Ido Portal - Just Move

Full transcript: Ido Portal on London Real

11:37 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mr. Ido Portal, who is a movement artist and teacher from Haifa, Israel, who grew up studying martial arts and at the age of 15 began studying capoeira, which, if you’re not familiar with capoeira, it’s an Afro-Brazilian martial art dance. It’s kind of hard to describe exactly what it is. When I saw some of your videos on YouTube, I recognized it kind of immediately.

12:03 I was in Rio de Janeiro about 10 years ago and I was next to a McDonald’s outside of Ipanema and a capoeira movement broke out in front of me and there were like seven-year-old kids and 50-year-old grandmas and they were doing backflips on the concrete in front of me and someone was playing music and I was just, I’ve never seen anything like this, and I think if it was ever an expression of movement for just the sake of movement, that was probably it. I never really seen anything like that before, so I’ll ask you more about capoeira, but after capoeira you studied gymnastics, yoga, dance, circus arts, martial arts, in your pursuit of what you call a movement culture, which I believe represents a paradigm shift in physicality. I think you’re trying to move us away from things like fitness, which you see as a culprit, and I think you’re trying to move us away from the separation that we have between health, aesthetics, performance, art, as in I might see a runner or a bodybuilder or a fighter or a dancer, but I think you’re trying to tell us they’re all movement people.

13:07 So you have a worldwide following, you’re here in the UK to teach this weekend for two days, you’ve got countless videos on YouTube showing your movement and describing your philosophy, which I think is as important as your movement, maybe your philosophy is more important than your movements. Ido, welcome to London Real. Thank you, thanks for having me. That was a quite a long-winded introduction, right? You’re probably wondering when I was gonna stop.

13:31 You know, I was thinking back to that capoeira moment today. I was down in Rio to train some Brazilian jiu-jitsu and I just remember that happening in front of me and I don’t even think I understood what they were doing because it wasn’t really a performance, it wasn’t a workout, it wasn’t a fight, it was just these people kind of being happy and moving. And I don’t know, I just remember that. I was wondering what struck you about capoeira when you were 15 that kind of made you go that way?

13:56 Yeah, probably what struck me was the fancy stuff and not what it really is, which is first and foremost a social interaction, right? Movement, corporal dialogue, movement conversation. It’s a tactical game and it can take on a full-on fight, right, moments, and it can be also like more showy or take on different expressions, but it always happens in a context of a culture, society happening around it, and what got me into it is not what got me to stay there.

14:32 It’s two different things, but it was the movement, the movement that got me in there, the fancy movement first, and then I stayed because of not the fancy movements and the more intricate, the more interesting, the cultural aspect. Okay. You’re from Haifa, Israel. I was wondering if you could tell us what is Israel like, what is Israel not like? A lot of us know Israel because you guys are in the news all the time and I was watching you in your studio.

15:02 I’m from San Diego, California, and everyone thinks San Diego must be the greatest place, why would you ever leave there? And you know, and I always just say I think San Diego is a little boring, I get bored with beaches, but I was wondering what is Haifa like, what is it like growing up in Israel, tell me? Well, Israel is very different, I think, from the outside, the point of view, the media kind of, you know, taking certain aspects and enhancing, and not always in a way that correlates with actual statistical occurrences or happening, you know.

15:40 One of my favorite authors, Nassim Taleb, he wrote not so long ago about we should have a news channel that reports according to statistics, and then, like, diabetes, for example, the amount of people dying from diabetes each day is much more than any terror attack, but you hear about the spicy stuff, you hear about, you know, the conflict. So Israel suffers definitely that kind of a reality. I grew up in a beach town, Mediterranean weather, you know, or around similar to San Diego, 300 days of sun and yeah, it was a great place and it was also peppered with a more complex reality of terror attacks in the 90s and the Gulf War, ’91.

16:29 Was still a kid and remember that gas masks, rhymes, because Saddam was threatening to attack Israel. So yeah, yeah, that made everything much more intense. Yeah, and that kind of sits in the background, and but the daily life is very Western. Okay. We speak English pretty well, we grow up with Americanized TV, Americanized food, so very familiar.

17:00 Probably the biggest difference is what we call a tactless, a very kind of down-to-earth, super practical thing that always sits in the background and no kind of an approach, and because of reality and because because of the necessity of such an approach, so people don’t walk around the bush, people call it as it is. It can be a bit rough on the edges but also extremely warm and extremely real. Is that because it’s inherently a dangerous place? Is that why people cut through and be very honest with each other, or is there other reasons?

17:36 That’s the thing, it’s not inherently a dangerous place if you look at it statistically, but I guess the reality of getting recruited to the military, 18, and you know, you guys go to college, we go to the military, and that kind of sits in the background and kind of directs how you act. And nowadays it’s much better, but in the 90s, a lot of terror attacks and empty malls and, you know, reality of fear that definitely was there. Again, if you look at the numbers, it was never really bad compared to other stuff going on, but but still, you know, it gets to you, right?

18:16 It’s okay, it’s kind of always in your mind, and yeah, it’s interesting how you say like statistically it might not be there, but as humans we’re very anecdotal, isn’t it? So we respond to things that are new, and there might be more deaths in the U.S. to lung cancer by a factor of 100 versus say terror attacks, but of course that’s what we talk about. Do you ever think about the man that you would be like without your military service? Would you even be doing what you’re doing now?

18:42 It’s definitely changing your perspective and definitely changed my perspective of movement, and it’s a big chunk and it’s something that we prepare for in high school and, you know, we get very physical to get ready for all the special operation tests and, you know, various exams and drills, so it definitely changed my physicality and I think it sits in the heart of a lot of the physicality back home, and at the same time things like martial arts sometimes take a bit of a weird angle after you do stuff in the military where it’s not, it doesn’t feel very real sometimes to Israelis, you know, the martial arts seems kind of funny, and it’s a very different experience, I think, than doing military service in the UK or the US. First it’s obligatory, and second, yeah, just the whole the whole way that it changes us is different.

19:46 It’s not something we like to talk about too much, it’s not mentioned a lot afterwards. Yeah, but you’re protecting your home turf, you’re protecting your family, the conflict is very real, it’s very nearby, it’s different than if you’re in the British Territorial Army. We don’t realistically have to worry about anybody coming in here and, you know, bombing my grandmother’s house, that’s not realistically gonna happen. Is that what you mean, that that kind of really brings it home or makes it a little bit different there?

20:15 Yeah, what you’re saying is right, but in the end of the day you’re fighting for your friends, you know, you’re fighting with your friends, and that doesn’t change if you’re in the UK and you’re deployed somewhere and you’re seeing some action or you’re in Israel, so I guess that thing doesn’t change, but something else changes in in the way that everybody’s involved and there is like this feeling that people went through it and they know, but nobody kind of talks too much about it, it seems like. I mean, if you talk about this service, it seems like it would be a country full of really tough guys, you know. I mean, I’ve met a few guys that have come from Israel that have come through here, some are in the tech scene around here, and like I’m always like, okay, I wouldn’t, you know, he could probably handle himself in a fight.

21:04 You can tell guys give off an aura, especially when they’ve been through some tough things, is that they’re usually they don’t project this sense of insecurity and neediness that you see some kind of tough guys do. I was wondering if you do you think it in a weird way breeds out, you know, maybe the feminine side of the males that might be the more creative side or that kind of thing? Do you think I never actually even thought about this, I didn’t, I wasn’t even going to ask you, but I was wondering if you think of something like that’s because you’re a creative guy?

21:31 Yeah, it all kind of, you know, correlates and, you know, you pull on a shirt, everything, every atom in the shirt gets affected, everything is connected, and I’m sure in some way it desensitizes you, and sensitivity is a very important concept inside creativity and maybe the most important concept to have the same sensation, sensitivity to the options, to the possibilities, and then flowing within those possibilities in a creative process. I can see that affecting things for sure. It’s a a very deep and a very long-lasting kind of effect, the more you were involved, the more you got to do in the military, which thankfully I have, I didn’t get to do too much, and and I’m glad for that for sure.

22:26 You know, I have a lot of people that come through here and some are quote unquote famous or some are in politics, some are writers, and I look at you and I look at the impact you have. I have a lot of friends that are in mixed martial arts and they can’t say enough things about you, and obviously on the web everyone really likes you, and I think it’s more about your movement and more about your philosophy because I don’t think people are drawn into just movement, I think there’s a whole piece behind it, and I was wondering if you could even explain it to yourself when you take a look back and you’re saying, you know what, why is this such a big thing? Is it because of this underlying philosophy that you have or what you’re telling to people, why do you think it is?

23:05 Well, first it’s very important to say that you don’t sit down and, you know, hash plans and create, you know, big long-term philosophical approach. It’s more of a reactionary reality where you react to things and you unravel, you more unravel, you pulls on string, you pull on strings and you let that dictate, you know, your approach, and that’s definitely how I approached it. I’m not some form of a genius that sat down and kind of, you know, thought this out years in advance and I’m just, you know, executing a plan.

23:43 I don’t believe in planning, I believe in reacting, and the planning happens on a very short term, and the philosophy to movement, it’s something that yeah, it just happened. It happens like Bruce Lee said, you know, I don’t hit, it hits, it happened to me. It was, it’s all by itself, that’s what he said. Yeah, famous line from Enter the Dragon. Yeah, and I think the best stuff is like that, and many times we don’t let things happen because of planning, controlling, right?

24:14 So I was just moving, I was just, you know, doing martial arts, and then I got into capoeira, which was a lot more movement basically, and it struck me and I was in love, you know, I was in this romance with capoeira for 15, 16 years, basically thinking of myself as capoeira, you know. I always said like, how can I stop capoeira? I am capoeira. Yeah, I can’t stop what you are. And yeah, with the search of bettering myself and my students, I started to teach very early and I had a big following back home, a lot of students, I opened up a training center, started to develop everyone, and I was searching for tools, I was searching for answers and trying to get to the next level, and that got me to research more and more, get into other stuff because the answers, the answers were not there, they’re not part of capoeira, for example.

25:09 You do BJJ but there is no much information on how to keep your body healthy while doing BJJ, inside BJJ you have to go out and search for other tools, and I was searching for those tools and then while doing it I kind of lost track and I ended up actually enjoying others, other stuff and doing them not for the sake of capoeira anymore, and that got me into the realization that what is the connection there, what is this invisible thread that goes through all these disciplines, and it was movement. Did you feel like you were betraying capoeira in the beginning? Oh, 100 percent.

25:50 Yeah, so he was like a lover to you? Yeah, and I was, I’m a radical guy, I’m known for it, that’s the first thing that people will tell you. I’m I’m the full out going for it, and I was called in capoeira their nicknames and my nickname was Missionário, the missionary. I was the capoeira missionary. I had very extreme following, students that lived with me, ate with me, you know, everything was before capoeira, and I thought of myself as that and it was extremely difficult to make the transition.

26:29 So first I kind of had to cheat myself that I’m still doing it for those reasons, but eventually had to face it and realize it and then communicate it also with my students, and that got into a very interesting point where I nowadays I believe it’s not about what you want to learn, it’s about what the teacher wants to teach you, and people hate hearing it. If you find a real teacher and if you find a real process, it doesn’t matter what he teaches, what what it teaches, what she teaches, and it just matters that you found that thing. So if I’ll find a real violin teacher, I’ll study violin.

27:16 Mastery of everything is the mastery of mastery, it’s the mastery of yourself. And so you’re saying people are searching for the truth, they might not necessarily even at your seminar this weekend be searching for movement, they might be searching for direction. 100 percent, they come to me because they think they know what I do and actually it’s so far from what they think they know what I do, but then I change their mind about it and then they want to do this thing and not in a bad way, in a way that I present to them a bigger, better thing, a bigger dogma.

27:48 You must choose a dogma still, you must have some form of a leading dogma in your practice, in your life, and I just show them a bigger umbrella. So people think it’s about handstands and, you know, jumping on the rings and doing flips or whatever, and actually our work is way, way beyond that. It’s a completely different and a huge paradigm shift in the way that you think about your practice and your movement and your body, and that is sometimes hard to deal with because people, you meet your demons when you meet that, and sometimes you have this reaction, no, no, that’s not what I came to learn, but mostly, interesting enough, and when you’re doing a good job, people accept it and it’s a life-changing moment in in many of our workshops.

28:38 In the end of this weekend, just two days, people burst out crying, people change future plans, people write me letters, hand me letters in the end of the workshop, and it’s an amazing experience to see that and to be part of it, and for me it’s a huge honor, huge honor. You know, if I hadn’t had experienced that myself, I would think you’re crazy, but yeah, it’s funny, a lot of guys in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, they go there to learn how to say beat up guys and they’re like, okay, I’m going to come and learn how to beat up guys, and when they do it for a while they realize that they find out why, that they’re actually fighting themselves, you know, and it’s all about maybe not fighting yourself anymore, and you know, you see these huge changes and personalities, and I’m guessing that’s a little bit of what you’re describing happens with your seminars and your students.

29:28 Yeah, definitely, sometimes reality forces you into that corner because you came, you came to do one thing and maybe you’ve done it, and when you’ve done it it’s a bad day because then it’s over, it’s over, and then you can make the obvious choice, next challenge, but at a certain point you realize, I’m gonna get all this stuff or I’m not gonna get all this stuff, but anyways there is something bigger that must lead me here, you know. Like I remember the first day I got a one-arm handstand, I was like three years focused on this skill somewhat. How long it took you?

30:06 Yeah, and you started from a very strong base. And actually I started, yeah, you can say it’s a strong base compared to another person, but I’ll tell you, some of my students learned how to do a one-arm handstand under the process that I offered in three months. It took me three years and I did it myself, I taught myself, I had very little communication with people who could do it and I had to kind of create a process for myself. The day I got it was a weird day and it was a yeah, what now, you know, this emptiness hits you and it’s with everything big, with them, you know, making your first million, with anything big, and then after it happens enough times you start to realize that you have to kind of operate on a different dogma.

30:55 These challenges are not enough, you know, like, and that changes what you are searching inside, what you do, or it changes what you do. So for example BJJ might not be enough at a certain point, or you would make the transition and find within your practice in BJJ what you need, a bigger thing, a bigger dogma. And so for example like the one-arm handstand, you get that and that’s a challenge off your list, and of course now you can set up the next challenge, and the one-arm pull-up and this, and then you’re realizing that hold on a second, this is not making me happy and my life is not about overcoming the next challenge and now I need to evolve into what am I doing, whether that’s not even teaching or learning about yourself, and it can be hard like you said, you’re probably looking at yourself, what do I do now?

31:42 It’s a very common thing to realize, you know, as they say, the laundry after the ecstasy. It’s a very famous book. You still have to do the laundry, you know, you got into the ecstasy, wake up the next days. So in a way you still form challenges and operate according to them, it doesn’t stop you from doing that, but you do it from a different perspective. So for example, one thing that changed in the way that I approached things was understanding that I need to decentralize my approach to movement, to practice, to life, so I can adapt better to the unraveling of reality in front of me.

32:25 For example, if you’re a hand balancer and you lose your arm, it’s a bad day to be alive, it’s over, and you’re not ready because you centralized all of your efforts in one area and now it’s over. But if you are working with a very big per spectrum then you’re able to adapt and react better and you’re able to form challenges and react to them much better. So in a way I still go after skills and I still go after qualities and but I do it and with also a kind of a diffused mind a bit at times, in a good way, not in a bad way, not to be too invested in each one of these.

33:09 Okay, yes, and I’m sure the other side of it, not to make it look all very, you know, utopian, is you might be pursuing with less fire and with less in intensity, but that’s fine because there is a war to win and not a battle to win and I think it’s got it, it comes with age, with experience and with understanding, and I’m really, I’m a big coward, you know, I’m very afraid, and that keeps me very safe, like I’m preparing for the future, I’m not slamming myself into the wall and realizing it too late. I was always very careful and always very calculated and I’m glad in that regard that I was able to prepare myself for the road to come. And you said you’re scared, so you’re are you prepared to lose your arm, is that what you’re saying?

34:08 Are you more purported now than, say, you were five, ten years ago? Yes, for sure. Okay. Yeah, okay, because we will lose everything, you know, and it’s part of the thing, we’re actually, we are, yeah. One of my good friends, Josef Roski, he talks about the fact that we’re actually cracking our shells, we to release ourselves, we basically age, we we crack our physicality so something can come out and something can happen, and you can look at it metaphorically, esoterically, it doesn’t matter, but it is a process where you basically discover who you are, whether you want it or not.

34:46 Mastery will come to you with age in a way, right, and you’re going to discover these things as your aim, your end comes closer and closer. You must almost submit to the aging process and there isn’t much choice because you’re faced with a new reality every day, aren’t you? And so you have to adapt in some way, and I know you’re a big proponent of saying there are cons with every, you know, pros with every cons, and if you focus on one thing you are by definition going to make sacrifices in another piece, which is an interesting idea, and I want to get to that.

35:18 For people that don’t know about your practices, can you tell me about on a base level what is your concept of self-dominance and what, for example, you’re going to be doing for the next two days? If I showed up tomorrow morning, Northampton, at your seminar, what will it look like in there? All right, so that’s the million-dollar question. Yeah, because does everyone ask you this? Yeah, yeah, for sure, nobody, you know, from the outside it’s very hard to understand what we’re doing.

35:45 So what we are actually doing is we’re showing only the outer shells of our practice, and because the inner stuff, the inner shells are not well presented in a media setting nor in a book and there can only be experienced on a very personal level. But let’s really discuss it honestly and I’ll try to get across a little bit of what we do, and when a person comes to us we start by developing kind of a core practice, and that core practice changes, there is no one core but individual, by individualizing the kind of core perspective. We might develop some basic strength, we might kind of invest some time in protecting joints and articulations, we will develop some basic mobility, and then we will start to feed more and more movement nutrition, which is a phrase that I coined a few years ago.

36:48 Basically I look at movement as food and the necessity to chew up on stuff and develop your teeth and your digestive tract as opposed to kind of the liquid nutrition that we get more commonly these days in movement practice. So we start to take all of these abilities and skills and we start to develop an intelligent mover, someone who can deal with ever changing environments, and it means learning new stuff constantly, never being master of anything. I’ve never mastered anything, I’m not a master, although this title has been put on me, I don’t like it and I don’t believe in the word in a way.

37:34 And yeah, then using what you have, and these core elements are usually kind of developing a basic control, upper body strength, lower body strength, the ability to do some basic human skills like squat and transition from lying down to standing up and sprint and hang, and then going into the real fun stuff once that is addressed and then you can really explore and it’s an endless thing. So for example, one day I’ll wake up and I’ll do a martial art practice or boxing or, you know, I’ll go to BJJ class and work there, the next the next session I’ll go take a contemporary dance improvisation class, the next I will do a strength session to make sure all these basic skills are there, then I’ll go rock climbing, then I just keep on, you know, and that’s the big part of what you do when you’re already on the intermediate higher levels.

38:38 Then I also have like big projects which I take on myself and all my students do the same, so for example for the next few months I will research a concept, for example moving fast. This is the concept that I have been researching lately, just to be able to move fast regardless of technique, not sprinting fast, I mean moving fast, moving your hand fast, moving your legs fast, and yeah, just experiencing and researching that. In the next few days we lead a group of people in a variety of drills, we do a bit of strength work, more kind of a gymnastics oriented strength work, and we do a little bit of hand balancing, and that’s two aspects that everybody knows, but then we’ll also be using a concept that I call kinetic coins, like movement riddles, and we’ll throw people into movement riddles and ask them to solve those riddles and teach them how to deal with those riddles, and then we’ll also be doing some locomotive patterns, which is a whole language I developed from my background and how to locomote and move across the floor in a very interesting way, and then we’ll be doing some hanging work, which is pretty rare.

39:53 Everybody’s doing pooling but only kind of rock climbers and a little bit gymnasts are doing hanging work, which is a really cool stuff and fun stuff, so those are some examples. Okay, so if I stuck a GoPro in the corner, these are the movements I was seeing I would be seeing, and what’s the subtext, what is going on under the surface of this weekend, for example, you know, what are you really teaching? First to embodiment, to you have no choice, you live in a body.

40:25 People ask us what’s the prerequisites for the event, so one of my students, he answered, to have a body. Yeah, and we all have a body and we all move, we have no choice, the only question is how well are you doing it, and most people just don’t have the user manual for their own machinery. Why is that, why aren’t we given a user manual as humans? We’ve moved away from it, we’ve we’re not forced anymore into developing the user manual. Okay.

40:54 And when we are not forced to do stuff we lose it and that’s a very common thing that happens to us and then we have to approach it in a completely different way and regain those abilities, and that’s kind of the romantic kind of paleo perspective, but I don’t operate according to this dogma alone. I believe we are now moving also certain part of the population better than ever, and I believe we are the most complex movers on the planet, although we like to romanticize and the animal kingdom, we are the most complex movers on the planet, and it sits in the heart of how we ascend it to the top of the food chain, our movement capabilities, brain was a tool for those movement capabilities. We can climb not as well as other primates and we can’t run as fast as as the cheetah, but we can mimic all of these animals pretty much and we can go into the water and we can go into the trees and we can operate on the ground and we can develop all kinds of tools and move in very complex ways, so we are the most complex movers on the planet.

42:14 If I was a banker, Wall Street, you know, or City trader here in London, and I’m going to show up tomorrow on Saturday, what are the range of my emotions going to be like? Am I going to be frustrated at some point, am I going to be confused with kind of what you’re teaching? Do you see kind of like a typical range of emotions from people coming in? You must be used to it by now. Yeah, we’re very careful with people in that regard because we’re, I am very connected and realized many years ago and the abuse that goes on, it’s very easy to traumatize people and it happens a lot in martial arts, and you must know a lot about this, BJJ is a huge world of abuse.

42:56 Huge, let’s be very frank, and I was going to think boxing at first because I know so many extreme cases where someone throws someone in a ring when they don’t belong there and they get hurt. I don’t see that kind of specific thing happening in jiu-jitsu, but please tell me, tell me. Oh, it’s actually, I’ll give it to you as it is, like there are certain cultures that do it more than others and the Brazilian culture is a huge, huge culture that in their physicality they’re amazing movers, amazing, and but there is a lot of abuse going on within the martial arts in Brazil and it definitely happens also in BJJ where certain positions are held for a bit too long and you know a lot of like stuff that shouldn’t be there, always, it’s not always necessary.

43:42 Yes, we’re doing martial arts, but you are actually preventing people from progressing with this, you’re traumatizing them, and for sure in boxing it happens a lot. When I started boxing I went to train with some of the Russians in Israel, the Russian immigrants, and I was the only ones, you know, kind of speaking Hebrew there and I was abused 100 percent, you know, I was humiliated, abused, and I had to, you know, chew down on it and deal with it, and yeah, I was okay eventually, but definitely it carried something in my mind and I left boxing for a while. The next time I went to box with my current teacher, Yakov the Scholar, Jacob the Scholar is an amazing coach, and I realized there is another way, right, and I saw a really careful and very successful long-term process where the coach is not afraid to throw the white towel in the right moments and taking one step forward and maybe three backwards and again building up a few single steps forward and kind of realizing who is he working with.

44:54 Movement is the same. If you throw someone into movement challenges and he experiences just, he slaps a title on himself, puts a title, I’m uncoordinated, I’m not talented enough, I’m not gifted, and it’s not for me, and this I don’t allow in my workshops, in my classes, in my work, and I talk about it and I put it out there and I take just, I tease people and if they’re good then I’m gonna go deeper and deeper and this should be individualized. Sits in the heart of how we approach things, we individualize things, there are no protocols and that’s a major reason behind the misunderstanding of what we do, because people look for protocols, they want to, okay, that’s what they do or this is what they do, but actually everything is context for me.

45:48 So yeah, very few people understand what I’m doing and how to approach it and those are the people who work with me and work for me and they’re very close people to me, they’ve been living, spending time with me for years. I will never certify someone over a weekend, over a year, because I believe it’s all context and it requires a very wide set of tools and understanding in a certain mindset to be a teacher. You know, you talked about dogmas earlier and you talked about capoeira, it’s interesting, you know, the most famous videos and pictures of you are in your one-handed stand, you know, one-armed handstand, again like the flashy moves like you said about capoeira, and are you ever at risk of becoming known for those things which ultimately aren’t really what you’re about?

46:35 Yeah, yeah, for sure, and it happened, it already happened, many people recognize me for those movements. And do you like that or do you not like? I don’t like it, but I used it, I have to realize what a tool it was for me, a tool to get to more people and deliver the right message, and I’ve corned my way into people’s hearts and minds and used what I can use, used, you know, everything from my body and into my movements, and then later would I arrived at the point where I can deliver a more potent message and yeah, tell you the truth, it’s a bit of a secret, not many people know, but I talk about it with my close people, I’ve lost my interest in handstands a long time ago.

47:28 I still teach it and I still share it because I believe that’s what people needs in certain aspects, but I’m not there. That’s blasphemy. Yeah, you know, and I’m not there, I’ve never, how could you be, you spend so much time perfecting it, if you were still interested in handstands I would think something’s wrong with you. Yeah, but a lot of people will do that for years and years and we’ll just take the next challenge. I could always take a next challenge, my handstands are garbage, they could have been much better.

47:58 Yeah, I can stand on one arm, it’s super impressive, but there are people who eat me for breakfast with handstands and I made a choice not to be there because I realized that’s not what I want. I don’t want another position and perfecting another small detail while I’m losing sight of so much stuff on the other side. So I really form the practice around it and I help people achieve those things that I was once interested in, but me myself, I’ve moved so many subjects since handstands and researched so much stuff and it’s a never-ending thing.

48:36 I believe, like, the rest of the pyramid will just dry out if I don’t continue and have this kind of a research mindset. Talk to me about dogmas and, you know, and getting past your own dogmas, you first set up to differentiate yourself from the world and then you end up becoming a slave to them. Tell me your thoughts on that and how do you avoid it? All right, so first in my eyes you must choose a dogma, there has to be a leading kind of leading thing in your life, in your, that dictates the method, that dictates the goals.

49:14 People confuse these three things very often, and for example they will set up goals that have no relationship with the dogma, they’re related to the methods, then they will fail achieving the goals and because the dogma is not connected to these goals and the methods are not producing the right results, and then they will change the methods instead of realizing maybe they should change the goals or change the dogma. It’s very difficult to do, changing your dogma takes guts, it takes bravery, it takes courage, because you live for long periods of time with ideas of who you are and then you realize that’s not who I am and it’s a very dark, can be a very dark moment. What’s an example of one of your dogmas or what was an original dogma?

50:08 For example, I’m a capoeira guy, that’s my dogma, that’s my thing, you know. And then your goals and methods would be what, right? Then I was like, one of my goals was to move really well and I realized like I don’t want to just move capoeira really well, I want to move really well, but then the methods that I used didn’t produce the results because I kept on holding to the capoeira dogma, trying to kind of bring all these tools of movement, these methods of movement into the capoeira context, and if they didn’t match the capoeira context then I wouldn’t use them because I’m the dogmatic capoeira guy, and yeah, that was a huge dogma for me.

50:48 Another dogma is, you know, it can go very deep, I’m Israeli, I live in Israel, I’m very, you know, patriotic, etc. Another dogma might be I need a relationship, you know, like it’s a must, everybody must live, you know, in a relationship, and etc., it’s always there, and then at a certain point you realize who’s the master. I’m not the master, I coined the dog my years ago, it became my master and now I’m behind the dogma instead of the dogma being a servant to me, and still, to replace that dogma you must have a new dogma, right?

51:31 So eventually you kind of very carefully in the way that you form your dogmas, and I was very careful, so after 15, 16 years in capoeira I didn’t make the next mistake of being an acrobat, being, I don’t know, a dancer. I realized I love movement on all of its shades, utilitarian movement, artistic movement, breathing, any form of mind-body connection, and if it’s just kind of the cartoon existence from the head up, a very cognitive, then I’m not so interested, it’s always about the connection to the body. And that’s why I use that dogma and I think it’s a good dogma to have, it’s wide enough for me to shift and move and I have room for movement literally inside this dogma and I can change what I do.

52:27 I’m not the handstand guy, I’m not the gymnastics guy, I was never a gymnast, right, I use whatever works for my movement dogma, so the tools, the methods are borrowed from a lot of these isolated aspects, but my dogma is bigger. You’re here this weekend and you’re going to teach, you know, 80,100 people at your seminar and it sounds like you will continue to do this, you’re walking the earth like Caine and teaching people all these things. How far is the human race now behind where they should be when it comes to movement?

53:02 I know you’ve said that the fitness industry never impressed you in the past, you said it’s a limited world with many problems, a polluted world. How bad are we off right now as humans with the fitness industry and where do you come in? Yeah, there is a things have been, the order of things have been disrupted. We don’t think of ourselves as movers, human beings, but we think of ourselves as specialists, and I kind of created this small phrase to describe it where Homo sapiens bigger than Homo motus is bigger than Homo specialitas.

53:44 The Homo sapiens, first you’re a human being, second you’re a mover. Mike Tyson needs to squat down to lift his child off the floor, and then you’re specialists, and these two first two layers many times they’re not addressed, and so we are lacking, many specialists are lacking as human beings, and you see it, they go straight to specialism, they’re just lacking the tools of different layers, it’s not addressed. So some of the biggest douchebags out there are specialists in the top of their field, they’re just not good human beings.

54:20 Okay, does that have anything to do with the path they took to get there? Yeah, 100 percent, it’s just a lot of focus on a different layer, then as movers they also suck at, you believe, you know, like an amazing boxer like Roy Jones Jr., he’s an amazing mover, not necessarily, maybe he’s not the best example because he can still do some things, I saw him playing basketball pretty pretty nice, and but still as a mover I’ll tell you it’s not enough, I don’t think he’s a great mover and et cetera. So certain sports you see where you’re like, they’re just not a great mover.

54:58 Yeah, it’s very common, most sports are like that because most sports have lost sight of what’s important. Most sports were there to serve the movement layer, the movement world was the biggest universe around it, and then we created all these sports and then the sports created the world of fitness, right, and in a way it always existed in various levels, but when I take a very black and white kind of point of view, that’s what you see nowadays, the world of fitness is the bigger world, there are more people doing shitty fitness out there than people actually doing martial arts, dancing, moving, rock climbing, I don’t know, which is different than 20, 30 years ago, that wasn’t the case. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

55:41 Yeah, and it all comes, you know, the golden era of bodybuilding and what we, our physical culture of taking this, you know, turns and the media served that thing and we took on this aesthetic thing and yeah, we tried to reverse engineer a capable body and kind of put on ourselves the aesthetic of it, but we’re left with nothing, it leads you to being sick, incapable, depressed, where you have these crazy bodies, they can’t do nothing. I mean, look at 50 years ago, go on a beach and then go now, you’re going to see a whole, it’s like different human beings, right? It’s almost like different creatures.

56:20 Yeah, yeah, 100 percent. So you see people in the top of their fields that are specialists that are douchebags and they don’t know how to move is what you’re saying? Yeah, they’re not very good with movement, not on a very human layer where the patterns that you must do daily, you know, you’re gonna lay in a bed, you know, sounds funny but many people can’t lie down these days, for example. The average IFBB pro bodybuilder needs to use like six pillows to get comfortable at night.

56:55 So dear friends, you’ve made a terrible mistake, you have made a terrible mistake, you took yourself and you’re not you’re immobile, you’ve trained yourself out of mobility, out of movement, you slept on these aesthetics that are degradable as well, you sacrificed health and you can’t move, so there’s no wind, there’s no wind there at all? Well, you know, I’m sure there are winds but it’s so far back on the curve, right? You can go after aesthetics and get some nice benefits with movements until a certain point but then it’s over, and notice how people say, they still make the mistake and say, he looks very strong.

57:41 No, you can’t know if he’s strong or not, you have no way to know because it’s comprised of so many different elements, and even strength is not a very reliable predict predictor of movement, as you know from grappling. Yeah, so we’re still making these mistakes. Yeah, where we’re and this this needs to be corrected. Is it being corrected, are you having any success? Well, I’m a mosquito, I’m a small mosquito and I’m buzzing around and I’m making, you know, my noise, but I’m not yet.

58:15 Okay. And on a large perspective, maybe my students will be the ones who will do, maybe I will never get to see that, but there is a lot happening as well on the edges of the world of fitness and movement and there are some voices starting to promote more movement and we’re definitely have been a major part of that, and some big, big companies and corporations have noticed it and I’ve got a chance to work with it, like Nike and and come there and speak in front of the board of directors and give them my perspective. So definitely there are things happening where people realize it’s not necessarily fitness that we want to do, we actually wanted to move, and we now we know it, you know, now somebody said it, now we realize that there are other set of tools that are missing and you can actually learn how to move, you can perfect it, you can progress in it, there is a process there, you’re not lost, but we’re still not there because people are lost even when they get the message, I want to move, they get lost, and the only thing that we’ve been doing so far is just offering them kind of a very private perspective where we take on students and we touch them face to face or very, very intimately, even through online coaching, we haven’t taken this on a larger scale, but it’s definitely something that will happen.

59:39 On the edge of that fitness industry is CrossFit, this probably is going in the right direction, as in you’re seeing functional movements, you’re seeing, you know, Olympic lifts, which I know you’re a fan of, so how do you feel about when you see things like CrossFit? I know in an interview you said they’ve brought a lot of good things to the industry. CrossFit is definitely a very positive phenomenon in my eyes, and everybody likes to and moan on CrossFit, everybody and everyone who comes on the show, everyone wants to ask me about CrossFit.

1:00:11 They’re like the whipping boy but yet they’re a huge movement at the same time. Yeah, I think it’s a very largely positive force and it definitely brought in a lot of movements, so for example just in the first few years of CrossFit you’re gonna have to learn a lot of movement, deal with a lot of patterns. Yeah, it’s limited, it’s not about movement, right, because the center of the CrossFit model didn’t place movement, it placed capacity, which is a very mechanical concept, right?

1:00:46 That’s the workout of the day, the WODs, it’s how much can you do, post your result for time, exactly, it’s taking, it’s quantifying the movement, right, it’s in a way quantifying, trying to quantify. Yeah, although this is not mechanics, this is biomechanics. There is a huge difference in the way that you approach biomechanics and mechanics and any beginner scientist would have caught on to this for a long time ago and would say there is a major issue.

1:01:13 So in classic physics, you know, like moving an x amount of mass from point A to point B is always the same, where you look at it from a biomechanical perspective, the engine that moves that mass changes the whole perspective and sometimes the longer path is the more efficient one, not the shortest linear line, and you see that all the time, for example a pull-up, to pull up and down in one line is not very efficient, the behind-the-back pull-up for example is much harder than assuming some form of an arc, but physically you’re moving the same amount of mass from point A to point B, yeah, against gravity, I’m talking about against gravity here, so yeah, that’s it. I think CrossFit is a good thing, I think CrossFit brought back a lot of good stuff, I think all of these people who like to criticize CrossFit, they eat the breadcrumbs below CrossFit’s table and they need to have a bit of respect there and they need to realize where they stand and then you can also criticize, that’s fine, you can also say things and you can present things and I think the CrossFit community is a very open community.

1:02:29 There are the hardcore fans that, you know, don’t really listen to anything and just, you know, blah blah blah, but then there are a lot of intelligent people within the CrossFit industry and I think a lot of them are geared wanting to get more tools for movement, and I’ve been working for years in all across the world with CrossFitters and I like it, they’re hard workers, they’re open-minded mostly, and some of them are moving in a movement perspective and changing their minds and that’s because CrossFit has brought them to the point where they can make this paradigm shift, while the global gym goer is so far away, you know, just can’t hear you, right? He’s not thinking, he’s coming in and doing these standard linear movements every day and writing them down on his card and it’s you would much rather have a CrossFitter than that guy.

1:03:27 But what is CrossFit missing then? You talk about the WODs as being some kind of an attempt to quantify and then that misses the point of, for example, what you’re doing. No, it’s a huge, there are so many things missing. It’s the funny thing is they’re, most CrossFitters are not humble enough to see how much is missing, but once you show it to them they accept it, but they’re not in themselves, they believe that they’re working on their weakness, for example, there is a very large talk about like working on your weaknesses, working on your weaknesses requires sometimes a completely different set of tools.

1:04:10 It’s not about strength, it’s not about, you know, like there is so much stuff happening in the mental game, in the development of movement patterns, coordination, the formation of habits and balance, a lot of stuff that is not addressed in CrossFit on a large scale. CrossFit operates with quantifiable patterns, that’s already problematic because you eliminated a lot of non-quantifiable patterns. It doesn’t work with improving movement intelligence, the ability to adaptability, the ability to react to changing environments.

1:04:46 So give me the guy with the biggest engine but if he can’t manipulate the car, throw him in a BJJ match and he can’t do anything, you know, he’s missing the tools. Some of them are perceived as technical tools but it’s not only that because of course he doesn’t know BJJ, so give him the techniques, but there are other set of tools, and that’s for example a lot of stuff that I’m doing with BJJ practitioners, MMA fighters. There is a layer of Homo motus, the mover, that should be addressed, and it’s below it’s somewhere between strength and conditioning and technical work, right, and this adaptability is unknown and the best of the best out there have this thing in common, right?

1:05:30 You see Georges St-Pierre from the UFC, he was always doing box jumps, he was always doing all of these techniques which seems like what you’re talking about, somewhere between these two grounds that had no direct application to martial arts but yet it seemed to always come out in the cage with his explosiveness, and he was doing gymnastics before any other MMA fighter I think was doing it. Is are those the kind of things you’re talking about, is that just the tip of the iceberg? Just the tip of the iceberg.

1:05:55 Okay, but I’m going in the right direction? Yes, there are good things about what you say but it’s not enough in many ways and a lot of these top level fighters you will see it happening in between the definitions, for example stand up, clinch, ground, but what is in between these things? This is something that, and I talked not so long ago with a good friend of mine, Frank Schunegen in Germany, and he kind of opened my eyes to this and mentioned that what is in between is rarely explored and the best of the best, they’re very comfortable in this non-defined, not defined reality because they have tools from the layer of movement, from Homo motus, because the specialist, he learns about the clinch and he learns about the ground game and learns about stand up, but while transitioning from area to area the other more capable mover will take advantage.

1:06:54 You see it big time on Rickson Gracie back in the day, remember this moment where I think it was in Japan somebody tried to flip him over and you just saw that his kind of acrobatic nature, something that almost in the air. Yeah, he just, he had complete awareness of where he was and just landed on the other side, took the side control, took the mount, finished it, and another guy would just lose orientation. This is a very good example, who in fighting works on air sense, orientation in space?

1:07:26 This is something that every gymnast develops on the trampoline, right, this is a great tool for fighters because they do find themselves being thrown, being moved around, most of them just lose orientation, freeze up and crash like a sack of potatoes just to wake up and continue from a defined position that they are more comfortable in. That’s again just one example. That’s a perfect example, I bet most of those fighters rarely find themselves in that circumstance except when they just got clipped in the cage and they don’t practice that, and so it’s very, you can see they’re very disoriented, you know, when that happens.

1:08:01 Let’s talk about martial arts really quickly, an Irish fighter named Conor McGregor, he is the first one I started hearing talking a couple years ago about movement, and I know you that’s it’s a word that’s now probably turned into its own have its own dogmas around the word movement, but he started saying I’m a student of movement and I’m all about movement, it’s like kind of the new breed coming up where you see these fighters that are embracing so many different aspects, are not only able to handle these transitions you’re talking about, that can be creative during the transitions, like they’re not alarmed, they’re excited by the possibility, the, you know, Anthony Pettis Showtime kick where he’s kicking off the cage, probably not the best example, but what do you think, what do you think of mixed martial arts now?

1:08:44 Do you find it inspiring, do you teach those guys, how do you feel about that? Yeah, it’s definitely an interesting reality because it is real, they put they test themselves every week in the cage for real circumstances. This is a bit of a tricky thing. Okay. Very similar to the CrossFit dogma where the testing grounds that they are debatable, they’re debatable, and if you change a bit the rules you’ll get a completely different outcome and a completely different set of skills that are required to achieve that outcome.

1:09:21 Mixed martial arts is a great thing as well for movement, for the world of movement, it’s a huge force, taking a big chunk of fitness these days, so you see it all over the world, people are doing MMA not for competition, for fitness, and I actually think it’s much better, right? You would rather see that definitely, they’re kicking, they’re ducking, they’re sprawling and they’re still doing their pull-ups and they’re still, you know, wrestling and they move a lot. If you look at their movements, you know, they move a lot and I wish we could actually quantify it and there were a few attempts with the various bracelets that measure movement, but actually what we need is a suit that measures movement in any direction and you would see that an MMA guy who is just moving a lot more maybe even than a CrossFitter, I’m not talking about the load on him, he might not be loaded but he’s moving in a lot of directions and in an inorganic way, and yeah, MMA is great for that and the creativity still amazes me, you know, you’ll see a new technique that it comes out of nowhere and then you’ll see the meme of that technique like multiply and you’ll then see, you know, the front kick to the face and then you’ll see 20 of those and then it’s you see us as humans and how we copy each other and how this thing’s going to happen, it’s a huge culture and a very interesting one for me.

1:10:54 I know that a lot of people share the same opinion, like the early days were the exciting days, you know, the 90s, this crazy Kumite kind of, you know, idea and then of course it went and specialized, you know, like everybody realized this very quick learning curve of, you know, a culture concentrated around a mutual goal although everybody’s fighting everyone, they’re getting into the top of the pyramid in what’s the most efficient way to do that and that’s getting more and more boring in my eyes. Okay. I know that people who are involved inside, they’re still excited because they stump some stuff happening but not as much as the old days where every fight had like so much revelations, you know, and all these traditional martial arts with like you know the concept of grounding yourself completely failed and it was replaced with mobility, footwork.

1:11:51 So all this like traditional martial artists trying to, you know, you can never move a mountain kind of thinking, it just blew up in their face, you know. So yeah, it is a test, I mean you can say it’s quantified in the wrong way but it is a dogma, it’s a quantification, so at least you get to see these things play out, that’s one good thing about it. Yeah, yeah, it’s a great thing. I just as a phenomenon I’m aware that it’s already in the ending phases kind of of its development because of the limitation in rules because of the because of the learning curve we’re progressing onwards and for so for the general public it’s a lot less exciting than the early days, but that’s the nature of things, you know, like who can blame, you know, who can blame it.

1:12:39 Now there are a few weird attempts on group MMA fights, did you see that? Brazil, yeah, a lot of people are, I saw some Polish thing, two on groups on groups and brutal and crazy, and those are attempts to kind of lateral development, you know, not the vertical development, right? Also very interesting to see what’s going on there and of course it’s, you know, some people hate it and you know it’s not sport, but it’s not sport in my eyes, it’s not, it has been promoted as a sport in many ways and but there is a lot more there, you know, like old-school boxers look at it and a very problematic guy.

1:13:24 Yeah, boxers are very, they’re very old-school in that way. You talked about trauma earlier and you know almost any martial art has kind of an aspect of trauma because it’s a quote-unquote fight, and I was wondering if you find that that ultimately hurts that art form because, for example, this weekend, you know, what you’re teaching these people will not be a confrontation whether as a martial art almost is by definition ultimately based in a confrontation. What are your thoughts on that?

1:13:55 Yeah, the trauma thing is a tricky, it’s a tricky thing. Trauma will happen, you’re not going to prevent it, you just need to provide tools to deal with the trauma and that’s what’s lacking in a lot of martial arts and martial artists. And teachers in martial arts, they don’t provide the tools because you’re going to get traumatized, you’re going to get abused and you need to kind of create a set of tools, very realistic tools so you can get dirty, and we are, we don’t like to hear it, we don’t like to hear that things get dirty in movement, in martial arts, we don’t like to hear that it’s not a probability, it’s a certainty that it’s going to happen.

1:14:37 You’re going to go out of alignment, you’re going to get you know, held in choke for a bit too long, and and the best processes take this into account and they anti-fragilize, as Nassim Taleb says, the person instead of just making things optimal. That’s important, but you have to support it with anti-fragilizing the practitioner, especially in martial arts where the chaotic environment is is problematic for an utopian frame of mind. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face, very famous, very famous quote.

1:15:13 So anti-fragilize, as in you look for a method of kind of toughening them up but in a very predictable and non-traumatic way? Sometimes you have to use trauma to to get bulletproof from trauma, and but in the right quantities, use stress versus distress and just enough, you use stressors to condition the iron, you know, that’s how you do it, and and also, you know, in a mindset that is not expecting predictive, predictable results, that’s the most dangerous thing. We’re planning and we’re gonna get this result, it’s not humble and it’s not real.

1:15:57 All of your plans will ultimately change and you’re gonna have to react, a more reactionary training versus planning, you know, a long-term planning that is not realistic in many ways, learning how to react to changing environments, you know, like breaking your hand in a boxing fight and then you have to finish the fight with this broken hand inside, and you can see the people that come in from a certain perspective are able, for example, to switch their stance, place that hand behind, protect it, while others just have to give up, okay, I broke my hand, it’s over. Many legendary boxing fights have been won with broken limbs. Yeah, MMA fights as well.

1:16:41 Yeah, you know, you talk about movement and so the corollary of that is everyone asks you about what you do when you’re not moving, which is what you’re eating, and so I know this isn’t necessarily what you specialize in but everyone wants to know what Ido is eating, and I know people have asked you from the beginning, I know since ’96, you know, you were quote-unquote paleo, whatever that means now. In the past you’ve not had good things to say about vegans, I don’t know if you still feel that way or if that was blown out of proportion. We’ve had the parkour athlete Sebastien Foucan, the French guy, and then the English guy Timothy Shieff, he’s been on the show a bunch of times, he’s vegan.

1:17:21 My vegan joke is how do you know if someone’s vegan? Wait five minutes and they’ll tell you. And so I always give Tim a hard time but he is on the front lines of promoting veganism at all times and it works obviously very well for him. What do you say about diet, paleo, vegan, anything? Diet exactly like movement, no general prescriptions, no protocols, investigation, a wide set of tools, individualization.

1:17:51 Having said that, there are some vectors, not coordinates but vectors of direction of investigation, and that’s what I am with time realizing more and more and more and more, and so I definitely originally started with them when I investigated diets with the cavemen kind of an approach and looking at our at our past to kind of realize what we should eat, what we shouldn’t eat, and I’ve been using that for many years with myself, then I had to tailor this approach to my students and the changing needs, and yeah, I’m still on that kind of journey but in the last few months I went through a major shift in what I use and what I don’t use and looking at them, you know, hormonal shifts and trying to look at things in a different way, trying to get away from my own dogmatic thing, right, always testing, am I the slave or am I the master of the dogma, and this was very important for me.

1:18:50 Thank God I wasn’t a, even though I was a big part of the paleo movement and I talked about it, I was always, I always realized it’s a title I don’t want to sleep on myself and yeah, I didn’t do that in a way, but when people did it it was their choice but not my choice, while movement is something that I definitely feel comfortable standing behind. Yeah, that’s pretty much it, animal proteins, animal proteins, I cannot seem on a large scale people operating well without animal proteins, and there are many examples of people who do operate well and I’ll give you a lot of examples of parkour kids that eat McDonald’s and smoke cigarettes, right, so I’m not gonna start to smoke cigarettes and eat McDonald’s, and you can bring me the Germany’s strongest men in the world and a million other individualized examples, this is not a quality debate.

1:19:49 Another thing to say about vegans is the most, they’re the most hostile community out of all of the communities concentrating around nutrition and I’ve made it a point not to go easy on them and I think they think their doesn’t stink and the reality around us is a lot more complex, whether in sustainability, in animal blood on your hands, etc., and yeah, I think it’s debatable, nobody has any, you know, reached the gospel truth, nobody, it’s a complex reality and we have it with a lot of stuff, nutrition is one, and so it’s very important not to present it in that way, and I maybe made a mistake there that I should take responsibility for where my experience with with veganism was pretty bad throughout the years, students walking in and my own experiments and just having to see again and again and again the same kind of problematic mindset, energy shifts and development within movement, and maybe I made it too much of a point and because I tried to kind of shield myself, you know, from that issue, but I’m sure there are very successful individuals out there operating with a vegan diet, the ones I respect the most are those who are not violent around it, don’t believe that their doesn’t stink and they’re holy, and and those that they also realize that the need for individualization of the approach, and in your history and your past experience when you have work with the vegan students and that or when you put yourself through it, there was something missing?

1:21:41 Yes, yeah, mostly that was my experience but I’m sure I could have had other experiences with different people but I took a generalization, of course it’s a generalization, I’m just one person and I have to make up my mind and move in this complex world around me and choose my students, part of my reality is I have to choose my students because there is too much, too many people reaching out to me, so I made it a point to kind of create some kind of a filter and that’s either Portal’s filter. What I feel sorry about is that I heard some people’s, you know, feelings and actually in the last in the last few years I started to investigate more on an individual level before I made up my mind if I accept that person in or not or before I just completely avoided it altogether.

1:22:35 Right, you’re maturing a little bit, I’m sure. Yeah, well, I have no choice, right. Yeah, we said earlier, how are you dealing with your own aging? Yeah, it’s a big thing, huh, and some days better, some day, some days worse. How old are you?

1:22:52 I’m 34. Okay. Yeah, it’s a constant change. You’re very in tune with your body, I’m guessing? Try to be, although it’s not just, it’s tough to monitor yourself as a human, but I’m guessing you can notice things and this is tougher or different than it used to be?

1:23:11 Yes. One of the biggest, my problems, my one of my biggest personal problems is I developed a very close relationship with pain and this relationship is counterproductive to aging where for me to realize I should stop is very hard many times, so this is very common in gymnastics, for example, where the way that your hands feel when you’re practicing on these wooden bars, you know, with so much friction, you’re constantly in pain. One of my students and a good friend was a gymnast many years, he told me two weeks after he retired from gymnastics after 10 years of practice he had all of a sudden a realization sitting in his kitchen, oh, my shoulders don’t hurt, was for 10 years his shoulders hurt, so you know what, you just register the worst pain at that specific moment, you don’t register the rest, and this was part of how I grew up to move in movement, constantly pushing yourself through the pain barrier.

1:24:20 Yeah, to be able to do all these things. Yes, 100 percent, lactic acid, tendon pain, everything, everything, just yeah, just moving through it, and I had to change that thing and realize, you know, within, and I also had to realize the other side while I’m changing this relationship with pain, I might becoming a bit of a lucified version of myself and it’s a constant game between these things, and that’s why I cannot say I have a utopian relationship with aging nor pain, I’m playing between the two, I’m pushing myself but I’m learning also how to back off and I’m definitely the most in tune I’ve ever been with my body, but maybe I’m not at my toughest point, right? Okay, that’s a good answer.

1:25:11 You say that there’s sacrifices in everything you do, you say that if someone’s doing yoga they’re getting the benefits but they’re also sacrificing some things because they’re not doing something else, the same goes if you’re bench pressing, the same goes if you’re doing this. You’ve said the same thing about success, anyone who’s successful has made sacrifices to get there. What do you mean by that? Because a lot of people would say all of these things are a healthy life, you know, but you seem to be a little more matter of fact about things like that.

1:25:37 Yeah, people like to lump up a lot of stuff and present a very optimal, you know, reality work. There is one dogma, I believe there is one major dogma each person has, one major thing, the biggest driving force, and then there are many other kind of supporting dogmas and ideas, and then there is the methods as well, which are confused with dogma sometimes. So for example, movement is my dogma, it’s not health, which means I’m not doing everything in my power to be the healthiest, I’m doing everything in my power to move well.

1:26:15 Sometimes it go hand in hand but sometimes they separate, these two things go hand in hand until a certain point and then they start to separate. For example, most of the specialists out there, they like to present things as, yeah, optimal, and I’m the best MMA fighter I can be and I’m also, I’m also promoting the best health possible. It cannot co-exist and it’s a simple truth, you can see. Yes, they can walk hand in hand to a certain point and maybe you’ll be healthier than the couch potato but you could have been healthier if your main dogma was health and your supporting dogma would have been MMA, etc.

1:26:58 So sacrifice and success is very much like that, you know, success measured by money is not on top of my list, just not, and I’m not doing things optimally in that regard and I’ve sacrificed a lot of stuff for that. I’ve turned down large sums of money, I’ve booked deals or, yeah, sponsorship, yeah, I gave the finger to a lot of people, you know, like I cancelled, you know, things and that I didn’t feel right with. Because you didn’t like the vibe or the message you were giving?

1:27:32 Yes. Okay. Yeah, and the same with health, although it would have been very common for me to say I’m moving my health optimally and my movement optimally and it goes hand in hand. I’m not going to lie to you, it does move hand in hand until a certain point, but I’ve been moving 8, 9, 10 hours a day for the last 10 years, I’ve passed that point. I am a very healthy person, but maybe I could have been even healthier.

1:28:07 I intend to live long but maybe I sacrificed a few good years and because of my movement choices, so it’s all about sacrifices and keeping it very real and realizing that every choice is pulling the shirt and all the fibers of the shirt are being affected. You’re not gonna place these three points and they’re all going to coexist perfectly together. Let’s talk about your success. You are spending weeks and weeks on end going around meeting people, teaching them.

1:28:38 I know that people on your Facebook page are always asking either when can we get a book, you know, what these private training sessions on Skype, they’re just not scalable because you can’t teach thousands of people at the same time and the community definitely wants more from you. How do you balance that want and then that probably, you probably have a desire to teach everyone with the fact that you can’t do it in the way you want to do it? Yeah, I don’t let it pull me in but there was a risk at a certain point that it will happen because I created the beast and now the beast is pulling me and I make it a point and to keep myself focused on what I want and I make it a point that the close people to me keep me focused on what I want and support me in that regard, and because the bigger it goes the more you’re being pulled and affected by the audience, I don’t want the audience to affect my message.

1:29:39 I speak for them, I do for them from a place that I’m feeling very genuine and real about and happy about, so one of my choices was to develop a kind of a core group of ambassadors around me and I’ve been devoting the last few years for that and working very closely with people because I felt the need to deliver that experience and from there we’re gonna scale it, you know, bigger and bigger and provide more tools, and but maybe at a certain point I’ll say enough, that now it’s not scalable beyond that point and it’s going to water down the message and the approach, the methods, the dogma. How many ambassadors do you have and how many would you like to have? Yeah, there are, let’s say, there are core group of hundreds of students around the world very much involved with me, they come to all of our events, they make it a point to come once a year to the movement camp, they study with us, they train with us, they communicate with us, and then there is a very much a small tribe around me of just a dozen people, a bit more, that are very, very closely related and they’re like my close students, it’s a disciples, not even students, you know, it’s on a different level, it’s some people, I’m sure, look at it and think it’s a cult, or we live together, we move together, we make it a point to spend time together, we do research together, and yeah, I love it.

1:31:11 And you’re comfortable with that? I’m comfortable with that at this moment and I know that this is going to provide more tools for more people in a quality way, in a way that I can support it, and I don’t want to, you know, put something out there and realize it’s not me, and it’s a big risk and it happens every day to people. The need for a book, you know, when you put up a book, I’m not too old, I’m not old enough to write a book, you know, that’s what I feel like.

1:31:37 I mean a book, I mean it’s seen, I bet people been asking you for a book for five years, right? Six years, I’m sure. Yeah, what, why not book? Well, first it’s such a changing environment, you know, like walk beside me, don’t walk behind me, don’t walk in front of me, you know, just walk beside me, that’s what I can offer. Come in and let me share with you an experience, I’m a bit in front maybe in some aspects or maybe in some other aspects you’re a bit in front but let me show you in this way and take you on this journey, and the kind of book is like, okay, you’ve arrived at the gospel truth, you know, that’s it now.

1:32:20 Not saying I’m not going to write the book, I’m sure I will at certain point, I just want to kind of feel a bit more stable because my mind is so erratic still and my choices, my opinions and they keep on changing that I just, I’m being idol, I’m just trying to handle myself in that way and be genuine, not just put things on a paper and after two days I can’t look at it, not to talk about after a year, right? So I’m in a point where I’m not comfortable with that. Okay, understood.

1:32:50 I told you before we started, I’m in this kind of strange transition point myself, I’m 43, I did jiu-jitsu for 10 years, my my Thai boxing instructor is moving on, I have to do something different, I lift some weights, I do some running, but you know, I don’t even know what I’m going to do but I really want to be excited about moving and I don’t know if I’ve been excited for a long time and that’s criminal, you know, that I’m not excited about moving, especially when I meet someone like you. Now I can’t go to your seminar tomorrow because I have plans. How would I learn more about, how would I learn from you?

1:33:22 What is the way I can, because I can’t read a book. If I look at your videos on YouTube I see your one-armed handstand and that’s so impressive, I don’t know where to start, but what you must get people ask you all the time, what should I do? And the simplest answer is there is no simple answer and you need to do research. If you’re in this point that, you know, you want to be excited about movement, you know the importance of it, you don’t want to lose sight of it, it’s part of you, it’s part of your background, you need to ignite that motivation and inspiration again by research and it can be free of charge, just go online and, you know, use what we put out there and what other people also put out there and do some research into it and you will just unravel, you you’ll pull the string and it will start to create this whole chain of reaction.

1:34:09 You need a practice, everybody needs a practice, a physical practice, you need to look at it in that way. There is no difference between your weight training, running, BJJ, it’s all movement practice, so first thing, change your titles, that will open your mind to so much, and then you need to start to dive deeper and deeper and create tools to serve the needs that you developed and the goals that you developed, and we offer a very personal perspective and we assist people through online coaching with that thing, we develop them and it’s very non-compromising, very demanding, expensive because we’re limited in our ability to help people on such a personal level. We also offer events, we also yeah offer seminars and internships and movement camps, so we create the ignition moment there to research more movement and realize what is actually movement and what can I do.

1:35:09 Yeah, that’s what people should be doing but it’s not a simple answer, right? I don’t give you like a door, you know, yeah, you can go to my website www.idoportal.com and you will start there, but I don’t want to give you the illusion that it’s going to be that simple. That’s just pulling the first string and then you’re going to have to put up some hard work to writing the user manual for this body and understanding what you want to do with this body. Let me tell you, you’re 43, you’ve been practicing in a lot of chaos, BJJ, fighting, this is not going to last a lot longer.

1:35:46 Yeah, and then I won’t be able to do that. You won’t be able to deal with ancillary physically, physically, okay, with a chaotic environment for so long, it’s a problem. Look at, look at the top level grapplers and, you know, I’m not talking about fingers, it’s knees, backs, herniated discs, you know, why? Because it’s a chaotic environment, you cannot throw yourself so many times into the washing machine and, you know, come out okay, and yeah, you can maximize your ability to deal with it but you will need other things, and the more you age the more you need to decentralize your efforts.

1:36:23 You’re not a martial artist, you’re a mover, you’re not a fitness guy, you don’t try to keep fit, you want to move, you want to have a practice around it, you want to research your body, you want to work with it, you know, and it starts with simple stuff. We promoted stuff like squatting 30 minutes a day for 30 consecutive days, just accumulate, not in one go, just accumulate the time spending in a squat, down in a squat, down in a squat, in a flat squat, because that’s the original use behind the squat, not getting stronger, that’s the fitness perspective, the movement perspective is it’s a resting position before we had chairs. Exactly right.

1:37:00 And still, sorry, sorry to keep you in a chair for so long. Yeah, that’s okay because around it I will move, yeah, so I’m not hating on the chairs for movers but I’m hating on the chairs for the general public, those who don’t move. Yeah, and that’s a basic perspective. Another thing is like I really recommend that you do some hanging, you need to hang from stuff, you’re supposed to do that with those shoulders, which means if I don’t see any anchor points around, it’s not good, you need to have an anchor point everywhere, in your office, everywhere.

1:37:41 If you have that anchor point, it can be a simple china bar in the doorway, you will hang from time to time, right, if you don’t, for sure you will not, right, and those are just basic two concepts, you know, that will keep you moving instead of approaching it with a workout perspective. I tell you, spread it throughout the day, put some squats in between your emails, every third email do it in a squat, answer your phone in a squat, wait for the training in the squat, that’s a movement perspective and that’s what we want to do, we want to educate people on such things, but there is no simple solution there, it’s education. It really is a paradigm shift with you and it’s getting away from language and it’s getting away to all these preconceptions we have in our head about what movement is for us as human beings.

1:38:24 It’s quite complex, isn’t it? Google, on Google campus now they have the treadmill desks that they do their computer on, I’m guessing you’re a fan of that over a chair? And not sure it’s the direction we should be moving. Yeah, okay, a changing environment is the best, there is no one thing, even walking is, can be overused, even water will become toxic at a certain level, that’s the thing, there is no one movement. There are standing, you know, standing tables now, it might be better than a chair, right, but it’s still not stagnation, yes, it’s still stagnating you in a different position.

1:39:03 Ten years ago Ido Portal is enjoying himself and he’s discovering movement and that’s why you’re here talking to me today, because there was a guy in Israel who just was feeling his body and how it moved and now you have a website and you have a business and all these things, you become kind of the Ido Portal brand like everyone does. Does part of you ever think, I’m just going back to the beach and I’m going to want to walk away from all this stuff and I’m just going to get back to the guy who fell in love with his body? Actually I am that guy and that’s one of the major things limiting my development in a business, business as a teacher.

1:39:42 Sometimes I’m still that guy and everybody around me knows that, it’s like I’m I’m still that guy on the beach, every day I’m out there, that’s what I do, I still move more than my students, I still research the body deeper and enjoying my movement, and that’s for sure major reason why people are reaching out and they can’t get what they want from me because I didn’t devote a lot of time to doing that because I was busy doing this because I realized that I need to lead from the front. In the Israeli military this is a basic thing, we lost more higher ranked officers than any other military because we send them in front, as illogical as that be, when you’re being led by someone from the front you have full confidence in that person and you just go with everything that you have.

1:40:33 That’s the only way that I know how to do things and I’m trying to lead from the front and not kind of, you know, develop a small belly there and talk about my movement days and, you know, that’s garbage, and the more I age it the more tricky it becomes, but I want to do it in a good way, I want to do it in an honest way, and yeah, that’s funny enough, I never set out to do any branding stuff and actually I didn’t name it under any name so my students called it after me and that became the brand name, so I went with it because you need a brand name, you need something, but actually I never wanted to develop a brand and I always talked against brands and I just realized it’s the least worst, right? Maybe that’s why it works so well because it’s not engineered from the top.

1:41:20 Maybe, maybe you seem a bit like a reluctant messiah, that’s the one thing I was thinking when I was preparing for you, you know, do you like that term? You could use that in that so many people seem drawn to you and now I understand why because you’re the real deal and when you talk about these things it’s because you believe it and the reason people come and see you in person I think is because you look into them and you’re like, I’m gonna show you something and I’m gonna do it in a way where there’s no trauma and that kind of thing, and then you get people saying, Ido, what do I eat, what do I do, what do I buy? It seems to me you’re a bit reluctant to be that guy, am I right?

1:41:58 Yeah, yeah, even though in your mind you leap from the front like the Israeli military told you how to do, but part of me thinks you don’t want to be answering everyone’s question about life. Yeah, it’s a bit tricky. Yeah, it always sounds ridiculous in an Israeli mind, this kind of thing, you know, like giving people, you know, the answers, you know, or something. Again, it’s like come next to me, let me lead. I’m definitely a leader, always was in any environment that I was part of, but also leading with a smile, with a wing, with a, you know, yeah, and not trying to sound too gospel, and some of the stuff that happened to me was a bit too much for me in a way, the image that is so far from, for me, not because we set it up wrong because people want, need an image and they affect it, the way the eye of the beholder, it affects how you, who you are, how you look, and the closest people to me, we make fun of it a bit, and you know, like my website, I look like, you know, something in between an underwear model and an acrobat and that’s, I don’t subscribe to it.

1:43:17 I never cared about how I looked, how my body looks, maybe, never say never, at certain point I care but I don’t even remember that point, and but people of course assume because you see that body there because maybe we’ve used that thing. I don’t want to be a messiah, I want to be respected, I want to be credited for what I developed and that’s important for me, important for me to people realize where it comes from, if it comes from me, and if not I will name the names like I did in this conversation, everything that comes from somewhere else I will credit, exactly like the scientific community do. Does but I don’t want, I’m not a messiah, I’m a thinker, I’m a teacher, I’m a mover and I take these things and I put them out there and then it’s yours to do whatever you want with.

1:44:18 I call it the vomit, you know, the knowledge is a little bit like vomit, you come in into a room like this room and you know it’s all over the floor and now there is a choice, you can come in and you can and then in a different room you’re gonna, or you can zip through the cracks and it disappears and nobody know we were here, and this calling in the vomit is because I don’t want to be the sum of my knowledge, I treat it very on a very low, low way and to keep myself distant from my knowledge, so it’s a very complex reality. Well, you want to be credited for your ideas and your intellectual property but at the same time you don’t want to become that thing and then you want to provide answers but you don’t want to sound like a messiah, and I’m trying to do my best to balance things out.

1:45:12 And in a way that I can go to sleep with myself at night. Good answer. I love the vomit part. I always finish off every show by asking a few questions to my guests. I’m going to hit you with them.

1:45:23 If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Ido Portal and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him to do or not to do? Hmm, good question. Yeah, it’s kind of a Bernard Shaw kind of questions, huh? Unravel, unravel, which is don’t do anything, you know, more than necessary. React, don’t plan too much, pull, pull the strings and then react and then wait for the wobble, you know, in the matrix around you and react to that, and because I was delusional about planning for many years.

1:46:08 I guess the epitome of what you do is being in the moment, right? That is a given, I guess, when it comes to movement, you can say it’s another messiah kind of thing, but yeah, of course the embodiment, being in the movement, leaving that reality and being able to react is very important, to be in the movement or else to be in the moment or else you can’t react. Best advice you’ve ever received in your life? Best advice, hmm. When you wipe your rest, don’t look.

1:46:46 And everybody looks, it’s a funny thing that we all have this tendency to look, to examine, but sometimes in life you don’t need to, you don’t need to look to observe or to stop and examinate and measure yourself, you know, it’s very thing like, what did I do here, like this reflection back is not always the best thing, and it was a good advice that I got many years ago, one of my teachers, and just move on, keep going. Yeah, yeah, move on, it’s not necessary always to examine because that puts you in the mindset of future planning and sometimes it’s not honest. Okay, last bit of advice to the 20-year-old that’s listening to us around the world that wants to move more, I guess I asked you this before but what advice do you give to them, what should they do?

1:47:36 Research. First thing is research, start to research, and you can use my name to start that because I laid out the groundwork for you there, there is so much there, just go and google my name, go on our Facebook page, Ido Portal, and go on our website idoportal.com and just have a look and start to unravel from there and do your research and then just start to experiment with movement and start to open your mind, go do some gymnastics, go do some, you know, martial arts, and don’t think about efficiency when you’re doing martial arts necessarily, it’s not about that. Movement wise it’s one choice but it’s not only that, so for example for a child I might move away from the efficient martial arts and I might give him a lot more movement by choosing something traditional.

1:48:23 Yeah, just move, experiment, you know, open your mind, take a class, you’re, it’s all for you, it’s all for human beings, you don’t need to be a dancer to take a dance class, you don’t need to be a martial artist to, that’s how you become a dancer, that’s how you become a martial art, but many people already have a title they come in and limits them, so move, basically move. That’s a bit of advice. Ido, thanks so much for coming, it was a lot of fun talking to you.

1:48:51 It is interesting because, you know, you get an image of someone because I’ve been to your website, I’ve seen your videos and, you know, obviously the person is always different than the image and what’s fascinating about you is you probably didn’t even create that image and now it’s probably not even in your control anymore because your fans and people have established that this is the Ido, it’s probably the Ido they present to their friends, look at this guy, and it might not have anything to do with you, so it’s fascinating to meet you. I hope I do come and take one of your seminars one of these days. Honored and a pleasure, thank you for having me.

1:49:23 Fantastic. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can come see our great looking faces on YouTube. If you want to get in touch with Ido, you can go find him on Google, on his website, it’s a great looking site, or just go to YouTube, he’s got some fabulous interviews and fabulous videos and things like that. As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you well in your, Ido, thanks so much.

1:49:42 Thank you. All right, take care.