Ross Edgley - Athlete Adventurer

Full transcript: Ross Edgley on London Real

7:49 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Ross Edgley, who is a strength and conditioning coach, performance nutritionist and co-founder of The Protein Works. You write for the publications’ GQ, Men’s Health and the Telegraph, and your clients include Andy Bolton, the seven-time powerlifting Congress world champion. You recently completed a marathon, but you did so by pulling a 1.4 ton car behind you at Silverstone racetrack.

8:20 It took you over 19 hours. Ross, that’s crazy. Welcome to London Real. What an introduction. Thank you.

8:27 I didn’t, when you put it like that. Yeah, it’s, yeah, it’s quite a list. Yeah, it is. I want to hear about this marathon, but you know, Ross, a lot of people come to this studio during the focus groups we hold. They stop me on the streets and they always say, Brian, one day I’m going to be a guest on London Real, and you know what I say?

8:46 I say, make it happen, make it so, where I can’t ignore you anymore. Make it so where I have to have you on, because I have to hear your story, and I was just thinking about that today, because I want to hear your story, and I love a lot of things about you and I know we’re going to have some fascinating discussions about nutrition, fitness, health, steroids, everything, but you promote yourself really well, you know. And I actually asked one of my staff, I’m like, is he American, because, and that’s, and I’m American too, but I mean, like, you promote yourself almost like an American, as in, look, you’ve got great photos, you’ve got articles you’re doing cool things for charity, and I think that’s missing a lot of times, and when people go to build brands and we have a business accelerator course, and half the course is about building PR, getting people to notice you, getting people to want to know your story.

9:32 And yet you do that really well. So I was wondering, how did you become the guy who is a great promoter of himself? Did that take time? Or did it, was it always natural to you? That’s a great, that’s the first time I’ve been asked that.

9:46 Really, it’s also very nice, confident in that good question. I think once you have something that you want to promote and what you want to stand for, which for me was always just pushing the boundaries of physical excellence, just challenging stuff that we take for granted. The marathon being a great example. People saying, you know, strength and stamina exist at two ends of the fitness spectrum, you know Hickson’s theory on molecular biology, that you know you have to be so specific.

10:11 Tell your body to adapt to strength or stamina, but the two rarely merge, and that’s why I wanted to do the marathon, just to go, okay, let’s rip up the rule book on that, and I think when you have something like that, everything else falls into play. So the nice pictures, the social media, I mean, I’m so lucky. So many people listening to, you know, my musings and my scribblings and then I was lucky enough with GQ as well. They kind of realized, well, hang on, you know, this guy’s saying some stuff that’s not quite conventional, you know.

10:40 He backs it up with science. You know, let’s give him a voice, let’s give him his own platform, and it just kind of snowballed from there, if I’m honest. And with everybody that’s so supportive. It’s, it just, yeah, it just snowballs. Yeah.

10:53 When did you start writing, and when did you realize that was an important part of getting your message out there, cuz not everyone can write good copy? Yeah, yeah. I think the thing was, it was, you know, when I was actually coaching and training people, it was always one-on-one, and I love doing that, but I was always going to be limited in how many people I could actually influence and broadcast to, so as soon as I started writing, all of a sudden those teachings went out into the world and they just took upon a life of their own, and then you just get emails.

11:22 There was the, you know, losing 24 pounds in 24 hours. Initially, I did that because I was working with a few MMA fighters and powerlifters, and there was a lot of dangerous weight-cutting practices, so I turned around to them and said, look, you know, your weight cutting looks like a concentration camp, you know. You’re locking yourself in a sauna in a sweatsuit on a bike, you know, whereas it should be more like a spa weekend, you know. You should be enjoying yourself sit in a nice Epsom salt bath, you know, reduce your carb intake, reduce your muscle glycogen, but make sure that you’re loading up on MCTs, you know, we’ve already discussed that.

11:56 It should be pleasant, because even if you then lose the weight, you’re then going to get into the, you know, the cage, or you’re going to get onto the lifting platform. Your immune system is going to wonder what went on. Your indoctrinates very different to weight loss, you. So fat loss is adipose tissue, whereas weight loss is just your sort of, you know, weight in general is a numerical reflection of your relationship with gravity. That’s all it is.

12:39 And so after that whole stunt took a life of its own. It was originally for MMA and powerlifting and weight-based sports, and then it just went into the mainstream consciousness, and I was on Australian breakfast TV kind of explaining all of what just happened. It’s fascinating. I mean, it’s so important, I think, for personal trainers, anyone in the fitness business to realize that in order to scale, you have to go to a mass media, because you could be the greatest trainer in the world, but you only have your 10 hours a day.

13:08 And it’s, yeah, and so many trainers get into that, they’re making pretty good money and they’re done, and I met so many of them, just like you’ve got to scale your message, and they don’t. So I think that’s great, you embrace that. The weight-cutting thing is fascinating, and people that don’t know, MMA fighters have to make a certain weight 24 hours before they fight. Conor McGregor used to make 145 lbs before he moved up to 155 to challenge the belt, and then he moved it up to 170 for the hell of it.

13:32 We’ll talk about that later. And power lifters, I’m guessing they make weight probably the same day or the day of the lift, depending, but, like, you know, one of my guests that I’ve had on, Mike Dolce. I’m a big fan of Dolce. Dolce was one of the first guys that did weight cutting the easy way like you said, and so many athletes, again, it’s like a meme that gets mutated, and people think, oh, weight cut. I put a sweatsuit on and I basically pass out in the sauna, whereas Mike would say, you know what?

14:00 We’re going to hang out in the hot tub. We’re going to reduce calorie intake. We’re going to do it the easy way. And I still think the MMA community is struggling to find the right place. Now they’ve banned intravenous rehydration, which makes it an even harder game.

14:15 So that was, but you’re right, there’s so many great real-world applications to that, because most people would think it’s crazy. You can lose 24 pounds in 24 hours, and you can, but that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with fat loss. That’s 100%, you’re right. So yeah, that’s initially why that was. And even putting it back on, I mean, people were like, oh, you lost 24 pounds in 24 hours?

14:35 Yes I did, but you know, in every single article I was very quick to point out one. This is not a diet. two, I don’t recommend it, and three, I put it all back on in the space of, honestly, an hour. It was that quick. You know, that’s how adaptive, you know, this physiological puppetry, I called it, that’s how sort of delicate and easily is manipulated.

14:54 An hour, you put on 24 pounds. Oh, it was a good hour. Yeah, water and meal deal with some carbs. Yeah, lots of water, electrolytes, replenish, do it all intelligently, and that’s another thing I think you see even in the UFC. There’s a few fighters, not mentioning the names, but you always see them, and they’re there saying oh, look, this is what I’m going to put my weight back on with, and you’re looking, and it’s just chocolate Mars bars, you know, sweet sugar.

15:18 And I’m like, yeah, but again, you know, it’s so much more intricate than that. So granted you’ve got your carbs, you’ve got your simple sugars there, yes, but where are the phytochemicals, nutrients, enzymes, all those things that your immune system, you know, your body as a whole, has just kind of gone, whoa, what just happened during that weight cut, and then you’re going to try and give me sugar and go get in the cage and fight? Yeah. A lot of fighters, what they do is they’ll cut weight up until that Friday night, they’ll do weigh-ins and then a lot of them go out for the party meal.

15:46 They’ll eat pizza, ice cream, sugar, all that stuff, because they’ve been cutting weight for weeks in their training camp, and then they fight the next day. It’s insane, and then all the smart fighters are like, no, no, you have that meal Saturday night after the fight. You really need it, but the night before, you should be eating similar things to what you have. Maybe you had the carbs in, or add some more stuff. But, so true, but it’s amazing how even at the leading edge of a multi-, probably, you know, billion dollar industry, now people are still doing it the wrong way.

16:13 Right? Oh, definitely. Yeah, I always say, you know, the laws of biology, these universal laws of biology are never linear, so we can’t necessarily mathematically control them. We’d like to, and many people. I think there’s a lot of nutritionists and personal trainers and strength and conditioning coaches who have, you know, this kind of Messiah complex, and they like to sit there and say, I know how the body works, you need to do this, you need to do that.

16:38 But no, you know, there’s this huge biological ambiguity, and at best we can only ever sort of manipulate and positively influence those universal laws of biology. And so, yeah, you’re so right. If you’re leading up to a fight and you’ve lost all that weight, and then you just go and do something that you haven’t done for six months in all of the training camp, and you go and attack the donuts, the pizza. Your body isn’t going to respond well to it. But yeah, okay, intelligently saying, right, you know, almost saying thank you, Budd, for getting me through that weight cut.

17:10 Here, here’s the nutrients, enzymes, various things that you need to repair and regrow and get us ready for tomorrow, and then you’re so right. After that, yes, then have your party meal, but to do it before, that’s nutritional suicide, right? It’s crazy, right? Yeah, yeah. All right, I want to get into your fitness philosophy, but I still want to finish this thread out and find out when it comes to, you know, promoting yourself.

17:30 You’re writing now for GQ. You got great pictures on Twitter. You post of yourself, and they’re really well thought out. They’re not your usual selfie in the gym, you know, they’re active. You put a lot of thought into that, I know, and I want to get your thoughts on other people, because a lot of people are trying to build personal brands these days.

17:46 We do it here too, and I want to get your thoughts on that, and then, finally, these stunts. I mean, these, you know, for charity and else. I mean, you thought about this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So going back to sort of marketing yourself, I think you’re so right.

18:01 I think what you put out there needs to represent what you do. Like, there’s the huge selfie culture right now, and there is a value to it. There’s lots of people doing very well from that selfie culture. It exists if you want to embrace it, that’s absolutely fine, but I think there’s such a thing as kind of aesthetics, so just looking good, and then you’ve got functional aesthetics. You’ve got your gymnasts, you know, you’ve got various people who do stuff.

18:27 With going back to some of your guests, you know, Ido Portal looks fantastic, but he’s functional. James Haskell, mountain of a man, functional. Elliot Hulse, equally so. All these guys, yeah, they look good, but it’s a complete byproduct of this functional aesthetics. And I think, but you look good, you’re highly aesthetic.

18:46 Oh, you, yeah, I, and I don’t think, I think too many people maybe make excuses, and they’ll draw that line. There was a great question, actually. I’m, ah, it’s going to bug me now. I’ve forgotten his name, but he posted on Instagram when we announced that we were going to do this chat, and he said, how do you feel about the fitness community becoming too far down the route of aesthetics? Amazing question.

19:08 I’m going to apologize now, I forgot his name. I think it might be Dave. So yeah, the fitness industry becoming too far down that aesthetics and a little bit shallow, for one of a better term to put it brutally, but people seem to forget that even bodybuilding, so Eugen Sandow, the father of bodybuilding, he was an amazing athlete. He, you know, single-armed snatches, stuff that he could do as part of his routine. There was real showcases of strength, and then the posing was almost after, you know, people would say, oh, you know, show us your B.

19:45 So he would then, you know, go into certain poses, but he was an amazing strongman, a celebrated European strongman, and people forget that the father of bodybuilding, so the father of aesthetics, was first and foremost a strongman, and it was this kind of secondary byproduct of it that he looked the way he did. Okay, so both are important to you. Yeah, I think if you’re an athlete and you’re competing, then, you know, so many UFC fighters, for instance, will have unbelievable VO2 lactic thresholds, but to look at them I never forget.

20:16 Going back to boxing, I mean Chris Eubank looks amazing, but then equally you’d look at someone like Joe Calzaghe, who didn’t necessarily have an aesthetic physique but was unbelievable. You know what he could do in the ring was amazing. So if you’re an athlete, just train for functionality. You have a job to do, whereas with me, I’m not an athlete, you know, in the strict sense. I’m more, I’m more a bit of a circus act, you know, with my charities and stuff, like, and I acknowledge that you know, I have so much respect for professional athletes.

20:45 I’m not one of them, so I realize that I go into this other circle, which is athlete, writer, marketeer, in a way. And so over here, aesthetics is unavoidably quite important, because it gets people’s attention. You know, the well-sculpted, you know, the light with the shadow picture on Instagram, true, gets people’s attention. I mean, it’s your way in to get the message, so I don’t fault you for making those, the absolute best, and you do, you put time in on those.

21:14 Yeah, and it’s more than just a selfie in the gym, and yeah, and that’s a conscious decision you made, I think. So yeah, but then equally, I will always say on my social media, some of the best guys out there, you know, people who I will sit opposite them, you know, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, Steve Ingham, head of physiology at English Institute of Sport, when he talks, I’m just like, wow, you know what he talks about is amazing. Yet, sometimes I sit there and he’s got, you know, a few thousand on his Twitter, and I’m like, people would be so much better off following him than a lot of the other athletes, not mentioning any names, but a lot of these fitness models who have got millions of followers, and yet they’ll talk about you know, sets of 21 on biceps, you know, things like that.

21:56 There’s a fine line between the two, and you know, one thing I love about Ido is that by saying things that he feels and that are controversial, and like he’ll go after vegans, and you know he doesn’t give a s***, and like he’ll say things, and that’s in the past that’s done him well. And he even admitted to me the one-arm handstand got a lot of people in the door, and he even said he hates one-arm handstands. Great point. And so you have to have both, and I asked him that in our moving conversation.

22:18 We were walking through London talking. I said, what’s the balance between, you know, being this monk on the mountain top, practicing that no one knows about, via versus the million followers on Instagram, fitness model that has nothing to say? But there is a fine line, because if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it. I used to say it did fall, but it doesn’t fall, so you’re aware of that. Okay, now let’s talk about this charity stunt, because a lot of guys would be like, you, I got the great looking pictures on Instagram, I’m writing for GQ, I got my, I got my, you know, my fitness supplement company, the charity stunt, and I think you got another one coming up.

22:52 I do, do you just wake up in the middle of the night and say, I’m going to do this? And that was no joke. I mean, it took you 19 hours. It was in the rain. I think people don’t realize how hard that was, and, can you tell me how you came up with it, and how the execution went?

23:07 Yeah, yeah. So it was sitting there wanting to do something, you know, great for charity. It was the Teenage Cancer Trust was the main charity. A good friend of mine, years ago now, was diagnosed with leukemia, recovered. He’s absolutely fine now.

23:19 But as a result, a lot of the work the Teenage Cancer Trust did for him was amazing, and we’ve never forgot it. So I always wanted to do something for them, and we were sitting down throwing around ideas, and we just sort of said, yeah, running a marathon, you know, that’s kind of cool, and everyone was like, yeah, but I feel the bar needs to be raised, and then I can’t remember who it was now. Somebody said, why don’t you do it, pull in a car? And I was like, okay, now we’re on to something, and it escalated, you know, from there.

23:48 MINI heard of it, and they said, look, we’ll wrap a car. Silverstone were amazing. They were like, do you want to, you know, do it running around Silverstone? I was like, yeah, sure. Those are big buy-in I mean.

23:58 MINI is a big company. Silverstone’s the, it’s the heart of racing in the UK. Yeah, I mean, Silverstone were there. There was a moment, 6:00 in the morning, rain pouring down at Silverstone. There’s no coverage, so if it rains and there’s wind, it just comes horizontally at your face.

24:13 But there was just, you know, pitch black, seeing Silverstone just lit up, and then throughout the whole stunt, Silverstone just, like, lit up and revealed itself to you as the sun rose We did those night and hours, and then it set. It was emotional. It was something I never it was amazing. But yeah, it was really kind of, if we’re going to make an impact and do something for charity, it needs to be big. You know, it needs to be huge.

24:38 You can’t just do a marathon. Let’s make it bigger, and I think off the success of that there’s been a lot of people who have since rung me up and said, hey, look, we’ve gone an event, will you do something crazy? And you know, after a few bulletproof coffees my mind works over time, so I was just throwing ideas around, and it’s almost become now people have given me a license to do crazy. Just booked up now for the… Was there ever a point on that day where you thought, I’m going to pack it in, this is not going to happen, this is taking too long?

25:09 No. I mean, the Silverstone actually came out, and the head of PR turned up, and it was raining. I was cramping up. It was, you know, I was slipping at certain points, so the car wasn’t actually moving as much as I wanted to. My legs were just coming from underneath me.

25:23 But never, my support team was amazing, and never once did I want to give up. So when Silverstone said, are you okay? I was like, yeah, but how long can I have the track for? And they were like, oh, it’s on Monday. I was like, okay, quickly did the math, that’s 56 hours.

25:36 Okay, well, I’ll be here 56 hours if that’s what it takes, and they just laughed and was like, all right, see you in a bit, and they checked on me, you know, throughout the day. And how long did you think it was going to take? My dad worked it out. He was saying he’d be surprised if I did it under 24 hours, so he was one of the first people I rang afterwards, and I was like, Dad, 19 hours. Boom.

25:56 What did you think? Same thing, maybe. Yeah, yeah. It was completely uncharted territory. I mean, I was so lucky, cuz Jeff Capes, two-time World’s Strongest Man.

26:05 I rang Jeff up when I said that I was doing the stunt. He, I think he still may hold the record for the truck pull. Yeah, he’s a specimen, and what he doesn’t know about strongman isn’t worth knowing, and he just, he was brilliant. He sat me down and just said, Ross, systematically, let’s break this down. You know, he said, whatever you’re going to do, do a mile in training.

26:28 Once you’re done, mile, double that time. You don’t push yourself in that mile, and then work off that, and a mile of pulling a car yeah, yeah, that was when I very first came up with the idea. So we did that, and then I was able to actually sit down and plan the logistics, and it was looking about 24 hours. And when you did that first mile, how long did it take you to double that time? Oh no, so he was saying, double it in terms of what you predict you’ll do.

26:52 So if you’re able to do, you know, a mile, say you run, run-walk three miles per hour, which is a good walking pace. He said, you know, double that, that’s half that, and that’s 1.5 mph, you know, and he wasn’t wrong. He was pretty spot on. What happens when you cramp up, like I’ve had muscles cramp, and they just don’t work no matter what you want. I mean, that really is the muscle deciding not you.

27:12 Yeah, so what do you do? I was lucky on the day, I had literally everything taken care of, so going back to what we were saying with, in terms of sports nutrition, you know, not too long ago they used to say carbohydrates are your body’s primary fuel source. You know, it was widely agreed, and to go and try and do a marathon or anything like that on anything other than carbohydrates was suicide. I would think so. I would say carb up the night before.

27:35 Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, and then what’s happened now, recently, and not even recently, but kind of uncovered, there was the shortcut expedition. I think I’ve pronounced that right. This famous expedition of the Antarctic, and the one of the explorers who went loaded up, and he had bread, and he had rice, and he had pasta, and a lot of the natives were just laughing, and they were like, what is this guy doing? You know, that is going to last him two days before it freezes and perishes.

28:00 Sure enough, it did. And then what happened is they taught him to go and hunt for bare meat, for seal meat, various things like that, fat, these rich fat sources. And what’s amazing is I was lucky enough to read his diary. This was long before ketosis, and all of our sort of, you know, nutritional science knowledge. Now he literally described ketosis down to a tee, long before it was labeled, and he’s there saying, in sort of Ye Olde English, you know, words.

28:28 He’s like, the bare meats have a strange smell. It’s quite potent. It stings the nostrils, and he’s reading stuff. He goes, but after about four days, you know, it doesn’t sting the nostrils as much, and he just starts detailing how his body starts to adapt, and I don’t think you know, often, we are, you know, sort of, generally humans are quite arrogant. We like to think we know how things work, and it’s like, carbohydrates are the body’s primary fuel source, yet 100 years ago this guy was explaining how his body went into ketosis, and, you know, the Inuits knew it, and sure enough he completed the expedition.

29:04 Now we have, for people that don’t know, ketosis is when your body is really primarily burning just the fats to survive. That’s right. Yeah, yeah, and then equally, now you have, and if I get this wrong, don’t directly quote me on this, there’s a guy Timothy Olson. I love this story. He’s an ultramarathon runner, and he ran an ultramarathon, was stopped in the last five miles from stomach cramps.

29:27 I believe he then had a test, found out he was gluten intolerant, so decided to not only cut out gluten but carbohydrates. He ran that same event the following year, won it, and set a race record completely on fats. But what I love about Timothy is, he says, you know, I’m not, I’m not on a Paleo, I’m not on ketosis. I’m just on a high-fat diet. He almost refuses to label it, you know.

29:49 And an ader to that and famous writer, one of my favorite writers, Nassim Taleb. One of my favorite quotes of his, as humans facing limited knowledge, always resort to prescribed ideas and narratives, and I think we’re always trying to put things into pigeonholes. Okay, he’s, he’s a high carb, he’s carb-loading. Oh, but over here he’s on a Paleo, he’s, he’s ketosis. Over here he’s he’s, but it’s like, no, you know, why, why try and label everything?

30:14 So going back to my marathon, I was taking a dual fuel source. So yes, I’d carb-load, like, right up until the day before, but I can hold what 4 500, you know, grams of muscle glycogen at most, once that’s run out, which will be pretty quick when you’re pulling a car. 1.4 ton car, your body’s going to sit there and go, well, what else have you got? Luckily, because I’ve been training my body to use fat stores, MCTs, which we were talking about, and that’s another thing people go, get lots of fats down, you know, and it’s like, well, yeah, but fats is this incredibly broad, you know.

30:47 Let’s bring that down, so it’s okay, MCTs, and then people go, oh, medium-chain triglycerides, oh, coconut oil, that’s high in medium-chain triglycerides. it’s like, yeah, but let’s even get more specific than that. So then you’ve got linoleic acid, capric acid, caprylic acid so coconut oil, for instance, great source of MCTs, but quite high in linoleic acid. So when you start to look more specific, MCT powder, in this pure source, you start to get capric and caprylic acid, and that these are the sorts of MCTs over here that are actually converted to ATP store as adenosine triphosphate more efficiently in many ways than sugar, and that’s what you need over here.

31:28 So yeah, carbohydrate primary fuel source, fats, but then looking more specifically at what fats are you’re having when you start to understand the intricacies of that energy source. Wasn’t an issue during the marathon. I finished and still had energy. You know, that wasn’t an issue. It was cramp.

31:43 Which we, okay, were you consuming those MCTs during the day or were you just training yourself up until that, for weeks? We, before, yeah, both, and then on the day we had a gel, a gel energy source as well, so we were going for, like, simple carbs, you know, MCTs, electrolytes, various things. Simple carbs is sugar. Yeah, yeah, and it was like, okay, you need, but plotting that all along the way, okay energy wasn’t an issue. What was the hardest point in the day?

32:07 About 5:00 in the morning, when the rain was just coming at your face like that, and I was just slipping. I could not get any grip whatsoever. So we had to just regroup. I looked at my support team, and they were just like, I think he’s broken. I was I just can’t get any grip at all, so we went back, changed the footwear, went back out, and then managed that hill, that Silverstone.

32:30 I can tell there is a hill, even though it’s a racetrack. There’s hills, that’s it. If I went to Silverstone now, I would be like, Brian, see, that’s pretty flat, right? And I think we’d agree, as soon as you have a car on your back, I can tell you it’s not flat. All right, and what was the feedback from the media when they heard about this?

32:45 It’s funny, I mean, like, and I deal with people all the time that have done incredible things, but like, if I, someone says, what’s Ross all about? I’m like, well, he did that. Even someone here was like, he did what today? So it’s an anchor. Was it bigger than you thought it would be as far as the effect?

33:00 It was. But what was interesting is, leading up to the event, I was talking to all of my media contacts, and I was telling them, I even went out on social media and was like, hey, look, this is what I’m doing. World’s Strongest Marathon. Going to run a marathon, pull in a car, and I think lots of people, I think the media ignored me, sort of, quite broadly. They were just kind of like, oh, he’s probably going to give it a good go, and then afterwards be like, I tried, guys.

33:23 So no one really believed I was doing it, and then right afterwards, all of the media was like, you did what? And I was like, no, but I told you I was going to do it, and they were like, yeah, we didn’t believe you. So then it was quite nice, and what I love with social media is you don’t even have to rely. I mean, that’s what you guys do so well at London Real. you take, you know, that power of broadcast into your own hands, right?

33:45 And you did that as well. You documented it with film, or did you have a news team there, or no? Well, news team, as in my friends on GoPro. So yeah, and that was what was so nice. We ended up World’s Strongest Marathon trended for 18 hours worldwide.

33:59 And that was what was quite nice, that regardless of the media, it was like, we’re going to do this. We’re going to make a difference, whether the media powerful. That’s the lesson for anyone listening today, is that take it in your own hands. Don’t wait for the media to cover you. Cover yourself.

34:14 Yes, it’s exactly that. Yeah. Okay, and so there’s more of this coming for you. What’s, what’s next? I mean, obviously now you’re being known as the guy that does crazy things, and it is empowering, like when you get to be known as the guy that does X, you kind of want to do, you want to do 10x.

34:28 Then yeah, so did part of you think, okay, now I’m going to get back to writing and get back to the serious stuff, or were you think, I’m going to do something crazy? Yeah, it was. It was that evening. I went home, was with my mom, my dad, my brother, and we all sat down and I was like, I need another, I need another stunt, and they were just like, please just rest. I was like, no, I need to do another one.

34:47 What next? 23rd of April, to Toughest, which is Sweden’s biggest obstacle race. they’re coming to the UK for their first UK event, and Adam and the owners threw around ideas. They heard about the MINI, and they were like, look, will you do an event? You know, do a stunt, another stunt at our event.

35:06 I was like, okay, so we started throwing around ideas again. It was almost said whimsically, as a bit of a joke, and I was like, hey, look, why don’t I climb a 20 m rope for 24 hours up and down repeatedly until I’ve climbed the height of Everest? And everyone went, that’s a great idea. So that’s what we’re training for right now, which I did. You know, I managed 6 hours the other day, but my hands gave up on me.

35:33 They were blistering. They’re fine now, but you see the calluses there. So you’re climbing up and down a rope, 20 m. Yeah, I think we’re going to do it, 20 m, but I might, pretty high. Yeah, you’ll hurt yourself.

35:44 Yeah, I know. We’ve been looking at that, but it needs to, again, going back to the marketing. I think if it was like a five-metre rope, people, the medic in attendance, might just be like, you know, so it needs to be a bit more, and it would be the height of Everest in the end. Yeah, yeah. Get how many, how many hours is that?

36:03 Yes. So we worked it out, something like 10 m on the minute, every minute for 24 hours, so when you start breaking it down like that, you know, we’re going to have, impossible to do this is what’s quite nice. This is what I love when people say about the World’s Strongest Marathon, people like, but no, that’s not possible. And then I’m like, well, we’ll find out. And then it’s the same.

36:25 I love throwing around ideas, cuz people like, we were educated, start going, well, hang on, what’s going to give up? You know, lactic threshold, VO2, are you going to be breathing that heavy? Maybe it’s just your tendon strength. Surely your grip’s going to go. What about clothing?

36:38 Are you going to burn a hole in, like, your gloves? And all of these things start going, and I’m like, let’s find out. Let’s, 23rd of April, let’s find out. But there must be something wrong with you when you get to, I this is all fun to talk about, and you’re having a great time thinking about this, and you seem you can act like a lackadaisical guy, but 30 minutes into that challenge, you must be thinking, oh my gosh, now I’ve got to finish this, and then some real grit has to come out.

37:03 Yeah, oh yeah, 100%, yeah. But what’s interesting is, over an event like that, for 24 hours, like the World’s Strongest Marathon, sometimes it’s just keeping sane. And this, my support team were amazing. It’s not, pulling a car for a marathon is not an individual event. You know, they were amazing.

37:20 We had, like, Marvin Gaye playing on, like, the car, blaring out, and people were walking past Silverstone. We had tourists just taking pictures, like, what is going on? As one of my friends was hanging out the window, and it was just all fun. So it’s the same with the world’s longest road climb, that’s what we’re going to call it. We’ve got 10 loads of my friends coming.

37:37 We’re going to have a barbecue. We’re going to have music, and it’s going to be a real sort of, like, spectacle. So we start at 9:00 on the Friday, which is the 22nd, and then we’ll finish at 9:00, 23rd, the Saturday. So then everybody who comes, about 10,000 people in attendance, we we’ll see you doing that? Yeah, we’ll sort of see the finish.

37:59 I love this. Yeah. Okay, and now I have to ask you a personal question. Now, when you’re up there after 14 hours doing this, something drives you to finish this. What makes you feel the need to, like, finish that race?

38:11 Do you think, do you want people to know that you’re the real deal? Are you proving this to yourself? Like, what is that? That’s a good question. I think it’s probably a mix.

38:22 I think, Wim Hof, massive fan of his, and he similarly had this belief, you know, and he was turning around to people and saying, oh, okay, you know, how, your immune system, we can’t control it, right? And everyone was like, no, you can’t control it, and he’s like, well, I think I can. And everyone, you know, by his own admission, people were laughing at him at first. So then he started going, well, okay, fine, I will bathe in ice cold baths for hours to prove to you, you know, that what I’m saying, I can do various things to the point with his immune system where he said, fine, inject me with a bacteria, I will cure myself, and did, and I think it’s the same.

38:56 I think there’s a lot of self-proclaimed experts out there, and if you’re going to turn around and say, oh, okay, I’m going to challenge strength and stamina, you know, I’m going to challenge certain widely held beliefs in fitness, then you just got to put yourself out there and trial it. So I think there’s partly that is that you want to prove other people wrong, or just say, hey, we need to find out, and I’m going to be the one that’s going to mix these two, cuz this is another strength and stamina mixture, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah.

39:24 And then we’ve got something later in the year, which I will, well, touch upon, but there, it’s just always finding something where you can sit down and just say, okay, this has challenged what we thought was possible, and that’s what drives me, that you can sit there and say, wow, okay, we didn’t think that was possible. All the books and all the sport science that we read. So going back to Robert Hickson, molecular biology, and concurrent training, which is kind of, if you’re training, it needs to be strength, it needs to be stamina, it needs to be agility, it needs to be speed.

39:54 Don’t really combine all of them because it becomes ineffective. Well, I was the first to, sort of, go, okay, I’m going to pull a marathon, and you know, with a car, and maybe challenge those beliefs. So yeah, it’s, it is that, just pushing, pushing the boundaries in your chosen field. I think, yeah. Okay, what’s coming at the end of the year?

40:13 I’m trying to guess. I’m like, okay, what is the ultimate in stamina event? It’s probably that 100-mile race that my guest Joe DeSena did here. He did, like, three ultramarathons in three days. No, he did, like, seven in seven days or something stupid, that with, like, carrying, like, triplet babies with cancer on your back.

40:31 Yes. This one I wanted to do something a little bit different, so I used to be a swimmer, many, many moons ago, but you play water polo for Team GB, that’s right. Yeah, yeah, but, well, swimmer initially, but I’m built like a hobbit, you know, so everyone was like, Michael Phelps’s size, and you need to be tall for those long arms. Water polo. Yeah, well, and so, then I went into water polo.

40:53 I quite liked the sort of physical aspect, you know, with swimming. If someone beats you, you got to shake the hand and say, you beat me in water polo. If you’re losing, you can get a bit physical, bust him up a little. Yeah, and I liked that. So again, we sat there, all exchanging ideas, and one idea was, I was lucky enough to go out to the Bahamas, not too long ago.

41:12 I was shark diving, learning how to wrestle sharks, various things like that. So I got in contact with an old friend of mine who’s a shark wrestler, shark diver, who’s now a freediver. So I was like, okay, just going to put it out there. World’s strongest, longest free dive. Dive 100 feet with 50 kg on your back, hit the bottom of the seabed, squat 10 times, and then come to the surface again.

41:38 They were like, that’s, that’s not possible. I was like, well, let’s find out. Let’s do 10 feet. Let’s do 20 feet, and let’s just find out. So later in the year we booked half flights off to the Bahamas, and I’m going to, going to try that one.

41:51 World’s strongest free diving. Okay, I love it. I love it. Free diving is fascinating. It scares me.

41:56 It’s to see a lot of people don’t understand certain things about it. I find it fascinating. When you get to a certain depth, you actually sink, don’t you? So you don’t actually need weights at a certain depth. There’s a lot going on there.

42:08 It’s really a battle with your brain, I think, more than anything. 100%. It’s very dangerous as well. Some people have died. Yeah.

42:14 Okay, so that’s coming soon. Shark wrestlers, I mean, I don’t know if I should even go there, but this is who you roll with. These are people that dive with sharks and then want to touch them as well. Yeah, yeah. So, good friend, Jeremiah Sullivan, invented the, the metal mesh suit that you see with a lot of the shark divers will use.

42:34 So it was essentially his job to create a metal mesh suit, try it on, and go, yeah, that feels pretty good. I’m now going to go down and see if a shark attacks me, and if the suit will withstand it, and that was essentially his job. And did it. Yeah, no, thankfully. Yeah, he’s still, you know, I mean, he’s incredible to this day.

42:53 He’s still inventing various things on suits, and then just going down and wrestling with a shark just to see if it works. It ensures the shark doesn’t rip your arm out of its socket anyway, when it, that’s what’s interesting. I mean, you know, sharks are like 90% muscle, so if a shark clamps down on your arm, you know, a lot of people will kind of go oh, that’s of course your reaction. You’re going, get off me. The sharks are, but as soon as you actually move away, now the shark’s not going to bite through the metal mesh suit.

43:19 In fact, it might just be coming over to just see what you’re up to. You know, it doesn’t have any hands, so it can’t even touch it, so it’s just kind of nipping, just to see what’s going on, and if you panic and flare like that, then the shark’s just going to clamp down and go, oh okay, hang on, it’s prey. Exactly, but as soon as you flare your arm and it’s away from the actual joint, it won’t bite through the metal mesh, but it will clamp down and twist and that’s when your arm just twists out of his socket, and irreparable damage.

43:47 So that’s what actually does the damage. So if a shark, as I discovered in the Bahamas, bites down on you, you, it’s kind of like this water jiu-jitsu. You pull the shark in like that, keep everything tight, and if it goes for a roll, then you go for a roll with it, and you just, you, I mean, you’re in its house, so you just have to accept that you are going for a roll. You go for a roll, and eventually the shark’s like, okay, it tastes of metal, I don’t even like what it is, and it will leave you alone, and hopefully you come out the other end.

44:14 Did you have this happen to you? Well, no, this was all explained. Thankfully, if it does, you roll with it. We saw Jeremiah. Okay, but yeah, thankfully, I’m yet to experience that.

44:26 That’s fascinating, that makes a lot of sense, though. I, I dove with the sharks in South Africa, in your Cape Town, we went to that place where it’s like the highest concentration of great whites. There’s an island where the seals live, and so we went out there, and I, it was this like old South African guy that spoke African, and he was just like, with like four teeth, and he was just looking at me, and we were going out on the boat to get out to where all the sharks are, and it was like a couple miles out, and I said, and I’m American, so safety is king, and I was like, do we have any life vests?

44:56 And he said, he was like, mate, he said, if you fall off this boat, yeah, you’re going to be dead, cuz the sharks are going to rip you apart, and it doesn’t matter if you float or not. you’re f***ed. I was just like, okay, so no life vest. He’s like, no life vest. I was like, okay.

45:13 I was just like, Jesus Christ. So anyways, there’s a cage, and they suspend the cage in the water, and you get in the cage, and the sharks come by, right? And meanwhile, he’s got a fish head that he’s swinging around on a rope to, cuz they’re trying to get the sharks coming by. And the ones in South Africa, those are the ones that do the vertical breaches. So they’ll come up from underneath, they actually grab the prey, fly out of the water and into the air.

45:32 They don’t do that in the States. You know, they’re more calm, and so these sharks coming by, with the scariest s*** things you ever seen in their life, cuz they move so slowly and so big when you’re in the water in this little tiny cage, you’re just like, why am I here? But yeah, much respect to those sharks and to anyone who shark dives. Yeah, you’re so right in that. You just have to appreciate you’re in their house, and it’s just like, hey, look, if things go wrong, I’m just, yes, your friend said with 14, I didn’t think we’d be talking about shark diving.

46:00 All right, I want to get through a few other pieces because you know, you’re our resident fitness expert. You know, you’ve got the stunts, you got the look, everything. You know just basic, your fitness philosophy. I mean, we talked earlier that you have much respect for guys like Ido and what they’re doing, and Elliot, what they’re doing, and you know what Dorian did in the past, and all these pieces, but like if you have to sum your philosophy down into a few things, how do you explain who you are?

46:25 Because the space is so wide, and like I told you earlier, it took me like a few interviews to understand what Ido was about and I had to go to his moving experience, and then I got it, because it’s a big space, and a lot of people try to tell you it’s this, and it’s not this. Like you said, you try to break ideas about you know, stamina versus strength. So how do you describe your philosophy? Yeah, I suppose what I tried to do is just become a melting pot of all of these ideas.

46:53 So the guest that you have on. I’m a huge fan so if you were to just, I don’t know, trying to almost create this hybrid athlete. So imagine, I don’t know, let’s take MMA, because we both share MMA as an example. Say you had an MMA fighter, and he was going in, for about, he needed to cut weight. Well, okay, then Dave Asprey, you know, MCT is coconut oil, his knowledge is going to be valuable, but all of a sudden he needs to move better.

47:19 You know, an MMA athlete needs to understand movement okay. Dan Hardy obviously would be an amazing choice, but also Ido. Okay, but hang on, maybe he needs to go up a weight category. Conor McGregor recently needs to put on quality functional mass. Sometimes bodybuilding and hypertrophy is almost like a dirty word, but why, you know, sooner or later strength is a neurological adaptation, but in terms of actually becoming stronger, there’ll be a time when you have to actually increase the size of your muscle.

47:48 You, there’s that strength deficit. So for instance I’m not sure where, but if you have what’s training strength, competitive strength, and absolute strength. So absolute strength, for instance if we took your, as you’re sitting now, if we took your quadriceps and we electrically stimulated them, completely involuntary, we’d be able to test how strong your quadriceps are, not you trying to get, you know, psyched up on smelling salts. But no, let’s electrocute you and actually see how strong your quadriceps are after that, after you’ve recovered.

48:19 Now let’s get your competitive strength so all of a sudden, you know, you’re getting psyched. You got smelling salts, you know, the crowd’s going crazy, all your friends are like, Brian, you got this, you got this, now let’s test your competitive strength, and we do that now monitoring the difference between those two. If it’s a large difference between when you’re electrocuted and it’s involuntary, and what you can actually get stimulated and psyched up for, if it’s a large deficit, well, then that means there’s more neurological strength, so you’re not using your full capacity there of your quads.

48:50 But if it’s quite a small deficit, well, hang on, then we’re going to have to do something here. We’re going to have to increase the size of your muscle, the size of the engine because you’re using it to its full capacity. So huge fan of Ido. Neurologically, his strength is amazing, but at a certain point he might need, you might actually have to increase the size of the muscle. Where the teachings of Dorian Yates, there’s no one better.

49:15 You know, that’s why a lot of Olympic lifters, Chinese Olympic lifters for instance, some of the best in the world, they’ll do bodybuilding exercises to supplement their Olympic lifting. Yes, it’s not like Bulgarian Olympic lifting, where they used to preach the law of specificity, so if you were seen doing a bicep curl, you would be kicked out of the gym it was so specific. But no, there’s actually a merit to doing these supplementary hypertrophy bodybuilding exercises, so it’s like thinking outside of the box.

49:39 So going back to this MMA fighter, now he’s moved up a weight category, so Dorian’s helping with his hypertrophy. All of a sudden he might be fighting some guy with a crazy VO2, you know, Nate Diaz, triathlete, Frankie Edgar, amazing tank, can go five rounds. So okay, we, Frankie Edgar and Nate Diaz. So now we need to increase your VO2. You know, the Iron Cowboy.

50:02 Let’s get him involved. You know, someone like that with insane work capacity, or Wim Hof, because we need to basically increase your work capacity, and after a certain amount of time you’re going to sit there and you’re going to be like, well, I need a rest day. All the other time the guy’s training harder than you okay, so let’s get Wim Hof on board. All of a sudden you find you don’t need rest days. Now that’s a pretty, pretty potent formula there.

50:24 That athlete who I’ve just described: hypertrophy from Dorian Yates, movement from Ido Portal, Elliot Hulse strength training over here, Wim Hof, he never gets ill and he can just train forever. The Iron Cowboy, that’s a pretty cool athlete, and that’s the sort of athlete who I would strive to be. Okay, so you like to really think about all the different philosophies and how each one of them can contribute to the mission, and the mission can change like you said.

50:52 And so, and also it sounds like, with Nassim, you’re a huge fan of Taleb, and you just try to constantly understand that you might not know everything, and so let’s not try to put things in boxes. Let’s try to maybe think that maybe we don’t understand everything, and to test, try new things, not categorize. 100%, yeah. I think in a hundred, in a thousand years, I think, you know, our kids, our kids’ kids, they would look at us and they will laugh at the way that we trained and we ate.

51:19 They’ll be like, oh my God, I can’t believe they were eating like this. You know, we look at our grandparents, well, oh my God, they thought you know, this. So all I want to preach is, hey, look, why can’t we become the first generation of epistemic democrats, the first generation to just question everything? You know, the first generation. Socrates, we were talking, you know, the only thing I know is I know nothing.

51:42 Become the first generation to go, hey, okay, let’s just look at everything, including our own knowledge and challenge conventional wisdom. Let’s become that generation. You know, yes, there will be, you know, revelations in sports science, nutritional science, everything, but let’s become the first to actually just go, hey, okay, maybe we don’t know everything. But let’s try and figure it out together. Conor McGregor just lost.

52:06 It was a fantastic fight, as in it was just amazing to watch. I actually predicted a Conor McGregor first-round KO. I’m a big fan of McGregor, I’m big fan of Ido, but I’ve also been following the Diaz brothers for 15 years. I remember when Nick fought in Pride. I remember Nick knocking out Robbie Lawler.

52:24 I’ve been following Nate since he was on The Ultimate Fighter. I love Stockton. I have a 209 tattoo on my ankle? No, I don’t, but John Anik from the UFC, who we’ve had on London Real, has to get a 209 tattoo on himself, because he said if Nate won, he would do that, so I love the Diaz brothers. Sick Jiu-Jitsu, incredible strength and stamina.

52:43 They, Nate’s never been knocked out. I don’t think Nick’s ever been knocked out. It says a lot, and you know, he won, and he won in a beautiful, spectacular fashion. Conor went from fighting at 145 to fighting at 170. It’s a huge increase, being used to the weight.

52:57 I don’t know when he put the weight on, he was obviously going to fight at 155, which, you know, meant probably a net gain of 10 pounds of something. All of a sudden he’s up at 168 at weigh-ins. Your views on what happened there, and what could have been an issue with gaining that much weight? Stamina, strength, all that stuff. Yeah, I mean, first, huge fan of Conor McGregor, Ido and Kavana.

53:19 I think what they do is amazing. They are pushing the boundaries in MMA. It’s amazing, but pure speculative, and this is one thing that I love, that you can have these exchanges of strength and conditioning, and just say, okay, well, here’s a theory. Maybe this didn’t work. So without knowing too much about their camp, you know, afterwards Conor said, you know, I just didn’t use my energy efficiently.

53:41 You saw that crazy crescent kick that Capal was amazing, and if that works, wow, you know, connects, hits the jaw, absolute hero. But you know, he said he didn’t use his energy efficiently. So when you’re going up against someone like Nate Diaz, who does triathlons for fun, you know, you know, he’s got a VO2, you know, he’s got a lactic threshold, he’s going to be there for five rounds and beyond. So again, not knowing too much, but maybe looking at the training camp, and you see a lot of movement, a lot of agility, amazing, so, so valuable, working on these movement patterns.

54:16 But then you’ll see, you know, a ring muscle-up perfectly performed, with an amazing eccentric contraction as they come down, but eccentric contractions, by their very nature, incredibly taxing on the body. You know, Dorian Yates talks about, when sort of looking to build muscle, emphasize the eccentric contraction, when when actually, so eccentric, when it’s in, you know, the muscle is in tension but it’s lengthening, so on a bicep curl so many people will do that, and then they’ll just drop the weight. But no, you know, actually slowly lowering the weight you get so much more hypertrophy, strength adaptations in the muscle, but it’s incredibly taxing.

54:55 Right, there was video on UFC of Ido Portal, walking Conor through some eccentric muscle-ups when they were in LA, I think, before, when to Vegas, it was like four days before the fight. Yeah, and you’ve got to kind of wonder, maybe, you know, if, for instance, sled drags, you know. So I was doing a lot of sled drags towards the World’s Strongest Marathon, and that’s because what people found amazing was with sled drags and pulling a car, it’s just constant concentric contractions, so your legs are in tension but they’re constantly shortening.

55:24 There wasn’t really an eccentric phase. It’s not like a squat, where you’ve got that lowering phase that’s, again, too taxing. That’s where the actual tearing of the muscles, and all sorts, happen. So what people found amazing is, after the World’s Strongest Marathon, I was running. I went for a run the very next day.

55:38 I did 10 miles straight off the bat, because I just wasn’t aching. That would have been very different if there was more eccentric contractions within the workout. So when you’re looking at Conor, and there’s a lot of movement, and I know he loves it, and Ido is fantastic at what he does, but with those eccentric contractions, was that detracting from a workout which could have been more conducive to increasing VO2 lactic threshold? Then would energy, by Conor’s own admission, been such an issue, you know, if it was not necessarily more intelligently done?

56:10 But if you looked at the bigger picture and said, look, I always use the example. It’s, imagine you have, so there’s 24 hours in a day, and imagine it’s that’s your bank. Okay, and you’ve got 24 gold pieces representing each hour. How you then spend them is so important. You need to spend those gold pieces efficiently.

56:33 Now, for Dorian Yates building muscle, he did it better than anybody else, because he sits there and says, okay, when I’m sleeping, I’m repairing, I’m regrowing, growth hormone spikes, neurotransmitters are replenished, all these things, so you go, okay, that sounds pretty good. Should I spend 24 gold pieces in 24 hours sleeping? Well, that would be nice, but you also need some stimulation. Okay, you actually have to stimulate the muscle to grow. Okay, okay, cool.

56:56 So, so maybe it’s 10 hours, 10 gold pieces sleeping, and then over here I’m going to spend an hour, 2 hours maybe, an hour stimulating muscle growth, and then another hour, separately, hour separated, and then I’ll do some cardio for fat loss, so I’m manipulating my body composition. But then looking at somebody like Conor McGregor, he’s got his 24 gold pieces, and it’s incredibly complex, because he needs to become this ultimate fighting machine. I don’t know, but were there too many gold pieces spent on movement, you know, when in reality fighting someone like Nate Diaz, it could have been better spent on work capacity, one of the most underappreciated components of strength and conditioning, VO2 lactic threshold, maybe a bit of strength.

57:37 You know, I don’t know the answer as such, but it’s certain it would be amazing to have that discussion, you know, just throw around the idea, looking at a fighter and looking at the bigger picture, you know, and then again, if work capacity is an issue, address it. Recovery days, Wim Hof method, various things you can start doing. But you know, I don’t know if, if that crescent kick came off, yeah, and I don’t know the answer either, and that’s a funny thing.

58:02 If he had won that fight, we wouldn’t be talking about this, because he’d be the man again, and that’s why I put that video out over the weekend that you talked about, where you know the thing about Conor is he just, he puts it all on. He’s like the guy that puts it all on. Not black, he puts it all on Black 27, and then when it wins, he sticks all the wins on Black 27, and when it wins again, and each time he’s making 31 times his money. Yeah, and he does that with himself, with his life.

58:23 When I heard he was moving up to 155 to fight Doos, I’m like, you’re insane, and then when you see him going up to 170, it’s just like, you know, but that’s what he does. He’s in the business of taking risk, and for that I will respect him always tremendously. I think he’s going to win on the back of this, just like Ronda Rousey won on the back of her loss. She’s on Sports Illustrated after her loss, she’s on Saturday Night Live after her loss. I think Conor is going to come back even stronger, but these are good questions to ask.

58:48 And I’m glad you’re posting them with those gold pieces. As an MMA fighter, it’s tricky, cuz you got to learn wrestling, you have to learn Jiu-Jitsu, you have to learn boxing and striking, and then you have to have strength, recovery, diet, and you really run out of gold pieces. Some say more than, say, a sport of boxing. I’m sure that has its own gold piece set, but you have all these things for your mind, gold pieces, and your body, and it’s constant juggling, effort, let alone when you’re trying to prepare for a fight with 11 days’ notice.

59:14 So then you go back to, well, how much can he do for Nate? Even Nate said he didn’t have time to spar, and I don’t even think he had time to do a lot of conditioning work in 11 days. I don’t know what you can get done, except maybe hurt yourself more. You know, it’s so then it just becomes a mental thing. Oh, mass with 11 days, movement is relevant, so looking at biomechanics absolutely, but you know, 11 days, your VO2 is what it is, your lactic threshold, your strength, all of those are pretty much set.

59:39 So then start looking at movement. I think Kaver says upgrade the software without affecting the hardware. I love that saying, but if Conor was to fight someone like Frank Edgar with his insane conditioning, you know, I hope UFC 200, although it’s going to be huge, maybe based on the fact that, again, by Conor’s own admission, you know, he wasn’t efficient with his energy, then maybe go back and address it, take a longer training camp, you know, look at things, look at this bigger picture.

1:00:10 You mentioned those gold pieces, and it’s so true that in something like MMA, that is so multidisciplinary, you have to be so specific. Right? In this session, what do I want to achieve, what adaptation? Cuz that’s, training is adaptation, and you have to be so specific with what you’re telling your body. So are you training for speed?

1:00:34 Yes. Cool. Okay, then on a cellular level, get in the gym and make sure that everything, plyometrics, everything is done with speed. Resistance bands, I’m a big fan of that, but too often you’ll see people performing plyometric training, or they think they’re doing plyometric training at the end of the session. I’m like, well, when you’re fatigued, you’ve just squatted, you’ve done German volume training, and now you’re trying to do box jumps.

1:00:56 That’s completely counterproductive, so it’s every time you go to the gym, especially with MMA, you need to be so specific. I mean, Dorian Yates was amazing at it, because he had one goal. I love when he said to you, I only have, you know, one egg and one basket, and that’s where I put more. Every time he went in the gym, his sole goal was to send a cellular signal to my body to increase muscular hypertrophy. Done.

1:01:20 Now it gets more complex when you start dealing with other athletes, but you still need to be so specific, and that’s why, in the mornings leading up to the World’s Strongest Marathon, it’s like, okay, in the morning we’re going to deal with endurance. I’m going to send a signal to my body to start adapting to endurance, mitochondrial efficiency, all these sorts of things that’s going to go on over here. But then in the afternoon, that’s when we’re going to start looking at muscular hypertrophy.

1:01:42 I needed to be heavier, because just pulling a car at 85 kilos wasn’t going to happen. I ended up putting 10 kilos of muscle on for it. So there’s muscular hypertrophy, so specific, then the strength. There was also a power element, but I’d make sure anything that I did with speed was done in a completely different session. Too many people will go to the gym and they’re just not clear about the cellular signal they’re trying to send to their body.

1:02:04 See them over there, they’ve just done German volume training, but then they’re over here and they’re doing plyometrics, but hang on, now you’re on the treadmill, so you’re doing endurance, you know, but you just told me you want to lose fat, but then you’re sipping on Lucozade, you know, so insulin spikes, which is suppressing lipolysis. Yeah, yeah. And we could go into a whole discussion about, like, do people even know why they’re doing what they do in the gym, and how much of it is just based on memes of things we saw that one time you wrote a great article, I think, for GQ, about Rocky, the movie Rocky, and some of the things, the goods and bads, you can learn from watching Rocky Balboa train.

1:02:39 And it’s just like, how much of us are training because of something we saw, or we heard, or because of that one thing. I think it was the Pumping Iron documentary, where Arnold was like, doing this bicep curl over his knee, that was now mimicked by people all around the world, even though I think he just made it up on the day. Or the classic boxing scenario, you run, you know, 10 miles to be better a boxer. Just, there’s so many of them, and quite honestly, I’m on my own journey of questioning my own memes that I do, you know.

1:03:05 And I used to just lift very heavy, and I used to be just a martial artist, and kick pads and roll Jiu-Jitsu until somebody tapped out. And like, you know, thanks to Ido, it just really opened my mind into so many other ways you can move as a human, and then how much I enjoy it. Like, I have a big smile on my face when I do monkey bar swings, or I can do a backhand walkover, or a breakdancing move, or a handstand, but before I just limited myself to all these moves, and now I’m playing around with breakdancing.

1:03:32 And like before that, if you want to be like a tough guy, which a lot of guys want to be, tough guys. Okay, a lot of your followers want to look like you. They want to be strong. A lot of guys get strong because they were getting bullied, or they want to be more men, whether they know it subconsciously or consciously, and when you get to this martial arts stage, it’s like, all right, we’re going to fight. Okay, how about dancing?

1:03:49 Oh no, no, we don’t dance. So now I’m trying to explore this more, maybe feminine side of myself, and dancing’s fun as hell, and it’s very physically expressive, and I think I learned that from Elliot Hulse as well, is that we need to be physically expressive as humans too. But you know, from a classic strength and conditioning standpoint, it’s usually just do these things, and like you said, a lot of people get really caught up in just their own memes, like you said.

1:04:12 The Bulgarian strength people, no bicep curls. That’s not, we do Olympic lifts, you know, or these people, we do this. Yeah, there’s so many schools of thought, and we get kind of on the wrong track as humans. Yeah, yeah, but you’re so right. The best you can ever do is just go on your own journey and question.

1:04:30 Biological individuality is like the only unequivocal law of human physiology, that we’re all more different than we are alike, you know. Nutrigenomics, relatively new field of nutrition, you know, that how our nutrition interacts with our genetics. Me and you, Brian, we could sit down now, we could have the same coffee, the same bowl of porridge, and the same protein shake, we would assimilate it completely differently. Then if I gave you exactly the same bowl of porridge, we then went for a run, a workout, a glycogen-depleting workout, and I gave you another bowl of…

1:04:58 Do you assimilate that completely differently? Only you know. But it’s been lost, you know. I think we’re too prescriptive now. We’re looking at other people.

1:05:09 Ralph Waldo Emerson, huge fan of his, and, you know, he was such a big believer in self-empowerment, and it’s so true that that’s really where you’ve got to look. If you’re looking for answers, look to yourself, you know. I will people. All of my followers, they’ll ask me questions, and you know, they’ll say, coconut oil, is it good? And I’m like, Dad, so you know, what, for your hair, for your skin, for your teeth?

1:05:36 You know, oh, you want to ingest it? You know, no nutrient, no food exists in a vacuum. You have to compare it to everything, consider it in its entirety. So when people ask me questions, I always, usually, much the most people’s annoyance, come back with a question, and they’re like, oh, just tell me, should I have coconut or not? And I’m like, but that’s not the, it’s not going to benefit you if I say yes.

1:05:59 It’s not, it doesn’t benefit either of us, and so you’re so right. What you’re doing is just questioning everything, that you do is the best thing that you can do. And that’s why I think I never really went down the personal training and strength and conditioning route one-on-one, in many ways, because I think that within all of us, you’re your best nutritionist, you’re your best personal trainer. I can help, and I can give you stuff to read, and I can, you know, try and sort of instill some sort of change in your life but ultimately it’s got to come from you, because I don’t know what’s going on inside, and the same I think too many people, too many nutritionists, too many dietitians will take that stance and say, here’s your diet, to follow.

1:06:40 You don’t know how they’re feeling, you know, and it’s one of my biggest pet hates. You see a lot in the media, battle cravings, combat cravings. I’m like, what, why do you want to battle cravings? That’s a physiological signal that your body is trying to tell you something. Something, hey, like we’re deficient in chromium.

1:06:57 You know, you might be quite tired, maybe, letting gin, like your hormonal slightly out of whack. You know, blood sugar levels are probably IR regulated. It’s trying to tell you something, but no, you know, you’ve read a certain magazine, it’s telling you to battle them, combat them, and it’s, no, these are the wrong messages. You know, Ido again with this paradigm shift, it’s so true, but it needs to happen in nutrition too, and on mainstream, on a huge scale.

1:07:21 You know, too many people are, I’m going off on one. It was the Bulletproof. I know, too much coffee, you know, but it’s a great point you make, and you know, more to come on nutrition, cuz I think it’s something we’re going to talk about more on the show, but let’s talk about one of our favorite subjects on London Real, and one everyone’s been asking about and wants to know your thoughts on it, and that’s our good old friend, steroids. We talk about it on the show not that much.

1:07:44 Dorian talked about it. It was funny enough, because Dorian, I mean, I guess to everyone it’s obvious that there’s steroids in bodybuilding, but Dorian talked about it and said, Brian, it’s one of the few sports where you can see, so people associate it when they see Lance Armstrong weighing in at 62 kgs, people don’t see it there. When they see Maria Sharapova, you know, as a tennis player, long and lean, they don’t think that there might be some banned WADA substance there, whatever it is.

1:08:12 So it’s a funny one. UFC, Nate Diaz came out at the press conference of Conor McGregor and said everybody’s on steroids, you know, in a very cool tone, and on Stockton Way, and even accused Conor, which Conor didn’t like that very much. All, and fair enough, you know, there’s no indication that Conor has anything to do with that, but Nate’s like, everybody, and a lot of people in the UFC have popped for that kind of thing. Where is the place for steroids in this world?

1:08:36 Because for a while there’s this body in Nevada, or somewhere, or that says it’s legal, then they can decide it is legal. Then there’s sports where it’s there for a reason, for fairness, and then there’s the fitness industry, where you can do whatever the hell you want, and then in America now male testosterone replacement therapy is just everybody’s doing it, including Joe Rogan for the last 10 years, and he’s just like, this is what I do, it helps me do everything I want to do. Where do you stand on steroids?

1:09:06 It’s such a good question, because the line is drawn in so many different places depending on where you sit. It’s a strongman. You know, bodybuilding, you know, these people are celebrated, you know. Look, oh, he’s the World’s Strongest Man, and you know, look at the bodybuilders, look how big they are, he’s the greatest Mr Olympia we’ve ever had. But then over here someone might miss a drugs test.

1:09:30 You know, Mo Farah, for instance, Mo Farah missed a drugs test. He was never, he never tested positive for anything. He just missed a drug test, and yet he was, yo, look, well, you know, he’s, but hang on, but then over here these people are knowingly doing it, and you are celebrating them, and look how big they are, and you know, but over here, you know, then you’re hung out to dry. It’s odd how you can, you know, have that, but one’s an Olympic sport, and it’s, he knows he’s being tested, so he has to make it the bodybuilding.

1:10:04 They don’t really test for it in the big bodybuilding competitions. They have the natural bodybuilding competitions, I don’t know how that really works, but in bodybuilding, it, they’re technically not breaking atal law. I don’t think so. Those are slightly different scenarios, but when is it okay to use steroids, and when is it okay to talk about it? For a long time, the bodybuilding magazines didn’t talk about it.

1:10:24 You’re in the fitness industry, it’s probably not really talked about very much. No, you’re so right. I, so you’re so right. I think sport side, competitive sport side, because if you’re adhering to the rules in that sport, you know, then you’re not breaking any rules. If there are no rules on that, then you’re not breaking any.

1:10:42 If there is, there is, but putting that aside, one of my main grievances, I think, in fitness, is there, people take them, you know, but then they’ll use it to sell a dream. You know, so there’ll be a lot of fitness models who’ll have striations in places you shouldn’t have striations. You know, they will be, they’ll put on two stone in a matter of months, and then they’ll go and sell their diet plan. You know, they’ll go and sell their fitness regime. That’s fine, but be honest about what you are taking, then, because there are going to be, you know, young teenage boys looking up at you and thinking, oh okay, you know, and yes, you might be doing German volume training or sets to failure every single day of the week, but you can do that because you have these ergogenic aids rolling around in your body.

1:11:31 Don’t tell a kid who’s still growing, you know, who is completely natural and is having nothing but his mom’s Weetabix for breakfast, to go and do the same thing, because he won’t get the same results. He’ll probably do more harm than good. But F the fitness industry doesn’t do that, right? They don’t help you about that, and then they sell that. This, yeah, you put on 10 kgs of muscle mass for the pull.

1:11:51 Do you use steroids? Not necessarily muscle mass, and that’s the, I would, I would dig out some pictures. I’ll show you them. So a lot of it was just bulk. I’ll show you what I ate around Christmas.

1:12:01 It was ridiculous, and that was the thing as well. If why not use them, if it’s going to help you get to a goal? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There was no rules in the world’s strongest Marathon. You know, it was an event created by me.

1:12:15 Personally, I don’t, I won’t ever use them. I don’t use them purely because I just think that you will blow your body up to beyond what it was naturally meant to do. You were, of course, going to have to come off them. Dorian Yates, such an honest interview, you know, and he said that, you know, when he came off them there was just this, you know, sheer, his body was trying to compensate because it had been up here for so long, hormonally, muscle mass, everything.

1:12:38 His strength, so it was hard, because when he came off it, he had this huge deficit, and he was never going to get to the now. Dorian’s turned around. He’s so functional now. I know he cycles. He does yoga, and it’s amazing to see what he does, but I think he’s still on replacement therapy, replacement therapy, and that’s the thing, you know, he’s 50-something years old, and in America I think that’s getting more standard these days, and he had deficits for a while, but again, like, what’s wrong with that?

1:13:03 I don’t think it’s always a personal choice, but right now my body is exactly where I need it to be, and if I was to put anything that would help me perform above it’s just not worth the low, you know. The high for me isn’t worth the low, and if I can continue on the trajectory that I am, I want to be like, I’ve always said I want to be the fittest 80-year-old, you know, in the nursing home. I’ll be sitting there still pulling cars and stuff. That’s what I want, that longevity.

1:13:30 But if, if you’re going to spend 24 hours climbing up a rope, and I’m like, hey, Ross, I’ve got this here that will make you probably slightly more aggressive, it might even make you accomplish that. It’s easier. If it was a military mission, you would probably take it. Why wouldn’t you? Yeah, again, it’s not worth the low for me.

1:13:47 So yeah, it would, it would enable me to complete the rope pull, the marathon, you know, the diving with sharks, all of those things. For me it wouldn’t be worth the low. I think afterwards I’d be in the gym, you know, 180 on the bench wouldn’t be going up anymore. You know, I’d be like, what was happening there? You know, I’d be running, and my recovery afterwards, right now, I’m so, and I always preach this physiological intuition.

1:14:12 A lot like the Bulgarians, they didn’t have rest days, 365 days of the year, they were lifting, and they did as many competitions as they possibly could. The only periodization that they had was, listen into your body. If you need a rest day, have an active recovery day, work on speed, but don’t lift heavy, and right now that’s exactly what I’m doing with the rope pull, so my arms are crazy conditioned at the moment to do those 24 hours. If I was to take anything, more or less whatever it would be, I’d just be completely out.

1:14:44 What, physiologically? I wouldn’t have the same intuition. I know exactly what my body’s capable of, and you don’t want to gain weight now either, do you? No, no, no. I will be lo.

1:14:53 I mean, I’ve been working, you know, probably on armr, so my nutrition has just been kind of keeping everything, but I will for the next four weeks, so 23rd of April. You’ll see me, you know, a lot, lot lighter. But yeah, it just won’t be worth it, and again, that’s the thing where people sort of say to me, oh my God, throughout the year you’re doing all these crazy stunts. You jump from one to another. But as you’ll see, again, with most fitness models or people in the industry, it’s crazy how they’ll just get shredded, striations, unbelievable, and then, you know, 12 weeks later they ballooned up, and they’re, and they’re like, oh, I’m bulking, I’m bulking.

1:15:29 But for me, fat loss, if you don’t compete and you’re not a professional athlete, there shouldn’t necessarily be this periodization. There shouldn’t necessarily be this offseason. You know, I’m bulking, this is my downtime. No, 365 days of the year, just be ready, be cut, body fat low, physiologically ready. How can you maintain that low body fat?

1:15:52 First of all, do you ever use any supplements to cut weight? Cuz like, it’s, you know, like that. I understand that to get down to those really lean pictures, I mean, it’s still, they test that in UFC, but it’s not performance enhancing. No, I mean, so use some of that stuff sometimes? No, again, it’s just, it amazes me, going back to what I was saying, that people are always looking for that magic pill.

1:16:14 They’re always looking for it. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist, but if you start to understand and listen to your body, if you, for instance, if you’re reaching for the biscuit tin and you’re looking for the cake jar, it’s already too late. You should have listened to your body an hour ago. You know, already leptin levels are out of whack, and stuff.

1:16:30 You’re, you’re going to nail that cake whether you like it or not, and that’s what people don’t understand, that you can be the most determined person in all the world with all the willpower, but cravings aren’t about willpower. It’s a physiological irregularity within the body. They’re saying, hey, look, something’s not right as soon as you start to understand that. I genuinely don’t really have cravings, and if I do, it’s probably for a good reason, and I might, if my hormones are out of whack, I’ll go to sleep and I’ll wake up and I’m fine.

1:16:58 You, it’s like, oh, we needed that. If I, but sometimes I might be craving something, and it’s because I’ve just done some crazy workout after the world’s strongest Marathon. I had the largest cheesecake you’ve ever seen. But GLUT4 receptors were firing, muscle glycogen depleted, insulin sensitivity through the roof. Did it taste good or not?

1:17:15 That tastes unbelievable. Did you feel bad afterwards, or did you feel fine? No, and that’s the thing as well. So people talk about a cheat meal like, oh, I’m going to have a cheat meal. I pretty much have a cheat meal every single day, but it’s just not a cheat meal, you know.

1:17:28 It’s not this kind of a cheat meal in the conventional sense. So people honestly look at me, gone out, I’ll have a crazy workout, and then I’ll sit there on the bench press with natural yogurt, whey protein, and dark chocolate, and I’ll be just nailing a chocolate bar, and people like, Ross, you’re meant to be cutting, you know, my late last photo shoot, I was having chocolate right up until the day. Sugar in that chocolate, or is it just chocolate without?

1:17:53 And this is an excellent point. So now, chocolate by the modern definition is this sugar-ridden fudge caramel-laden type chocolate. That’s what everyone’s like, oh, that’s chocolate, but no, chocolate is a plant-based food, high in flavanols, that improve insulin sensitivity. So chocolate, dark chocolate in the traditional sense, like the Mayan warriors used to have, that’s the sort of chocolate that I’m having. So again, thinking outside of these prescribed ideas, you know, when you’re thinking, oh, chocolate’s bad for you, yeah, the modern chocolate, the one that’s been actually, you know, nutritionally engineered to make you want more and more, that’s bad.

1:18:27 But I would challenge anyone to have like a kg of like 90%, you know, high in flavanol chocolate. You just won’t want it, cuz it’s just so satiating. Yeah, you get a buzz off of it too. You once said you once said six-pack abs are made in the kitchen. What do you mean by that?

1:18:45 Yeah, I think crunches are probably the most overrated exercise in strength and conditioning. I think so many people will spend hours, and they’re like, H checking their hours, not working. It’s body fat. You know, your rectus abdominis, so the muscle that goes down the front that’s responsible for the appearance of a six-pack. Yes, like most muscles, you can increase it with size.

1:19:06 You can, it is subject to muscular hypertrophy, but, you know, the depth for them is only going to be millimeters, you know. So you’re far better off spending time cutting body fat, and then even if you’re performing all of the exercise, if you’re squatting well without a belt, engaging the transverse abdominis, if you’re Olympic lifting, you’re engaging your core anyway. There’s no need to do this and move centimetre at a time. There’s no need. Far better off getting a good cookbook and going and, another meme gone wrong.

1:19:36 So, just to round out the steroid discussion, what should we do with Sharapova? You know, when we find out I think I got it straight, but she was taking something for a long time, 10 years, her family doctor gave it to her. Apparently, apparently she didn’t know when the USADA ban came out. I find that hard to believe for a $20 million-a-year industry, which she is, I think, but at the same time I’ve never heard of this stuff before. Meldonium, or whatever it is, but apparently it has some, you know, performance enhancing effects.

1:20:03 You know, what do we do about that? I feel that she’s probably going to be made a scapegoat and kind of held up I whether it’s right or wrong. I don’t know, because again, it goes back to previously, by the letter of the law she wasn’t doing anything wrong. You know, it’s only recently, so it gets incred. Like the whole discussion we just then about professional sport, it gets incredibly complex when the Russians get busted for steroids.

1:20:25 They say, oh yeah, that’s because the US makes the laws, and they know the drugs to use that we don’t know, so it’s just a game that people are playing and playing and playing. And Dorian said it really well. He’s like, you know, bodybuilding is inherently competitive, and in any competitive industry where there’s either money or power or fame on the line, people will cheat or find the better way to cheat. Yeah, and it’s just a natural. It is, it’s, you know, you can then argue it’s gamesmanship.

1:20:50 You know, it, it gets such a gray area. It’s not necessarily as black and white, and you’re so right, then in bodybuilding, or even if there are things going on right now, genetic manipulation, various things like that, that we can’t even test for. That we aren’t even testing for by the letter of the law. It’s not wrong, but then you know it’s wrong, so then it becomes a moral dilemma. It’s such a gray area, so gray.

1:21:13 We were talking about Vitor Belfort earlier, and when he was on testosterone replacement therapy, which is again another construct of what, you know, it’s steroids, which is fine. It was legal at the time. He looked different than he looked later when he fought Weidman, but when he knocked out Luke Rockhold when he fought Jon Jones, he, he looked like a specimen. Apparently he was taking way too much. But can you tell when you see someone in the fitness industry, you’re like, okay, he’s probably on steroids, or can you not tell?

1:21:38 You’ve been around yeah, I think, I think it’s how you use them. So you were so right with Lance Armstrong, on S Roy, to help his recovery, so therefore he’s not necessarily rippling with muscle, with biceps on biceps, but you’re so right in that, doesn’t say he’s not on them. You know, it’s just he’s using them differently. You know, to use Lance Armstrong as example, using ceroid, he was using it to reduce his recovery rate so he could train harder, longer than anyone else.

1:22:06 There are others when it’s, it’s more easy to see. You know, you can be like, well, you’ve clearly, you know, used ergogenic aid, steroids, whatever it is, to build yourself some insane delts or arms. Yeah, then that’s easier to see. What’s interesting is if you start to look through history, you start looking at Eugen Sandow, father of bodybuilding. Then I think you get, yeah, granted, there’s been more developments in sports nutrition, creatine, you know, aminos, BCAAs, leucine.

1:22:32 You know, understanding far more about leptin, mTOR receptors, how to trigger them post-workout, so you can actually repair and regrow all of these things, but Eugen Sandow is a great example of someone who built a physique naturally. You know, when you look at him and when you look at him and compare him to, like, modern-day bodybuilders, you’re like, ah, okay, that’s the difference. Right, right. I understand that that is, that’s the sort of genetic ceiling right there for pure muscle growth, and then Mr Olympia, right now, whoa.

1:23:02 Right, so it’s like bodybuilders in the 50s maybe, is that was maybe the peak? Maybe they didn’t have the weight cutting and stuff, but that’s like that, and then now you look now, and it’s, it’s this growth hormone and steroid. Okay, I think that’s reasonable, and the final piece is like you said, people in the fitness industry or other industries that sell that, it’s my protein powder, or it’s my this, when it’s actually a that they don’t talk about.

1:23:25 Is that something we’re always going to be dealing with? How, how do you mean that, as in, you know, is this something like you said, a kid at home eating his Weetabix thinks that if he does the 8-minute ab routine he’s going to look like a guy that’s probably using a lot of supplements to get that physique? Are we always going to be battling that? Is the public going to wake up one day and think, oh, it’s obviously not that? I mean, bodybuilding magazines had this for 30 years.

1:23:46 All the magazines never talked about it. Yeah, yeah, I hope so. I hope there is this public awakening. You know, I really think it’s kind of happening now. I think right now we’re on the cusp of a lot of people realizing that that’s not necessarily healthy.

1:24:03 It’s not what they say it is, and people are no longer being sold a dream, but I still think there’s quite a way to go. I still think people like to, you know, I always use the example, when you look at a GI Joe doll, you know, from like the 1990s, and you compare it now. I can’t remember the exact statistics, but the GI Joe doll of like the 1990s, and stuff, you, if you made him life-size, his biceps were like 13 in, you know, his chest, I don’t know, like 38 or something like that.

1:24:31 You compare him now, and the GI Joe doll now, and I think his biceps, don’t quote me on this, they come out of like 24 in or something like that. If you actually made the GI Joe doll today into a life-size man, you’d go, oh my God, what is that? And I think, you know, we need to kind of address that, so much has been done. You know, anorexia, BMI, but muscle dysmorphia is not far behind, if not bigger. It’s, and Instagram makes it worse.

1:25:02 Yeah, you see these, you know, some of the fitness models out there at the moment are good fitness models, but they’re even better on Photoshop. You know, that’s the reality. Yeah, I wonder if we’ll ever come back from there. If we’re going on, what would people be surprised to know you do in your spare time? I mean, are you the guy that, you know, I, they see one image of all these things of you, but you’re obviously reading books you’re doing a lot of other things that fill your mental space.

1:25:25 What would we be most surprised about? I love food. I just, I love food. I think too, too often, fitness and good food, you know, are seen at two ends of the spectrum. No, you know, as I was saying with a cheat meal, cheating every single day, if I go out, if my friends ring me up and say, they say, Ross, we have found this rib place there’s an eating challenge, you got to come down.

1:25:48 I’m like, right, I’ll be there, but I’ll be doing some insane workout beforehand, so post-workout, that meal, that crazy cheat meal eating challenge that we do is solely used, and it’s functional. It’s going to, you know, replenish muscle glycogen, you know, spike insulin, kickstart mTOR receptors, so it’s all functional. Yeah, and people my friends have to make allowances for that. They know if I’m coming out and I’m doing an eating challenge that I’m probably going to be running straight in the door from a workout, having just Sher.

1:26:15 We sit down and we go, see, I love my food. If I watched you over the next seven days and watch your training regime, what does it look like? Are you a crazy mad man in the gym? Do you, like, when you get to work, do you just, like, not play around, or are you just, like, constantly active? Is it your work ethic?

1:26:31 Is it your constancy that really gets you there? What is it? It’s a mix. I think you’ve got to know when to go full throttle, and then other times just to ease up. You know, going back to, like, the Bulgarians, they train 365 days of the year.

1:26:45 There was no downtime. There was no offseason, and that’s the same as me, and then people go, well, you know, that’s a bit full-on, Ross. I’m like, yeah, but you’ve got to understand Mother’s Day is just gone, so you know, my workout consisted of a little bit of, you know, calisthenics in the gym, and then tennis with my mom. We all went and played, so that wasn’t necessarily hardcore. I wasn’t there serving 80 mph on my mom, but it was just that, that was that, and then other times I’m taking the dog for a run.

1:27:13 You know, other times you’re squatting heavy. Exactly, and it’s, to know that Andy Bolton, huge fan of him, and one thing he does brilliantly is periodization. You cannot go into the gym if you’re a powerlifter. You can’t go into the gym on smelling salts with your friend smacking your back, getting like wired for every single lift. Your central nervous system will be fried by the time you get to Friday.

1:27:36 You know, intelligently, that’s the thing too, many people. Yeah, it’s an old gym saying, but you know, too many people are training harder, not smarter. Right, smelling salt, does that actually work? About 10% more on your lifts? Is this a powerlifting trick?

1:27:50 Yeah, have you never done smelling salts? No, no, I haven’t. Right, you got like, what will it give me? An extra 10%? Yeah, honestly, when you are lifting big, when you’re going for that one, one-rep max, or you’re going, yeah, something like smelling salt, it’s, just, you’re wired.

1:28:07 Like, I remember my first ever 200 kg bench, and my friends smelling salts like that. I was in my face going, you got this. I sniffed it so hard I could not see, my eyes were watering. He then slaps me on the back. I had a big handprint on my back.

1:28:23 I get under the bar, and I’m just handed the bar, cuz I can’t even see, but I think especially on bench and more so than on a deadlift with your deadlift, if you haven’t got it, you haven’t got it. It doesn’t come off the floor, and you’re like, but with a bench, it’s completely neurological and psychological, in that when you unhook the bar like that, if you think I’ve not got that, then you’ve not got that. It doesn’t matter. Touch the chest, that’s not coming back up, cuz you told yourself already you need to be so confident.

1:28:51 So with smelling salt, sometimes you’re so wired, you’re not even thinking, and certainly on that 200, it just hit the chest. I wasn’t even thinking, and it went up before I knew it, and I think that going back to that strength deficit, you know, you got absolute strength, competitive strength, training strength, and training strength sometimes is just no stimulants, certainly no smelling salts. Your friend’s not slapping you, just calm, you just go, you know, clean and jerk snatch, just be smooth, just hit it, drop it, chill out, listen to some music that’s training strength.

1:29:25 You know, there’s no stimulation, and there’s a lot to be said for that. When I was when I was doing sort of Bulgarian squat methods, where you are essentially squatting every single day, you can’t get wired and fired up on pre-workout. You can’t do that every day, so it became weird in that squatting every day with like 200 kg on your back, but just so calm and chilled, listening to like Marvin Gaye, Barry White. It’s a weird sensation and then after, you know, 8 weeks Bulgarian squatting, all of a sudden you just become comfortable.

1:29:57 Your body adapts, you know 200 on your back just feels nice. That’s wild, and true, what you say about bench, as in, like, you can your brain decides, right, when you take it off the rack, and I had my personal best on bench when I had a cold, and I had a bunch of PBs on C when I was sick, because you, you’re not thinking, you’re not really there, and you’re also not thinking you’re going to get a good lift, so you take all the emotion out of it. You take all the consequence out of it, and I’m just like, I’m going to get this workout done today, cuz I know I have to, and then all of a sudden it’s just like, bam, bam, and like, oh, and I agree, it’s, that’s a fascinating lift in that sense, as opposed to, say, a dead, where you either have it or you don’t.

1:30:33 I think, definitely, absolutely. I think you’re so, what you just touched upon there, again, goes back to that biological ambiguity. You know, progression is never linear. You know, we can say that. Yes, I’m going to stick 5 kg on my bench every single week, so by the end of the year I’m going to be benching 300 kg.

1:30:48 Yeah, it’d be nice if it happened like that. It doesn’t. You know, the graph in reality is like this, and you make, might make these crazy gains, and one day you’ll go in full of cold, hungover from a night before, whatever. You might have just eaten loads of cheesecake, like the worst sort of PR, and then for some unknown reason, you know, squat, bench, whatever, it just flies off. But at best, when we understand sport science, we can influence these universal laws.

1:31:14 So going back to bench, one thing: if you do go in, you got a cold, or not even a cold, if you just going and you’re not really firing, you know, you’re just not really feeling it. I always say, with a lot of people, I’ll train, take the deadlift, for example. I’ll get them to start performing sub-maximal snatches, cleans, all of a sudden you can’t grind out a snatch. You can’t. No, that’s got to go up smooth.

1:31:37 Everything, that kinetic chain, neurologically, everything’s got a fire, has to. But I guarantee right now, if I loaded up, you know, 140 on the bar and went there, you go, Brian, go deadlift it right now, in your suit, go deadlift it. You could grind one out, you know, you could. It would be ugly. You’d grind it out, but it wouldn’t be the same.

1:31:53 With a snatch, cuz everything has to work as it should. So by doing those sub-maximal snatches, cleans, jerks, everything starts firing as it should, then not fatigued, submaximal, then you start going over the same with box jumps. How you feeling today? Not really firing? All right, cool.

1:32:10 Let’s chill, maybe get a coffee, get pre-workout. You know, let’s start doing some box jumps. Let’s see how you feel, make them weighted box jumps. Start working up, all of a sudden the body wakes up. Now get in the squat rack, bang oh, okay, now you’re firing.

1:32:22 Yeah, yeah, I always tell people when I squat, like, every weight is just as bad as the first, like the 60 is heavy and the 120 is heavy, and it takes me a while to warm up there. So, Ross, let me ask you a few questions. I want to find out about some of your personal success secrets. I want to know what it’s like to be you, and if there’s something you’ve adopted over the years, you know, do you wake up early? I just had Jocko Willink in here, the US Navy SEAL from Hell.

1:32:48 He’s such an intense guy. I’m so impressed with him. But he wakes up at 4:30 every morning. He takes a picture, his watch, and puts it on Twitter, and he says, what are you doing? And he, he does this workout every morning.

1:32:59 Okay, he is insane, and it’s really cool, it’s actually working out for him, but you know, he’s been an inspiration. But is there something you do every morning? Is it meditation? Is it, is it a wake-up? Is it that you train every day that the rest of the show.

1:33:31 I love the stunts, and people forget. I mean, Branson built his empire on those stunts, and this is before social media, the internet, and all that stuff, so that was really the internet back then. If you had to do something crazy to get the media attention. If you remember back, the Virgin brand was always on those goddamn balloons it was on the boats. So he’s crazy like a fox, right?

1:33:53 Yeah, and so you’re doing the same thing, which is great, and people are grabbing on to it. We got to do more stunts here at London Real, so that’s, guys, more stunts. But no, it’s important that you stand out of the fray, and you love it, and the crazier the better. And again, respect to you, your stunts are no joke. Like, seriously, climbing up and down a road for 24 hours, doing it for two hours is pretty nuts, but for 24, I mean, that’s crazy.

1:34:16 I would love to see that. Yeah, I’m looking forward to that. Amazing, so good. Ross, I always ask everybody here at the end a couple simple questions. I’m curious to hear your answers.

1:34:25 But if you could make a phone call right now and speak to the 20-year-old Ross. So what, 10 years ago, I’m curious what that guy was like. But if you could just give him a few words of advice and say, hey, just look, let me tell you this, do this, you know, maybe he wouldn’t even know it’s you. Just say, follow these 10 words or 20 words. What would you tell him?

1:34:44 Probably very, very similar to your motto, and it’s just probably, just enjoy the journey. I was, I’m, I think a lot I’m in my own head a lot, and I think everything happens for a reason. It sounds a bit cliché, and yeah, just enjoy it, the highs and the lows, just enjoy it, because sometimes when you’re doing it, and the events like the World’s Strongest Marathon, various things like that. My whole water polo career, I was so intense. Sometimes just enjoy it I think would be the best advice.

1:35:15 You’re hard on yourself. Yeah, very hard. Yeah, yeah. So just, yeah, sit back and just enjoy it. Sometimes, you know, don’t be so intense.

1:35:25 You know, try and just appreciate the journey a little bit more, the highs and the lows, and learn from each one, take stock. I’ll go from one stunt to the other, and I’ve always been like that. So it was the same when I was playing, you know, sport. It was there was always something to strive for. Sometimes just be like, just bask in it, you know, enjoy it.

1:35:43 Yeah, it’s good advice. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? Could be from your dad, your mom, a trainer, anybody. Yeah, probably, yeah probably my dad. Going back to what we said, you know, if you do what you love, you never have to work a day in your life, and I think that’s so true.

1:36:00 You know, for anyone, everyone has a passion. Just find it, just find what it is, and then just explore it. It doesn’t matter where it takes you. Just enjoy it. And it’s the same with, I knew I was good at sport and health and fitness and nutrition, and it’s just led me to so many sort of weird places, and I know we spoke in an email about, you know, being out in the Amazon and ayahuasca, which I know you’ve, you know, experienced yourself, and going back to the younger Ross, who did that whole shame and ritual, was very much going back, sort of intense, and just wanted to control everything, and it’s just like, hey, just enjoy it.

1:36:46 Yeah. I think that. And when was your ayahuasca experience? It was about 8 years ago now. Yeah, eight years ago.

1:36:55 And that was what was weird, because going back to what we were saying about drugs, so when they were like hey, look, sat down in the Amazon. I’m sitting there, Carito, who’s the head shaman, turns to me and he says, we’re going to do ayahuasca, and I was like, okay, okay, so. And it’s an initiation to become a shaman and be part of the tribe, the Jamwa tribe, and immediately I was like, whoa, hang on, okay, so drugs so this is drugs, and I’d labeled it, you know, like, wait, hang on, because in my naivety that’s all I sort of knew, and I was very much like, this is black and white, drugs are bad, and you know, this is good, and what was amazing is, during that whole experience, you know, Carito and Alice, who was his daughter and also sort of part chief of the tribe, was like, well, no, you need to understand.

1:37:40 It was all translated, and they said, no, you need to understand that over here, if you take drugs and you can control it, like a man, like a shaman, it’s a good thing. And I was like, okay, but you need to understand where I’m from, drugs are bad, you know. And we had this whole discussion, and it was so eye-opening, but not necessarily in the spiritual sense, and everything because I think I was too close-minded at the time. But one thing I learned, going back to nutrition, was, once I’d taken ayahuasca, I’d taken it, no, with no expectations, no.

1:38:11 I had no idea what was going to happen and I was, oh, this is another good bit of advice, actually. So I’d taken the ayahuasca, and I am sweating. I mean, you’ll know, Brian, I, it’s like someone’s thrown a bucket of water over me. I’m drenched like that, so I remember just sitting there, and I’m just like, oh my, and I’m tasting colors, and my head’s spinning, and I remember just, you have done this, oh, I remember, and I remember just doing this, and I was like, if I just sit here with my head in my hands, I can just sit this out.

1:38:44 So immediately I’m fighting it, and it was later explained to me, Ross, it’s like a roller coaster. Once you’re on, you can’t get off. It will go up, it will go down, but you can’t get off. I was just trying to get off, so I sat there like this and to this day, right, it felt like someone was scratching me, and it was all filmed as well. We did something with the BBC, so I’m sitting there, and I’m on this log on my own, and I feel someone scratching me, and then I keep doing this, cuz I want, I think, one of the shamans, you know, playing around with me so I look, there’s no one there.

1:39:14 This goes on for, honestly, half an hour. I’m just like, and there’s no one there. Of course, you know, it purges your system. I project vomit everywhere, all over myself, and at this point I’m tripping out so bad that I remember thinking, look, there’s got to be a way out of this, you know, there’s got, I need to find a way out of this. There’s got to be an antidote or something.

1:39:37 Exactly, exactly. And my mind’s working over time, so I go to myself, right, Ross, if you lay down in your own sick and pretend to be dead, someone’s got to come over with an adrenaline needle. There’s a medic over there. I bet she’s got an adrenaline needle, very creative. This is exactly it, and that’s what I’m saying.

1:39:53 I’m one up in my head, I’m like, okay, that’s a great idea, Ross, it’s brilliant. No one’s going to think you’re faking this, cuz who lays down in their own sick? So I lay down in my own sick, and then all of a sudden I hear, and I, he, it’s gone wrong, it’s gone wrong, and I’m like, yes, someone’s going to come over there, they’re going to give me an antidote, and it’s going to be fine, Brian. I, my head is pulled up like that, and I look up from where you’re sitting now.

1:40:19 Carito, the 80-year-old shaman looks at me like this, and then goes and wipes his armpit sweat on my face to cool me down while the tribe’s women sing prayers into my head for my soul. I was like, what are you doing? And that was my ayahuasca experience for all the wrong reasons, but I thought he would say he gave you another cup. No, I was like, no. But afterwards, what was amazing is, then he said to me, look, you know, it was explaining to me the roller coaster analogy and everything, and when sober, in the light of day, the harsh light of day, he really explained to me about ayahuasca, and how, you know, void of its calorie content, its fat content, or anything, he just understood how it worked, and that was the same for every single food in the Amazon jungle.

1:41:13 He just understood. His knowledge of ayahuasca plants, various things, was far more advanced than most nutritionists, just because he understood it, even things like looking at it, was like a caiman or like a crocodile, I think it was, and there was a particular part of it that he handed it to me, and he said, you know, I was okay thank you, so I ate it, and then everyone started laughing, and I was like, why is everyone laughing? And they gestured they were like, oh, it’s an aphrodisiac, and I was like, oh, fantastic.

1:41:43 I’m in a jungle, you know, running around with an aphrodisiac now. But it was later explained, and I found out, this very high in zinc. Of course, zinc and magnesium ZMA, one of the best-selling supplements in sports nutrition. Zinc, directly related to healthy testosterone in young males. Had carer read any of those studies?

1:42:01 No, he just understood, and there was that connection with food, the same with everything that he handed to me, you know, everything from the fruit to, you know, the ayahuasca. He kept on explaining. He’d say, you know, hand me mint, and then he’d be rubbing his stomach because I was just sick, and he’d say, well, this has digestive properties. I’m okay, not because he read a study. He just understood.

1:42:22 Yeah, that the CHS down there, they always ask them how they know how to make the ayahuasca. How do you combine this vine and this piece? And they just say jungle told us. You know, the plants told us. So yeah, there’s some high-level knowledge getting floating around there.

1:42:37 It’s not always explained well. I don’t think, have you been back since? Have you had any ceremonies since? No, I would love to do it now, knowing what I know, and I’m so much more open-minded. I mean, that was a 22-year-old, quite close-minded Sports Science graduate who was a little bit kind of, you know, anti, you know, drug, mind-bending drugs and stuff, and it would be amazing to go back.

1:43:04 I didn’t quite realize the experience there when I did it, so yeah, going back would be amazing. I think I’d go with a whole new perspective on things. Sounds like it really opened up your mind. Anyway, so, well, Dan Hardy was just here, and you know, in pure Dan Hardy form, who’s always pushing himself, pushing his limits. He was like, he was doing UFC Fight Night here, and then the next day was going to Peru, and so he’s back there now, I think, yeah, cuz he was going to come to our event, but he’s in Peru.

1:43:29 So much respect to Dan. And yeah, look the whole word, drug, I mean, we could talk for hours about it. It’s fascinating. We had a great episode with Dr Carl Hart here, who is a fantastic scientist out of Columbia, who talks about drugs in a way that most people aren’t used to them. He actually has a great TED Talk, saying, let’s stop abusing drug users, and it’s a great way of looking at this word, drug, and what we call it, and what we, it is.

1:43:54 And, again, so many people when they think of, say, crack cocaine, they think of the movie New Jack City and the way that Chris Rock looked when all that happens and what they showed him doing. But that’s actually a Hollywood version of what that does, and you know, Carl Hart’s like, look, a lot of people use cocaine regularly, and they don’t become addicts. So he said, let’s be honest about this with our children, with everyone, about the effects of these things, and let’s not, let’s stop making these things, these things, and these things, that thing, because that affects ultimately your view of ayahuasca, because you’ve been a whole life you’ve been shocked, because we like to shock our kids.

1:44:25 Don’t touch that, it’s evil and bad, and then when it comes to an ayahuasca plant medicine that probably did you some good, you’ll be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, my mommy taught me that’s bad, and so all comes out the language. We talk about it a lot on London Real. You’re so right, and that’s it, just becoming the first generation to just say, hey, we don’t know, let’s just question everything, let’s be that first generation, rather than prescribing drugs are bad, this is good, that’s black and white.

1:44:49 It’s not. Yeah, to be continued the human race will always, I think, struggle with these things called drugs, and we will always consume them. Yeah Carl Hart always says there will never be a drug-free America, nor would you want one. So, but that’s another thing to be discussed. Last question of the advice, one is this, and it’s actually curious that you’re here, because Dan Peña gets this question asked a lot, and he gets a lot of males, you know, a lot of males watch our show.

1:45:13 He gets a lot of males that ask him, and a lot of them are drawn to personal training, and they’re always like, can I make a career at this? So I want to ask you, to the 20-year-old that’s listening, that says you know, what, I just got into fitness. I want to be like Ross, you know, I want to be, you know, a personal trainer. I want to be like Elliot Hulse, be like more like Ido, you know, but they want to make this their business. They want to, you know, turn it into something that can make money.

1:45:33 What advice do you give to them? Because it’s not simple to do. It’s a crowded space in some ways. What do you say? Good question.

1:45:42 I think that fitness is just this crazy broad term, and so many people are just like, I want to be a personal trainer, and they just have this huge broad spectrum, whereas, again, too many personal trainers and fitness experts don’t specialize, and then are afraid to say, I just don’t know. So I’m sort of speed, strength, hypertrophy, power. I’m quite well versed in there. There are much better people when it comes to endurance, and so when I’m faced with a question on social media and someone says, hey, you know, I’m going to run my first Ironman.

1:46:16 What shall I do? I’m the first to say, oh okay, you know, maybe check out, you know, the Iron Cowboy. Huge fan of his. Timothy Olson, ultramarathon runner, and I’ll send them there. There’s nothing wrong with that.

1:46:25 There’s nothing wrong with saying I don’t know, you know, sometimes as well, I’ll get, what, what kind of crosses over to medical advice, and they’re saying, oh, hey, you know, I’ve got this wrong with me, that wrong with me, and I’m like, okay, well, go see a chiropractor. I don’t, I don’t know Too many people, because they’re self-proclaimed experts, or they’ve had expert labeled on them, they feel that they want to sit there, and they want to give an answer, because if they don’t give an answer, then it’s like, a, he doesn’t know, he’s not an expert. Just be honest.

1:46:53 There’s nothing wrong with saying I don’t know. Great question, let’s try and find out together. I don’t know. So to go back to the, the answer to, to the 20-year-old sitting there thinking, I want to be a personal trainer, great, find your niche, whatever that is. I’ve just been with the Cambridge rowing team actually, the captain, Luke Jet, amazing, studying physiology, unbelievable rower, and he’s like, well, what can I do with it?

1:47:16 I’m like, well, that’s amazing. You’ve got this, like, insane rowing capability, and you’re studying physiology. Let’s go down that that. Find your niche and specialize in it, and become the very best personal, whatever it is. Elliot Hulse is an amazing strength coach, but he’s also this unbelievable motivator of people.

1:47:36 You know, other people are slightly more insular and what they do, and just, you know, they just, through their own achievements, just managed to do so. So just find, just be yourself, find what it is, and excel at it. Yeah, it’s such a massive industry that there’s so much room for all these niches, and they intersect, they, they, they collide, they do all these things, but it’s a big space. I mean I’ve had, you know, probably 25 fascinating people talk about fitness here, and I agree, find your niche, and then just be it, and be genuine about what you love.

1:48:07 Yeah, and it’s a great advice. We say, try not to, you know, if you don’t know the answer, to show someone else. You know, Elliot was here, and he was the first one to say that, like, Brian, I got really big, and now people are asking me pickup questions, and he’s like, and I answered them, and he’s like, the problem is sometimes, is, you know, you get into this state where it’s like Elliot knows everything. Like, ran, I went down this rabbit hole where I’m telling people about pickup, and I’m telling people about this and how do they manage their money?

1:48:29 And he’s like, it gets crazy, and he’s like, I had to pull myself back from that. Oh yeah. So, it’s, it’s, I think it’s a constant battle. Try to know when to stop, and when to, you know, open up to is exactly that: help people, but know, you know, when you’re out of your depth and just pass them on to someone else. There’s nothing wrong with that, you know, and just, yeah, say hang on, and Then the same on that as well.

1:48:49 I just think too many people now, because of the way that fitness is going, they think that, you know, taking a selfie, getting a six-pack, looking. So many fitness models now, they look so generic. It’s like they turned out of a factory. Whereas when I was at L Bruni, you know, there would be guys in amazing shape, but they were specific to what they did. So you’d get, like, Liam Tancock, world record holder, 50 meter backstroke, was amazing, like sinewy, lean, and unbelievable for what he did.

1:49:16 But then you’d look over there, and Johnny Wilkinson would just walk in on the bench looking stacked, not shredded, but big and functional for rugby, and then you’d look over there and you’d see the sprinters putting up some insane, like, plyometric jumps, looking sinewy. Everything, their power-to-weight ratio was amazing, but it was functional to what they did. I kind of feel, let’s get back to that. You know, your body used to tell a story about you, whereas now it’s just like, you all look like you just sort of come out of a factory.

1:49:47 There’s another one, there’s another one. Whereas people sometimes, when they meet me, you know, I look like a tiny little hobbit who’s not bad at endurance, and I’m cool with that, and it’s like, find what you do. Nothing wrong with it. Yeah, good advice. And when I see your pictures on Instagram, I actually don’t think you look like a hobbit.

1:50:06 You know, so, yeah, it’s really good. You said every, your body used to tell a story about you. I think that’s a fascinating way to look at it. I like that, I like that. Ross, it’s been a huge pleasure having you here.

1:50:18 Oh, nice. You know, the internet doesn’t do you justice. No one sat you down for a proper conversation. You’re a fascinating guy. You’re very, very well-read, you know, a lot of stuff.

1:50:29 You’re a humble guy, but you’re also a great promoter. You know the value of self-promotion, and you go for it and do these big things, so I think a lot of people can learn from the fact that you own that space. You know, I, I just, I don’t, I don’t have a lot of time for people that want to build a business but then don’t put in the work, you know, to tell people about it. But like I said, there’s no good media view out there of you actually talking about real stuff.

1:50:50 So yeah, honestly, and like I said, been a massive fan for ages. and this is probably the first sort of interview where I’ve sat down and just spoke. I think through my social media, a lot of my followers who get to know me, know what I stand for and stuff like that, but this is the first one. So honestly, I, Brian, I can’t thank you enough. This has been amazing.

1:51:08 Dude, our pleasure. I always like people who have new ideas, open-minded to things, who like learning from all the people here. So really glad we booked this. To be continued. You’re a gentleman, as we, oh yeah, go ahead.

1:51:20 23rd of April, come down. Yeah, where is it? We’ll get another rope for you. Okay, yeah, Jesus, no, I would love to. I’d love to see this, and let us know.

1:51:28 We’re going to, we’re going to tell people about this. I love the idea, yeah, if you can climb a rope, that’s insane. So okay, I’m doing my math, with my MIT brain. So no, that’s awesome, Ross. As we say in London Real, it’s about the journey, you know, that.

1:51:42 It’s fascinating to hear about your ayahuasca experience at 22. It makes a lot of sense to where you are now. You should go see her sometime in the next couple years, maybe. Maybe I’ll come with you. I’m do back.

1:51:52 And no, it’s about the journey. I wish you well on yours. To be continued, but thanks so much for your time. Oh, you’re not thank you, thank you, and now I introduce you to