there what have you learned from some of the
lifters you've interacted with like Ed Cohn for instance I mean the man the myth yeah not really the myth the man the legend I mean almost mythological though mythological proportions yeah what are there's a book by Marty Gallagher that's right here how you do it's a great book this is hard to find it's not viable okay there it is okay so this cone the man the myth the method the lifetimes and training of the
greatest power lifter of all time written by Marty gallagher this is a [ __ ] great book it's unbelievable so so it documents his uh all his different contests and stuff like that it's it's unbelievable so can you give people just a little bit of background on Ed and why people fear him so much and then Owen is the greatest power of all time he's regarded as the greatest power of all
time because he competed in the 220 pound weight class there's um a lot of different weight classes in power and of thing but from Ed cones standpoint competing at 220 and 242 there's also the 275 pound weight class there's a 308 weight class and then they're super heavies which you know the super heavyweights are guys at way over 308 someone weighing 350 and stuff like that
Edie was so strong that he was able to topple Bill Kazmaier from back in the day Kazmaier told a little bit over 2400 pounds and Ed was able to surpass him it was kind of a lifelong journey for him I think it was like 1991 or so was around the time that he did it he also the the style that he did it the way that he did stuff was always super impressive Bill Kazmaier people who don't know
number one they might recognize the name from world Strongest Man competitions just a beast Oh Bill Kazmaier was a savage there's no question I mean the way the guy was built was extremely impressive he was he was very lean for how heavy he was but you know when it comes to American strongman competitors he's he's a legend there's no doubt about it even just in a history of strongman period in American or
otherwise he's a legend so I interrupted you though you're saying his you're talking about Cohn and his is meth his technique it's not just what Edie Kohn did is how he did it a lot of times as well he's not a guy that cut corners he's a guy that kind of used old-school methods he uses hard work he's a tough bastard his tough guy and he's not gonna let anything hinder they don't let
anything get in the way of him being the best and so on his quest to topple this all-time world record you know he would hit these huge squats he'd hit a big benchpress and then a lot of times it would come down to the deadlift now anybody who knows Edie Cohn he's one of the greatest deadlift there's of all time he did a nine hundred one-pound sumo deadlift at one point at 220 pounds
a record that still stands to this day mine mind-boggling he just had a belt on for that lifts Edie Edie struggled a little bit in the benchpress so so for him to try to beat bill Kath Bill Kazmaier by the way had the world record in the bench press for a long time he benched 661 pounds 300 kilos which is just just another mind-boggling feat what gear or lack thereof at the time
was I don't think just as my workbench sure I think just like a singlet and a bell I think the 661 benchpress that Bill Kazmaier did I could be wrong but I think it was just a t-shirt he built casma are also squatted like in the mid 8 ramped up singlet of some sort didn't do a whole lot for you some cheap knee wraps and they would just go at it you know and then bill also was able to pull
over 800 pounds so if Cohen had to make up a lot of ground in the squat and the deadlift because he couldn't bench as much as Bill Kazmaier did but this one particular meat that he did down in Texas it came down to the deadlift and Ed cone injured himself in training he couldn't he couldn't bowl sumo so he gets down to his last deadlift and he's got to pull 887 pounds conventional so
sumo is wider stance hands inside the legs conventional is kind of the opposite likes closer together arms on the outside correct and so they're COEs dead cone he goes up to the bar and he 887 pounds and just like the true professional that he was rips weight up off the ground locks it out and it's kind of only time you'll ever see him celebrate you can find that video on YouTube it's
really neat to kind of watch because he doesn't really celebrate he's usually very stoic whenever he does it live so he could see him get really fired up and just a passion the guy has the one tot the time that he did come out here and the time that we spent with him here at super training we shot some videos with him we podcast with him and when he when he left that day I told the rest of the
guys in the gym I'm like well that's it like there's never that's it that's that's to go that's the greatest of all time they'll never be another egg cone walking through the door so I was like it's all just downhill from here or any other lifter that way yeah and everybody's laughing but but everybody now understands why I said it because he's a great person off the platform
he's a great he's a great person either way you know so he's he's somebody that I look up to in lifting and in life he's super awesome guy to be around he's always very happy he's always very energetic he loves sharing in for me he's gonna be the first guy he's gonna be the first guy to help you he's also gonna be the first guy to brag that he helped you which i think is funny he brags to me
all the time still this day about how he helped this guy with that he helped that guy with that and he's so excited about it and it's just great to see but something I learnt the main thing I learned from him I guess two things when it comes to lifting what I learned from him is that he likes to just do one set because he built up so he acquired so much strength that he really only needed
the stimulus from like one main set one main work set one main working set but he would have warm ups of course of course and warm ups I don't even know what you would even call him because it's seven hundred pounds then it's seven hundred thirty pounds and seven hundred sixty pounds and it's eight hundred pounds and it just goes on forever and ever so but but yeah they're warmups they're very easy for him to do
you know there's seventy percent for him eighty percent one thing that struck me reading this book way back in the day I've had it for ages is that his training regimen is actually very similar to the training regimen of Dorian Yates when we Yates when it was in his prime I mean that the programming was very similar yeah there's kind of one and done you know they get that main lift in there
the other thing I learned from which is this is really hard to do I would advise anybody to try to practice this I challenge anybody to be able to actually be able to follow through with this because it's really hard to do but this is a advice for med Cohn the greatest power through all time he said be nice to those who are nice to you and that's it don't do anything else and I always talk I always took that
it's like a challenge that's really hard to do in life you get somebody being mean or nasty to you the only thing you could think of is like how do i retaliate how do i how do I get this person's attention so I get back to him how do I get them to stop how do I you know cut them off or I want to punch him in the face whatever it might be and you know that advice from him to me was was
was critical and it came at a really good time I was having some issues with a old member of the gym and stuff like that and so it just kind of it kind of relieved me of that tension that was like you know what he's absolutely right why don't I just you know why don't just concentrate on what I'm doing concentrate on the positive great things I have going on just be nice with people
who are nice to you and then ignore the rest ignore the rest are there any other lifters for instance you've interviewed some some just phenomenal athletes and of course you have a ton of them here at the gym but a few names that come to mind because they're just like you put it mind-boggling dmitriy klokov constantine Konstantinov so you having the name right yeah that guy good lord I
mean there's a video you guys can see what what's the WA was at 9:45 985 with just uh just a belt and no it was no belt yeah no belt no no I have you have you taken anything away from these guys and Dmitry Clark office just a absolute mutant of Olympic lifting have you taken anything from those guys you've tested or incorporated in your own training or otherwise um you know sometimes when you
look at some of these guys you you do have to recognize that there's just different there's different species among us you know there's some people that are just different there's uh you know there's a guy in high school who's 64 who's really lean who gets all the chicks right I mean there's there's some people that use this sometimes can't keep up with for lack of a better term
you you don't know how to compete with them and some of these guys are like that like you're truly and honestly just not ever going to be able to compete with them at some of the stuff they do we have a bit of lifter here for a long time lifted us he was a PhD in mathematics and he said I think it was like second or third grade they put some equations in front of them for
multiplication and division and they're like we're gonna be going over this the next month and you know we're gonna review this and you guys will know this like the back your hand he was like I already know all the answers you know there's there's people that are just like that there's people that walk in here I just told you a story today about encima one of the lifters that we have
in here he did a 715 pound deadlift I've been working my whole life double double overhand grip double overhand grip with no belt it was a hook grip you know double overhand would be almost impossible with that kind of weight I don't know if there's anybody can do that so grip just for people listening you don't know this is with the four fingers of your hand on top of the thumb correct
could not hurt any worse yeah I can't anyway I mean nothing I'm trying to be part of the conversation if you like one of the boys obviously I can't even I can freaking hold the water bottle for you guys but so it has never been comfortable trying I hope you know it hurts like you know so I guess my point is is that sometimes some of these guys are on such another level it's hard to
really learn much from them at all I guess like dmitriy klokov this is like gonna sound ridiculous is saying it but like one thing that he really preaches to other other Olympic lifters is to get stronger as funny as that may sound I think that what is referring to is like hey you know what stop worrying about like you know becoming more mobile and stop worrying so much about your technique in your form and he's like
it's not all these different things it's just that you're a [ __ ] you're not strong enough so work on being stronger a lot of things can be really solved through dead lifting and squatting and so his point was hey you know what let's just get more weight on your back like this okay let's get have that be the focus rather than you spending 10 hours a day on your technique in the snatch or
something like that well you have a you have a big mural and the gym there's a strength is never a weakness okay and you know one of the guests I've had on the podcast Pavel suelen if you popularize a kettlebell in the university but also say strength first like that is sort of the foundational skill and then you can build everything else on top of it it's true I would go so far as to say with say Konstantin who
is not from Latvia alright he does need doesn't get really any from Russia but he lives in Latvia and he's like let's get something clear like yeah yeah yeah he pretty fired up yeah yeah it was interesting and interviewing him his the text that came back was like so like harsh that when we started to edit it on our end I was like oh no we need to leave some of that in there I like how
he's like he's kind of like he's kind of like really once and he was also kind of mean to towards Americans like Americans are weak and Russians are strong and tough and that's like we're leaving that in there like that sounds that sounds great I love this guy it was a good interview I mean I read the whole thing and I actually underlined quite a lot but what I what I was gonna say is that
in some cases it's it seems to me dangerous to emulate some of the habits of people who are in the top point zero zero one percent correct because they've already built such a a foundation of strength training that they can then break the rules right so he actually he initiates a lot of his record-breaking deadlifts with a rounded back right but if you take someone who's just doing
saying to X body weight and when I get to three times body weight they're like oh now I should lift with around in rack it's like well let's not put the cart before the horse yeah a great a great analogy for that would be you know you've done some MMA type stuff you've done some martial arts and stuff like that imagine just learning a few weeks of martial arts and being like ok I want to
I want to start doing some stuff like bones Jones and and where you try that is in the UFC against another you know against a professional fighter when you've had no experience with that so sometimes you got to just leave some of the things up to the pros and recognize that they're gonna look different when they do things Constantine Konstantinov it appears that he lifts with a rounded back but he's
his back rounded or are his erector so dense that when he goes to bend down his spine just kind of looks that way it's hard to really tell I mean the guys so damn jacked it's hard to really reference much of anything the thing to learn from him though is the blow cygnus and the intent he's he's not out there to like to win a balloon or a lollipop no he's he's trying to like
break stuff he's trying to be very violent with the weights he's trying to rip the weight off the ground as fast and as explosively as he possibly can so that's something you could that's a good take-home message for people then also realize he built up his deadlift by utilizing by doing a lot of repetitions I remember in the article he said it used to do set to 10 and 15 routinely
you'll see that then often in the deadlift it reminds me also although you know Pavel and you need Dan John a lot of you guys who would would if they're looking at what they were called easy strength they're probably doing fewer repetitions per set but you know Pavel has said to if you want to press a lot you have to press a lot yeah yeah and work on that that's skill and the technique of a speaking out in those
positions for the positions that you're bad and hang out in those positions for a long time as you've gotten older what have you added to your regimen if anything to try to minimize the likelihood of injury or spinal issues I know one fan of mine had mentioned and I don't know if this is accurate but the ronnie Coleman's had a number of back surgeries man were saw to see you know
Edie cone has had hit you know double hip replacements Yeah right how do you think about addressing that as you get older because you're not just a power lifter now right I mean you're also an entrepreneur and you also you have a lot of other projects and responsibilities how do you think about that I don't you know I can't be I can't be that worried about tomorrow if I'm gonna do the
things that I that I really truly want to do now now it would be irresponsible not a thing about it at all so there are some things that I added but when I say them you'll laugh because it just sounds silly to even say out loud but adding in more food it's been a big part of it you didn't want her eating more food yeah more fuel you know you're gonna need more fuel for the task see that you that
you need to be able to complete and and that's not to say like that doesn't go along with getting older probably less food goes more along with getting older than anything else but in order for me to be competitive in order for me to stay strong I mean need to add food into what I'm doing so food is gonna be a big part of it and the sleep regimen is gonna be a big part
of it as ridiculous that sounds Jesse Burdick and I laugh all the time we wanted to start a website called rest wad how about snoozing all about sleeping so I like hanging out with Jesse because he has as large a head as I do oh my hell of a cranium that's incredible how would you suggest these also pockets like on the side oh yeah it's great it's kind of like a pit bull when you see people like
chewing oh my god what are those muscles press so but Jesse is also I mean he can pull a lot of weight yeah this is a real athlete how much can be now I my first real like hands-on interaction with Jesse was getting a RT from Jesse oh no I'm gonna come back to that in a second but like what did what is Jesse pull do you have an idiot his best deadlift in competition I think is 821 821 it was a
strong unit very strong the candid young man and I met him because I was having lower back and hip related pain so Active Release Technique for those people are not familiar I'll try to give a very oversimplified definition and then just a short story on Jesse Dean oh my god so the idea the basic idea and this is going to be super oversimplified is that if you have tissues let's just
say that our have developed scar tissue and adhesions and there adjacent tissues that you can have someone effectively stick their fingers deep in between them and then have you go through different like gliding motions to tear it apart I mean this is yeah roughly what it's like now if you don't know where your soaz is imagine basically a millimeter next to your you junk your genitals
either either gender and it travels up kind of through the hip and attaches to the lower back and so people who sit down a lot be very tight in the episodes and hip flexors and then they stand up and it pulls in the lower back ouch ouch and so I decided to go see Jesse Bernick at one point and he late you got me lay down on a table with kind of my legs dangling off and he said okay safe word
is brisket that's how he started which is Jesse way to buy to 80 or so to 80 basically imagine making like a ridge hand like you're gonna sort of Austin Powers judo chop someone and he it felt like he sticked his he stuck his hand kind of up to like the second knuckle into my groin and then move my leg around like a marionette it was I was a memorable day I felt like I was I don't know like
welcome to Rikers out yes I've had something similar done before and for some reason even though their hand is on your stomach it feels like someone's fist is going up your ass it's like weird feeling like what just happened yeah tickling your spine from the front I mean it's it's a very anger like I don't know what's happening this usually you have to go to a funky club in the
middle of nowhere at 3:00 in the morning with with where right blue lights to get that eye service but if just I guess Lee Burdick flowers I mean he'll be willing to do it all the time for you the rest wad so what what what else do you have the other element the other element of the you know the staying healthy you know as you get older is is just to make sure that there's no stone unturned in
your training and make sure you're not doing that stupid stuff at the end of your workout that's gonna compromise you know at the end of your workout you always have you got the angel and the devil on your shoulder and the angel is always telling you hey you should go home you should probably just rest you should you know take take today as a win buddy and just relax and you have to devil telling you no you should do
another set you know you need to be more jacked and so when you have that that that sensation and want to do more stuff you probably shouldn't especially if you're already cooled down there's there's other days to Train there's other days to get the job done and it's it's a long long process to get stronger it's a long process to beef it's a long process to stay in shape so view it as
that make sure you're getting in make sure you're hydrated make sure you're sleeping well and even if net if need be then take a nap all these things are gonna be crucial in your in your journey towards succeeding at whatever it is that your goals are and the the simple stuff it's so funny how often and I've found myself succumbing to this often it's like you're not getting proper sleep and yet you're gonna obsess unlike
the minut details of some tiny variation of some exercises like no you dumbass you just need to actually get your sleep or take it 20-minute nap or whatever it might be and the what you just said echos true across a couple of different fields because for instance in surfing you know that that like just one more wave it's like always when people get so people like Laird Hamilton said
I'm never allowed to say that and then you have people like Tim O'Neil is I think a six-time national champion in rally car racing and it's like at the end of the day 4:30 like the witching hour that's when everybody [ __ ] up and drives a new tree or has some type of accidents like mine's not connected to anything anymore that's what you call it and you know coach summer the former
national team gymnastics coach from men's gymnastics has put it to me because I'm also inclined to push it too hard and particularly with connective tissue I get muscularly stronger quite quickly but then my connective tissue lags and I get injured and he said look if you if you you can always push harder the next training cycle or in the next workout but if you overdo it today you might be
out for two or three weeks yeah and everyone's always trying to have all these crazy recovery methods and foam rolling and doing all these other things and all those things are great and they can't they can really help a lot but if you just don't Train like an idiot then you don't need it as much yeah these less of it let's hit just a couple of rapid-fire question here and then we can get back
into the gym and we can demo some of these exercises the first one is one of my most common questions that is when you hear the word successful who's the first person who comes to mind for you then why my pops pops my dad yeah all five foot four of them uh you know I got a bo Jackson rookie card sitting right here on this desk that we're at right now and you know when I was a kid I
probably would have viewed that as like success but you know what I've learned over the years is that the success that we embrace as Americans and success that we that people are judged by can actually be quite maddening to even ever reach and it's not always all that obtainable you want to think about success and you want to think about what it means to be successful I don't know if people really
truly think about what the what the term means to them that's the most important thing like what does it actually mean to you if you think being successful is being in movies then look at any issue of People magazine and see how many divorces and see how many problems a lot of these people have had that we would normally put up on a pedestal and say they're successful they have all the
same problems a lot of regular people have but they're amplified and their their lives spin out of control very often through alcohol and other all other kinds of problems as kind of pointed out in prescription thugs those types of things become very real to the rich and famous and so success to me is defined by the simple act of being good for a long period of time and doing the
right thing over and over and over again you know people want a fast way to success people want a fast way to getting better or self-improvement and people often talk times talk about like you know a steroid or this and that's gonna get me here faster well the ultimate pill that you could take is again the act of doing the right thing as often as you possibly can it's hard
because we have a lot of self-doubt in our body we have we talk ourselves out of stuff every day we have naysayers we have people that tell us that we can't so sometimes that sneaks in and they're like oh yeah you know what they're probably right I'm probably right I probably can't do that I should probably shouldn't be doing that and so to me success is the ability to continually get a lot of stuff done
whatever it is your goals may be to continually make the right decision day in and day out and see act of being good for a very very long period of time because being successful in being great is not something that can happen just in one particular day or one particular month I've talked before about Michael Jordan and talked before about Muhammad Ali these are not people that were good
just a given day they were good for a long period of time they did the right thing for a long period of time and that prepared them to be great when the time was right and they stood the test of time to me that's the ultimate form of success is to be able to stand the test of time I remember as a kid and as I started getting more and more into girls and stuff like that watching my dad and
seeing him as an example I remember a couple times I'm like there's no way that my dad is not gonna look at this girl it's impossible there's no way this girl has two little clothes on from not turn his head and not look at this girl when she walks by I don't care how in love with mommy is just no way there's no way it's not possible my dad would never look and to me that's the
definition of greatness somebody who's that disciplined and somebody can make that sort of commitment I would just add also that one thing I've admired about what I've seen of your path and we haven't hung out as much as as as I would like but we we have interacted a fair amount and you I think one enviable aspect of what I've seen you do is that and an admirable is that you don't take
yourself too seriously and I think that like life life can be really short it can be cut short ya can also be really really or feel really really long yeah so I think that the act of not taking yourself too seriously is allowed you to accomplish a lot of really serious things and then that's an awesome there's no question about it Abbi you know having fun how can having fun not be part of your success having
and I've at the same time you know if you're not kicking ass not getting ahead it's harder to have fun you know you know make no mistake about it like like I'm a driven person I want to kick as much as the next person but at the same time I don't I'm not gonna I'm not gonna sacrifice my training or I'm not gonna sacrifice such a serious person that I think everything's gonna be diminished
or or interfered with if I have a couple laughs before I go do a lift now obviously before I load up the bar with 600 pounds I'm not going to be like the I'm not gonna be like the source of entertainment for everybody for those you know 15 20 30 seconds before I go and do my lift soon as it's done though you right back to your normal self having a good time I just have learned
you know over a period of time that it's not a it's not a great thing to to be so self indulged in what you're doing it can really as I mentioned earlier it can be maddening when you're trying to chase after certain numbers and certain things it can it can really make or break you and so I'd rather do it if I can't have fun and chase at the same time I'd rather fall a little bit short and have
fun along the way what $100 or less purchase has most positively impacted your life recently oh man positively I was gonna say that initially I'm gonna say a pair of Groucho Marx glasses that I bought in Japan a lot of legs out of those crotch or marks buzzes yeah they were they were about she liked him I can't remember how she costs but they were like in the US dollars they were like two bucks
but for some reason everybody wanted to take a picture of me with something that all the instantly made me famous somehow I don't know how it happened but there's like hundreds of p in your head yeah there yeah human being wearing glasses oh my god yeah we're the most Japanese comic book thing and I was also wearing a purple jacket Ribera Steakhouse purple jacket satin nonetheless to make matters
even better but let's see $100 purchases that is done what exactly just positively impacted your life it could be any purchase really I'm just looking for something that's not like well my new Escalade because yeah people are just gonna run out and buy it you know what the wife he does so many other purchases around the house that okay I can rephrase it yeah what is a piece of
gear that that you're extremely happy with that people might not be familiar with you shouldn't be one the triad is that what it's called yeah yeah this was pretty cool yeah I saw another weird device which looked like some modified type of pulldown grip for lat pull-downs as which I could remember the name of that thing yeah is that thing pretty we will take video of that so it
seems pretty badass in terms of the lifting equipment in the gym and I really like we have you know we have well the everything in there so expensive so it's you know there's nothing ok yeah yeah there's what's called the duffel Oh bar which is by a friend of mine Chris Duffin basically it's a kind of a spin on the Buffalo bar which is a bar that is specifically bent a certain way so it's less stress on
your elbows and shoulders when you go to squat I like that piece a lot and then we have something in the gym and I'll introduce you to that you'll really like it's also by Chris stuff and it's called the Geisha and this thing is I believe that's how you say it it's a hundred and it's a hundred and twenty pounds of cement that is in the shape of a foam roller and you just roll it on your back
and roll it on your legs ah terrible and magnificent insane I have seen a number of products from him so he also makes there's like the widow or the the Widowmaker or whatever all these days yeah they're like weighted cylinders yeah yeah Donnie Thompson makes some of the stuff as well they I think they make some stuff in conjunction and one of the things he makes is called the ex-wife
and it's like a hundred fifty times like that pretty a try it's pretty cool as well which is basically thick bar or you could use it for thick bar training but it has three different ya grips on each let's just call it well try it 20 pounds 40 pounds 60 pounds my friend my friend who makes those is a huge fan of yours so he's if he listens to this he's gonna he's hearts just gonna well I was gonna
ask you if I could buy a few of them actually saw the name of the company's havoc if we can plug it he'll haven't ya fantastic yes check it out folks if you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it that is not an advertisement if you could just put like a phrase or anything on it what would you what would you put up there I like the quote you know that quote that some
of the quotes we have in the gym but one of my favorite quotes of all time is either you're in or you're in the way and a little little backstory on that I won't go too long into it but a friend of mine I was uh I was single at the time and I was dating a few girls and was trying to find the right one I was trying to find mrs. Bell and you know I wanted a few dates with my now
wife Andy and my friend at the time a little Italian guy very fiery very excited Danny DeVito like sort of guy but then also super jacked and super ripped and built and talked 100 miles-an-hour chain-smoked like a [ __ ] but looked like a pro bodybuilder the same time it was weird combination of [ __ ] going on his uh his name was his name was his nickname was Vinny goo BOTS he was so abrasive and
when he was talking to you he always looked like he was like getting in a fight with you but he's just telling you a story but he's always moving his hands around so much and he was so energetic and loud and stuff he used to stay at her house a lot my brother just let him stay at the house for a while he was kind of down and out for a period of time and my wife ended up seeing him out
somewhere and then they spent like a few hours together they hung out at the beach together and stuff like that while he's smoking and cursing up a storm at the beach my wife thought he and I were really good friends it was just more of an acquaintance than anything else that my wife was trying to just spend time with him and and to get on my good side basically and so Vinny comes home and he
tells me he's like hey I saw Andy you know and we were hanging out she's super sweet she's super nice girl why he's going on and on and he's like you know he's like you're a [ __ ] idiot I don't know why you know you're with this girl you with that girl you complain and he's like he goes I got a saying either you're in or you're in the [ __ ] way he's like an Andy she's in and so that speech right there led to
Andy and I being married for 15 plus years now and having two children either you're in or you're in the way I love it well mark I tell you what we could we could talk and talk and talk and we'll do around to sometime but I want to let you get back to training we're going to film some stuff that people can see in the show notes so some grab some video and probably also finds some of your
your tie rates your professional wrestling challenge videos to put in the show notes but I where can people find you what would you'd like them to check out how can they reach you or learn more about you on the interwebs etc yeah so Instagram it's at mark smelly Bell on Instagram and Twitter I'm have a website called how much you bench net which has all my products which is they're all supportive
gear to help you lift more weight to help you lift more weight more safely and then also you're gonna want to check out my youtube channel which has tons and tons of great information on training its youtube.com backslash super training o6 all right well there we have at any parting comments suggestions things you'd like listeners of the podcast to consider just multiply your
muscle and multiply a hustle all right mark thanks so much everybody thank you appreciate it and everybody listening as always you can find links to everything we discussed and more resources etc in the show notes for this episode and every other episode at 4 hour work week comm forward slash podcast and as always until next time thanks for them available for more of these if you need
me I can take over a little bit when you're not around anything you need money substitutes mark bell thank you guys hey guys this is Tim again just a few more things before you take off number one this is five bullet Friday do you want to get a short email from me would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend and
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