Ben Patrick reveals how sled dragging, Nordic hamstring curls, and "knees over toes" (KOT) exercises—inspired by Charles Poliquin and debunking traditional gym advice—helped him earn a Division I basketball scholarship at 23 after years of knee surgeries. His resistance-based training, like Louis Simmons’ sleds, targets underused muscles (tibialis anterior, QL) to eliminate pain and improve deceleration, key for sports longevity. Joe Rogan credits Patrick’s methods for enabling his own high-torque kicks at 54, proving that disciplined strength work trumps outdated recovery shortcuts like icing or supplements. Both argue passion and integrity over financial obsession unlock true potential in fitness and life. [Automatically generated summary]
When you're an athlete, you don't get a scholarship.
People think you failed at life.
But I was painting walls, researching relentlessly, and I saw a clue from him about the farther and stronger your knee can go over your toes, the less chance of knee injury you have.
Which is always contrary to what they always tell you in gyms, at least they used to tell you, don't ever have your knees over your toes, you do squats, it's very dangerous.
So he popularized And so he could probably tell someone much more in detail, but the idea of a sled, of dragging something as a form of human exercise.
Yeah, so when you jump like that, that's crazy how high you can get up when you tell me that you didn't used to be able to jump at all when you were young.
Yeah, so that's what makes my story unique because all my coaches I played for, they'll attest and they've attested on camera like what a terrible athlete I was.
If you pull up my Instagram, I put so that anyone listening can get the world's fastest education, meaning I made for the podcast, I spent the last week preparing six posts in order.
So let's go to that one on the top left.
The current human exercise fundamental is walking forward with a machine doing the work for you, a treadmill.
It should be the human doing the work.
Even pushing a sled would be so much better.
You can put an older person on pushing a sled.
Only they move the sled, so you don't have the, you know, with a squat or something like that.
And then depending on how many people are going to be training there, like if only one person would need to use the sled at a time, then I think about four feet.
So you could go like four or eight or twelve, I think you'd be fine.
If you can push it on the way there, so that's getting your feet, your hamstrings, your glutes, without stressing your back, and then backward on the way back.
Right, because mine, I just have a chest harness, and I put the harness on, and it's got a clip, and it clips to a strap, and I just pull it backwards.
So let's break down that point, because it's actually the resistance...
that makes it fundamentally safer.
Meaning if I just tell my 82-year-old neighbor, go sprint, I mean, something bad is going to happen.
But when he's against a sled, you're basically trying to find the right amount of weight that slows you down, but still allows you to get into a natural motion.
Obviously, if it's 1,000 pounds, it won't move.
So the best weight is going to be right in the middle, a medium amount of weight that slows you down so you're not taking any jarring, like when you throw a kick, that's the like all that impact coming in.
But if you can get into a smooth resistance, pushing and going backward at the sled, you're now actually working your knees in that similar motion of the kick or in basketball, the landing or the jump, these positions that really hurt at the point of impact.
And you notice how you're able to get like circulation?
So that's part of the trick is to get those knees to heal.
Okay, we got to get them stronger, but how do we get them to heal at the same time without the strength work increasing the risk of injury?
You see what I mean?
So it can be tough to get out of that knee injury, knee pain cycle.
You're not allowed to do your knees over toes stuff here.
So the school gave me a scholarship.
Full ride.
I'm gonna be living out my dream, having a chance to play in March Madness, whatever.
Now, I mentioned I was 23. So I get a call from the head coach before the season, and he tells me, NCA has denied your eligibility.
They say your clock is up.
None of us knew.
It's a very rare thing.
I've never heard of this happening, of someone fixing their knees and then later going to college.
So we did a whole appeal process, but in the back of my mind, I was like, I don't want to now have to go two years trying to train behind the strength coach's back and look at the system.
If you've been in team sports and you bring something up to the head strength coach or the head coach or something like that, there's a lot of pressure.
You're risking getting in murky water, having a bad reputation on the team.
So I never got past that opening conversation with him of like, I've been doing these things.
So new data can come out, and new data has even come out on full knee bend, and your knee going over your toes and stuff like that, and how it actually leads to less pain and more athleticism.
But now, from the moment that data comes out, it's not like the textbooks magically all switch.
The whole curriculum and textbooks and the tests.
So even in my first couple years of college, I would have to be guessing on tests.
Is the answer the actual answer that's up to date right now?
Or is the answer what the textbook thinks is the answer?
But I did realize, okay, I'm going to need to approach social media the same way I approach needs and try to become as competent as I can possibly be and be patient with it and be responsible.
You know what I mean?
I really liked Gary Vee because he had a positive vibe.
Well, I don't consider myself a lucky person, so I had to go, okay, I know how much dragging this freaking sled works, and it gets your cardio in, and you can put older people on it, and you can rehab on it.
People aren't aware of it the way I am.
How do I get there?
Okay, I want to get lucky.
I want my post to do well.
I want people to know what I know.
So I tried to put luck on my side and literally work at it harder than anyone else was going to work at putting the negatives out there.
Here's this empowering, positive thing I'm trying to get out.
And I've rolled around in this year and I haven't.
I didn't go back.
Because when you finish the end of the night and you watch a TV show or something like that and you have some pizza or whatever, those are like a temporary form of happiness.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Now imagine if you don't have that and you want to make yourself like super happy.
You know what I mean?
So I spent a ton of time working my business.
I spent so much time with my kid.
I've taken that kid on like a thousand walks on my chest.
He looks at you like when we're playing with the Hyperice vibrating ball.
We have this massage ball.
It's called Hypersphere, I believe it is.
And it has varying levels of vibration that is amazing for rolling out little tightness like so this is not it was just an accident I've had this thing going on with my neck so I came in here today and while we're talking I said, well, it's not going to seem weird to you.
You're an athletic guy.
So I put my hood on and I put this vibrating ball and I started doing these rolling things in my neck.
And your son was like, what is going on over there?
And so then when I give it to him, I was pointing to the little button.
He's very smart, because he was realizing that the button was causing that thing to vibrate, and then I'm like that like that, and at the point he puts his finger on it, and then I push down on his finger, and his eyes light up.
He's tuned in, man.
Obviously, the time that you spend with him, interacting with him, is really having an effect on him, and he's obviously very smart, too.
He's going to be free to, you know, be in front of screens.
And I think what's realistic is, like, I think if I live this way that I like to live, Monday through Friday, I think he'll be cool with that.
He'll be like, alright, dad doesn't watch TV during the week.
You know what I mean?
We can still watch a movie.
We can still have pizza on the weekend.
That's still 104 days a year to be normal.
But I've really fallen in love with this style of living 'cause it's like you're trying to, you gotta do more, you gotta get out there to be happy 'cause you can't just resort to these temporary things. - Yeah, that is true.
And so when they get home, they cannot wait to get in front of that computer and play a video game or wait to binge on some Netflix and order some food that they enjoy but that's bad for their body.
Yeah, and it's totally normal, but it may prevent them from getting to their long-term goals if they're, you know what I mean, if they're doing that all the time.
Well, I figured that out when I was young because I was absolutely convinced that I was going to be a loser.
Because I couldn't concentrate in school.
I didn't care.
I could not pay attention.
And I guarantee that if I had different parents, and maybe it was a different time in history, I would have gotten on some sort of ADHD medication.
They would have said, this kid's fucked.
Like, in order for him to be a productive member of society and graduate college and all that, we're gonna need to put him on some medication so he can pay attention in school.
I guarantee.
Because I couldn't- I did not give a fuck what they were talking about.
And so I thought that I was going to be a loser.
I was like, I'm just- I can't work.
I can't- I just can't focus.
Then I discovered martial arts.
And I could do nothing else.
I was- all I could think about was that.
And I was super focused.
And then I realized, like, oh, I just need to find something I like.
And it just is like a bell went off.
And then there's an expression that I learned when I was doing Taekwondo when I was young.
Is that martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential.
And that is an amazing statement.
And it proved to be so fucking accurate.
Because...
What martial arts showed me was that if there was something that I really loved and enjoyed and something that gave me great satisfaction and I dedicated my time to it, I could reap tremendous results from it.
And it set the tone for my entire life.
Like all of my work ethic, all the things that I've done since then, I mean...
All of it I owe to martial arts, and I owe all of it to this realization that it wasn't that I didn't have the ability to focus.
It's just that I am fiercely opposed to focusing on something I don't give a shit about.
But when there's something I do give a shit about, I am fucking all in and I become obsessed.
I was like, so what I thought was just A terrible personality flaw that I have and discipline, a complete lack of discipline I had was actually not the case.
I just am completely opposed to being forced to do something that's uninteresting.
And that is the majority of...
The majority of this country is stuck in a situation where they have to do something they're not really interested in.
And so what do they do?
They find enjoyment out of the social aspect of work, working with people that they like.
So that's good.
So they're doing something they don't like, but at least they like the guys at work and they like the people that they interact with.
So that's where they get their enjoyment from.
And then when they get home, then they find some other stuff to do.
So if you have a boring class and that class is over and you have another boring class and that class is over.
And also I went to public school and a lot of the teachers, it's not a knock against public school, some of the teachers were great.
But a lot of the teachers were like really uninterested.
They were just showing up and doing their job and all they wanted was you to listen and pay attention.
And I couldn't fucking care less.
I really couldn't.
And I was completely sure that I was going to be a loser.
I was so insecure about it.
I was thinking about my future and I was like, man, what am I going to be?
There's not a thing that interests me.
This sucks.
And I was convinced that this was because there was something wrong with me.
Until I found something that I loved.
And then I got so good at it so quickly and I was so dedicated.
I was like, oh, okay.
And then when I quit that and started doing comedy, and then I started applying sort of the same mentality from martial arts to comedy, I was like, oh, you can get good at anything.
That's what a lot of people don't realize or don't have the opportunity to learn.
Because they get stuck into a system, like maybe you have overbearing parents that want you to go down a very specific path, like, hey, Mike, you're going to be a doctor.
Hey, Jill, you're going to be a lawyer.
You're going to do this or you're going to do that.
My parents were like, I mean, if you finish with the knee stuff I had and no recruitment for college and I'm still like, yeah, I'm still going to be a basketball player.
And she didn't think I was going to make it as a fighter either.
She was like, what are you doing if you're going to get hurt?
But that's just because she's a mom.
If you're a baby, someone you make in your body wants to kick people in the head for a living, you're like, what the fuck are you doing?
Don't do that.
It's got to be, I mean, it's immensely hard now to be a parent.
But to be a parent in the 1960s when my mom gave birth to me, I'm like, fucking, who knew what to do?
No one had any good data.
You had Dr. Spock.
He wrote a couple of books.
There's so little to...
People didn't understand how much variety there are in human beings and what their interests are and what their desires are.
They really just didn't know.
So it's like most people that raise kids, they learn from their mom and their dad or their grandparents or the people that are around them.
And so you kind of like...
You adjusted based on your instincts and what you've learned along the way, but all you learned was from the way you were raised.
Today, we have such an amazing amount of information about the different styles of parenting and the benefits of those and why it's important for your children to encounter adversity.
One of the things I've found with my kids is introducing them to sports.
Getting them used to losing.
And losing is important.
It's very important.
And learning why you lost.
And learning to make adjustments.
And learning that bitter sting.
One of my kids was playing basketball and they had a terrible game and I was like, listen, it is so much better.
to lose because then you realize like when you missed and it sucks and you could have won the game if you made that well fucking practice more and then maybe you'll make it next time like become dedicated become obsessed and then you will reap the rewards of that and then you will understand that you can apply that to all aspects of your life 100%.
It really is.
It's a complicated formula, but it's also simple.
It's complicated in that you're dealing with the human mind, which is filled with doubt and anxiety and emotions, and you're also in the middle of all the other everyday life stresses and relationships and job pressure, and then you're trying to figure out...
How am I going to feed myself?
How am I going to prosper in life?
How am I going to not be a loser?
How am I going to be someone who, when someone runs into me that I went to school with a few years from now, how am I going to not be embarrassed to tell them what I'm doing with my life?
Bombing and comedy has been one of the most important teachers ever.
For me.
Because especially once you get your legs...
In the beginning, it can be fucking ruthless.
But once you get your legs under you and then you have a bad set, the bad feeling that comes with a bad set is the ultimate motivator.
Because it makes you go back and reassess and dig in Some people, though, not.
Like, some people with emotional issues, like, it causes them to spiral, and then they're paranoid, and the next set they're even more fearful that they're gonna have a bad set.
It's the same thing that happens with fighters when they lose.
When fighters lose, Particularly at a high level, when you notice it in MMA, there's fighters that are streaking and they're doing really well.
And you're like, wow, this guy has real world-class championship potential.
And then they have a loss.
And that loss devastates their confidence.
And sometimes they never bounce back.
Sometimes they bounce back, but there's some struggles, and then they return.
A good example is Francis Ngannou.
Francis Ngannou is the UFC heavyweight champion, and he's actually defending his title this weekend against this guy Cyril Ghosn, who is his most formidable challenge.
And Francis was this juggernaut who was destroying everybody.
Made it to the UFC heavyweight title and then got beaten up by Stipe Miocic.
He's the most accomplished heavyweight champion of all time, Stipe.
He's one of the all-time greats without a doubt.
Goes down in history as one of the all-time greats.
Stipe figured out how to avoid Francis' devastating striking power, get him to the ground, and wear him out and beat him up, and just dominate him in a five-round decision.
Francis was devastated after that fight, and for the next fight, he fought like shit.
He had another fight afterwards.
And against this guy Derrick Lewis, a very dangerous guy as well, and him and Derrick had this completely uneventful fight where neither one of them would pull the trigger.
But Derrick did enough to win the decision, but it was one of the worst heavyweight fights of all time, with one of the most exciting heavyweight knockout artists ever fighting the other most exciting heavyweight knockout artist ever, and neither one of them pulled the trigger.
It was terrible.
But it was just his psychological defeat.
It wasn't just a physical defeat to Stipe Miocic.
It was a remnants of the psychological defeat.
But then the pain of that was so frustrating and infuriating that he dug deep, revamped his training, switched camps, changed gyms, changed his approach, started destroying everybody, and then came back and devastated Stipe in the rematch.
Just knocked him out, and now he's the heavyweight champion of the world.
So it's one of those things where it's like, ooh, after the Stipe fight, let's see how he rebounds.
He didn't rebound good at all.
It looked terrible in the Derrick Lewis fight.
And everybody was like, he might not ever make it.
Now, boom, he's the heavyweight champ of the world and one of the scariest motherfuckers to ever walk the face of the earth.
He figured it out.
But he figured it out partially because of that loss.
If he just went in there and knocked out Stipe in the first round in that first fight...
He probably wouldn't be the fighter he is today.
Probably worked harder.
Yeah, he probably worked harder, learned more, developed his endurance more, realized how to pace himself more.
It was the most valuable yet painful lesson.
And those losses are so much better than those wins.
If you think of his wins like the knockouts of Curtis Blades or the knockouts of Junior Dos Santos, I'm sure it boosted his confidence.
I'm sure it showed him that he could perform at the highest level in the big stage, but Not as much as that loss.
That loss was like, that's the burning embers that will not fucking go out.
Well, the other thing is if you don't do those five years, your knees are just going to still suck and those five years are going to happen whether you like it or not.
I think over the years, I've seen that the more frequent, because it allows you to get that circulation, having a really good setup and getting it in more frequently, I've seen this work really well.
So, anyone listening to this could stand in front of a mirror right now.
And if you went to take your first step backward and paused right where you're at, first off, your knee is over your toes.
Now, What originally scared people out of knees over toes is that when your knee is over your toes, there's more pressure on your knee.
That's the position that the pressure goes into the knee when your knee is over your toes.
But now it's been found out that bodies with more pressure on them age biologically younger, not the other way around.
So it's actually when we start avoiding these areas of pressure that a joint will degrade and get really fragile.
So this is a way to get that pressure in a safe way with your knees over your toes.
So every step backward, you're strengthening your knees over your toes to some degree.
The better you get at it, the more you do it, the more you add up that pressure that actually makes the area stronger and gets it to heal and gets it to be younger.
So there was a gross misunderstanding of knee over toes equals more pressure on your knee, therefore avoid the area completely.
And I can see why that would be.
That could make sense.
But that was just a conclusion based on seeing that there was more pressure, not realizing that the way human bodies age and stuff, they actually need motion and pressure, even something like compression, like a knee bending all the way.
Motion and compression is how you get synovial fluid to carry nutrients to the joint.
So we would think avoid bending a joint to make it last longer.
It's the opposite.
Now, just forcing into pain, that wouldn't make sense either short term.
You see what I'm saying?
So my job is like an art of how do you get motion and compression and pressure?
How do you do all that stuff safely?
So it's a subject in itself, but that's not a subject that you can learn in any textbook yet.
Here's the story, and people are walking around with shirts now that say chicks dig big tibs.
I was training a high school football team and I actually had to come up with clever ways to get them to buy into being the strongest in these smaller areas.
And so I convinced them that women looked at pictures of men with and without shorts and that men who had those tibialis muscles were subliminally more attractive to the women.
Is that true?
No, not at all.
There hasn't even been any studies on it.
But they bought into it.
You lied.
You lied for their benefit.
I lied for their benefit.
And they're now like a Division I scholarship factory.
But...
Getting stronger in these smaller areas.
It's understandable why someone wants to go into the gym and pump up the biceps and not pump up the tibs.
There's something about the hip flexors that if you can develop those from lifting the weights with your feet, with that device, you can develop much more power in your kicks.
The Nordic I was describing and showing, it's the opposite.
So I believe in doing the hamstring curls for more repetitions with lighter weights.
You can get that healing effect.
You can get blood flow into the area.
Be gentle with it.
But then the Nordic has...
That intense bulletproofing effect because it's getting stronger as that muscle is lengthening.
It has much more powerful effects on adapting your body versus just general strength and healing.
So light curl machine, general strength and healing.
What was shown there was a free weight hamstring curl.
So there's still...
Body weight and free weight versus just machines, you know, it's well-proven.
Machines can have their place for sure.
But there's something really special about free weight.
You know what I mean?
And so that's what, you know, applying the free weight and body weight concept to your ankles and knees and hips has really powerful effects.
So if you've gone your whole life, and for me, the reason I became obsessed with the hip flexor was because of being a super slow guy.
I, in high school, was like breaking records for my terrible 40-yard dash and stuff and just...
It was embarrassing, you know?
And even once I started getting to where I could jump better until I started training that Nordic hamstring curl and the hip flexor and taking those as seriously as other people care about their bench and their squat.
Right.
Now basketball is so much more fun because I can really run fast.
And I've trained a lot of NFL corners and stuff, and I'm now like average speed with an NFL corner.
That's fun.
That's wild.
But without doing measurable overload for the muscles that pick up my leg, I just wasn't there.
The natural athlete can go do – it took me years to do what the natural speedsters can do on the Nordic hamstring curl and the hip flexors from day one.
You see what I mean?
So that's why I was saying I started to get really fired up about this because the grinder with the work ethic and the skill who doesn't have the body to be a pro athlete, to have that pro – oh, it's one thing to get the pecs of a pro athlete.
No, no, no.
But the speed, the kicking, you know what I mean?
That explosive quality that is so mythical and only the natural.
But seven times as much money has been spent studying how do you accelerate more versus decelerate, even though the majority of our injuries happen in deceleration.
And now I see people are having good results with the idea of doing it for a shorter period of time.
Like these ice baths and stuff.
Now, unfortunately, if people are expecting to get a bunch of good tips on that kind of stuff, I have no helpful tips because I don't do anything for recovery.
I'm sure you eat pretty good, but you know how difficult it is to get the...
Well, first of all, how old are you?
30. Yeah, I'm 54. When you get to be older, then you realize, like, not that you're older and wiser, but your body needs those things in order to recover.
If you were a professional fighter, And you were going to fight a version of yourself, like you.
But there's you who does sauna, who does ice baths, who takes vitamins, who gets massages, who's involved in all sorts of VO2 max tests and all sorts of different...
Doesn't mean that he would win because maybe you'd be better skill-wise or more efficient or more dedicated and disciplined or just fucking meaner.
There's things that are intangibles, right?
But I think all things being equal, which they rarely are, but all things being equal, the person who optimizes their nutrition has a body that functions better.
So I think that's a wonderful test, but if you think that you're going to, if you think knees over toes training is going and trying that, that would be very risky, you know what I mean?
Paul's work, what's really interesting, is the highlighting of the fact that if you look at nature, that these brightly colored, delicious things are what nature wants you to eat.
These plants essentially want you to eat their oranges.
They want you to eat their apples.
That's how they spread their seeds.
People eat them, or animals eat them, and then they shit out the seeds, and that's what actually helps them grow new trees.
And this is just a part of the process in that they don't develop these protective chemicals that some vegetables have.
And so what he's trying to highlight is that there's a lot of things that people eat that have some kind of protection against predation.
And we know that this is a thing, right?
We know that this is a thing with plants that...
There's some plants...
I think it's the acacia tree?
That will actually, if you can play the sound of a grasshopper eating leaves next to the tree, they will emit a chemical that makes their leaves taste like shit.
And they've done this, Google this, because this is pretty important.
It's really wild stuff.
There's things that happen with plants where they're not exactly sure what's being communicated, but they know that if, for say, a giraffe is upwind and this giraffe is eating leaves,
If the wind from the giraffe eating leaves comes down towards these other trees, those trees will emit a chemical that changes the flavor of their leaves and makes them taste horrible to discourage predation.
That's fascinating.
His perspective, and I don't know if he's accurate, but it's fascinating and he's a very, very intelligent guy.
It makes sense.
It's logical.
What he's saying is that if you look at animals, all animals essentially, most animals are edible.
Very few plants are edible.
It's a small percentage of plants that are edible for human beings, but almost all plants are.
The plants don't have the defense mechanisms that the animal has.
The animal's defense mechanism is it runs away from us.
Like if you look at a deer, they run away from us.
Fish, run away from us.
Those things, they run and that's how they stay alive.
What plants do is they develop these defense chemicals.
And these chemicals taste like shit or these chemicals can cause animals to not want to eat them.
They discourage predation.
And what he believes is they also create inflammation or some sort of a chemical reaction in the human body that could lead to some autoimmune disorders, including things like nightshades, which I love tomatoes.
They're fucking delicious.
But he had this whole thing about them, about the chemicals, the oxalates in different forms of vegetables like kale and other vegetables that we think of being healthy that might not be good for you.
However, there's other doctors that look at these chemicals and look at these things and say, no, these, when you eat them in the proper quantities, are good for you because they have a hermetic effect.
They have an effect similar to the effect that you get from being in a sauna.
Like if you're in 185 degrees for the rest of your life, you're dead, right?
But if you're in 185 degrees for 20 minutes, it's actually very good for you because your body produces these heat shock proteins in response to that heat.
So this is where the debate sets in, and this is where I'm not sure who's correct.
But what I do know is when I eat nothing but meat and fruit, I feel fucking great.
So it seems to be working for me.
However, honestly, when I think about it, I go, well, I think what's going on is that I'm cutting out bread and pasta and most bullshit and processed foods.
I think that might be what's making me feel better.
I don't ever feel bad when I eat vegetables, though.
This is why it's confusing to me.
If I eat a bowl of pasta, I feel like shit.
I feel great while I'm eating it.
The mouth pleasure is amazing.
I love delicious food.
If I eat a salad, I don't feel bad.
I enjoy the salad, but afterwards I don't feel bad at all.
So is there a long-term effect from a cumulative effect of whatever defense chemicals these plants release?
I don't know, because I've only heard Paul talk about that.
I would like to see someone debate him who is logical and objective and reasonable and well-educated.
That would be an interesting conversation.
Not someone who's ideologically connected to eating vegetables only, but someone who has looked at this from an analytical perspective, looking at all the data that's currently available.
And for me, at the end of the day, I look at everyone trying to do their best out there.
Paul got me to actually eat more fruit instead of eating junk.
You see what I mean?
So that's a huge win.
That's a huge takeaway for me.
That I would tell anyone, and I've helped a lot of people now with like, here's my only diet advice I have for someone else is try fruit for dessert at night instead of stuff you know you don't want to put in your body.
When I did the carnivore diet before, I would call what I'm doing now more animal-based, because I'm doing it from Paul's descriptions, which is I will still eat fruit, and I will still eat honey and a few other things.
But when I did it before, I did an entire month with nothing but meat.
I ate mostly ribeye steaks, and if I ate lean game meat, I ate, like, bacon with it.
So what I'm super passionate about is the idea of doing strength work through flexibility.
So I don't currently do any static stretching.
I'm not against static stretching.
Static stretching I would think of as a foundation.
What I really enjoy is when my strength work and my flexibility work kind of become one and the same.
So I'm trying to get...
I'm not just trying to reach my body to a position and then strengthen a different position.
Anywhere I can go, I want to be strong there.
And I think that's why I can do...
The splits cold or I can be playing basketball and then do the splits or these kind of things and not have to worry about tweaking something because I'm getting strong in those nooks and crannies.
Yeah, like a straight legged deadlift, like that kind of thing.
But where I'm not sacrificing, I'm not trying to go heavier and shortening up.
You see what I mean?
Meaning every rep, you're trying to get the best range of motion you can.
And you may have seen me do that Jefferson curl thing where I... I curl my body and I reach my hands like down below my toes.
So if you look at the angles of those, and if you look at the angles of that ass to grass split squat, that full range of motion split squat on the back hip flexor, you can actually approximate the angles of a front split through only strength training.
So I don't static stretch personally.
I use static stretching in my system as an optional basis, but what I'm trying to do is figure out, even when it gets into my groin area, like a butterfly stretch, I hold weights on my knees and I strengthen my groin.
I was extremely stiff, and I found that if I just stayed static stretching, I would get some benefit, but I would tighten back up.
You know what I mean?
And here's another example where there's no studies on your groin injury from having a strong and flexible groin from this exercise we're talking about right now.
You know what I mean?
It could be 20, 30 years or more before something like that is in a textbook, but I'll tell you this much.
When your groin is flexible and strong and you go play sports, all past evidence would indicate if an area is stronger and more flexible, you have actually way less chance of injury.
There's an exponential thing going on when it comes to strength and flexibility, being in harmony versus either being strong but stiff.
And that's why I'm doing that is to stand up for flexibility because the amount of young basketball players who are scared to get flexible because they think it'll take away their jumping ability or something...
It's like you said, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
They're tight and weak, so they're worried about getting flexible when really the problem is they're weak and inflexible, and they need to be getting more flexible and stronger.
It's like if you just take an area and you don't do any, you know, strengthening through that range and you just, I guess, passively push it through stretches, you know what I mean?
I don't think URI thinks that's going to make you athletic.
But the idea then to think that flexibility makes you slow is just false.
I mean, for someone that has legs the size of this guy and to be able to do, and he's all about like full range of motion and strength and flexibility.
I don't know where he lives.
A lot of these guys in one championship, because one championship is an Asian organization, and they fight a lot in Singapore and all over the world, but a lot of it is in Asia.
Yeah, you don't have to be flexible to be athletic, but if you're like me and you lack explosion, period, and you're stiff and weak, well then if you're gonna try to get explosive, the ability to open up flexibility and strength, you can then just be- Look at this.
So most people, you can either dunk or you can't dunk.
It's not like you're going to fully grow and you can't jump and then later in life you're going to I don't think I would have been able to do that if I was stiff.
You know what I mean?
I firmly believe that the flexibility gave me the access to then adapt these areas in my muscles.
It's just so interesting because you've come from this place of having these destroyed knees and you've figured it out along the way.
It's like you're a real gift to athletes because there's a lot of people out there that don't ever have knee problems and they probably would never pursue what you're doing.
Like the fact that you've achieved this level of athleticism and ability because of the fact that you had fucked knees.
Yes, you get some of these similar common denominators of training areas that most people aren't thinking about because they're thinking about the performance side, not realizing that the pain and injury is the number one thing that stops you from throwing more miles per hour or jumping higher.
So when you figure out the recipe, when you figure out a sort of Mathematical recipe of the action you're doing, and you can always be more bulletproof than what's needed for the action, you can keep putting out more force.
You see what I mean?
So like for a kick, you could probably break it down to some of these various, probably the Nordic, because it's like your leg is straightening.
Definitely the hip flexor, depending on how you're kicking, probably that tibialis muscle, and then of course the knee.
And so there's no absolute, but it just means that You can probably go after that a little bit harder if your strength training is accounting for those different angles.
I'd say there's probably three things I'd do a bit more unique on that.
And number one is just when we think about the six pack, I'm thinking about that lifting the feet.
So I'll show you my favorite exercise for that.
If you go back to that fifth post, which we've used a bunch, at the moment that I'm using the monkey foot, you're going to see my training partner lying down.
He's hooked up to a cable machine.
He's lying on his back.
This is like a reverse sit-up.
And so, like, we know in my gym, for males, half body weight, 20 reps, most people can't do it.
But they train it for a while, and then they can.
It's coming up right here.
Boom, there he is right there.
So, he's hooked up to a cable stack with a measurable load, trying to get his knees up.
And, like, I'm telling you, like...
If you take the average male athlete and you put half their body weight and you ask them to do 20 reps, they reach a point where they cannot get their knees up.
Their lower abdomen and stuff is not capable of getting it up.
We put a box behind us with weight on it so it won't move because it's maximum effort.
So right off the bat, We're trying to strengthen our core from the ground up, meaning the ability to lift our feet.
And then we also go on a back extension machine, but sideways.
And that trains the QL, quadratus lumborum, a four-sided muscle.
It's not your low back.
It's not your abs.
It's in between the two.
And what that one does is it pulls your body from side to side.
Because when it comes to twisting and stuff, what you're often really looking at is a combination of a lot of things happening at once.
And if you don't actually strengthen that muscle, which does straight up go side to side, you don't realize you're missing out on like one of the key muscles that creates that lateral explosion or twisting, that rotational strength.
Yeah, and I think that one's super underrated for our lower back because when we kick or swing or jump, a lot of us, we have more of a one-sided thing because of sports.
So the hip flexor, the quadratus lumborum, you're already training areas that most people in their quote-unquote core work are not quite training, you know?
Let's explain to people that are just seeing it, or listening rather, what you're doing is palms down in the full extension, and as you bring it towards you, you bring your palms to you.
It seems like a lot of this would benefit from at least some kind of supervision from a trained athletic trainer, someone who really understands your system.
So then I had a buddy who was doing online coaching and he was like, well, you're going to have to charge an arm and a leg for that.
You know what I mean?
And I was like, all right.
He said, you got to charge at least 99 bucks.
I said, all right, I'll do half that.
And that's what I've been doing since.
And I've coached hundreds of thousands of form videos, and now I have a dedicated legion of people who did the program, changed their life, and now they work for me.
And we work seven days a week coaching people's form on these exercises.
That's what I do for a living.
The books are just meant...
It can help for someone who doesn't want to dive into this to just be able to read about it.
You know what I mean?
That's what the books are there for.
The books is just a new thing.
What I've been...
Doing for the last years is dedicating how do I coach people's form affordably and that's it.
So it's one service.
There's no higher tiers.
We work our butt off watching your form and guiding you.
Dude, I mean, you know, you could be so much more obsessed with business stuff instead of just, you know, pursuing your passion and the effect you're trying to have on the world, you know?
And that's going to be the right move at the end of the day.
One of the things about Buddhism that always drove me crazy is this, like, the idea of attachment to objects.
Like, you don't want to be attached to anything.
And you don't want to be attached to people, so you have this sort of monastic existence where you are, you know, not monogamous, but you're celibate, you don't have any relationships.
I'm like, well, then you're missing out on a lot of life.
But some people, the thing about the Shark Tank thing is that's their game.
Their game is like numbers.
I have a good buddy who's a financial guy, and he's very wealthy, stupid, fucking preposterous wealthy.
And he'll call me up about business stuff and ask me about this thing or talk to me about an investment.
I go, bro, you're talking to the wrong guy.
I don't give a fuck.
I'm not investing in anything.
This is not happening.
And he's just trying to hook me up, and I'm like, eh, that's nice, but no.
My interest is in doing the things I'm interested in.
And when it comes to podcasts in particular, if I was just going to chase down the people that are going to get the most views, I'd probably be miserable.
There's a lot of people that would get giant views that I've turned down.
I'm just because I'm not interested.
And I don't know why I'm interested or not.
I don't think about it that much.
I think about what am I interested in, and then I just do that.