The Joe Rogan Experience. What do you do now? First of all, how old are you?
20. You look great. Thanks. Thank you.
Great haircut, too. Thank you. Yeah.
I like it. How old are you, really? I'm working on being 20, Joe.
Let's stick with that. Working on going back? Yeah.
I'm 52. Are you older than me? I'm working. We're both working on going back.
How about we stick with that? I don't want to be judged based on my age. I understand.
How often do you train these days? How often do I train? Almost every day. Almost every day. Just doing something differently.
Yeah, doing something different. Mostly kettlebells or? Mostly for the last several years with, I suppose, last several months were kind of experimental doing something else.
But for the last several years, pretty much has been nothing but swings and dips. Just one of my protocols. It's a very particular anti-glycolytic protocol.
Anti-glycolytic means, well, the kind of thing we just discussed. Just swings and dips? Yep. Why that combination? Trying to be minimalist, pretty much, and trying to cover as much base as possible.
Also trying to do things that my body likes. But the swings are... I would argue that the swing is the most beneficial exercise anybody can do because you will, again, you're training power, you're training your fast fibers, you're developing mitochondria in the fast fibers, you are training your conductive tissues, and you're getting your cardio as well.
It's not focused on that, but you have that side effect. The dip is kind of covers what's been missing. I like the idea of very minimalist general strength. Strength protocols that just have pretty much a hip hinge and a press. That's a preference.
What about chin-ups or things along those lines? Sure. It's great. I'll do them sometime.
But you will find, to your surprise, that if you do swings powerfully and if you do dips or push-ups powerfully, chances are you're not going to lose your chin-ups. Really? Chances are for most people.
So here's something to keep in mind. What is general training versus specific training? So in Russian sports science, there is… is a concept of general training versus special training. Special means sport-specific, pretty much. So the general training can be strength, can be something else, gives you foundation for everything else.
And it's characterized by a high degree of carryover. So for example, if you decide to do barbell squats, You know for a fact that you're going to jump higher, you're going to run faster, you're going to hit harder, and so on and so forth. If you decide to go leg extensions, you can be sure that you're going to get better at leg extensions. That's it.
So general exercises are the ones that are fairly simple to perform and give you the greatest possible carryover. So that's what you do. And then after that, you start adding more. specific stuff.
So let's say that, you know, you want to increase the number of chin-ups you want to do. Well, you got to do chin-ups. So that's a specific practice. Absolutely.
So chin-ups are great. One of the things that I noticed that I thought was really weird was when I started doing kettlebells. kettlebells, things that I wasn't doing, I got stronger at. Like I wasn't doing dips for a long time. Like I didn't do them for months and months.
And I was just doing kettlebells. I was just doing cleans, presses, snatches, swings, a bunch of different squat protocols, overhead squats. My dip went through the roof. Awesome.
But it was so strange. We call this the what the hell effect. So that type of carryover, some of it we can understand, some of it we can explain. Well, some of which we can't. But, yeah, we've had the kettlebell swing, for example, increase the performance of world champion powerlifters and top marathon runners at the same time.
It's a very bizarre thing. And, again, some of it I can decipher. Some of it I can't.
But, hey, we'll take it, right? What do you think is going on there, if you had to guess? Okay. So it's a number of different things. One is the type of...
the type of breathing patterns that we use, for example, for endurance, that helps strengthen endurance. So we use this pressurized breathing that increases your strength on exhalation so that pretty much increases your strength at any kind of exertion whether it's punching or lifting and at the same time we are also training our muscles that inspiration muscles inhalation muscles as well and so developing developing these muscles is really important for your performance so that's just one of the aspects another aspect is the you Well, this is kind of interesting. Mr. Haney was a coach for Donnie Thompson. Donnie Thompson is, he broke the 3,000 pound total record in powerlifting some years back. So I'd known Donnie for some time.
So Donnie kept hurting his back and his deadlift was stuck. So we met. I showed him some kettlebell stuff. He started doing that, invented a couple of cool things of his own as well. So nine months later, he added about 70 pounds to his deadlift, 100 pounds to his bench press, set the total record.
And what his coach said, interesting, he said kettlebells work the muscles without killing them. So it's kind of interesting. So it appears to be that the particular stimulus that you have there's always a positive and there's always a negative when you're training, right? So there's something good that's happening. It's also something that's holding you back.
You have to recover. So it seems to be the nature of whatever things that happens within the muscle is positive more than negative. And I think part of it is very well-dosed ballistic loading. The body adapts to it extremely, extremely well.
Part of it has to do with the particular training protocols we have because... We produced the right amount of acid but not too much acid. A lot of trainees in the kind of pop fitness world, they're just enamored with burn.
Like, oh, go for the burn. Fred Hadfield, Dr. Fred Hadfield had a great line. So Hadfield was the first lifter to squat 1,000 pounds in competition.
And he was just a brilliant sports scientist, brilliant coach. He said, do you like burn? Light a match.
And so. People are just enamored with the burn. So, again, the loading protocols we have is such that you have the right amount of that stimulation, not excessive. Because what happens, you have too much lactic acid.
Right. Here's what happens. Well, many, many things happen.
We don't have the time to discuss this on the show, but most of them are really rather negative. Some positive, most of them rather negative. But for sure, it makes you more sore, for sure. Thank you.
People like to say, well, soreness is just caused by eccentric loading, and that's it. It has nothing to do with lactic acid. Well, eccentric loading does contribute to that, absolutely, but acid does as well. It doesn't literally burn holes in your muscle, but it does stimulate lysosomes, something that kind of eats up defective components of the cell to function. And you also have the spike of free radicals.
And so that free radicals damage cell membranes as well. So with what we do, we try to implant. Plus, there's other stuff happening, like body starts producing ammonia, which is toxic, and depletes your ATP. So all those things start going.
They're really sideways. So I think the nature of what you do with kettlebells, especially if you use the correct protocol, is you just optimize this metabolic environment to get exactly what you want. But there are some other things, too, like in your case for pressing and for dips.
I challenge anybody to find a pressing exercise. exercise that's biomechanically more perfect for the shoulder than the kettlebell military press. It's perfect. Ranger motion is perfect.
Great stretch, great contraction, just absolutely perfect. So some of it we get, some we don't, but hey, what the hell effects will take it, right?