Keith Weber, known for his viral kettlebell DVDs (like the 44-pound beach-buried one), debates natural running vs. shoe-induced injuries, citing Born to Run and studies on unnatural gaits. He advocates 16–24 hour fasts (Eat Stop Eat) for fat burning, referencing 261 papers, while dismissing processed foods like corn and nitrates-heavy bacon. Functional strength—squats, deadlifts, Turkish get-ups—trumps gym aesthetics, with Weber’s hockey-hunting friends preferring homemade jerky over store-bought. Core stiffness (not belly-button pulls) is key for heavy lifts, though flexibility aids power in sports like karate. Rogan praises Weber’s raw intensity but warns of deep windmill risks, noting get-ups build stability—even if his wife roasted his pacing and sand rash. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, you know, I thought I'd be really nervous and I thought maybe there'd be some important stuff I forgot about.
There's some parts of the video that are really hilarious that I didn't want to forget to mention because I've looked on the internet about some of the comments people put and most of them are actually positive, the ones I've read.
And there's a few that are quite hilarious.
The most hilarious ones are obviously the negative ones.
The thing that blows me away, we always go on holidays at least two or three times a year to a tropical place because my wife and I and the kids love the beach.
I've never read anything on running because there was a great comic named Bill Hicks who used to make fun of Jim Fix, the guy who had the running books.
It's amazing because we're in Venice Beach right now and a lot of people run in Venice Beach and I totally get why runners get a bad rap sometimes because a lot of people are running that really shouldn't be running.
Do you deal often with people that are starting from scratch?
Because that seems to me to be a very daunting proposition for some folks who have been kind of couch potatoes their whole life, and then all of a sudden they're like, you know what, goddammit, I want to get fit.
I really want to do something.
Like, I have a buddy who's really big, and he's been telling me lately, he does a lot of shooting competitions, like he does those tactical things where you run through a maze and you have to shoot at targets.
But he's too big.
He's like, goddammit, I've got to lose some weight.
But I can tell it's hard to just start doing that.
It's hard to just change your lifestyle.
We have patterns that we fall into.
You know, you got your average everyday pattern, you get up in the morning, you eat some unhealthy shit, you go to an office, you sit in a cubicle, whatever you do, it's really hard to say, today after work at 6.30, I'm going to go and do jumping jacks and push-ups and chin-ups and I'm going to get my shit together.
I honestly think women have a different mentality.
I have a buddy I run hills with just a couple blocks from our house.
It's a perfect hill.
If you bust your ass, it'll take you about two minutes.
20 seconds to get to the top.
That's absolutely giving it everything you have.
So it's kind of the perfect length of a hill.
It kind of taps into that mid-range energy system.
And there's mornings, every morning in the summer, there's a group of women If this playground nearby at 6 a.m., like 20 of them doing boot camps and push-ups and burpees and things like that, you'd never see 20 guys doing that.
Like just on their own will and desire to be in good shape, most guys, unless they're professional athletes, if they're just the average guy that wants to look good and be like that guy in the fitness magazine, They don't like being in public, almost, I think.
With these shoes, with this big fat pad near the heel, which is really unnatural, correct?
Like, the way the foot is designed, you're supposed to land on the ball of the foot, and the foot is actually supposed to act as a bit of a shock absorber to slowly decelerate your weight, and that is how a natural gait is supposed to be performed when you're running, right?
Yeah, and there's actually, there have been studies done where they've taken people and they've blindfolded them and looked at their gait patterns, And then they've put these big runners on and they have a very similar gait pattern.
It's almost like you take away that sensory ability of all those thousands of nerve endings in the bottom of the foot to actually feel what's going on so your body subconsciously puts the brakes on and makes you heel strike.
Yeah, the heel strike thing really didn't happen until, what was it, the 1970s or something like that, when they came out with those running shoes?
Isn't it amazing that they virtually changed the entire country, or really all over the world, the gait of people when they run by putting a big fat pad on the heel?
But there are a lot of people that, even if they started running in a perfect scenario with the right shoes and everything, if they're not strong enough, it's going to lead to some problems.
And it's one of the things that I always stress when I talk to people about the Onnit.com products that we sell, the kettlebells or the...
Like the steel clubs, things along those lines.
I'm like, please, just start slowly.
Men don't want to pick up an 18-pound kettlebell.
They're like, boy, fucking bitch.
I can work out with more.
But your video with a 35-pound kettlebell kicks my ass.
Just 35 pounds.
You think that's not that big.
It's like a four-year-old.
Women carry four-year-olds in their arm.
My wife carries our four-year-old all the time.
She's about 35 pounds.
I mean, that's all that is.
And you're doing this workout, and at the beginning, it seems like, wow, this is not that hard.
But then a minute in, you're like, holy shit, how long is this going to be?
And then you realize that just one kettlebell, just one simple 35-pound kettlebell, if you follow your workout, you can get an absolutely brutal routine in.
Yeah, it's kind of, for me, it's a measuring stick.
I like to use my video at least once a month to test myself, make sure I'm not getting lazy or kind of starting to fall off the rails because I'm just like everyone else.
If I don't stay with it, I can get, you know, a little bit lazy.
It would be awesome if there was something like a class or something like a really common class that was taught where people that had never worked out before could all get together so they didn't feel like freaks.
So you don't like show up at the gym and there's all these fucking bros all studded up and screaming and throwing weights around and dropping them after they lift.
You know what I mean?
There's a place you could go for folks who are just cubicle jockeys, you know, what have you.
Like you don't want to do too much so that you're burnt out when it comes to your skill training later on the night.
Like when it comes to like technique, martial arts technique.
But a lot of guys do like to do their strength and conditioning first to wear themselves out so that when they do their sparring, they try to be more technical because they're already exhausted and they can't use strength.
There's like two schools of thought when it comes to that.
You know, there's like one school of thought that says you should roll really tired.
And then there's another school of thought that says you should do all of your strength and conditioning after you've done all your technique work.
So your technique could be Like, as sharp as a razor.
And then after, you can worry about getting sloppy when you're running up hills.
I think it was one of those things that probably sat at the back of a gym and hadn't been touched in 20 years because no one knew what to do with this.
Maybe once a week I'd go and I'd felt more and more pathetic every time I'd go.
It was horrible.
My son has a theory about that.
So I was in really rough shape.
And I remember people that knew me were saying, hey man, you should do this body transformation challenge.
And in my mind, I was still in awesome shape.
I mean, oh yeah, good idea.
I think, why is everyone telling me this?
But the key to that program was you're supposed to take a before picture.
And I remember my wife took a before picture of me in the middle of winter, you know, didn't have UV light for four months at least, and I looked horrible.
Yeah, and then I fell in love with the whole Bill Phillips muscle media concept and read every magazine cover to cover, and I sent my pictures into muscle media, and I didn't win anything.
I might have won a sports bag or something like that, but the after pictures were quite...
Astounding, comparatively.
And I will admit, you know, I had a bit of a tan and I maybe got a haircut.
Summer's short, and never judge a book by its cover.
That's where I was going with that.
Like, you'll have people doing these triathlons that are in front of you for most of the race, and they're huge, and they don't have the typical athlete body type at all.
And they're just like thick guys that should be playing rugby or something like that, and they're still fast.
So they must have a powerful engine under there to cart that carcass around that's 50 pounds heavier than me.
Yeah, actually, I was thinking about that the other day.
Because people ask me a lot about what I eat.
I don't think I eat particularly crazy in terms of discipline until I hang out with someone that I always wonder about.
And I won't say any names here, but there's a couple of buddies I have that do triathlons, they're working out all the time, they're doing stuff, but they got a little bit extra.
And so all I need to do is go for a bike ride with them.
We're going to go for a two or three hour long bike ride to find out why.
And during these bike rides, these guys will consume, like I'm not even hungry and we're into one hour of the ride.
I'm just starting to warm up.
And these guys are, they've already chowed down an energy bar.
They're drinking this sugary Cytomax or whatever type solution with electrolytes in it.
You know, there was some study recently about rehydrating, and they were talking about how much more people rehydrate if they're around things that taste good.
Like if you have sugary drinks, like a Gatorade-type drink, how much more you'll drink than if it's just water.
When I took the course initially, there was a lot of, again, studies from Asia that indicate, like MRI studies where they're taking an MRI of a person's brain and poking needles in different points and they're showing like Major brain activity in different parts of the brain.
But I think a lot of these people that do it all the time, and the people that are real hardcore Chinese medical practitioners, I think they almost have a sense of where the energy is.
Did you ever see that movie where Steven Seagal was in a coma for a long time, and they put some acupuncture needles in, and he came out of that coma and started fucking people up?
There's the type that you stick on the end of the needle, and then there's like a big long stick, like a big cigar, and you light the end of that, and then you wave it over...
There's a major energy point on our belly button.
And that's actually a forbidden point in Chinese.
Same with your nipples.
Hey, you don't want to be putting needles in these places.
How much of this stuff do you think is like things along the lines of acupuncture or, you know, these types of meditation, how much of them are actually changing your state because you're just focusing on it?
And how much of it is not necessarily a placebo effect, but in the act of saying, okay...
They're putting needles in various spots in my body.
I'm putting myself in a very calm place.
They're lighting the moxa.
Just getting yourself calm and accepting the fact that you're in treatment at that moment, which is very different than you would be normally, say, if you have a backache or something like that.
If you have a backache, like, God, my back sucks, really been fucking with me.
But do you ever, like, sit down and try to calm your whole body and meditate?
If you did, would that bring the same result as sticking yourself with a bunch of needles and thinking about it?
Having had acupuncture done it myself many times, my take on it from doing it for a long time is these needles are going into our skin, which is a huge sensory map.
And the needles are so fine, they actually don't cut us.
It's like taking a baseball bat and putting it into a vat of cooked spaghetti.
I heard about Kobe Bryant using it, but my friend Eddie Bravo, when he was preparing for his match against Hoyla Gracie at Metamorris, he started using it on a daily basis.
Alan Joban, one of our fighters from 10th Planet who just fought in the UFC, his knee was hurt and he did it twice a day, every day before his last UFC fight and it totally fixed all the inflammation in his knee.
You go into this tank, this box, it looks like a meat locker.
There's two different doors.
One door is where you take your clothes off, and you keep your underwear on, you have earmuffs on, you wear a mask over your face, and you wear socks and slippers because the floor is fucking ridiculously cold.
You have gloves on as well, and you go into this room, it's 250 degrees below zero, and you go there for three minutes.
That's what I do.
I do three minutes because I'm not a pussy.
A lot of pussies, they get out at about two minutes.
I fucking hang...
I don't even know if you should do three minutes.
It's probably not even a benefit of going that extra 30 seconds, but...
I'm a meathead, so I continue.
So you go in there, you do three minutes, and then you get out, and I warm up.
I get on the elliptical machine, and I do it for, like, the elliptical machine for, like, ten minutes.
Get my body temperature up, and then I go back in again for another three minutes.
And it is, it's ridiculously good for inflammation, ridiculously good for any aches or pains that you might have, like muscle soreness, because your body freaks the fuck out.
It feels this 250 degrees below zero, and it just goes, holy shit!
And it pulls all the blood from the surface of your skin down to your core.
Then, three minutes later when you're out, you know, it's enough time so you're not dying of hypothermia.
You go out and then your body goes, oh, we're okay.
And whoosh, it all just rushes out.
And it's been explained to me in very technical and scientific terms, all the different mechanisms that are going on in the body.
That are protecting you from this impending death by cold.
And so when your body realizes that it's not happening, what is the actual mechanism that causes this anti-inflammatory response?
But it's way better than these ice baths that people have been taking for a long time.
I think that being uncomfortable, your ability to endure comfort or discomfort is a muscle, just like everything else.
And my friend Bob Caffarella, when I was back in my Taekwondo days, there was this guy who was one of the senior students when I was first starting out.
He was a black belt when I was a white belt, and his name was Bob.
And he used to live at the school and teach and train there, Bob Caffarella.
And Bob used to take fucking cold showers in the middle of January in Boston.
He would just crank up the cold water and just get in that shower and wash like nothing was going on.
And I would go, I can't believe he's doing this.
It's so cold!
The water was so fucking cold!
And he'd be in there just...
Just doing breathing exercises and taking a shower and everybody else, get the fuck out of here, turn that water on hot and take their shower.
But this dude, he really believed in testing your spirit.
And he thought that taking these ridiculously cold showers, like actually, probably in the long run, it was actually good for your body, now that we're knowing about cryotherapy and things along those lines.
And ice baths, it was probably actually good, like post-workout for anti-inflammatory response.
But it was also, he believed that it's like a muscle, that you're testing your will.
And by doing that, putting yourself constantly in that state of mind where you can endure discomfort, that you build up your ability to endure discomfort.
Everybody that I've brought down there, it's called CryoHealthcare in L.A. And they're one of, I think there's only two places in the whole country that have the very specific type of cryotherapy device they have, where you step all the way in.
Usually there's one where your body's in, but your head is above it, and it's sort of like a liquid nitrogen that keeps you freezing cold, but that's not as consistent as the one where you step in.
You step in, I mean, your fucking head's in it, your face is in it, you're gonna love it.
It's just so cool that they're always coming up with these new ways to increase the body's ability to recover, new ways to increase your body's ability to fight inflammation, you know?
But one of the things I do if I run, and I read this in a book and I thought it was ingenious, is just lay on my back and put my legs up against a wall.
Because a lot of times after you run, you just sit down and have a coffee or something.
Yeah, just pool, and it just pools, and then I stand all day at work.
And it's hard for that blood to get back to the heart, especially when there's all that inflammation in the legs and all that heat created and all the blood just bashing down into their...
So yeah, it makes a huge difference for your legs.
I just love the fact that you can get so much out of one piece of equipment.
You know, with one 50-pound kettlebell, you can have an unbelievable ball-busting workout and your whole body will be ridiculously sore.
And all functional strength.
Like, I love Turkish get-ups.
Things along those lines, because they're not glamorous exercises, but if you do them consistently, you feel a difference.
If you go to help a friend move a couch, you feel it.
You feel like you can physically carry things better.
Like I said, I was hunting in Alaska this week, and I had a big pack on my back, and I'm climbing up hills, and I felt great.
I'm in good shape.
I'm going up these ridiculously tough hills and sliding around the dirt and everything, and it's a lot of lifting yourself up with one leg and then lifting yourself up with another leg.
So it really is consistent with the workouts that you create in your videos.
Yeah, I just think that it's one of the best exercises for, like, translating into, like, using your body in everyday life.
If you have to pick things up or move things, just be strong.
Like, have your body, like, oh, you know, it doesn't bother me if I have to move these boxes right now.
I could pick because like like Ben from honey honey we're talking to him our friend from band honey honey yesterday was talking about how they're on the road all the time and he hurt his back from just carrying he's like carrying their gear Just picking things up and carrying their gear.
Everybody thinks there's a lot of vanity and ego associated with exercise.
Like, if you look at the cover of all these magazines and dudes are all sleek and six-pack, you're like, fuck that douche.
Well, there's a lot of people that actually do look that way, right?
But that's the thing.
For what you were talking about, your friend that cuts weight and they dehydrate themselves before they take those photographs, that's something that most people are probably not aware of when you look at those magazines and you see someone that's unbelievably shredded and vascular and really thin-skinned.
They're dehydrated and they're super unhealthy.
You can't stay like that either.
That state that they reach, like contest weight state, Like right before they compete in bodybuilding competitions, they're like on death's door.
EatStopEat.com And I just found it, I don't know how I found it, but it's like an e-book, maybe 100 pages, and it's based on 261 research papers.
Anyway, this guy, Brad Pilon, he worked in the supplement industry, and he started wondering, and it's Pilon, P-I-L-O-N, and I think he started questioning the wisdom of six meals a day.
Do we really need six meals a day?
does the body really attack its own muscle tissue if you're not constantly full? - Right. - And is fasting really that bad?
So he looked at all these different studies on the effects of fasting, and it turns out you can not eat any calories for 16 hours before your blood sugar levels even start to be affected.
And supposedly that's why we get a little spike of growth hormone in the middle of the night.
Because presumably if we've eaten supper at a certain hour, by the time the middle of the night rolls around, we've dipped our blood sugar down a little bit compared to what we were after we ate, like four hours after.
It's strange how nature works as far as, like, you know, reacting to what you're putting into your body.
As far as, like, you're burning off sugars because you're consuming a lot of sugars, and then you stop that and you give yourself only, like, complex carbohydrates, vegetables, proteins, and your body goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, where's the sugar?
Because it's sort of been proven that people that lived in the Paleolithic era didn't necessarily eat that and they probably did eat some grains and they probably did eat anything they can get their hands on.
But the reality being that simple sugars, whether it's a lot of pasta, a lot of bread, cake, those things are not necessarily the best thing for your body and it's basically sugar.
When you eat a piece of bread and you say, oh, I'm going to have a piece of bread, you're eating sugar.
Your body processes it almost the same way as it would process a simple sugar.
But people don't have a problem with a stocked lake, but they do have a problem with high fence hunting.
I think we feel like we have such an advantage already over animals that to have more of an advantage, like to have them blocked in by an actual fence, is kind of a pussy way of doing it.
It just started to bug me because of all the bow, all the archery.
So I have a lighter bow that I shoot with now, too.
But archery is fun just as far as an exercise for your mind.
It's just a zen sort of a thing to tune into that one spot you're trying to hit, keep everything calm, everything's together, tune in, and let the arrow go.
Everything's absolutely still, just perfectly lined up.
Well, he said what they do is they'll have the guy that's going to kill the thing in sort of the danger area, and then they'll have the guy calling it behind him.
Well, he either thinks it's another male or he thinks it's a cow.
They call during what's called the rut, which is when the animals are all trying to get their sexy time in.
And they have this crazy noise.
Have you never heard an elk bugle?
I've never heard it in real life.
I've heard cows, they make a weird whistle.
I've heard that in real life.
But unless you're there during the spring, or during the fall, rather, like right around, I think it's October-ish, like right around now, really, is when they're rutting.
Human beings can't even really conceptualize it, I don't think.
Our idea of what a smell is, when they're getting a fucking internet download PDF file of you when they smell you, they're getting like, oh, this guy's eating hamburgers, drinking beer, we gotta get the fuck out of here!
I smell gunpowder, let's go!
They just bolt.
They're getting so much information from your smell.
We think of it as like, oh, he can smell me.
I think they're getting a book on you.
I think they're...
They just fucking, they get your whole life story and like, go, see ya!
A lot of people, they also eat grass and vegetables only, like a few guys I've talked to, like the week of the hunt.
So their breath is the breath of a vegetation eating animal instead of like someone who eats like a lot of meat and you're making burps that it smells like rotten meat coming out of your face.
The problem is, if the deer hops the fence and goes to your neighbor's yard and it's fucking tits up, bleeding out on his lawn, and he's like, hey, Keith, where were you fucking dickhead?
unidentified
How about you shoot a fucking animal in my neighborhood?
Yeah, like if you have been on a farm, that's one of the things they say.
Like if you...
Here's a funny story.
When Brian first started working for me, actually I think before Brian was even working for me, he was selling a laptop.
He had a laptop and he put it up for sale on the message board.
And I private messaged him and I said, I need a laptop, like a second laptop for...
You know, work stuff.
It was a Windows laptop, and I said, I'll buy it.
So he sold me the laptop, sent it to me, and then I took it.
Like, from the moment I got it from him, I took it on the road, and I put it in my bag, and I went through the airport, and they immediately flagged it.
And they pulled me aside, and they said, your laptop is testing positive for explosives.
And I went, what?
What do you mean?
And they were like, well, have you ever been to a farm recently?
And all I could think of was that motherfucker is pranking me.
He put some fucking gunpowder all over the laptop and then sold it to me.
But it just had, for some reason, it tested for trace amounts of nitrogen and nitrates or whatever the fuck it was.
I remember when I was a kid, we lived out in the middle of nowhere and people would leave the animals in the ditch and after a couple weeks, the stomach would just expand, almost like you're blowing a bubble from bubblegum.
So I remember being a kid, I could never chew bubblegum because my mom would be so disgusted because it would remind her of this big sack of a stomach ripping out of this animal's body, hey, because all the little bacteria and everything go to work once the animal dies and it just like swells up into this big...
And I vaguely remember seeing an animal with like a big pink bubble sticking out of its gut.
Because it's customary after a beer league hockey game to indulge in meat-type snacks, cheese, preferably going out to a local pub to have chicken wings, beer, rum and cokes, things like that.
But there are times when we're in a place where they don't have a good pub and out comes the beef jerky.
And everyone's really...
Because I think they use a lot of the animal to make beef jerky out of.
That is a cool thing about a lot of hunters, they get really into cooking, because they're so connected with the meat that they get themselves, they start getting into being a chef.
Steve Rinello, he's a big time chef.
He loves cooking food that he makes.
Do you cook your own meals?
Do you have very specific recipes that you follow as far as healthy eating and recovering from exercise?
I don't know if she's followed it anymore, but she was essentially, she would eat like berries and some fruits during the day, but primarily her main meal was one meal a night.
She would work out all day like a beast, and then she would eat this, you know, I think, like I said, some berries and some light things and fruit juices and things during the day, but her primary meal was a nighttime meal, and she was having some great benefits from it.
It's taken me a long time to figure out how to implement that and make it so that you could actually have a video and follow along with two kettlebells, which was what we were going to experiment with, but your shoulder was sore.
Yeah, I think that's what's made our clinic sort of successful, is we're one of the few physios that that's what we specialize in, versus some places they'll use a lot of machines and fancy stuff like that, and it doesn't work as well as just grabbing onto somebody and breaking that scar tissue out of there.
That woman who created rolfing, I believe her son had cerebral palsy, and she created it to manipulate his soft tissue to give him more range of motion, give him more pain-free life.
I've gone through spells where I've had sort of two treatments a week for a while.
But once you get that crap out of there, it's gone.
Like I... I had a job tree planting for eight summers while I went through university, and it's a very one-sided job.
You've got the shovel in your right hand, you're kicking the tree in with your right foot.
You're planting literally thousands of trees a day, and you're walking up mountains with these bags of trees, and it's an intense job, but you get paid per tree.
So there's a lot of incentive there to work your butt off.
It's really, it's almost like writing or something.
When you get good with that shovel, you can like weasel in between rocks or find like a little patch of soil.
You look for a little blade of grass to slam that shovel into because it's all about economy.
Now I do know a few guys that messed up their dominant hand and had to learn with the left hand.
And they actually did, after about a week of making no money, they actually started, the brain almost just like, that brain plasticity had kicked in, and they were like, oh my god.
So from then on in, they could like, take all the trees out of this bag, switch hands, and take, so I always thought that would be a good idea to do, but I never did.
Yeah, they say that when you use the dominant side only on any sort of, like, Steve Maxwell had a comparison when it was coming to people that work in football, the kickers, that these kickers are always kicking with their right side, and that they were really getting all these weird back pains and all these strains in their left leg, and all they had to do to get rid of it was start kicking with the left side.
So they kick an equal number of times with their left side.
And then it was also discovered that when you exercise your non-dominant hand, like if you're doing something with your non-dominant hand, it actually makes the dominant hand's skill set better.
Like your understanding of whatever you're trying to do, whether it's like executing punches or doing martial arts techniques or something along those lines, when you do it with your non-dominant side, it actually makes your dominant side better.
Yeah, you mirror what the athletes are doing, and you also, you sort of, I think martial arts, it's very important if you're in a gym to watch the best guys, watch the really high-level guys kick and punch and do jiu-jitsu moves, because you see what it should look like, and it gives you a high level to aspire to.
If you were going to like, say if someone like a Jason McDonald or say like Rory McDonald, some MMA athlete, a high-level athlete came to you and wanted to improve their strength and conditioning, how would you approach like training someone like that?
Well, you know, I'd look at what, because these guys are such high-level athletes, I would look at what they're lacking, what they feel like they're lacking.
Like, maybe there's something in their ground game that's lacking, or maybe they want more power with their strikes, and give them just enough to enhance what they're doing, but not so much that...
It's causing them injury or taking away from what they're doing.
I think overtraining is probably quite prevalent nowadays.
That's funny, because it never, that issue, because of, I did a lot of stretching when I was young, so I've always been pretty flexible, so I never felt like any flexible, any strain on my flexibility when I'm doing overhead squats.
I would have never thought of it as a flexibility exercise.
Well, and I'm busy working with people that have never done anything, so I can see how their squats improve so quickly, because a loaded up muscle will always stretch better, so...
I can see people, their first kettlebell class, doing these, you know, squats that are not that good.
And then after a couple sessions, it's like, whoa, where did that come from?
Yeah, that's a really unique exercise too because it's so difficult to keep your arms overhead and hold the weight up and drop all the way down where your ass touches your heels and then straighten back up again.
So they haven't learned yet how to integrate the hip flexors and the abdominals into getting that nice, almost like your own weight training belt in the front.
So their QL takes all the load.
And that's probably how they go through life, right?
Every time they bend over to pick up groceries, their QL is just doing all the work.
My favorite is kettlebell squats with 70 in each hand.
You're just so much...
So much stabilization work when you're doing those things.
And I feel like when I'm consistent and I do those once a week and I do it on a weekly basis for several months, I just feel a big difference when I'm going to do martial arts techniques.
I just feel a big difference in my ability to keep up the intensity deep into the rounds.
I mean, I love to combine the double clean with the squat.
And I kind of got this idea off a trainer named Dan John.
You might have heard of him.
But he's into barbell complexes.
And so I've sort of taken a few of his ideas in order to lengthen out that That set that you're using because you get gassed in a hurry with the double kettlebells.
So one of his favorite things is you do one clean, one squat, two cleans, two squats, up to five.
And doing that with two 24s is when you get to like that five cleans and you've already been like holding those kettlebells, but it gives you just enough of a break that you can kind of get to that last five.
And even the world champion, I think the top three guys in the world for triathlon right now, and these are the guys that are doing the Ironman distance, they admit to not stretching.
But he's actually world-renowned now, and he wrote the book Low Back Disorders a few years ago.
But he was the first guy.
He's actually a mechanical engineer.
And so what he's doing is hooking electrodes like deep needles into people's psoas muscles and putting force transducers on their actual spinal bones and he works on animals too.
And he's taking these exercises that we've given and he's actually measuring the force that the muscles produce compared to the shearing force and the compressive force when we're doing these different exercises.
And from all of his research, he's finally been sort of indicated, like a lot of people when he first came out.
There used to be a thing in physio where if you want your back to be strong, pull your belly button back to your backbone.
That's the best thing you can do because it's going to engage the transverse abdominus.
And he blew that theory out of the water.
The transverse abdominis actually will co-contract when you do that Valsalva maneuver.
When you're at the bottom of a squat and you come up, that transverse abdominis, it's almost like the rotator cuff will contract really hard if you make a tight fist and do that.
Well, he realized that the transverse abdominus doesn't engage by tensing up your sphincter muscles of your butt and you're pulling your belly button back.
So, and I think it came, there was a study in Australia many years ago where They were doing ultrasound studies of people's psoas muscles and they found that there was some psoas and multifidus activation when you did these specific exercises where you're pulling the belly button back towards your spine.
You know, you're pushing everything around, you know?
It kind of seems like it would...
Some people have this idea that you should eat smoothies in the morning because smoothies, like vegetable smoothies especially, they sort of lube up the pathway and then everything coming afterwards will have an easy ride through the body's digestive system.
So, he's all about the concept of super stiffness.
I think it's a term he might have coined, but he's, with athletes, he's all about having the core stiff so that...
And I don't mean stiff where you can't pick up your wallet or something, but stiff to the point where it's always sort of all these abdominal and postural muscles are on high alert.
So that when you do throw a punch or something, they kick in all at once.
And he claims that from his studies, excessive stretching of the core and the hips and the shoulders, you lose that nice tightness.
You lose that nice normal sort of resiliency between the core and the extremities.
That's interesting, but the only thing that I would take issue with is that I think that a lot of power comes from the range of motion and the flexibility, especially when it comes to kicking.
That's all whipping the body around.
There's a lot of power involved in having a long range of motion.
I wonder what would happen if you worked with a mixed martial artist that was like a kicking specialist, like a Machida or an Anderson Silva or something like that.
I wonder if they would change their tune, if they saw how much flexibility is necessary to pull off certain things like wheel kicks, things along those lines where your whole body is moving in a very flow.
It seems to me that there's different requirements that different sports have.
Like what you would need to be a very good shot putter, you'd need a completely different set of physiological skills or strengths to be a jiu-jitsu player or a judo person or a karate master or whatever the fuck it is.
It's almost like the people who are training you have to be skilled in those areas.
And I don't think anyone doing sort of body work and soft tissue work, I think they should all have some sort of foundation in some type of weight training or some type of exercise where they're going through those same processes themselves because then I think it gives you a really nice, innate understanding of what you're dealing with when you get a person on your table.
And, uh, actually, when we were in Hawaii, we, uh, we, uh, I did bury my kettlebell on the beach because I'm too lazy to take it back up to the room, and there's these guys with the...
Metal detectors, and there's one guy, he's like, he always gives me a wave, he's like, because there were a couple times where he's digging this thing up, and I'm like, oh, that's my kettlebell, and...
Well, when I hurt my back from jiu-jitsu, I really started concentrating more on back exercises and core exercises and strengthening exercises because I recognized that there's...
This injury that I was getting in jiu-jitsu, it was a weak link injury.
It's like there was a weak link in my chain and the weak link was the core, my back.
I wasn't doing enough curls, chin-ups rather, rows.
I wasn't doing enough back exercises and I switched my workouts to almost primarily that as opposed to primarily pushing like benching and things along those lines.
Yeah, the two hands anyhow, that's a great exercise.
Since we're on the subject of windmills, that is one exercise that sometimes I see people going too deep with.
There's that depth where it feels like your hamstrings are going to snap, and I think that's where some people, they'll take it just a little bit further so that they can touch the floor or the ground or whatever.
If you can make sure that you're aware of where your body's ending up, And keep that core tight because there's that point where you get to the point where, okay, my hamstrings, that's as far as they're going to go.
And then there's that little extra.
If you can stop short of that so that you maintain that nice, super stiff core, you probably already do that.
But some people that don't have as much flexibility, and I watched myself on the video the other day.
I was doing some homework.
And I'm going a little deeper than I should on some of those windmills just because I'm trying to look cool.
But for health-wise and longevity-wise, if you can make sure that you maybe even check yourself in a mirror once in a while, make sure that your back doesn't move at all at the very bottom of that windmill.
I wouldn't say never do windmills nice and deep, but if you're doing a lot of windmills, be aware of how much of your back you're using at the very bottom portion.
But mind you, that's a good thing with kettlebells.
Most people aren't using so much weight that they have to worry about that.
Even someone that's really advanced, usually they're not using much more than 40 pounds or something like that.
Well, it seems to me like a really good stability exercise as far as your ability to maintain your stance, maintain your pushing on things, holding your ground.
I mean, you're doing such a weird exercise.
You stand like that, and it's so control-based, like dropping down, laying flat, holding the kettlebell up, pressing it all over again.