Laird Hamilton, a surfing legend and endurance athlete, champions turmeric coffee for gut health and sauna-cardio combos (170–180°F for 10 days) to boost IGF-1 and stress adaptation, debating icing’s role in recovery. His XPT program—pool training with weighted "gorilla curls," breath holds (inspired by Wim Hof and Russian military techniques), and barefoot sand running—revolutionizes injury-resistant workouts, like Joakim Noah’s dunk gains or Grant Hill’s vertical leap. Hamilton’s broken ankles (6–7 times) and hip replacement (cadaver/patellar tendon grafts) highlight his unconventional approach: letting bones calcify naturally while critiquing kickboxing’s foot damage risks. Injuries, he argues, force deeper adaptation than wins, proving the body’s resilience in events like the Hawaii 500. Pool workouts, dry needling, and ice baths become his tools for joint-free exhaustion, offering Rogan a summer trial—where science meets primal survival. [Automatically generated summary]
But the system of craving, I believe, is part of a natural human thing that we have that was meant to crave good things, but we abuse it because sugar in nature is meant to be safe.
So if your core temperature is weighed down, you can...
If you got off a stationary bike and your core was nice and hot and you went in there, you'd be lucky to get 10 or 15 minutes out.
If you come out of an ice tub or you've been outside with minimal clothing, you could go in there for 20 minutes at 220. So it just depends on where your core is.
So, your ability to deal with stress and breathe through your nose.
I mean, everybody should be breathing through their nose, in their sleep, walking around.
I mean, somehow we became mouth breathers in the last 200 years, and they're not sure why.
There's a great book called The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McDougall that he actually is on our board of XPT.
But he kind of realized that our issues really stem from mouth breathing, chronic mouth breathing, which is scrubbing our CO2 and keeping our CO2 levels down, which is the marker to absorb oxygen.
So when your CO2 levels are down, you don't absorb the oxygen from your bloodstream.
The cells don't take it as soon as the CO2 goes up, then the body starts to pull it out of the blood.
Yeah, but definitely gets your CO2 tolerant up, but the smaller volume helps your body become more tolerant of higher levels of CO2. But the sinuses themselves emit a gas that helps the lung absorb the oxygen, and that's what I've been led to understand.
Well, you know, it's surprising if you start to nose breathe, even if you have struggle, because of that gas, it helps you open up.
A lot of people, I mean, I'm not saying that you have that, but a lot of people actually will gain volume after a few weeks of forcing themselves to nose breathe.
They'll actually start to open up all of that system.
Yeah, and it's interesting you're talking about cravings, because one of the things that I've noticed since I've been, I cranked up the temperature in the sauna for the first week to 200 degrees, and I've been doing 210 for the last few days.
And you crave it now.
I crave it.
Like, when I'm at home, I'm like, I can't wait to get back in that goddamn sauna again.
Meanwhile, when I'm in there, I can't wait to get out.
Like, I have an addiction to ice, and I've, you know, recently I've been, just came back from Hawaii, and I'm, like, dealing with this ice machines broken down.
I'm waiting for the new one.
I keep calling the guy and go, hey, when are you going to put the thing in?
And he's thinking it's, like, a luxury, like, yeah, you know, you got to, what do you need an ice machine at your house for?
I mean, because I have two, like, restaurant-sized ones.
But also, too, the body, the adaptation, if you ever put yourself under some real severe stress in multiple days, the first day you feel like you're not going to be able to make it, the second day you're feeling like you really can't make it, the third, pretty soon the fourth day, the body's like, oh, this is the new house we're living in?
Like, this is where we're at?
Okay, well, we're going to adapt and modify, and then pretty soon you're doing even more than you were doing the first couple days, and you're not even feeling it.
And so it's like, we're an amazing...
An amazing machine, you know, we're an amazing creature.
Just the way we can handle the load, and especially in our new world where we, you know, don't have to do much.
He ran a series of marathons all around the UK and he did one in South Africa.
And he was on two weeks ago and he was telling me that when you first started doing it, like the first few were really hard, but then your body's like, well, this is what we do.
We run marathons.
And then like day three, day four, things started picking up, day five.
And by the time day 10 came along, he's just running.
But it just shows you that ability to adapt and what we can do.
It's amazing how the body will just, when you push it and you keep, it'll just be like, it'll ramp.
And I think for us in our new world that we live in, that seems so...
Crazy, but probably in the past we were like, oh yeah, well we went all the way down to South America and we did some hunting down there and then we, you know, trekked a marathon or two per day and we came all the way back to Alaska, you know, like.
But you know what the real technique really is based on?
Is that our breathing.
That breathing is what gives us...
We have an ability to adjust our breath so we can actually adjust how many times we breathe per motion where a lot of these animals are breathing for a rep.
Every rep is a breath.
So every step is...
And we can do multiple steps in one breath, and so that's why we can outrun a horse.
At the end of the day, you always see in the cowboy movies, the horse is laying dead in the desert, and the guy's still going along, but because those mammals are breathing, every breath is a rep.
And you imagine how tiring that is.
Like you hear a horse run, sh-sh-sh-sh-sh.
Right?
They're breathing.
And we're rerunning full speed, but we can just do a breath and then do five or six or eight reps, and that gives us that endurance.
That's why we can run those gazelles down, because those guys are just breathed out.
I go, anybody named the Wildman's got to keep it up.
But he was, you know, like you're talking about...
when you go what does it look like when i see i mean you look at it's interesting to see in sports right now we have a lot of athletes right now that are operating as they're the oldest that you know that they that we've seen and i believe a lot of it has to do with the fact that that uh you know that they've have some examples but they're also not take accepting that hey now you're too old like that's because that's a decision like hey oh now you're too old Oh, yeah, you're going to keep doing that?
It's like, yeah, you're going to do it all the way until they throw the dirt on the box.
We're going all the way full speed until we're not, and then when we're not, we're not.
Eventually, it was a cancer that he couldn't fight through chemo, but it was within a couple weeks.
He just shut it down.
It was at one point...
He was a little bit like the Ever-Ready Bunny and Humpty Dumpty.
He would just double knee surgery.
He had a broken leg and he'd be on a stationary bike with a crutch on one of the pedals.
And he'd be pedaling and crutching on the other leg.
I mean, he was just absolutely...
Out of his mind.
And the doctors would be like, oh, you're healing faster than a 30-year-old.
And I'm like, yeah, because he's just a cardio monster.
And so he's getting that blood flow.
And we were helicopter snowboarding in Chile last summer, not this one, but the one before.
And I was with the guide, and the guy goes, hey, how old is your buddy?
And I'm like, he's 84. And he looked at me, and he's like, yeah, no, but how old is he?
And I'm like, he's 84. And he's like...
Yeah, he's 84. Like, check it out, buddy.
He's going fakie and like, I mean, you know.
But he was our, you know, he was our poster child.
He's our guy.
We look at, we go.
I mean, and I've had a few of those, I think, you know, that I've been exposed to in my life where there's guys that just – those are the guys that I always admired.
I always admired the guys that just were always going full speed and never, you know, they didn't succumb to all that pressure from society.
Like, hey, you're old now.
Are you going to still do that?
What do you think?
You're a kid.
Just all the bullshit that you can feed into and be a victim of.
Like everybody, we have a lot of sleeping issues right now.
And I'm just like, well, people aren't tired enough.
My daughter was like, oh yeah, having a hard time sleeping, and now she's been banging tennis balls seven hours a day, and I'll tell you, she's not having a problem sleeping now.
Yeah, the melatonin was created in their retina from staring at the sun in the early morning light.
I mean, they were up, they were moving, and they were up early, and they were going until dark, and at dark it was time to lay down, and then you just did that, and you were not, sleep issues weren't a problem back then.
I'm learning from my dog, because my dog is up first thing in the morning when the sun is up, and then when it starts getting dark out, once he eats, man, he's just laying down.
Well, I think if you set the thing up and you put everything on and you set it all up, you're already starting to warm up.
And if you're psyching up and getting your brain ready to do something aggressive, I think that you've already, the adrenaline's already going and you got a lot of stuff.
I mean, if you just get up off a chair and walk over and try to grab a giant bar with a bunch of weight on it and lift it, that might be a problem.
But that wouldn't be, you would never do that.
In nature, when you were going to lift something heavy, usually there'd be some lead up to it, whether you walked to the place that you were going to and you got the thing.
I don't know.
I think there's mixed opinions about people say don't stretch before you work out.
That's been the most recent thing.
Before, it used to be loosen up before you work out.
I'm like...
I mean, my dog does up dog, down dog, and that's only after he's laying down.
The future of humans does not look so rosy when you really think about how we're slowly deteriorating, becoming these gelatinous balls of meat and tissue.
No, I'm just saying, if 10's good, then 20's got to be even better.
But I think part of it is the natural evolution.
If you're sitting there doing time at 180 degrees and you can go in there and you're hanging out, And then just 20 minutes, it's 30 minutes, you might as well just try to turn it up.
And my understanding is that the Europeans, I mean, you know, you look at a sweat lodge, and you, I mean, it ain't 180. You know, if you go into any kind of sweat lodge, if you go to Europe, all the saunas are much hotter.
Like, it's like you go into a Russian, you know, steam thing.
It's not like those things are, you know, I think that they're pretty conservative with it.
Well, that shows you right there that you're adapting and then all of a sudden your tolerance.
You know, a thing I really like about the sauna is I think it really plays into overheating as an athlete.
You know, you overheat and that's usually when you have issues, right?
As you overheat and then your performance is encumbered, right?
And so the more your tolerance is for the heat, the more you can handle overheating.
Pretty soon you don't overheat and then you just don't have that.
Because that's one of the factors that gets an athlete, I think, in any performance is you overheat.
Whether you're fighting or marathon running or basketball, any sport, when you start to overheat, That's usually when you're toast.
You're done.
You start losing your motor skills.
And if you can build that tolerance up, and I think, like you said, hey, if you go in 200 and 220, and then all of a sudden you're at yoga, you're at hot yoga, and it's 105, and you're just like...
I did a protocol that I heard on Dr. Rhonda Patrick's show, and it was holding a one-hour...
A one hour straight at somewhere between 170 to 180. Whoa.
So that's another, and if you do that 10 days in a row, I was doing it twice a day for 10 days in a row, and you're supposed to get like some 1600% hormonal boost, like your whole body just goes into this radical hormone boost.
I just usually go off of instinct, and then sometimes it gets validated by science.
And so at the end, I mean, I think, and there really isn't any studies on it, but I truly believe that...
That heat is better after performance for recovery than ice.
I mean, I think ice is comfortable.
I had my...
I have a whole thing about pain, a relationship with pain, and I was doing a thing with...
I had a hip replacement, and I was set up to do all this icing before, and then I learned that icing suppressed the healing hormone.
IGF-1, there's a healing hormone that helps your body heal, and pain is...
Kicks that hormone off.
That's how the body knows.
So when you suppress pain, you stop that healing.
So you go on ice, you suppress that hormonal release of IGF-1, it's the healing hormone, and all of a sudden it's going to slow your healing down.
So if you do it because it makes you comfortable, like, hey, if you've been running around and you're overheating and you're going to go on an ice tub because it feels good, that's one thing.
But if you think that it's...
Going to benefit you.
I'm not sure.
I don't know yet.
I think heat could be the better benefit because you've got heat shock proteins which deal with damaged cells and all that stuff.
And then they talk about growth hormone, that your body produces growth hormone in the heat as another one of the side effects.
And so, again, from my understanding, and I'm not a doctor, so when I hear that, I go, well, then heat should be the thing you do because after every game, every football, every basketball player, every athlete goes right to the ice tub.
And they go, if you're going there for comfort, Okay, cool.
That's great.
But if you think that that's actually the thing that's really going to bring you the best recovery, maybe heat's going to bring you the best recovery, but it's going to be miserable because the last thing you want to do after you finish a workout is go sit in a hot box.
So if we go with the old, that old, you know, no pain, no gain.
I believe that the pain is associated with the healing because of that hormonal response that pain brings into you.
So I would attribute, like I had a fast recovery, but I attribute some of it is because I was not suppressing any of the pain.
So I think if you take pain meds, that's suppressing healing.
So if you say, hey, I'm so uncomfortable, I got to pop pain pills to endure this because it's so hard.
Well, then just extend the healing.
And the more you suppress the pain, no matter which way you do it, whether it's ice, pain pills, whatever it is, I believe the longer you extend the healing.
The more pain you can take.
I mean, inflammation is the marker for that healing hormone.
So again, reduce inflammation.
I don't know.
Again, I would like a doctor and somebody to tell me that really has a study that they know, that they've really looked at, to tell me that that's really working.
That the icing...
I mean, if you do it immediately, right when you get...
Snap your ankle and you go right in an ice bucket and keep it from fully, you know, inflaming?
So the colder it is, the shorter you have to be there, and the hotter it is, the shorter you have to be there.
So if you're hanging out, so if you can get it down to 15 minutes, and three to five minutes, let's say three minutes in the ice and 15 minutes in the sauna, then all of a sudden, let's say 20 minutes around, then here you go.
No, I mean, you know, what's interesting is, because I'm a surfer, obviously, everybody thinks, oh, you know all the surfers and your friends are the surfers.
Actually, I'm not.
I really am kind of outside of the community itself.
I have friends that surf, but I'm so not part of, you know, and in my career, I haven't been part of the industry of surfing anymore.
Yeah, really.
So in a way, I'm, I mean, I have friends that surf that come and do it.
And we've definitely, there's been some influence into, I mean, surfers in general, at least the good ones are, you know, training and using these ice heat protocols.
And so they're, you know, they're aware and motivated.
But surfing in general is, you know, I mean, I don't even know what half those guys are doing.
I think sometimes, you know, I mean, I think for a lot of...
Obviously, it's changed now, but in the past, I mean, you know, and it happens a lot with the younger people in general.
It's just like, don't tell me what to do.
I can eat whatever I want and do whatever I want.
I can go to Taco Bell and Burger King and stay up all night and still, you know...
Rip, you know, or do my thing.
And it's true probably in every sport.
And then, you know, I always say there's 1,000, you know, 20-year-olds, and then there's 530-years-olds, and then there's 250, 40-year-olds, and then there's like, you know, and then you just go as you go.
And there's less and less.
And, you know, I always love that, the term, the victory through attrition, you know, when you're just the last guy.
If you're just the last guy and you're standing, you don't have to be any good.
I think that the stress around that stuff is crazy.
But I really believe that to truly be, to have optimum performance and to be optimum, that you have to have Every spoke in the tire.
That you need every single spoke.
That you have to have a good relationship with your family.
You got to have love and you got to have good things with your kids and you got to have friends and you got to have your health and you got to sleep well and you got to be hydrated and you got to work out and you got to have your business thing.
I think you just have to have all these things to really have balance.
And I think if one of the spokes isn't tight, I think that's excellent advice.
Yeah, but I don't think he understood what I meant.
I felt like someone like that, if they were really taking good care of themselves, getting the right sleep, eating the right food, getting a workout, all those things, imagine.
Imagine.
If they can do what they're doing, burning it on both ends, imagine what they could do fully balanced.
Well, I think you have a blockage there, though, too.
I think if you can't pull back and look at it from a distance when you're in it, I think you get too detailed and then you can't, you know, you can't be...
Well, you have to get used to it because I've been in them and driven them.
And it's interesting how the body has to acclimate to the acceleration because you're used to that jolting, that shifting, you know, first gear, second gear, third gear, all that delay.
It's like AC versus DC. You know, normal cars are like AC, a little gap between the power.
And when you get that, you know, the body has to get used to the...
I'm still not totally okay with not looking where you're going and just flipping it on autopilot, but...
Well, that's fun on the highway, but, you know, I look where I'm going and I keep my hand on the wheel, but it is fun to, like, shut 10% of your brain off and just let the car kind of handle the speed.
Optimizing him because he's so amazing that, okay, let's optimize your amazingness by making you be healthier.
Take care of yourself so you can be around longer and maybe do more great things, right?
So again, I'm just speaking personally about when you try to look at optimization, right?
Like you're here, you only get so long, what are you doing?
And are you really optimizing it by...
Taxing the system and not getting all of it out of it that you, you know, but I guess in a way it's kind of like unhappiness, you know, people use that as a workout.
So that's a little, that makes you tired and you get hungry and, you know, there's always that.
Like, sometimes you just get stuck in the momentum of the choice that you made, and it's very difficult to, like, take that pause and go, okay, am I doing this the right way?
Maybe I need to reset.
Maybe I need to just take some time to really consider if this is making me happy and how many years I'm going to be able to do this and sustain it.
There's a groundedness that they seem to exhibit that is universal.
It's almost, you very rarely find completely frivolous, dopey people that live in Hawaii.
They're not, I mean, I'm sure you find some people that are not that smart, but there's a groundedness that so many of them have because they're on a volcano.
The guy's pretty interesting, and he does a study of why we gravitate towards being on the beach, why all the most expensive real estate is beachfront.
And that something about when we stare at the ocean, they did all these studies where it just totally lights the brain up that our whole – something about the horizon and about the ocean itself that affects our whole well-being.
And part of it, we don't even know why, but we're just drawn like why are we drawn there?
I know that when you're around dolphins and when you're around whales, and it's interesting, today I was in the ocean and I felt something was around and I could feel it.
I just knew something was around and then it just...
Five, ten minutes later, a big sea lion kind of popped its head up and went.
But I could feel before.
But when you're around those animals that are in the ocean, you definitely feel a kindred spirit with them, unlike you do with land animals.
You don't really have – I mean, okay, maybe a wolf or dogs because we were connected with them for 30,000 years.
We have that relationship.
You feel something with a dog.
But – But with the sea animals, like I say, when the dolphins come around and you just feel some kind of – there's just some – and they've done some studies with dolphins, how they affect kids that have different – Yeah, There's some healing ability and actually dolphins are capable of having a collective consciousness.
That's why when they get surrounded, the big ones don't just jump out of the net.
Everybody stays together.
But again, the aquatic ape that were from the ocean, I mean, listen, we call it the soup of life, right?
The ocean is the reason why we were here and why we can be here.
Because if it wasn't for that, it would be Mars and it would be hard to live there.
That's a beautiful book about – talks about that and the science behind that and the effect it has on our system.
But, you know, in a way, watching the ocean move is a little bit like watching a fire.
You know how fire is mesmerizing.
You have a fireplace and you just watch the flames move.
Well, the ocean has that movement and a – Sometimes I'll go to the beach and I'll do a headstand and stand and look at the ocean upside down, which is crazy because now the ocean is the sky and the waves are moving opposite to what your brain is used to.
So it's something I'm doing when I'm bored at the beach.
And people don't realize when they lived there, but when you're in a place with giant cement buildings that are tall, you're in fight or flight the whole time.
Really?
Yeah, because you're threatened by these big masses that could...
Why are we attracted to that, well, the abundance, you know, and we're drawn to go where everybody wants to go, a little bit like sheep, you know, like we all go where everybody wants to go, opportunity.
I mean, there's all these things that, you know, why does every city draw every young person from the countryside, right?
You know, I think it has to do with, if you look at most places that cities have been created, it's usually some geographical design, some shape, like a good harbor.
And obviously Honolulu is an incredible harbor.
So great harbor, great protection.
So that probably has a lot to do with the fact that it was developed like it was because of the nature of it.
I used to say if you went to Rio de Janeiro and no one was there and you showed up one day with a boat and no one had built anything, it would be...
If you showed up in Manhattan and you went up to Hudson and you pulled up onto that island, you'd be like, wow, this place is amazing.
So most of these places, if you're in Paris and you went and the Seine went around it, you'd be like, wow.
So most of the places where cities have been developed are amazing geographical locations.
And then out of necessity, they were easy to get to with boat.
That has a big factor to it.
There's always some sort of...
Strategic.
There's something to do with being a strategic location as well.
But yeah, I don't know why Honolulu, other than great for mooring and harbors and protected, real protected, all that Pearl Harbor stuff is very protected.
Which kind of makes it – but it makes it great too.
Like if you're – for the good group, you got guys – you go to the store and you got guys that are – that lived in Malibu for their whole life since they were kids.
They don't – they live up one of the canyons and they're totally grounded and – And then you got right next to them some giant mansion with, like you said, kids that are neglected.
But there's some good ocean there, and there's some good mountains.
So for mountain bikes and ocean activities, it's pretty...
The land stuff's always going to be tricky with the humans.
So I've always been, I think I've had a thing in the back of my head like, besides highly expensive, but just living on the beach, it's like, no, I'll go to the beach, I'll be at the beach all day, but then I want to be away.
XPT is, I would describe it as a kind of a, it's a lifestyle program that evolved out of what, how we live, like what we do.
And so we started an experiential thing where people can come for like two and a half days and go through this, you know, get exposed to speakers and they do heat and ice and we do pool training and breath work and mobility.
Well, I'll invite, you know, I would invite you to come and speak for an hour, or I'd invite Paul Cech, or we'd have somebody speak on longevity, or somebody speak on, you know, just...
During the experience, we'll have a couple speakers talk on nutrition, fitness, wellness, career, whatever, just as something, as another piece of the element.
And then, like I said, we have pool training.
And we've been certifying trainers now to kind of help people go through the process as well.
And so it's really about rest and recovery and breathing.
It's more based on that part.
It's not just another training thing of like, hey, how we can hammer you.
I mean, I think that's overplayed.
I think the ways we can train and how we're training is really overplayed.
I think we're not...
creating enough things that nurture the system, you know, and really look at trying to support people in their already, you know, hammering life.
They're already just beating themselves down.
It's like, let's get off the red eye and then we'll go to the gym and we'll hammer ourselves there and then we'll stay up all day.
And, you know, and I think they need some support.
So breath work is a big part of it.
Knowing how to move correctly, I think that's a big part of it because plenty of people hurt themselves, especially in the gym, without some knowledge of movement and form.
And then I have a pool training system I developed, which is...
No, but I'm saying, but if you said, hey, we're going to take these masks and these fins, and we're going to swim this coastline where the waves are breaking on the rocks, and we're going to go for five miles.
I'm in.
But if you said, hey, go down there and wear some swim goggles where you can't even see and swim in some murky water where you don't know what's in it and we're going to swim a mile down there and you're going to do that every day, I'd rather step on a rusty nail than do that.
Because of my disdain for swimming, that kind of swimming, if it's in the surf and the waves, that's a different game.
Well, the reason why we started it was because an opportunity to expose this stuff and share it with more people.
We were doing it ourselves naturally, and then we'd have friends come, and they were like, this stuff's awesome, and then can I invite my friend?
And then we realized that if we really wanted to expose it to more people and share it, it was going to be a limitation if everybody had to come to my house.
I'll give you a great thing that you'd appreciate.
I have this whole...
Well, first of all, there's a bunch of things that happen in the water, right?
Which one of the things that happens is when you're underwater...
The compression of the water allows the blood to flow through your lymphatic system, which normally takes about a 24-hour period.
It happens in one hour.
So imagine compression tights.
Like, you know, if you wear compression, it really helps the blood flow?
Well, this is the ultimate compression.
The water is, right?
So then you deal with the psychology.
So it's good for fighters.
fighters because of the psychology of what we can do because you deal a lot with stress so we're able to implement stress in a very controlled environment um and then and then uh and then like for example uh and grant hill at one point in his career but i have a friend joe kim noah who's a basketball player and we were doing these uh we're doing these in the water
we're doing these dunking drills last summer so he i trained with him and did a bunch of stuff because you can do a lot of highly explosive heavy loaded movement with protection Because now you don't have to worry about momentum, which is what's going to pull your shoulder out, it's going to throw your hip, it's going to hurt your knee, where I can take a basketball player and I can run him through thousands of jumps, thousands, which at the end of, if I did that on land, he would be broken.
He's already jumping too much in his season.
He doesn't need to jump more, right?
So I could load him up and make him do these dynamic movements, but now he's protected because we've taken gravity out.
So it's like saying, hey, we get to go trade in outer space, but it's in my backyard.
Well, so Joakim in his career, and I don't know how many years he's been in the NBA, he came back after doing this dunking job, just using this as an example, and had the most dunks per minute that he's had in his entire career.
He was like dunking on – he was slamming on everybody.
I mean it helps that he's seven feet tall, but the fact is that he noticed.
Now, Grant Hill was talking about he gained three inches in the last year of his career after playing in the NBA for 20 years.
and he's jumping three inches higher.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I mean, we're getting...
That's the kind of tangible stuff that I'm getting, just that there's a lot more things.
A lot of it has to do with breath, because in the water, it's all controlled breathing patterns.
So everything is controlled, because you can't breathe in until you get to the top.
So if you're doing a drill where you're jumping, and most of the things we do are leg-driven.
Swimming is mostly arms.
Part of the reason why people only use their arms is because you use five times the oxygen with your legs as you do with your arms.
So the legs are very inefficient for swimming, but yet they create a lot of load on your heart, which that can boost your breath holding.
And so there's a bunch of other things that happen, but a lot of it is just that environment is very protective.
So for recovery too, for like when somebody's got a hurt knee, hurt hip, hurt ankle, you can go in there and start moving dynamically early before you would ever do it on land and be protected.
So there's a bunch of, you know, and then we can just ratchet it up.
I can make, you know, if I, I truly believe if you gave, if you said, you know, I'll get, Phelps is going to come to your house and you're going to have Phelps for three months.
So you get a stone, you run along the bottom, then you put it down, then your friend swims along the surface, and then when you go up, he swims down, grabs it, and then he goes along as far as he can, and you swim, and you just go back and forth until neither one of you can do it.
So it was based kind of on that concept, but I wanted to expand that because that's kind of limiting.
You just swim and you run, and you can't...
Isolate movements and you're not working like you can with dumbbells.
So now I shift dumbbells into the water and I have all different weights.
So depending on your skill level, you know, everything we do.
And that's one thing about everything that I'm involved in is it usually has to be able to be...
For everybody to do it, it has to be old people and kids.
In my mind, it's not viable unless you can appeal to everybody.
A kid needs to be able to do it, an old person to really be valid, to really have legitimacy.
It's like, okay, the coffee.
There has to be things that the kids can have that creamer.
Old people can have it.
It can't just be specialized.
I think the specialization of some of this stuff is creates the lack of validity.
I don't think that it's valid if it's specialized.
And so I could take a little kid like my daughter does a bunch of the pool training stuff, right?
I have an older, older guys that come and do a bunch of the pool training stuff.
You know, I got Pat Riley comes in there and he trains in the summertime with us and stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we get a really broad spectrum of people and that, and that confirms to me that it's really legitimate, right?
So I have about an 11-foot deep end, and then I have a slope so you can choose every depth all the way, and then I have what you saw in that last video.
It's about a 3.5-foot shallow end.
So this is the first pool.
I'm trying to build a couple.
I'm trying to build one in Hawaii right now that's...
That's going to evolve from what I learned from this pool.
So this pool, I just kind of built it with the hopes of designing a program.
Then we're going to shift back two feet and have a 10 foot.
And then another flat area of 8 foot.
And then another flat area of 6 foot.
And then I have the magic width is about somewhere between 35 to 40 feet wide.
And that's like, if you're trying to swim a heavy dumbbell, you know, we do a lot of individual limb stuff so that you isolate each limb.
So we'll do pistol squats and Russian lunge squats and a bunch of other, you know, and, and movements that you can, you'd be very vulnerable if you did that in the gym, you could, Chances are you could hurt yourself.
But because you have that stability in that environment, it totally supports you.
So you can be, and go into ranges of motion that you don't have.
Like, you know, you might not be able to go sink all the way down into a deep lunge on one leg and press out with dumbbells in your hand on land.
But in the water, you can.
And the water actually makes it lighter.
So you have to boost the weight and stuff.
So there's a bunch of great stuff that comes out of it.
Actually, the thing that we have right now that's probably the most kind of prevalent one, the thing that's happening the soonest, is we have a breathing app coming out.
So we have a breathing app that has almost every different modality of breath work.
And so there's some pretty cool stuff in there where you can go choose, hey, before I go to sleep or before my workout, after my workout, during my thing.
So we have a pretty cool breathing app that we're working on as well.
Now when people are hearing this and they're hearing breath work, folks who have never done anything like that, they really don't understand what you're saying.
So, you know, like, we'll do a breath routine, and we'll sit somebody down, and we'll say, okay, breathe like you're running.
Breathe like you're running.
And we'll tell the guy, breathe like he's running.
And they'll go...
I go, that's a slow run, buddy.
Like, breathe like you're running.
You know, like, any time, any movement in any air in and out is a form of breath work, right?
And especially when you isolate the system and you're not doing it because of an activity.
The fact is that when you use that system and you work it and you're not...
Detracting from it by doing an exercise.
If you're doing the assault bike where your arms are working and your legs are working, so all the oxygen that you're absorbing is going into your arms and legs.
When you're isolated and you just do the breathing alone, now the oxygen is going into that system and that system is going to develop and get better.
Then when you do your assault bike after you develop that system.
So we'll isolate breath work and we'll just do it alone.
Whether we're doing, you know, whether we're doing breath holds, we're doing some kind of apnea breath work, which is, you know, we can do a pattern where you're doing like you hold for 30 seconds, and then you breathe in for 15, and then you breathe out for 15, then you hold again.
Then you go in and out and hold, in and out and hold.
That's one pattern.
Another pattern is in, hold, out, hold.
In-hold, out-hold.
In-hold, out-hold.
Like, you know, again, those are, there's, you know, and then there's pranayama, apnea, holotropic.
There's just some where you're oxygenating the system where, you know, like whims would be...
Where you just get that rhythm going and do that for five minutes.
And people go, wow, I feel lighted.
And I go, yeah, because you haven't had oxygen like that in your head.
You haven't had oxygen in your system like that, right?
So, again, bringing consciousness to your breath.
We're not just walking along in life like not thinking about breathing.
Well, that's the extension of that parasympathetic.
Seven is just the minimum amount.
But whenever you go into any of those long extended stuff, and then those breath holds, anytime you hold the breath, then you get that CO2 level.
And that's what gives you the angst to, you know.
What's interesting because, you know, Wim's done like some record-breaking stuff and you have that free diving stuff where they scrub oxygen, you know, where they hyperventilate and scrub the CO2 and get that real low, but you have to be careful about shallow water blackout.
So we don't really practice any of that stuff.
We do more like a salt bike, jump in the pool and see how long you can hold your breath.
I like deep texture running, so soft sand because of the foot and the articulation of the feet and not wearing shoes.
Um, so I'll do beach, I'll do sand running and like if I'm in the snow, like Alaska or something like that, but I love barefoot and deep stuff.
I don't like running on hard ground.
I just, first of all, as soon as you're, you know, if you're two 15 or two, you know, whatever anything over 200 pounds, I mean, you shouldn't be running more than a couple of miles a week if you're over a buck 20.
I mean, it's just, it's a, Oh yeah.
It's so hard on your system on the hard ground.
Absolutely.
That stuff is just pounding you.
I mean, it's one thing to go in a soft, something that has absorption.
You know, like if you're running in the sand or you're running in the snow or you're running in some deep, thick grass or something that's got absorption.
But yeah, you go run, you're 180, 200 pounds and you're running, you just pound everything.
It's just seven times your body weight on the download.
And then you're wearing a shoe and That's, you know, that's kind of deceiving you.
It's a little bit like a sunglass.
You know, you think it's blocking the light, but it's letting the bad light in.
You know, you think it's blocking the absorption, but you're just getting pounded.
I mean, you're, and your feet are, you know, I mean, barefoot is so important.
Grounding is so important.
I mean, these are, these are things, but I have a new, I have a cool bike that I just, somebody just gave me recently called a stand-up bike, which the company called Elliptigo, but It's a standing bike.
It's positioned for standing alone.
The posture is unbelievable.
You want to grind on a hill.
You don't need running.
Then you have zero impact.
I think running is hard.
I understand the high of running.
For me, real running is barefoot in some soft sand.
I have this one beach in Hawaii that I run on that's a little bit like quicksand.
You'll sink in like mid You know, lower, lower, lower calf.
But I'm saying an environment like that where you have to pull your foot out and then sink in where it's absorbing the impact.
I mean, that's where work...
I always question the damage versus the work, right?
Like the pounding that you – and most – I mean, once you're a certain size, the pounding that you get, I think you can get all the cardio you want.
Do jump rope.
Jump rope's great.
You're landing on your toe.
You're doing the thing about when you're running, inevitably people go to heel striking.
They're landing on their heels because they have a shoe that they – so they think they're getting – You know, they think they're getting protected because they're landing on something kind of soft, but it's still sending the, you know, that impact up your spine.
And inevitably, anything you do and you come back and your back hurts, I have to question, like, is that optimum?
And the thing that I would consider if I ever had to do it again is that the atrophy from the initial problem is harder to recover from than you just going and getting a new one.
And I think when people push it, you know, they used to try to push that stuff because they wanted to wait for the technology got better and they only last 15 years and all that stuff.
But the atrophy that you try to recover from is harder to recover from than if you would have gone and gotten it done as soon as you needed to have it done.
My friend Maynard from Tool, you know the band Tool?
Maynard is a jiu-jitsu enthusiast and he had to get his hip done and he fucked his hip up from stomping on stage because he's always stomping with one leg.
Listen, I went to my knee, to get my knee worked on, and the guy goes, he saw my ankle, and he goes, and then he saw how much mobility I had, and he called in some foot specialists, and they had to take x-ray.
They just wanted to see, because I have no metal in there.
When you lose your, and then you lose your ability to do stuff, and then you wonder why you're doing it, and if you're going to be able to do it again.
A bunch of, oh, fast breaks where we're doing this one where we drop down, you run along the bottom with two dumbbells to the other side, you set one dumbbell up, you jump up, you bring one dumbbell out, you go back down, grab the other one, bring that one out and then pull both of them out and drop back down and run back out.
We call that one fast break, kind of mimicking like if it was a basketball court.
You'd run down, you jump up twice, run back, jump up twice.
So, you know, you try to do one move and then you'd fail.
Some of them came from friends that I was working out with that would, oh, well, let's try this, and then we'd modify it.
Some of them came from my daughter.
I watched my daughter, my one daughter, swim down one day and grab a weight and then try to swim up with it.
I'm like, oh, that's a great move.
And, you know, so we...
Some of it came out of necessity for movement, like certain dynamic movements that the basketball guy, you know, one of my friends needed.
And then, so it naturally, all the movements kind of naturally evolved.
I think that's why they're all so great.
Great.
And there's an isolation to each limb.
So we have an isolation so you can really see if the dexterity of your right arm versus your left arm and how strong it is versus the other one, how strong one leg is next to the other one, the ranges of motion and the mobility.
We can do back flips and front flips, multiple.
So you jump up and get a breath and then do multiple flips and, and, and, and extend work time so that you extend breath work where you'll do, you know, like three or four moves in one on one breath.
So we have a bunch of ways to, to ramp it up as we evolve.
Cause you know how it is.
It's like in any exercise you get proficient and then you're like, well, how do I make it harder?
Well, you make it longer, you make it faster, you make it heavier.
I mean these, but because you're in the water, we always have the breath holding element And then we have the distance element, and then we have the weight because we have weight.
So we have the weight element.
So those are different ways that we can ramp it up.
And summertime is when it's really like the season for training because there's no surf.
In the wintertime, you're not going to train and then have a giant swell and be tired.
That would be just stupid.
So you never want to let – the problem with it is that you get – I tell people, I go, listen, probably in any sport, you get the most out of shape – During the season.
You're in a certain kind of shape, game shape, but you're really not in shape because you can't have a regimented workout routine.
So you can be, oh, there's going to be 20 feet next, you know, in three days.
And then all of a sudden, you show that there's not, there's no surf.
It's only half the size or the wind screws it up or something.
So you get all that buildup.
up so we have to do things to kind of exhaust the energy but you can't be in a nice monday wednesday friday pool training with tuesday thursday saturday you know lifting mobility and yoga and whatever you know it's like you can't get into that kind of a rhythm and uh and hawaii's not conducive for that anyway it's part of the beauty of it is like oh it's so beautiful let's go to the thing or we're gonna go down the coast because it's a nice day it's good day for fishing go to the mountain there's just so much other activities to be done we're in this environment
you're in the desert and it's kind of like okay it's a june gloom no problem just bang iron or you know ride the mountain or do whatever you're going to do so that's uh But in that summertime routine, I have a group of guys, and we bounce everything off of each other.
So we'll do 10, and he'll do 10, and he'll do 10. I'll be like, yeah, that was good.
Okay, up the weight.
Okay, oh, 20 is too many, or that weight's too much, or that weight's enough.
And so it's evolved naturally that way.
And then...
And then I got some other friends that are a little bit more professional.
We have a friend of mine, PJ, who's been involved with all of the stuff around XPT to write programming and do that kind of stuff.
He trains a lot of fighters and it's great in mobility and training.
And some other training stuff.
So he'll come in and they start to really break it down and make it into a real program.
But we have routines that we do.
We have circuits that we do that we know how...
when we're taxed and you know it's an interesting thing about what the pool really teaches you is that you know you have a volume of energy available we go okay we know we got a 50 gallon tank and i can do three or four drills in in 10 or 15 minutes that did you just there's none left you just blew all 50 gallons right you do extended breath holds with super hard work where i can you know make the give you some things that are a little lighter and
Now we can take that 50-gallon tank, we can drag it out and make it last two hours, right?
Because we're doing higher volume, less weight, and so we're breathing more often.
We can expand that thing.
So everything in between, just blowing that whole tank up at once.
Right?
Through real intense breath hold with maximum weight.
You know, max breath hold, max weight, max rep.
Okay, we're good.
We're, I mean, it's, and I think lifting's the same way.
You know, it's like how many max lifts do you have in a certain day and how many per week do you have?
It's real tangible in the pool.
The pool's real, you know, the interesting thing about the pool is that it doesn't get, you don't get muscle soreness because of that compression.
So you don't get that, like, wow, I'm sore.
You get it, you go, almost every single person that comes, I always say, you know, you got to call me and tell me if you fell asleep at lunch.
And every guy, every person, you know, I was in the thing and just in their desk at the work or whatever, just fall asleep, like, guaranteed.
And some guys, you know, oh, I fell asleep for an hour.
I saw 20 minutes, 10 minutes, you know, but everybody, nighty-night.
I think it has a lot to do with the oxygen and the taxation of that environment.
But it exhausts you in a terminal way.
It's a complete exhaustion.
And I don't know why part of it is the threat of being underwater.
Part of it is that the water is sucking the calories out of you.
You know, because it's like when they were talking to Phelps about burning all those calories.
Well, you know, three-quarters of the calories he was burning is because he was in a 70-degree pool.
And people go, well, it's a 75-degree pool.
And I go, yeah, but the body's 98.6.
So for the body to keep itself warm over in three hours, it's at 75. That's 20-degree differentiation.
You got to keep – the body's just working to keep itself warm.
And because the water – It affects you more than the air.
It's more intense on your system.
You just get tapped.
So the water temperature, the oxygen load, the psychology of being underwater with weights, the workload that it's taking, all those things play into just full, thorough exhaustion.
And nothing I do exhausts me more thoroughly and yet more...
Well, it actually helps flush the other days when you're doing other land training.
So it actually helps support your – but no, I mean, we're not doing – we're doing pool training probably every other day.
It's just I end up turning the kind of – I love being in the pool so much that we do a thing called surf and turf.
So we have surf and turf where you're doing some sort of burpee press, some kind of lifting on the deck into the water, and then a routine in the water, and then back on the deck and back in the water.
You might be doing...
We have a move called...
Oh, wow.
So you do push-ups on that side.
You, you see horse over, you do push up that side, see horse back.
You do that.
I mean, you just blow up, right?
So we, I, I think I enjoy that, that part of it.
Just, just being creative, making it fun, making it interesting.
That's the part that really is enticing.
Just the drudgery and the monotony, like when you said, oh yeah, swimming laps.
I go, that's just like drudgery.
Which there's a mentality for that.
I can be good at that.
I can get on my board and I've done some endurance stuff.
I actually did a thing on Hawaii called the Hawaii 500. We called it the Hawaii 500. We started on the south point of Big Island, and we biked across the Big Island, so 125 miles.
Then we paddled to Maui at 38 miles, and then we biked across Maui, and then we paddled to Molokai, and then we biked across Molokai, then we paddled to Oahu, then we biked across Oahu, then we paddled to Kauai, then we biked across Kauai, and we did that in five days.
All of a sudden, the body's like, oh, is this our new house?
Is this what we do?
Once the body makes that decision, all of a sudden, you're good.
Like, okay, I'm good.
I mean, the hands had blisters everywhere, but...
The body felt like, oh, this is where we, you know, I did Race Across America with Wildman.
He talked me into it.
I didn't want to do it, and he suckered me into it.
And he said, because I was like, he had other plans, because he was an operator, and he's like, he wanted me to go in this race, and it's a four-man team.
You know what Ram is?
It's called the Race Across America.
It's a bicycle race across America.
You start in Oceanside and in Delaware.
And so you bike across and each guy just goes like 45-45-45-45 and then you chase the other guy when he's riding and you get out and then you just go full bore as hard as you can for 45 minutes and the next guy gets on and he goes.
But you're riding in the car chasing the other guy and you do this day and night, right?
You're doing it day and night and The first couple days, we felt pretty sick.
You don't even want water.
You look at water and you're like, that's when I really learned how to appreciate kombucha.
But we don't even want water.
And then day two...
Day three, all of a sudden, day three, you're like, wow, stomach thing goes away.
I'm ready to go.
I feel good.
Let's go.
But it was that thing about the body being comfortable with that kind of drudgery.
But I don't mind the monotony of that, of that kind of like, hey, I'm going to go that island and just, you're going to paddle for...
But if I do it in a routine, like something that's a little more...
Then I'm like, then you just, you know, I don't want to go in and do the same lifting routine day in and day out.
It's just not, I prefer creating new stuff and making it interesting and having that, the distraction of the challenge of something new and keep me interested.
The people that do it because they're into taking care of people.
They're not doing it as a profession.
They don't do it to make money.
They make money as a side product, but they're healers.
They just have a gift.
You can get 10 massages.
And they all can be good.
But there's just one of the people that they just have a skill.
They know how to touch.
They know what it is.
They know where.
They know how to feel it.
They know how to use the system.
I've done—the thing that I'm crazy about right now is I'm crazy about dry needling.
That's the thing that has been the most profound—I mean, I've done shiatsu and acupuncture and the thing and just—I mean, you know, and rolfing and I've done the 10 series— I've had all those different modalities,
but dry needling has been, you know, and then I have another person that just does, and I don't even know what art it is, it's just massage, and she just is able to understand the tissue, and she's relentless, and won't leave it until everything releases, and she knows how to release it.
Try needling is, you know, if I ever have my friend who's really good at it comes through, I'll steer her your way because it's the most effective.
I mean, I think as someone that you're always looking, right?
We're always looking.
Hey, we need the heat.
We need the ice.
We need the thing.
We need the food.
We need the thing.
Where's the turmeric?
We always are looking.
So when I run into things that are effective, I cherish them because I know that – and the problem is you have a high bar because when you've experienced great work – You just, you can't, you go get somebody who does a little mushy mushy, and you're just like, I don't have time for that.
I'll lay still for three hours if I know somebody knows what they're doing.
But I won't be there for 20 minutes if somebody, if I feel like it's like, You're half-assed now.
The girl that helps me is in Hawaii, but they teach in Colorado.
It's actually a technique that they developed.
Some guys that were studying pain, from my understanding, they were studying pain.
And so what they did is they had all these people that were injured in different areas, and then they injected them with different solutions.
And they injected them with like a placebo and like saline and Novocaine and all kinds of different things.
And everybody got better.
And what they realized is that it was the needle and the acuteness of the needles themselves in the areas that were painful that was causing this release.
And so they developed the whole pain referral chart, and then they developed this technique.
And it's – because everybody always confuses it with acupuncture.
They go, oh, yeah, acupuncture.
I go, no, it's not acupuncture.
This is in the soft tissue.
Acupuncture is on the meridians and on the electrical system.
This is soft tissue.
This is to get the soft tissue to release, but they'll take stuff that you've had that's just like a cable somewhere or a knot or something that just won't release.
Like, if it's super acute, then you need somebody to go in there and put the jackhammer on it.
But if it's not acute like that, just the normal maintenance and actually preventing the stuff from getting to a point where you really need to get the work, the sauna is magic.
- I was gonna ask you that. - I'm a little rocky with the infrared right now, only because of just something that happened to me with my skin, and then I met a dermatologist that was pretty educated, and he was saying that he says it damages the collagen.
I got a regular sauna just because the protocol that Dr. Rhonda Patrick was talking about for those, I guess it was, was it Norway that did those studies?
And so one of the things that we do is we'll three quarters into the training, we'll just pull out right when you start to kind of lose some of your juice and you'll go do like three minutes and come out and then try and you have another gear.
So that's another little thing to incorporate ice within that system, or we'll do ice as we train, as one of the stations.
Imagine doing a circuit, and one of the stations is, you know, we were doing a horse a couple months ago, last season maybe, but we were doing like an iron horse where you're standing in a horse position with your arms, and we'd stand in that position for 10 or 15 minutes.
So, I mean, there's always, like I said, there's always a little, you know, a little hook to give it, but the ice to incorporate it within your training, I think is phenomenal.
Like people, that's why I question warming up because people go, oh, warm up.
How about do three to five minutes of ice and then go start all your cardio and start to train, right?