Ido Portal - A Moving Conversation

Full transcript: Ido Portal on London Real

2:16 Fascinating people in the world. In the past four years I’ve spoken to astronauts, members of parliament, Hollywood actors and CEOs of billion dollar companies. But every now and then I meet someone who changes my life forever. Ido Portal is one of those people. I first met Ido in 2014 and encountered a man with a message, a man who was intent on communicating his views of movement to the world and to do so without selling out.

3:09 Ido is passionate, audacious and relentless. Needless to say, I liked him immediately. In 2015, Ido returned to London Real in our brand new studio for another epic conversation, but something was just not right here. I was speaking to a man whose entire life is dedicated to human movement and we were talking while sitting down, and so we decided to have London Real’s very first moving conversation: two men walking the streets of London in an unedited, unscripted and uncut conversation.

4:01 Anything goes, anything can happen. This was a fascinating time in Ido’s life because he had just come back from Dublin, Ireland, after training with the UFC interim featherweight champion, Conor McGregor. Only months earlier on the show we had spoken about Conor, but he and Ido had still never met. A few weeks after this moving conversation, Ido would go on to famously join Conor for his entire week of pre-fight training. Filled with broomsticks and animal walks, the whole world was asking, who was this movement guy?

4:45 It would culminate with Ido being ringside in Las Vegas to watch Conor knock out Jose Aldo in 13 seconds and become the undisputed world champion. This is our conversation. We are here in London at Hyde Park Corner next to this historic statue of Achilles, half man, half god, known for his speed and agility, and I am joined by Mr. Ido Portal. 100 god? No, not at all.

5:25 Known for his movement, his, uh, ideology, his inspiration. Ido, thanks for joining me today on a moving conversation. Thank you, it’s a beautiful day. Good to see you. Good to see you, it’s awesome to see you.

5:37 You know, our last epic conversation was at London Real studios two months ago and we sat down for a couple hours. Before that, a year before that, we had another great conversation and right at the end of our last interview I thought to myself, this is a man who moves for a living, we must get him out and have a proper conversation and not while he’s sitting there. And so I thought we would go for a walk. You know, some of the greats like Steve Jobs used to go for walks.

6:06 I think Mark Zuckerberg, before he bought WhatsApp for 19 billion dollars, they did it on a walk. So if you walk with me today, maybe we can do a little business and talk about movement. Yeah, yeah, beautiful. Very, very happy to be free this time. Good, good.

6:22 And also last time I was just about to go to your two-day movement experience and to say the least, I had a bit of a paradigm shift after spending two days with you in the seminar. I got to my gym on Monday morning and I looked around at all these people and I thought, what the f*** are they doing? You know, I saw them doing this and doing this and I actually brought a pair of Olympic rings with me and I put them up and someone came over to me and they said, you can’t use those for health and safety reasons.

6:51 And so I want to talk to you about what happened to me on that weekend, about the broomsticks and the animal movements and all those pieces. So hopefully you can tell me what happened to me. Yeah, yeah, I will try. It’s a very individual thing, but yeah, I think I have a little bit of experience with that paradigm shift happening and so we’ll talk about it. Yeah, it’s interesting.

7:14 Good, well let’s talk. You’ve probably seen me, I’ve been climbing trees lately, I’ve been jumping on the Olympic rings, I’ve been trying to walk along the ground like a lizard. I think you’ve seen me on the parallel bars. Something really changed in the way I’ve looked at movement and I was wondering what happened to me. Yeah, I think it’s all that paradigm, that paradigm shift, that depends so much on terminology and conceptualizing these ideas, and that tends to open all these doors, sometimes to bring under the same umbrella many things that were scattered and isolated, and sometimes to isolate and open new doors, and within, yeah, within the movement possibilities.

8:04 So the idea of play, the idea of communicating with objects, with the floor, with another person, to communicate with the elements, with gravity, with centrifugal forces, all this stuff that as a kid you basically you treat all those things as one. It’s a movement thing. But then with time, the adults in your life start to kind of isolate you and tell you, this is not that, this is not this, this is sports, this is studies, this is serious and this is play.

8:40 Well, it’s all play. Another thing you said during the seminar was, you said, look at my shoes, these are 10 euro shoes, look at these rings, these rings cost 30 pounds, nothing here is prohibitedly expensive, you can do this all with basic tools. Is that something you came up with out of necessity or are you trying to make a point in that? Exactly the opposite of necessity. And the more money was involved in my life, the more money I made, more of a point I made it to not be supported, not be dependent and not support products, commercial products.

9:37 I’m a big believer in education and that the technologies and the products they create a lot of dependency and they strip us off the basic research. High tech shoes, low tech feet. The more expensive the toys, the less, the cheaper is the mover. Yeah. One of my students said, okay, so I think it’s important to work on this thing and not to depend on all those gadgets and tips and tricks.

10:07 In the majority of the time they were developed for a necessity and that necessity was a certain comforts, a certain disabilities or problems, but they also create disabilities. You put on this highly supportive footwear, your foot is going to lose function, you don’t demand it to work well. So I’m a big believer is in don’t wrap up your joints with supporting accessories, wrap your joints with exercise. Okay, and that is kind of the idea I think behind your corset seminar where you try to build the body to protect itself.

10:48 Yes. One thing I noticed is that you had us experience some painful pieces or you introduced us to a small dose of pain, I’d say kind of Ido quartile style, and you had us trying to do push-ups on our wrists at one point. You and Odelia showed us how to almost do a push-up like on our fingers, and it was funny because I sat there and I was like, all right, here comes one rep, and I couldn’t move, I couldn’t lift myself up, you know, by my fingers. What was going on there?

11:21 Yeah, what’s going on is people don’t touch the floor anymore. You know, people simply don’t make the simplest contact with the ground, and I’m not even talking about some esoteric layer of some ion exchange with the earth, but I’m talking really practically. Do you even touch the floor, bro? Daily, daily. It’s almost like a philosophical thing for me.

11:46 If I was on a day of travel and I did not get the chance to do that, just before going to sleep I would make one contact between my hands and the floor. And we are losing function. We are not meant to walk on our hands all day long, but we are definitely opportunistic movers, which mean if I have two rocks here and I want to pass in between them, I will momentarily support myself and propel myself in between them. So the hands are meant to communicate with all these objects and the floor.

12:21 Crawling, yeah, and we can take it into the beautiful realm of inversion, handstands and acrobatics as well, but that is beyond the point. Okay, and do you think it’s your capoeira background made you extra comfortable with your hands and knowing that was a necessity? 100. Yeah, the capoeira introduced me to that importance and the beauty of being comfortable close to the ground. Right, and there are many legends in capoeira about why it became to be part of it.

12:57 Is there is this la- it’s a legend, might have a grain of truth to it, who knows, about the slaves being enslaved in this low slave quarters, prisons, and because of that low position they used to kind of communicate with the floor more. Also their hands were shackled, hence they used their legs a lot more than their hands, and from there comes a lot of these capoeira movements. Okay, all right, so that’s where that’s a lot of it. Okay, yeah, interesting.

13:31 Yeah, okay, all right. So, and it’s funny how a limitation can create a separate art or a separate type of modality and movement. I’m a big believer in using boundaries and limitations and rules to create freedom, and I think like the only way to expand freedom is by limitation and boundaries. Like, I can really heal your body using this stick, because now your spine has to do all those things. Maybe you got an injury there and I help you, I treat you.

14:08 Right, so people look at it more as an attack and defense, but it’s more than that. For example, lock your knees, you’re not allowed to bend your knees. Okay, so now it’s all spine. Okay, another room: your spine must remain straight, locked straight, straight, there is no bending there. Is no, so now we go to the knees and we heal those knees.

14:54 Okay, you understand? So I can shift the attention to certain areas, or stay down in a squat. Go down to a squat, you’re not allowed to move these points of contact and you’re not allowed to come up to stand. Okay, all right, don’t overreact. Okay, so now I work on your knees.

15:21 Okay, now I develop your knees, and three minutes I might be push, push your hips, look, look, look at it, look at it, look where it’s going, and now clear the knees here in front, look, so I’m really developing your knees now. Ah, sorry, necro. Yeah, so now all your body is getting stimulated in all these different positions, right? So also if I had been in a static squat I’d be thinking about my ankles now, but since you’re doing all that stuff, I’ve probably been in a static spot without thinking about it.

16:06 Yeah, I did, I do this for like sets of three minutes down there, and your whole ligaments, your whole knees must restructure, you know, must condition themselves, and it’s a more realistic spot because you don’t just, you know, stopping, you need that adaptability in positions. Okay, cool, man. And so some of the things you did with us that day, one of the most powerful pieces was when you started off with me learning how to move my neck again, and part of me was thinking, okay, what’s Ido doing?

16:44 I mean, to be honest, a lot of it was just me being uncomfortable being in your experience, and it started off with slow movements and then turned into bigger movements and then you would restrict us and you would say, okay, you can’t move your legs now, you must dodge my hand, and then you would let us move one leg, and it was all about introducing constraints and then seeing how the body and mind react. Yeah, yeah, that’s the process is opening up a few options, and it’s a little bit something that happens in BJJ, and I got to do some BJJ over the last two weeks with one of my students, John, who has been teaching me the basics, and he says you open one door and you squeeze the person out of the door, it’s a little bit, that’s the only option left.

17:33 So I’m using similar concept with just general movement development. I open a very specific door and then I allow the person to take that journey, and once he’s comfortable in that structure, in that house, traveling in between all of these rooms, I let him play freely. Okay, okay, so you give specific constraints and rules and then you let them play and explore what they could. Okay, I have to ask you about the locomotion because I found that very fascinating.

18:06 It was the second day and you started talking about, I think it was bipedal motion or the way that many animals move. And you know, I’ve found that, of course, I’m starting to get interested in these animal movements. I know when you were at SBG SBG gym in Ireland with Conor and Gunnar, that they’re big fans of the animal movement, and I want to ask you about them later. Why have us move as animals? Why?

18:35 We are animals, we are a product of that evolution and it’s inside of us somewhere. This system has evolved into where it is through all those stages. So a lot of possibilities to move your spine are still kind of aquatic possibilities, all the remains of that freedom that originated in the water, and then the quadrupedal movement, the walking on all fours, still exists inside our bodies, and so exploring those things is exploring yourself and exploring your history, exploring where you came from.

19:19 That’s one thing. Another thing is just that I love any possibility that exists. Whatever possibility is in my body, I would like to explore it because it’s there, because we don’t need another reason, because we live in this body and it’s a good day that we can explore those things. And once we start to lose those functions, everyone realizes it. It’s like, oh, I want that back, and you would pray for all gods in existence to get 10 of what you lost.

19:54 But why do we need to go through that route? We don’t need that. We need appreciation every day for this great sun, for this body, for this neck that can glide and move and the pain-free existence that we have, so we can maintain it and we can sustain it. So the best reason to move is because you can, because you can. So one of the things I loved about spending time with you moving is that ideas come out in you and I get to see kind of how your evolution has happened, and at one point someone raised their hand and they said, Ido, I have a question about conditioning and this muscle here, and do you agree with this?

21:10 And you said, when I used to do this seminar I would say, look at all my knowledge, and you could rattle off the research you’ve done and the study you’ve done in the years where you tried this and you tried this, and now what you do is you say, this is the way I’m telling you to do it for the maximum results. And when you taught me how to do that ring muscle up, you said this is the way to do it, do it this to this to this to this and you’ll get the result, and I could see your 10,000 hours there, and so for me that was a huge resource because I could see that you had done all this work and realized that for me as a beginner to do it this way it would work. Can you talk about your evolution from being the guy that used to talk about all that knowledge to now just giving that specific direction?

22:00 Yeah, it’s the beginner teacher is somewhat occupied with presenting the vastness of his knowledge, and it’s an ego driven thing. You are helping people but at the same time you have another dogma at your back, showing, it’s a peeing contest of a sort, or showing, submitting the students to the amount of knowledge that you have. But that creates some problems with the paralysis by analysis first and foremost. People cannot handle a lot of details, a lot of information at any specific stage, and there is a limitation, there is a cap to the amount of information you can relate, hence you need to be very accurate with the type, the right type of information, because you feel that stack very quickly.

22:54 Yeah, and with time you become much more pinpointed, much more realistic and the results are better, I think. Okay, yeah, yeah, I could tell that you had been the guy that had shown off and now you’re like, look, I’m just giving you, you know, the basics here. Another thing I remember you saying was we don’t do core work. You said I don’t do core work, and yet when I get done doing a lizard walk in the park I am huffing and puffing. This is from a guy who can kick Thai pads until my shins bleed, who can do kettlebells, and yet I feel a core engaged when I’m doing these animal movements.

23:32 Why don’t you do core work? Well, I don’t do any isolated work, I don’t look at it that way unless I need to pinpoint a problem area and attack it specifically, and in this case the core is rarely the problem. It has been blamed, it is the, there is trends in anything, and definitely within a fitness or exercise, there are many trends and one of them is core. It has been demonized and blamed for anything under the sun, but I see a lot of other areas failing much before, whether it’s a your scapula connection, which is much more hyper mobile and problematic to stabilize and strengthen, or, yeah, yeah, many other.

24:20 It can be your ankle, it can be your big toe. So I don’t do core much, but my core gets hammered in the daily work anyways. Yeah, okay, okay. I scripted some horses to join us today just to come along, and maybe you could tell us a bit about this animal movement here. Do you ever get inspiration from horses?

24:42 Oh, from all animals. Yeah, yeah, they’re amazing animals. A lot of their movement patterns, original movement patterns, are very different than what we make them do. Okay, but you can see a counter lateral pattern, beautiful opposite swinging, just very efficient. Sometimes the humans train them to add a specific gesture or to take an ipsilateral walk.

25:08 Right, huge, powerful animal, beautiful, muscular, lean. Yeah, just inspiring, and so powerful. You just stand in their presence and the heat radiating of this animal is just like, what an engine is here. You know, what kind of a raw power is here. Yeah, and so when you see an animal like that, you see an opportunity to learn about movement, to learn about locomotion.

25:35 Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100. Yeah, that’s fascinating. What do you think? I know you move all around around the world, you’re kind of a nomad, you’re off spreading the message. You spend time in Germany.

25:49 When you’re here in England and you see the horses ride through, you know, in a place like this with historic monuments, how does it make you feel? Oh, it’s beautiful, just beautiful day, just inspiring, inspiring, and the parks and the outdoors is something that I feel very connected to. I don’t want to spend my life indoors and yeah, I think like it promotes a lot more movement just being outside, just makes you move that much more. One of the exercises that we did with you was with a broomstick, and I think you told the story where you were somewhere, maybe up in Finland or somewhere where it was snowbound and you went to the gym to train but you got depressed because now that I look at gyms, they don’t offer a lot of spontaneity, there’s not a lot of places to play like a monkey or hang or do these things, and so you found the most basic of instruments and you started playing games and dropping the broomstick games and things like that, and I want to hear about that from you.

26:48 But I also found it fascinating that you use this simple technique to assess the physicality or the gifts of pro snowboarders, MMA fighters, all these top athletes, just seeing how they react to the gravity of a broomstick dropping. Can you tell me a bit about the history of you and the stick? Yeah, well, it’s a funny thing. I always, I always love the good stick, who doesn’t? And when I was there recently in Ireland working with the fighters and I talked with Gunnar, Gunnar Nelson about this, and I feel so close to Gunnar in our thinking, in our ideas, and me, Conor and him is just like a very interesting talks arise there.

27:35 And one of the things that Gunnar said was like, I always love sticks, you know, just having the feel of a stick in my hand and exploring its options, and you walk outside as a kid and you find a stick and it becomes your companion, right? And so this is something that I definitely I was always, yeah, into those simple things and exploring them, exploring the options, throwing it, bouncing it, rotating it over my body, letting it drop, catching it, playing with a friend, hitting a friend with it, you know, all these different options. How hard can I hit myself with it?

28:14 What happens when I hit myself hard with it? All these basic explorations, and yeah, with the years I decided instead of taking myself seriously and going, you know, going starting to use all these high-tech gadgets, is actually to make it a point to go back to the stick. I also knew that I can find a stick wherever I go, it’s very easy, it’s cheap and it’s accessible, so I decided to invest some more time into researching it, and that proved to be a great asset.

28:49 So nowadays I travel around the world and I just tell the local hosts, okay, make sure there are a hundred sticks there, and there are 100 sticks and it costs them, you know, 100 pounds to arrange it, versus depending on all this, yeah, elaborate gadgets. And the stick is linear, the stick will might bend a little bit but you will bend a lot more than it. You are organic, there is nothing linear in your body, so there is this interesting relationship between you and the stick.

29:24 It can give you all these markers, all these incentives, and help us develop. I saw Ronda Rousey, the UFC fighter who fought last weekend, I want to ask you more later about her fight, but she did a minute warm up routine, the first eight minutes was her and a broomstick, and she brings it out and she puts it over her shoulders and actually she can see her, she’s rubbing the forearms with it, she’s doing all these different planes of motion, and I never noticed that until I had spent the time with you in the stick that she used that tool. What is the typical reaction that someone has after they get all of this knowledge into them?

30:06 Sometimes people become, it’s too much, it’s too big, it’s too critical of their lifestyle and current choices, and sometimes people are very brave and they embrace and they get inspired to make huge changes, and it can be anything in between. Mostly we get very, very positive responses, tears, letters handed in, presents. Just this weekend here in London received presents from people and yeah, just showing their gratitude for this mind shift, this paradigm shift, and it starts to open up all these doors, which can be very confusing.

30:51 I sympathize, and yet I still go very hard on them to be able to open those doors because I believe there is a huge potential there, and the more the more we can do that, and with our current culture and society, the more we will live a better life, a better legacy, the more we will care for this body, for this planet, the more we will be aware and yeah, practice what’s important really. One thing, one of my trainers said when I got back with him, he’s a good friend of mine, and I came back and I said, this is what I did over the weekend and I’m gonna start doing this, and he said, Brian, if I told you to climb on the floor like a lizard you would laugh at me, but when Ido tells you to do it, you do it. And so I said to him, I said, you’re right, that’s true, but I said it’s the why, and I said it’s all about the why.

31:49 There’s a famous TED Talk about the why, and why does someone do something, and that’s what fascinates us as humans. And so for you, I know that you’ve gone through this journey in your brain and you’ve found that these things are utilitarian for you, and so knowing that you’ve done that, that’s why I go and try those things out. Yeah, it goes back to the point that we’ve discussed last time, when you find good teaching and a good teacher, doesn’t matter what the subject is, and that’s why it’s very easy to make people do stuff that they never would have done in another scenario once the why and the inspiration and the reasoning is there.

32:36 Actually, all movement, there is no bad movement, there is no, in the kindergarten there is no bad kid, it’s all movements, are good, all movements are potentially productive and can help us become more aware, more connected, more mobile, more smooth, and it is more about opening your mind to the possibilities and then realizing when will that movement serve me. So crawling on the floor all of a sudden makes sense, and once it makes sense, it’s very easy to implement and you fall in love with things that you wouldn’t even look twice before. Yeah, yeah, because now when I’m doing it, so now I will actually crawl along the gym floor as a lizard in a very nice posh gym and I’m the only one there, and yet it doesn’t bother me now because I know, and I’m actually fascinated to learn and to try to get better, and I know that after crawling across, everything has worked, I’ve moved, I’m feeling things open up, and I’m actually getting a learning curve progression every time.

33:41 Like, my walk gets better and better and better, and I don’t see this type of progression in the things I’ve been doing for ten years. And you talked about level one, level two, level three during the movement experience, and I was wondering, is that what I’m experiencing now with those animal locomotions? Yes, zone one, zone two, zone three. Zone one is when you’re introduced to a new concept and you can’t do it yet, you can’t fulfill the physical task or you cannot make it happen.

34:13 Then zone two is when you already made it but it’s not smooth, it’s not perfected. Zone three is when it’s perfected. Zone one is where most of the possibilities are. Zone one is where the best learning happens, even if you never make it, you would receive the same benefits. This is a point that is made by Steven Jepsen, this 70, 74 year old man I brought to the LESS Movement camp, and his methodology is called Never Leave the Playground.

34:48 He says, try to learn how to juggle, whether you made it or not. Two people devoted three months to the practice, one made it and can juggle three balls, the other one cannot. MRI studies of their brain will show the same exact results, so it actually doesn’t even matter if you make it or not. Zone one is the most beneficial one, zone two still carries a lot of benefits as you’re perfecting that lizard crawl, you still gain a lot of learning and neurological and structural changes, and then zone three has the least amount to offer to you.

35:20 It’s more maintenance. Where is the fitness world focused? On zone three, right? It’s all movement that even from the first day you can perform, you’re just improving them, you’re just perfecting them. So maximum zone two, zone three, zone one.

35:35 People don’t learn new s***, and learning new things every day is very important. How many movements did you learn last week? Most people none, none, some maybe two, three. A contemporary dancer might learn up to 400 new movements in an audition setting. So the type of brain that gets developed there, I’m not talking about the body, I’m talking about neurological changes, it’s huge.

36:04 And that’s the direction that we start to steer people towards: consistent learning. Now once consistent learning is is where you want to go, what does it make the teacher into? First a student himself, because that teacher needs to continue to inject new information in, and second an encyclopedia of knowledge and that’s why I believe we should invest and reward education more than gadgets, certification courses and water down, you know, systems. Yeah, we should reward quality education, people who are devoting their life to research and progress, their students and themselves.

36:46 Okay, okay. Yeah, and you always say that the brain is a result of the body being so complex, and that as humans we are the most complex movers of anything in the animal kingdom. And I guess that goes with what you’re saying, is that if you’re learning 400 new movements a week, that brain is constantly working, being challenged constantly. Yeah, it’s just, it’s like a mathematician and, you know, is constantly in a challenge and constantly continues to develop those connections, his neurons and neural networks are constantly evolving, developing, changing, and so the brain that changes itself, like the book, like the name of the famous book, you’re constantly in movement and the brain is in movement, your character is in constant movement.

37:34 Brian Rose, that collection of symbols and ideas and neural networks, is constantly increasing in complexity and adapting to the environment around us. So why wouldn’t we do this with movement, which is actually the biggest tool for that development? No amount of learning, no amount of mathematics would make the neurological changes as movement will, because movement was the original reason behind the brain’s development. Right, right, it’s the first door, and we want to stay in that level one all the time, which means even if you’re failing, try, try, try, and it’s natural for us as humans to probably go to something that we’re getting better at, but you get, you want to try to always put new riddles, new challenges.

38:18 Yes, I don’t stay on level one but I make sure level one is always present. I use all three levels, one, zone one, zone two, zone three. I learn new movements constantly, I improve those that I don’t perform well enough, and I also maintain and perfect movements, and but the zone one, since it’s been neglected so much, I want to open people’s eyes to it more. Learn new stuff, never leave the playground. Right, right, yeah.

38:50 It was fascinating because you told me to expect riddles and when you brought us there, when the sticks came out, you called them kinetic koans, is that, or koans? Yeah, koans, koans. Can you explain what that is? Yeah, it’s a term that a few years ago I was stuck in frozen Boston with a good friend of mine, Aaron, in the US, and we were freezing cold in his house, both of us, and me, him and Odelia cramped up in this house, we all loved to move all the time and we couldn’t move much, it was snow up to here, and we started to play.

39:29 I started to present the Odelia and Aaron these riddles and we started to play with it, and we started to kind of pull more and more riddles and more options, and then Aaron, who has a background in kind of Zen philosophy, and he said, okay, it’s a little bit like a koan, it’s a, and then I said, yeah, kinetic koan, a movement riddle, and yeah, it’s stuck, and that concept is something that I love, and I love those riddles, those movement riddles. I actually collected hundreds, over 500 different kinetic riddles, kinetic koans, that I present to people, to my students, to help them develop, and it’s something that got kind of popularized and started to become more abundant through my work, through the movement experience workshop that we gave all over the world.

40:21 Okay, okay, and that’s what you put people through, you put your martial artists through those things as well, and you did that to me in the experience. Yeah. Okay, yeah, and was that some of those pieces with the moving the shoulders as well? Yeah, all kinds of, all kinds of communication pieces with sticks or with the rocks or with the floor or with another person, and or with yourself within your own body. It’s incredible to see how you can get into a knot in your own body.

40:52 Okay. It’s a really interesting moment I get to see again and again with people, people can get stuck in their own bodies, any, everyone, I can get stuck in my own body. Are you constantly seeing and thinking about movement in motion when you’re walking and about, or do you tune out of that sometimes, or is Ido movement and his movement Ido? Yeah, it’s a little bit, I cannot think of movement because I am movement. It’s not something that I shift my attention towards anymore, because I spend so much time constantly kind of bringing my attention into movement that now it just stays there and I will shift and move and like I will be working on the computer and I will be constantly be moving, or as I’m walking I’m noticing what is happening with my spine and I will manipulate it in certain ways, I will notice areas getting locked off, close up, yeah, the motions of my neck, the awareness to the space between my fingers, the air that is passing in the negative spaces created by my body.

42:11 It’s just, I spent so much time researching those things and playing with them that now it’s just, it is there all the time. It’s like breathing for you. And that’s the childlike state, that’s why children don’t segregate and isolate, everything is movement, and they sit in the car and they move because you lock them in this space but you will not stop them from moving. Do you go and ever watch children play in the school and just look at the different ways they move and you’re like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

42:46 Children and animals are huge sources of inspiration for me. Yeah, and have been since the age of the age of men, you know, kung fu masters and the animals styles and the child like strength and all these phenomenons. Yeah, huge sources of inspiration because the system is intuitive. Sometimes I get angry at people, parents who tell their children how to move. How dare you invade the perfect system, a perfectly intuitive system that knows exactly what it should do because it hasn’t been tamed yet.

43:28 You are destroying it. You know, children sit in this W position on the floor, knees out, and some douchebag physiotherapist would tell them, no, it’s not good for you. What do you know about their system? Actually they are bulletproofing themselves for the future, but we put them in the chairs by the age of six, so by 18 they’re disabled, they lost this range of motion, that mobility, and some maintain it better, like you, you maintain like great softness in your body, suppleness, and some get locked up more, and it also has prices.

44:10 You are more, your body is more allowing ranges of motion, but it means you will be more susceptible for certain injuries and strength development would be more tricky for you. Yeah, and then there are the other side, people who their body is over panicked, will protect them more, they will not get injured so easily and but they will get stronger very easily. So that’s just one vector, yeah, of development, and that’s what your philosophy is, there are always trade-offs.

44:38 And I listened to our very first episode and you said, you know, I believe in optimizing movements, which is different than, say, a fighter who wants to do fighting or someone who wants aesthetics, and each person will sacrifice, and if you want to be the healthiest, Ido, by definition you won’t if you want to optimize movements. Yes, and so we’re constantly making these sacrifices. Yes, yes, yeah, you are, you’re constantly making choices even by not making choices, and wherever you develop yourself you’re also moving away from another element, you’re moving towards that you’re moving away from that.

45:19 There is no way to move towards that without moving away from that, and it’s as simple as that. I try to kind of grow in a very, in this way I move a little bit towards that and I stretch a little bit towards the other side, and then I remember there is these vectors as well and I just try to stay in the middle and kind of swell up and grow in the most lateral possible way, and it’s a tricky game, maybe it’s an impossible game, but it gives me great pleasure just attempting it, which again is level one, right? Yes.

45:58 So attempting these things, you have this analogy called the shirt pull and I was wondering if you could explain what that means to people who don’t understand, and I think what it’s saying is that you can never change one thing in isolation because everything is linked, and if you pull this here it’s going to pull on the back. What do you mean when you say that? Yeah, it, any system that is connected, it is one system, any, there are many times a ripple, ripple effect of any change inside the system, and that goes to an insecurity model like a shirt where I pull on it, every atom in the shirt is affected because of the physical connection, and the same happens in our bodies.

46:46 You cannot move anything in isolation in the human body, it’s an impossibility. We’ve fallen into this trap of trying to isolate pieces, that it’s impossible. Whenever I do this I affect my big toe, whenever I blink I affect my pelvic floor. Everything is connected and affected and the whole system is in constant dynamic movement, so once you take this into account it doesn’t even make sense to isolate things anymore because, you know, it’s an impossibility.

47:27 The maximum you can do is to target certain areas, certain patterns, notice I’m not saying muscles because that’s an impossibility again, and that moves you towards much more holistic solutions. So this is one of my favorite walks I always take in the city and it always takes me through some memorials, which I guess is common that big cities would have in the center, and this is a memorial to one of the branches of the Royal Air Force, and it was Winston Churchill that famously said, never was so much owed by so many to so few. And I think he was talking specifically about 1940, when it was the Royal Air Force defending Britain from a pending German invasion.

48:15 When I see memorials like this, I sometimes I start thinking about there’s this whole concept called the denial of death, and it’s this whole idea that as a human species we can’t deal with the idea that we die, and so one of the ways we do is we erect these statues of our children and our fathers dying in war, and then we put them up and say, oh, this is the reason why we die, and that people now drive by here and they say, oh yeah, that’s the reason we made a sacrifice for our ideals, but it’s just the human animal trying to get our heads around death. It sounds very strong and very true. Yeah, in many ways this reminds me of a, you know, you know the reasoning behind why churches are so big, to make you feel small in the face of God.

49:07 So they’re made into these huge structures, and we’re basically an animal that tries to wrap its head around a few hundred, two million years of human evolution, where in the last and hundreds and thousands of years we had to take such leaps and bounds in what we need to accept, one, what we need to live, that we’ve developed all these ways of going about it. I wanted to ask you about pain, and the word pain, and your relationship with pain. I think it was one of our interviews where you said, you know, as you get older you have to redefine that relationship because in your younger years it was about defying pain and pushing through that pain in order to accomplish things like the one arm handstand, but now it’s almost having a new relationship with pain.

50:07 Am I summarizing that correct? Yeah, it’s a constant, it’s a constant evolution of how you treat pain and how we treat pain from the moment you’re born and you experience these pains and you react in certain ways, and till the moment you die. And pain is also a very misunderstood phenomenon. It’s a very difficult to define what is pain and it has been going through a redefinition in the last decade or so as we grow and change our relationship to pain. Yeah, I think pain is inevitable in many ways.

50:50 Cleverland was right, prediction. Pain, what’s your prediction for the fight? But yeah, what is it? Some treat it as a signal, it is there to show you something. I find this over simplistic.

51:06 Okay, many times pain is not signaling you directly something for a specific task but it is formed due to certain habits, certain narratives created inside the nervous system, certain scenarios, so I don’t think we can treat pain in any one simplistic way, ignore it or always use it as feedback. Both of them will ultimately fail. It is about individualizing your approach to pain in any specific scenario. Someone like you with a martial arts background, you know that many times there are pains that you ignore totally while rolling with someone on the mat, and yet other pains you would tap out and they would stop the whole thing altogether.

51:58 If I put a forearm across your face, you would not tap from that, but a normal person might overreact and yeah, so is that the signal that directly, you know, you should respond to? I don’t think so. Ultimately there will be more pain if you don’t go through that process. You have to embrace some small pains to avoid the big pains, so you might tear your skin while doing certain pieces and certain preparatory or strength work, but that ultimately will provide you with a protection later on to avoid some big, big injuries.

52:39 Right, another one of your lines is people are not made of sugar, and I’ve been saying that more often these days. What do you mean by that? Yeah, yeah, we’ve over sensitized ourselves, we are, we’ve surrounded ourselves in cotton and now it’s a problem, we get hurt because of it. We try to protect ourselves and our children and we hurt our children, you know. There might be a kid, you know, here and I’ve seen it a few times coming with his parents to the park, and the mother takes his shoes and socks off and lets him run off in the grass, and then he comes back and he says, mommy, the grass hurts my feet.

53:25 And that’s a terrible moment. I’ve seen it a few times, even in my own family, and it’s a terrible moment where I realize we’ve f***ed the bed, we, this kid, it’s not his fault. It’s we who surrounded him and padded his legs with socks and better and better socks and better and better footwear, and now he experiences pain from simply walking on the grass. So people are not made of sugar, we need to bring a little bit back. Some challenges, some challenges, some aches, some small aches and pains, some discomfort.

54:10 10 degrees up it’s too warm, 10 degrees down it’s too cold, it’s never perfect. We need to be able to run out of the house and forget our jacket and spend the whole day out dealing with that, and yeah, those things are important and they make you happier, they make you feel stronger, more capable, and they rely on common sense, which is not so common anymore. So a lot of the black and white binary choice people would have difficulties with such thing and they would say, no, yes, but those who are able to kind of hold two contradictory ideas at the same time, a sign of intelligence by Albert Einstein, and would really benefit from it.

54:57 You want to play with some rings? Let’s do it. Okay, let’s check it out. This is the greatest tree branch in London. Do you tape up or not anymore?

55:05 Yeah, I’m aware that people tape up, but I’ve never did. Make this joke sometimes. Yeah. I didn’t, so after your seminar I was, I taped up in the beginning just because I kept tearing, and then I put less and less tape. Yeah, I always give people the advice of the first time, the first time you train, tape up after one set, right?

55:30 The next time you train, after two sets. Okay, and little by little try to open up more and more working sets without the tape so you can develop the skin and protect it and not become over dependent on the tape all the time. Right, okay, so let’s make this into a small competition. Okay, you have to set up the ring in as little throws as possible, ultimately it would be one, but the rule is, yeah, it must loop around the tree and you have to catch the buckle, okay, right on the other side.

56:03 So in sometimes, you know, it gets tricky, so the idea is to get it in one go and catch the buckle on the other side. I prefer this kind of a grip where it’s going around the outside, so when it will fly it will actually get released from my hand and then I allow enough rope here, enough of the strap to catch it. It’s pretty good. Yeah, my grandpa was a cowboy so we don’t know how to, we know how to do this, get the cows. Yeah, of course, I was the city boy, I didn’t know much about the cows.

56:39 All right, here we go. The Ido riddle, that’s what I need. All right, okay, I gotta watch the return. All right, all right. How close do you keep these?

56:57 Well, yeah, it depends, it depends on the use, and this is definitely a gymnastics tool, right, and there is all the definitions and you better believe that the gymnasts, the Federation International Gymnastics, measured it and it’s 50 point whatever centimeters. I don’t f*** care. I will use the gymnastics tools but I’m not a gymnast, I would use the martial arts tools but I don’t have to follow the martial art specifically, and yeah, I just treat it as a good toy and a good developmental piece.

57:32 So we will just keep it around shoulder width apart and we’ll slide it, grab this one and grab this ring. Yeah, first let’s say let’s kind of space them out a little bit. I will go, that’s perfect. Okay, yeah, we’re in a good distance now. These buckles are a bit tricky, you have to slide them through.

57:52 Yeah, I broke two sets of buckles. Oh, there you go. Yeah, because I was sliding it through the wrong way, now I’ve learned the right way. Yeah, looks about right. Yeah, okay.

58:29 We will start with just a nice hang. Okay, you know, hanging is so important and has been neglected, everybody is obsessed with pulling. I’ve been a major voice in kind of bringing back hanging into people’s practice. Hanging is not to get bigger muscles necessarily but it is a huge tool to open up, release tensions from certain areas in the body and improve tissue quality and even can take people out of like shoulder injuries and avoid surgeries in some cases.

59:03 So I’ve been using over a decade, I’ve been promoting hanging for my students. We’ll start with a passive hang, just a relaxed hang at the bottom, and we cannot really lift our feet off the floor, so we’ll bend them slightly behind us without any effort, just let them lightly touch the floor, that’s fine, and relax into the hang. Allow the shoulders to elevate, feel the pull of gravity over the tailbone, the rib cage, let your shoulders close your ears, should muffle the ears.

59:47 Every breath out, try to bring the rib cage into a more and more relaxed position, resting down. Try. Yeah, okay, okay, so just a normal grip. Lexing down, let the feet lightly touch behind, so this, these ribs, we’re aiming to put them more and more in every breath out, you let them relax. There is all kinds of massages that I like to give people while they’re hanging, but this is the most basic element.

1:00:27 Nothing is done really overhead these days, if unless you need to change a light bulb or something. People don’t really do anything overhead, so that range of motion is lost and we get a lot of shoulder issues and a lot of other issues downstream, coming from me. Great, beautiful, nice. I wish there would be like hanging stations in airports, right? You know, and this is something that is, yeah, it’s pretty hard to find an anchor above you.

1:00:59 I almost feel like stressed if I know there is no anchor around, so I travel with a chin up bar and I sometimes I get to a hotel or an apartment, I’ll put it in the doorway and I know I’ll have my hanging, right, done. Just so you can relax, just yeah, just yeah, because we do come from a reality where we’re meant to bracket hang, swing, we did climb those trees and those rocks, and nowadays it is a huge pattern, movement pattern that is lost, completely lost. So notice we didn’t even do pull-ups, it’s not about the pull-ups, it’s about hanging, relaxing, opening the shoulder.

1:01:41 Right, and this is a huge, huge factor in also healing people’s from shoulder injuries because their shoulders start to calcify, the whole, the soft tissues get adhesions and get sticky, certain motor programs are erased, so stabilizations overhead, what we call motor amnesia, is very difficult to do, so just bringing back that hang would really help. Okay, of all the tools you could use you choose the rings, and I’ve heard you talk about this before, it’s not the bar muscle up, it’s not so many other choices you could make, but you always have said that this is the one that you think most effectively works certain shoulder structures. Why, why these?

1:02:30 Well, the rings are genius, a genius tool. First, they will always move in 360 degrees to your weakest pattern, which makes it an ultimate tool for development. It’s like you’re weak here, it will move there, it will make you stronger there, now it will move here, ad nauseam, so it makes you very, very stable, very strong. Second thing, they allow a phenomenon called a closed kinetic chain, close kinetic chain versus open kinetic chain movements. The ring is the ultimate closed kinetic chain tool, you have to manipulate your center mass of the body in between two points which are not even fixed, versus an open kinetic chain where you manipulate the extremity towards the center of mass of the body which is fixed, like a lat pull down, right, versus a pull-up where I have to move my body towards the point, the anchor.

1:03:30 I lat pull down, I can do a lot of weight in the gym, it doesn’t mean much about my ability to do chin ups, pull-ups, muscle ups, but vice versa, we’ve shown in research to have greater transferability. So the rings are, this is just two reasons out of many, they also offer just enough instability but not too much instability, which is another misunderstood thing as people think that instability is good, stability is bad. No, not necessarily. If you stand on a Swiss ball and you try to squat to get your legs strong, you’ll never get enough intensity, enough weight to really get those legs strong.

1:04:10 It’s an example where too much instability will hinder your development, but in the rings they will move just enough and will still enable you to go through a lot of tension, a lot of intensity work. Okay, yeah, and there are many more reasons, yeah, just cutting it short. Right, and the price is right, price is right, it’s a, no, nobody can really patent this, nobody can patent this, hence nobody can really make big money off of it. They can just sell you, they take material, they make a ring, they sell you the rings, and I love it because it has existed for a long time.

1:04:48 Look at it, it’s a perfect circle, it’s what can be wiser. It allows you to transition from working below the rings to above the rings. So what did we do? We padded the handles, we changed the structure, we connected it at the top, we paint it in neon colors and we sell it for triple the price. I don’t like it, I don’t like it and I won’t support it.

1:05:12 You don’t like the whole idea of someone taking something that should be a basic human right and commercializing it and changing it and charging a profit for it, that bothers you to the core, doesn’t it? Yes, especially when it’s about merchandise. Yeah, you educate people, great, you know, that’s something else, or you sell a tool, you sell those rings, you made them with your hands, that’s great, you innovated something which works, patented, no problem.

1:05:43 But when you water it down, when you destroy it in the process and you make a profit, that’s not honest. Right, and you said to look out these rings with the wood, this width, this is what you want, right? Yeah. Okay, yeah, so cheap, so basic. When I bought my first set of rings they cost me close to 300 dollars and these ones nowadays 30 dollars.

1:06:07 Right, so it’s this is really thanks to the CrossFit community which made it so affordable and available. There was one point during the seminar that you showed me your elbow and you said this is the muscle I have from doing rings, and that’s when I truly realized that you are an alien, because I looked at my arm and I didn’t have the same muscle that you have, and that comes from the stabilization work you do, it is part of the ring work. And can I see her?

1:06:38 Yeah, yeah, so that’s the muscle there, I don’t really have one on, it’s a little bit different, huh? So this muscle there comes from, it comes from a lot of those Corset protocols that we’ve discussed and this protection, protection over the joints, because the joints are placed in compromised positions and are being demanded develop or else, and the rings do that to a certain extent and there are other things that we employ and to protect the body. This muscle appears in many different areas and these small muscles, small stabilization auxiliary muscles, it won’t win me any bodybuilding competitions, it won’t get me the girls on the beach, but it will protect me.

1:07:32 Yeah, and when I did some BJJ this week I definitely had an extra protection when placed in all kinds of compromised positions. Can you just talk me briefly about what the Corset’s all about and why you use that name? I know we didn’t talk about it but just as a general theory when you talk about protecting yourself. The Corset is a library of protocols that I collected from a variety of disciplines, from dance to gymnastics to martial arts to all kinds of pieces that I just collected all over the world throughout my travels and my studies from young, from my younger, younger years in traditional Chinese martial arts, and it’s basically my attempt to make a small encyclopedia of protecting, protective exercises to create a flexible body armor around the body so we can play better, because my realization was when we play s*** happens and we take more risks, we move around and we need a more, a stronger constitute and we need an ability to adapt to go into the fire to a certain extent.

1:08:52 Yeah, and it’s about mobilizing the body but strengthening it at the same time, it’s about affecting the soft tissues, it’s about thickening certain tendons, and I’m not talking about this tendon strength that is many times promoted and misunderstood. The tendon is not meant to contract or to create motion but it should take pressures. It’s about thickening cartilage and, yeah, creating more synovial fluid motion and improving your life and feeling more capable, more pain-free and more having more freedom to move.

1:09:33 Okay, very good. What did you see in my ring muscle up? It needs some work, to say the very least. I was almost a little embarrassed to put it up online or to show it to you because it was such a basic form and I know my knees are coming up, but I’m learning and I think I’m getting that neuroplasticity and starting to get through the movement patterns, and it came from you showing me those basics at the experience, where I knew that if I did these things I would get there.

1:10:03 I used a lot of that exercise, of that motion back and forth for a minute, very painful exercise, and I was just wondering what I should do to take myself to the next level when it comes to these. First, it doesn’t look ugly to me and there is nothing, there is no ugly motion. You’re going through a beautiful process where your nervous system is tuning itself and perfecting itself in this pattern. It can be tighter, it can be more technical, and that can be through the help of collective knowledge, someone like me stepping in and taking you through this huge leap with technical cues and help, and it can happen also by yourself through your intuition and just working that pattern, which will be more limited maybe but will definitely also happen.

1:10:54 So we need to get you a little bit tighter, we need to get you aggressively patient, which is a very important combination when working on the rings. You need to drive and reach certain positions very strongly and yet you need to pass through these checkpoints and you sometimes kind of skip some checkpoints. For example, as you’re pulling to the center of your chest, that contact is our first checkpoint to start to initiate the transition. A muscle up is from a pull into a push, and you have to smoothly transition between a pull and a push, and what is in between them is sometimes a very tricky moment.

1:11:38 Okay, yeah, so you have to consciously touch that chest, you have to touch that checkpoint Charlie, and then you can transition very smoothly. If you initiate the transition too early it will look jerky and you will kind of fall through, fall back down in the ladder, you know. It’s a little bit like the hierarchical positional thing in BJJ. Once you got to once you got to a, you got to a mount, you don’t want to fall back into a knee on belly. Right, right, you know.

1:12:13 So you can only progress onwards in position. So here, once you got up there, you don’t want to go back down, you want to transition and continue to drive onwards. Okay. Should we try one? Yeah, let’s do a few exercises to lead up to it first to make sure we clean it up.

1:12:31 Okay, and we’ll take some of that since those rings are pretty smooth. I always prefer the unpolished rings. Okay, because they have a little more grip. Yeah, they might rip the skin a little bit more. Okay, but they have a little bit more grip, so you might want to use a little bit of chalk.

1:12:50 Okay, yeah, yeah, I got some liquid chalk. Is that all right? Yeah, not a fan of the liquid chalk but it’s better than nothing, and especially when you travel, right? It’s more, okay, usually more realistic, right? Yeah, I’m gonna get some other stuff, so yes chuck.

1:13:07 I will not need much. Sometimes I ask people, like, smell it, does it smell like something you would swallow? No. In the military when you want to, when you find a piece of plant and you’re not sure if you can eat it, what’s the first thing that you do? You rub it on your skin to see if there is a reaction.

1:13:28 So if you wouldn’t swallow it, wouldn’t also put it on my skin. So you’re not gonna do it? No, it’s okay, it’s okay, I can get away without it. Yeah, so one of the first thing is just to get this very nice false grip. Yeah, and sometimes people just do it with a flex, twist, but I actually also supinate, the pinky down, and I bring my elbows in and I just, you can even just lightly test that false grip and see if that grip is deep enough and strong enough.

1:13:59 Okay, so when I remember you at the movement experience you said to kind of start gripping it up here and then, yes, yeah, that’s a very nice grip. Yeah, and just lean back slightly and kind of try to extend the elbows and maintain that tight grip. Right, and turn it as well, beautiful. Yeah, and now pull yourself up to the center of the chest, nice, and repeat it maybe three more times. I still haven’t got to the full hang up to the muscle up.

1:14:39 Yeah, should be coming very, very soon, very soon. Yeah, but I find the grip is very important, that if I can get really locked in on the base, yeah, then I feel like I feel strong and then I can really concentrate on the muscle movement, but if it feels slippery I feel like, that’s true, that’s true. And the reason is, what is really the false grip? Why are we using that grip? It’s actually very simple.

1:15:06 If you look at my hand when I’m in a support position on top of the ring, yeah, if I just grip the ring and I lock my wrist in place and I take my elbow down, I reach the false grip, right? So now actually the false grip is a way for us to make sure we would be able to transition between these two very efficiently. Right, now if I slide slightly out, that would become much more difficult as I put a strain on the wrist and do not have yet the mechanical leverage to transition.

1:15:42 So if I try to transition from here to a support, that would probably slip off. That can be done later on in more advanced stages, but in the beginning super important. Okay, so the next thing that we will do is just let’s go through a false grip chin up or a pull-up. Okay, and you would assume the same position here and you will lower only as far as you can comfortably lower while maintaining that grip, and then pull to the center of your chest. It can mean going all the way through or just partial range of motion.

1:16:22 Okay, try. The other thing I find when I’m doing this exercise are we getting there? Oh, you’re back. Are you back? Well, this is the world park too, retreat.

1:16:39 Oh, okay, because all the trees are protected on the Royal Park regulations. There’s a concept of restricted movement and we were just restricted from doing movement. How does that make you feel when we’re trying to move in a park and we can’t because of the authorities? Yeah, it’s terrible, it’s just terrible. You know, I tell my students, if you haven’t been thrown out of a gym you don’t really move yet, you know, and it’s just terrible.

1:17:19 What kind of a reality is that that we cannot enjoy those trees, those, we don’t hurt the tree, we hang from it, we climb it, we, you know, put a fabric which is very gentle on it and we perform, you know, some beautiful stuff, some beautiful movement, and yeah, I get this in many places and in many places not and I just kind of tend to gravitate towards the places which allow much more movement. Why can’t we climb the trees? Why is that not allowed? Why there should a restriction there?

1:17:59 Yeah, and in one of the most central and most beautiful public spaces in a major metropolitan city, why not have rings there for us? Why not have these climbing structures, why not have some broomsticks around? Yes, and they do exist in some places. You go out to Bondi Beach in Australia, you go to Russia, you see the outdoor facilities, you see, yeah, you see people putting slack lines in Germany, in Berlin, in the parks, nobody, you tell them to take it off the tree, it’s allowing, and this is a sense of freedom and it’s a great feeling.

1:18:38 Yeah, and when somebody restricts you, it’s almost like a knee-jerk reaction to resist, to bear, to be a renegade, to be a outside of the system, you know. It’s not a good thing. Yeah, I have to ask you, I recently saw some footage you posted of your time in Dublin with the UFC interim championship at 145 pounds, Conor McGregor. You were there with him with Gunnar Nelson at the Straight Blast Gym. I saw you, you looked like Darth Vader with the broomstick and the fights.

1:19:19 What was that like to finally train with Conor? I know you have been on each other’s radar for so many years, he’s been seen the motions that you gave to him, but what was it like to spend time with him? Just the beautiful, beautiful experience and great pleasure and honor too. Much fun, too much fun, too much fun. Yeah, Gunnar and Conor are so much into movement, so much into movement.

1:19:51 I also had the pleasure of working with Artem Lobov, who is the Ultimate Fighter finisher, another great guy, and we were just hanging out talking movement and eating good food and playing around and developing, and I shared with them a lot of tools and developmental pieces and got to play with them as well, and just, yeah, just the best. That’s what I wanted all my life to be about and that’s what my life is about, it’s about movement, about movement. And one of the things that you said you worked with them on was softening exercises, because as martial artists they’re sparring and they’re hitting and I guess you’re being a tough guy all the time.

1:20:36 What was it about the softening exercises and what did you do with him? Yeah, this is a very neglected concept that I did not invent but I brought from traditional martial arts that is missing in the modern fighting business. The nature of the work that MMA fighters and boxers do is very hardening on the body, it’s a form of protection that the body develops as an adaptation to the training, getting hit, hitting heavy bags, hitting people and yeah, just protecting yourself in the face of this great danger, and then what happens is if it’s neglected and it’s left to do its thing, you will harden and harden and harden, eventually crack and eventually break, and this is something that I kind of wanted to shine a light on and I have a huge amount of exercises, very unique physical tasks and drills and exercises and games that I collected over the last decade to bring the softness back into the body.

1:21:47 Mind you, it’s not about stretching, it’s not stretching, it’s about softening, and yeah, and those drills are a great tool and a resource for everyone and definitely for fighters, it’s a must. Okay, okay, and I saw you playing with the swords and with the broomsticks, you were introducing new movement techniques. When you see a Conor and Gunnar move on at just a basic level, were you surprised, impressed, was it what you were expecting from two great fighters?

1:22:23 They are highly specialized in reacting to another body. Once there is a change in the scenario the whole system has to re-pattern, which is exactly the reason why I want to do that work with highly specialized people. Okay, and all of a sudden it’s a stick and the range is different and the opportunities are different and the possibilities are different and they have to recalibrate, stay fresh, re-pattern, reinvent themselves and move in different ways, new ways, and that’s a great tool later on in the unpredictable nature of the fighting business.

1:23:05 That’s exciting, that’s super exciting. You said that you love loudmouths, and when you were talking about Conor and we put that short video together, we know Conor’s as a showman, a loudmouth, but as a great fighter, what did you find Conor is, something special, he’s a very unique. People know the showmen that Conor is and they know the fighter and the competitor that he is, they do not know the person that he is and they do not know the martial artist that he is, and there are all these layers to him.

1:23:42 He is a very, very dedicated martial artist, curious, obsessed with the development of movement and martial arts, and then very respectful and honorable student and, yeah, disciple. Then at the same time he has the showman layer, which he does extremely well, and he creates a huge division around him and, yeah, just steers things up, sells those tickets, brings those people in, and that’s another thing that he does very well. Then he has the layer of the person, the private person that he is.

1:24:26 Then he has the layer of the competitor and the fighter that he is. Yeah, and I think just the comment, the public doesn’t, does not get to see all this complexity and they get stuck on one thing, and their egos are getting reflected in that mirror that is Conor McGregor, and then they either they get a reaction, some hate, some love, some are inspired, but nobody can ignore. He’s got a big fight coming up against Jose Aldo, December 12th. You know, 10 years the champion, Conor’s been in his head for like a year, it’s been fascinating to watch.

1:25:20 I have to see that fight. So he’s by definition a great showman. Are you gonna watch that fight? Yeah, yeah, I hope to, I hope to be there ringside and help Conor in fight week, but there’s still a fair amount of logistics involved. I am very busy, he’s busy with all the obligations and we’re trying to work on that, and hopefully I would be there in Vegas supporting him.

1:25:49 Is he going to win? I’m no Nostradamus. I have a great belief in Conor, in his abilities, in his way, in his intelligence. I do not know much about Jose Aldo and I definitely hope he will win and he will capitalize upon all those unique traits that he brings to the table. I will find it very interesting and surprising to see Jose Aldo adapting to what Conor brings to the table: this unpredictability, rhythm, distance, timing, control, the variety and in vocabulary in offensive movement is just incredible, incredible.

1:26:41 And from what I’ve seen from Jose Aldo it doesn’t look like he can adapt to those things. Right, yeah, it’s very easy for him with his power to, like a sniper sitting there on a target and shooting it, but once the target is constantly moving to apply your fire is very, very difficult, and this would be interesting to see. Conor almost robs you out of your toolbox, that’s the feeling even when playing with him, you can feel this. Yeah, Artem Lobov says he’s a aggressive counter puncture, it’s exactly that.

1:27:19 It’s a form of a consistent pressure without doing anything, just stands in front of you and you feel this pressure from the managing, from the management of distance and positioning, and then that pulls a reaction out of you, you want to protect yourself and you make some mistakes and he capitalized upon it, and that’s what he does so well and that’s why he’s been so successful. Yeah, besides the fact that very few people can take those hits. Yeah, just the raw punching power is just too much for that weight category, nobody can take it.

1:27:58 Were you surprised when you moved with him what you saw, because we’ve all seen him, you know, in the cage and the videos that he puts out, but did you see things with him with your movement patterns where you were like, okay, yes, that’s interesting, that’s different? Yeah, I definitely enjoyed working with him and saw a lot of patterns patterns coming together happening very quickly, and more than anything I enjoyed the spark in his eyes, the interest, the love for what I love, the obsession for what I’m obsessed with, and yeah, and the same with Gunnar, who is just an incredible movement and a person that I really, really enjoyed working with, just in physical intelligence, positioning, a very unique way. You know, I gave him all kinds of movement riddles, these kinetic koans we talked about, and he does it his way and he does it well.

1:29:00 Right, Conor seemed really playful at one point, you guys were playing with the sticks and you grabbed one between your legs and you threw it against the thing, he’s laughing out loud. I mean, you guys look like three eight-year-olds in the playground just goofing around and just having fun. It just seemed like a good vibe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, from the start to the end we’re having fun and that’s the way to make great things because the training is so intense, you need to break some balls, you need to take the piss out and you need to make some fun, and the vibe is just it’s great.

1:29:36 Right, it’s great. I saw he posted a video of him fighting the mountain, which I think is a character from the Game of Thrones, guy must have been 120 kgs and Conor’s much more, much more 160khz. This is what, six weeks out from the biggest fight of his life and he’s having a, you know, bare-knuckled, you know, fight with this mountain. Is that Conor? Yeah, yeah, Conor is confident, Conor is, he’s confident, he’s playful, he knows how to protect himself and he lives life full-on.

1:30:15 He’s stoic in many ways, he doesn’t worry about things he cannot he cannot worry about, and that shows, that shows. Green trunks for the southpaw, the notorious Conor McGregor. Black trunks for the champion, Jose Aldo Jr. Caught, let me ask you a question. Last week we saw Ronda Rousey, which is probably right up there when it comes to the most famous mixed martial artists in the world, right next to Conor McGregor. She had a devastating loss in Australia, I’m not sure if you saw that fight, but we saw all the press she did, all of the expectations, hover the media you do before a fight, and you know, it all came crashing down, and when you see all the pressure that a fighter has to sell those tickets, to get in someone’s face, to be on constantly, what do you, how does that make you feel when you see someone like that fall?

1:31:20 Is that something you worry about, something like that with Conor, with all the pressure on him? There is all these different pressures and layers that you need to jump in between, press conference and media obligations and business layer and and then you have your martial artist layer and then you have your sportsman layer, and it’s just, it is difficult to juggle all these balls, maybe too big of a task for any human. Yeah, and a few, few can handle it for a while and yeah, most just for a very short while, and that’s why the game is, the game is short.

1:32:05 You have a few good years to do your stuff and, yeah, if you didn’t get it in, you might have lost your window of opportunity. Ronda, I feel for her, I feel for what she’s going through now. What did you see in that fight and with the loss, and what were your thoughts? Well, for a lot has been said about it in the media, yeah, lately, and I think from the way in, there was a feeling that something is going on here, something she’s not herself, she’s not, yeah, that was out of character for her.

1:32:40 Yeah, that was out of character, it was not clear what is going on and I can really sympathize and understand that we are all human and you can lose it, you can have a bad day. When I see a fight like that, I see, you know, when you’re talking about two humans that are 135 pounds going in there, like a women, or Conor 145 pounds, it’s hard for me to ever believe that someone can go undefeated for so long because this is someone that’s highly trained at their sport and there’s so many variables in MMA fights. I mean, the little gloves, Ron is in there like you said with Holly Holm, who’s been in 40-some fights.

1:33:22 I mean, how can there not be a chaotic nature to that? Right, yeah, even when everything is is right and even when everything is ready, which did not look like in this fight, but even if he did, s*** happens, it’s chaos, and I like Nassim Taleb’s point of view on, you know, chaos and our attempt to predict or to prepare should be taking into consideration and respecting chaos, respecting that we are small, small pieces, small factors in the whole equation. It’s enough that one small motion was done wrong to be caught badly and to lose the world’s title, so it doesn’t mean much for me about Ronda, it will mean more how she deals with that loss now.

1:34:15 Yeah, I always say with a fighter, you always tell everything about them of how they come back from that first big loss, you know, it’s, as the rapper Ice-T used to say, it’s not about the come up, it’s about to come back, and Ronda could be back, she could be bigger than ever, this could be the greatest moment of her life, and it very well could be if she makes those choices, you know. The 100, agree. Let me ask you about another mixed martial artist, one that I met because of you at your movement experience, and that’s Michael Venom Page.

1:34:53 We subsequently had him on London Real, the, yeah, the Venom. He, I stood next to him like this and I thought, you know, everyone who gets that stare down gets knocked out. We met at Ido Portal’s movement experience and I was just curious what you think you can learn from someone like that. He’s like, you know, when you generate energy and you went and snapped his hands and I stood there like, I know you watched the episode and the thing I said to him right away was, Michael, the way I watched the way he spoke with you, he was very respectful of you, very respectful you know, a young man, and I said you are a true martial artist.

1:35:45 So many fighters get into the fight game now and they’re fighters, they’re non-martial artists, and so when I see a man like him, in his demeanor, and it just seems like someone who’s willing to learn. I know you spent a week with him here in London at London Shootfighters. What was it like being with Michael and what was that thing you saw in him that made you want to invest the time in him? Well, first, Michael is a martial artist extraordinaire, from any layer, the respect and honor, the consistent bowing, bowing and respect to the dojo, to the partner, to the opponent, to the teacher, to the master, incredible, incredible young man, and then movement wise, a coordination genius, a guy who can manipulate and coordinate and place the body in very, very intricate sequences without falling out of sequence and while keeping things fresh and moving the whole time, and I just saw it in him, and a lot of people, you know, have a lot to say about where he is in the fighting game, starting out basically, and the fact that he didn’t fight the greatest opponent yet.

1:37:14 Yeah, he’s developing himself and also he makes people look so bad, it’s confusing, it’s misleading because of his ability to do those things, so I think he has a very bright future in front of him, and I didn’t even touch upon his work ethic, which is on a different level than most fighters and most people, even in the elite level, and Michael definitely brings in his work ethic, his rhythm, his timing, his distance, his playfulness. Everything is fun for him, he does not suffer through training, he treats it as a game. Oh, I caught you.

1:37:59 Oh, you cannot catch me. That’s constant, constantly in his, is something from his family, from who he is inside. It’s not a show, it’s not a show. He goes into the octagon and he’s having fun, and that’s why he’s successful. One thing he told me when I interviewed him was that he’s watching the crowd and sometimes he’s watching his opponent’s trainer and he’s just feeling everything’s going on, performing, drawing the energy.

1:38:30 I honestly have never heard any fighter talk about fighting that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he’s doing it in a different way, you know, in his way, hands down, way hands down, and it speaks for itself. I saw him training, I saw him sparring numerous times over the last two weeks and I definitely saw how he how he uses that approach to his advantage. You know, a good friend of mine says that while other people invest in companies he likes to invest in people, and it seems like with Michael you’re really investing with him early on, you’re spending time now.

1:39:11 I mean, he’s not a UFC fighter, he’s not going for the belt. Is that something that you’re conscious of doing? Yeah, yeah, I don’t care about I don’t care about the size, I don’t care about the money, I care about the movement and who I care about my playmates, you know, and my students and I appreciated Michael for his movement and now for the friend that he is, the person that he is, the student that he is, and it was a pleasure to work with him. Yeah, I don’t want to let money lead me and then be a slave to that, you know, I want to be leading myself where I want to go.

1:39:54 So many times, some of my best students never paid me a dime and but they were the right people in the right circumstances and I took them on and yeah, it’s important for me. It’s a question that I always ask you and I just want to get your thoughts. I mean, there’s always that fine line between a monk on the mountain and the guy, you know, that’s selling movement water, you know, the guy that’s gone too commercial, and then the one that the message never gets out, and I know it’s a fine line that, you know, even I walk there as far as staying true to your message but then getting most exposure, where does that go with you in the future?

1:40:49 Yeah, it’s a fine line, you want to make a difference, you want to get your message spread out and effect and help people, you need to you need to become accessible, you need to promote yourself, etc. I don’t let it lead my ideas. I always say expose your practice, don’t practice for exposure, and this is a major difference. I don’t practice in order to expose it, that’s not why I practice. I would practice even if nobody looked at me, I would still move, I would still teach, I would still do all of this stuff, but I expose my practice, this is a after I practice.

1:41:38 I also make sure to put some things out there to communicate in a language, for example in English, that is accessible to spread those ideas, to make myself appear in the right places and to connect with the right people to support those ideas. And of course there is the knee-jerk reaction of, I call it the small dick mentality, many people who did not make it, do not have the exposure and maybe had similar ideas, maybe don’t have similar ideas, and they always are very much a kind of putting down, you know, this kind of exposure and try to, you know, tell you, yeah, you’ve destroyed yourself now, you’re a slave to that. But I don’t feel that way.

1:42:29 I am still the same person I was many years ago practicing in my small gym with my small student body back home in Israel, and I’m still devoted and dedicated and I still live on the mat or on the grass or, you know, under the sky, 6, 8, 10 hours a day of movement, more than all of those critics, and I am still genuine with the way that I handle the close relationships around me and my practice, and I still continue to grow bigger also in exposure at the same time. I’ve been seduced by this exposure and I could have made it my bread and butter, but I didn’t. I didn’t, so I see those critics and I see those sore toes that I stepped on and I take it for what it is, it’s not what really matters to me.

1:43:33 And this nomadic lifestyle, you live a proper nomadic lifestyle, can that continue or is that just who you are, or is that the method of preaching these ideas? It can continue, let’s not forget the word nomadic, cultures who lived like this always, and yeah, but I don’t claim it will continue, I don’t try to predict whether it will continue or not. It is something that for me kept me very fresh and helped me spread my message and yeah, the, it’s an anti-routine practice to be a nomad, there is no routine, so it destroys the routine and hence it produces a lot of freshness, a lot of, it’s almost like constantly moving in new ways, which makes the body very open, very receptable, very sensitive.

1:44:31 So I like this lifestyle. I’m here and I have to adapt to this weather and to these beautiful birds behind you and the sounds and the people and the type of bubbles around people here, so when I walk I might pass closer or further away depending on the country I’m at, and yeah, this is a great feeling, but maybe one day I will change it and I will assume a different lifestyle, and I definitely lived many different lives in my life. Last thing I want to ask you is, the last few weeks you’ve been doing these incredible things, you know, you flew to Dublin, spent time with an incredible martial artist, you’re back here in London with Michael Venom Page, today you get to hang out with Brian Rose from London Real.

1:45:18 Do you ever think that, like, this is what it’s all about, you know, just being in the flow of information? You know, in a month from now you’ll be at the UFC championship fight. Do you ever think that, you know, this is the life that I, the ultimate life because I’m exchanging value with valuable people and this is kind of where I want to be for a long time? Yes, yeah, I’m so grateful. I wake up every day and I remind myself, I stop and I meditate on it and I’m so grateful to have this.

1:45:49 This is what I always wanted and I set out to do it, I planned it and I achieved it and I continue to, you know, to enjoy it day in and day out. I’m moving every day, I’m meeting incredible people and doing what I love. It’s another beautiful day on this planet, and it’s also a good day to die. What does that mean, a good day to die? It’s a good day to die.

1:46:18 It’s something that we also must meditate upon and to remind ourselves that it’s temporary, that if everything ends now it’s okay, it’s really okay. It’s a yeah, this is a, you know, the old samurai practice of meditating on your death daily, and I think it’s a very powerful thing and I try to put this in my mind, and yeah, I’m aware that things always change and will change and it’s okay. Yeah, as long as you’re also appreciative and capturing and stopping and being aware of this moment.

1:47:07 I feel like when I do things like today where I get some time to speak with you, I feel like it’s a treasured moment, and when we look back on this in 20 years time, you know, and all the crazy things that we’ve done in our lives, it’ll be like, wow, they were doing something. This kind of like when you go back and see a documentary from the 70s and you’ll see like the Eagles in their first concert and they’re like, look how young they look, you know. And so for me the ultimate reward of doing something like this with you today is that, yeah, I feel like I’m with extraordinary people talking about extraordinary ideas, and if there is any wealth in this world, this is what it is.

1:47:46 It’s right, this right here for me. Maybe it is for someone else, maybe it is that car or that place or that jet, but for me it’s with being in the flow of amazing ideas with amazing people and just trying to communicate that and be a part of it and be in that moment. So thanks so much for the time today. I think we might becoming friends, maybe you and me, maybe, maybe so. Right, you know, to be continued.

1:48:16 I hope we check back with you whenever you’re in London and we can just find out where you are, you know, what you’re doing next because, yeah, this has been, it’s been great for me and I’m changing as a mover and, you know, hopefully you can help me keep going on that journey too. Thank you so much and honored for another great meeting and for your friendship, for your support, for this great conversation and this beautiful day here. Right, it’s good to die, it’s a good day to die.

1:48:44 Thanks, man.