 Welcome back to the School of Caste, it's Tim, Jack and me, our special guest, we'll ask Edgy with us, and before we sit down to eat a massive rack of ribs courtesy of, I guess today's podcast sponsor, Athlete. They don't know, but they've given us such a good product, we've attributed and dedicated our podcast this evening and YouTube today to Athlete, so we'll put some details up for them because they've hooked us up. If you look, we'll post some photos because there is a significant amount of beef which is going to get eaten around his table in about an hour. You killed the dinosaur! I don't even know what has ribs like that! I'm excited. Now I'm sure every single person watching this will know exactly what Ross of some of the incredible things he's done, the journey he's been on as an athlete, adventurer, as you call yourself now. Listen, is there anybody else in the world who names themselves as an athlete, adventurer? I think it's a bit weird. Do you think I do? I like it. Before this goes out! Yeah, because it's weird, isn't it? It's kind of a hybrid. I'm not an adventurer, I always say that there's not going to be mountains named after me, but equally I'm not going to be at the Olympics. I don't think you and Bear Grills are a fight. I don't think it's money on him, he's a badass! He's got knife skills! He's actually had special forces! Yes, exactly! What am I going to do with my left-wing degree? But for the one person watching that might not know who Ross of the year is, give us the fast version of your journey, particular fitness and whatnot, to get to this point. Yeah, so real short, I used to swim and play water polo internationally, but built like a hobbit, so a five foot nine. My coach was like, Ross, you need to grow or find another sport. What sort of age are you when you're doing that? So yeah, I was playing internationally in the men's squad at 16, and I'm still waiting for my growth spurt now. And you ended the call-up. Exactly! I never got the call-up and I never grew, so I ended up studying sports science. So I just became very round, and yeah, studied sports science, love university, and kind of really became fascinated with how you could manipulate your physiology. Kind of very similar to you guys, you know, sports background, but then you wanted to look at the systematic strength and conditioning of the human body, like human optimization, basically. And then I started doing that, but then I just kind of got a little bit bored with conventional sport. So then I ended up, as you guys know, a random marathon, pulling a car, climbed a rope at the height of Everest, and then it's just, it keeps getting weirder every year. And then so last year, well, Swam, I was going to swim from Martinique St. Lucia, which is 40 kilometers, towing 100 pound tree. The currents were so bad, and I couldn't find the beach. I ended up swimming 100 kilometers with 100 pound tree, and I still couldn't find the beach. But I found out a lot about the human body in the process. So that's good, that's kind of it, and that's why I always say athlete adventurer, because it's, you're not just an adventurer, but you're also exploring your body. That's a little bit weird. No, no, no, I'm sorry. I know, we do a lot of body exploration, like we're the same sort of thing in terms of the calisthenics is like, well, what can I do? Like, what am I going to do to be able to achieve that? Like, you're, you have a penchant for ridiculous endurance events, like Jack and I less so. But I think it's the process of exploration of understanding of, like, actually, I want to do something which I don't know if I can do, but I want to go through the process to understand how, and along that way, you go, actually, not it's not hard, but you just enjoy the, for me, I enjoy the problem solving nature of it. And I think ours we get quite geeky about, like, leave a lens and wait distribution, that sort of stuff. I think yours is probably more around, like, understanding the psychology and the conditioning component. And like, some of the stuff I've seen you, you, you talked about, you've done, like, right back, some of the things I'm quite interested to go back to beginning is like, you've traveled to some quite interesting places. And how those sorts of things came about, you've spent time with, with some really interesting people and a lot of that knowledge kind of shaped how you think. So there's that sort of stuff that I think it shapes you as an athlete adventure, but then also, like, I see you crawling across mudflats because you, like, want to make good content, right? But too, like, you're doing that because you're, you're exploring some of the most brutal ways in which you can develop mental toughness to give you the skills that you need to go and achieve these incredible feats of athleticism. That's such a good point, because I think for, for so long, sports science felt that your physiology was the limiting factor. So we'd look at you and go, right, let's take, you know, a marathon, for instance, it'll be like, right, we have been a monitor. What your potential marathon time will be, we'll look at lactic threshold VO2, power to weight ratio, all of these sorts of things, running biomechanics, everything. And at the end, we'll go, right, okay, cool. You can run, you know, three hours, you know, some two hours. Yeah, yeah, what a record. You know, you are physically capable. But that was always looking at physiology. And then what I found really interesting Tim notes in the central governor theory, but there's been a lot of research on it, was saying that fatigue is an emotionally driven state that basically gets you to kind of like, pull the handbrake a little bit because it's going, whoa, this is horrible. You know, don't do, don't do yourself damage. And we'd have all experienced this, if you have run a marathon or you know, even like 10k or anything like that, you'll all know that there becomes a point where you're like, Oh my God, I can't go on. This is horrible. This is absolutely killing me. But you know, when you get to the finish line, and all of a sudden your family's there, and your kids cheering you on, and you know, exactly, all of a sudden, you know, you are using both your biomechanics change, you know, you are upright, you know, your cadence, all of a sudden. And it's like, well, where did that come from? And it's because your brain was telling you, whoa, hold up, hold up, you know, and it was just it's self preservation. You know, your brain is telling your body, Oh, this is horrible. Don't go on. And what's amazing is I found when you look at people like Emil Zatterpeck, so widely considered to be the greatest endurance athlete ever, winning two gold medals, one Olympics, Helsinki, I think it was, never ran a marathon before. So I think it was the 10,000 he'd already ran. And he, I do a terrible check, I sense, I apologize for any of your checklists, but he was like, he goes, look, it turns to discussion, because I want to run marathon, and they were like, but you've never run a marathon before. But he came from a military background. And he was just like, no, but I know how to run. And I know how to just like be comfortable in the hurt locker. And they were like, well, what do you propose to do? And he goes, look, he goes, show me who's going to win. And the favorite, and I will sit on his shoulder and I will overtake him at the end. It's simple. And then we're just like, but you've never kept it. Yeah, they were like, all right, fine. And that's exactly what he did. It was a British guy, sat on his shoulder. And it's amazing, this British guy. And he was amazing. I forget his name now. It's going to annoy me, but the British guy, he's, you know, he's old now. And there was this, this video when he was looking back, talking about a meal, Zatterpeck, and he was very, very sort of English gentleman. And he said, he goes, I never forget. He goes, I was running. And I was, you know, really struggling. And a meal Zatterpeck came up on my shoulder. And he said, he goes, I have never run marathon. Isn't it the Olympic game? And he goes, I don't know, because is this, is this good? Is it too slow? And I, and the English guy goes, I thought you, you bugger. I'm going to stitch you up here. So he said, so I turned to him and I said, Oh no, you know, a meal, this is far too slow. You know, they're going to catch us behind. And with that, a meal Zatterpeck turned to him and he goes, okay, no problem. I see you had finished. And he did. And he, a meal Zatterpeck went on and on and won it. But it was because of his military background. And a meal Zatterpeck was also known for pioneering interval training. So he used to run 100, 400 meter sprints. Yeah. So when you next think about hill sprints and everything, think of a meal Zatterpeck and just taking it to that level. His wife was a renowned javelin throw as well. And one of their favorite workouts that they used to do for fun, she would launch a javelin and he, like a dog would run and go and catch it and hand it back to her. That was for fun. He used to run in military boots. So like in terms of the biomechanics and understanding four foot placement, heel striking, everything like that. He used to just run in military boots. So the one thing about meals Zatterpeck, and I think this is one thing that I try to do, is he just understood how to hurt and be comfortable. And I think if you can do that, it doesn't matter what your sport, you know, you trying to break a world record for a handstand and you trying to hold a, you know, the human flag for the longest hour, you running a marathon, are you doing an ultramarathon, are you doing an Ironman, doesn't matter if you know how to hurt and just get comfortable being uncomfortable, you know, you can potentially win any sport. There's a lot in that, like what we talk about redefining your impossible, like a lot of the things that you're trying to do, people will say is impossible and your body shouldn't be able to do it. And I'm still looking at your arms and I'm going, how are they that big when all you do is swing. We were best swing and I've done for quite a number of years and I know the sets that the guys do and they're not trying to swim the distances you're trying to swim, but I know a guy who's a 1500 meter swimmer, Graham Smith, who won a medal in Atlanta. And he, his total volume for a week would be sort of like, maybe, I don't know, they were doing 10K, maybe pushing up towards 100, like you're pushing volumes similar to what the guys would be to go and swim 1500 meters at the Olympics. And our guys are maybe going to do a week and they might hit half the volume that you're training, but they're training for 400 meters. So you then start to argue about specificity and that sort of stuff, but still like the amount of volume that you're able to pack in is impressive. What was the first one? Was it the carpool? Was that the first? It was. Yeah. And I think what inspired that? Well, essentially work capacity. So, you know, within the book, coming out to have to make a so glad you asked. So within the book, we were talking about this earlier that I do systematically identify laws that every athlete should do. And one is, is the law of more. So work capacity, your body's ability to perform and positively tolerate training of a given intensity and duration. And it doesn't matter if that is, you know, marathon training and powerlifting. It doesn't matter. It's just, you know, your body's ability to just go, yeah, you know, I can cope with that and positively adapt. You know, if we all again were training for an ultra marathon, 100 mile ultra marathon, and we had a month to do it, and we all set off and ran a marathon tomorrow just to give us a good start, you know, some of us would just be on the sofa afterwards going, what was that? I mean, pieces and other people would be like, I hurt, but I can recover and go again. And I think, yeah, this idea of work capacity and the law of more is just, you know, your body's ability to perform, but positively tolerate it. But looking at ways to do that, it's not just about throwing stimuli at the body. And one thing that I've always found is with swimming, with the world's strongest marathon, it's looking at something of like work capacity and crazy volume, but it's actually a lot of concentric contractions. So if you think of swimming for the lads, it's all a concentric contraction. There's nothing eccentric. It's not like when you're running, if you're running downhill and you're quads in the house. Exactly. And it's exactly the same with sled drags. You know, it's all concentric contractions and pulling a car is just a very large sled drag. So after 26.2 miles of pulling a 1.4 tonne car, everyone was like, oh, you must have been in pieces afterwards. And it was like, no, because it was all concentric contractions. And because I developed over those 10 weeks a way of training, that I was absolutely fine. You trained 10 weeks for that? Yeah. And then the day after, just ran a half marathon as well, just to sort of about my own curiosity. Just was like, yeah, I was like, oh no, my legs still work. And I think it's the same with swimming, that yes, it is a lot of volume. And when people go, that's crazy. I'm like, yeah, but it would be very different if I was running it. You know, I'm sort of 95 kilos built like a hobbit. If I'm running downhill, my legs, you know, just that eccentric contraction, the impact, you know, going from each foot, you put about three times your own body weight for each foot. So going downhill, it's just like, you know, on a big descent, that's like doing 200 eccentric squats. And that's a recipe for disaster. But with swimming, especially long distance, it's all aerobic, you know, never out of breath. It's all concentric contractions. So looking at something like training for three hours and smashing, you know, sort of 15K, people go, whoa, that's crazy. I'm like, but when you actually look at the science of that 15K, low impact, non weight-bearing, concentric, all aerobic. Yeah. I've got a thing about swimming that I'm interested from mindset perspective. But I quite, I've never done a lot of swimming. And then when I started working with the Paralympic team, I, um, we were on training camps and there's obviously 50 meters, there's long course 50 meter swimming pools there. And I was like, I'm going to start swimming because I don't really know what these guys are going through. And I've not conditioned for it at all. And what I found was from, like, I'm not really the right shape of swimming, like you, but I'm just a smaller version, obviously. But like the elite swimmers that I see that just don't have a swim, they're not the same build. But I thought I'm going to give this a go. But I was so deconditioned for it that I was like, I would swim 25 meters and my lats and my shoulders were a bit, but I kind of pushed through it. My first set was like, I'm going to do a thousand meters. That is like, what I'm going to be like. And that was like hard. And then I was, I was training with a girl that actually done a lot of swimming, used to be a very good swimmer. She said, let's do a kick set. And I literally couldn't kick 25 meters from my hip flexors room, but he started going, well, actually, like, I've never trained like that. My, my sports background was all field based. But you realize how badly conditioned you are for some of these sorts of tasks. But I got better at it. But I remember like, I was actually, I was with some long course for the first time of 15 years. And I was with one of the guys who was the head coach at the time was, was the next very high level international level swimmer. And I was like, I did long course today. And he goes, it's, it's awful, isn't it? I was like, yeah, I got halfway. And I was like, I told Kara, my wife and I was like, I can't swim long course for the first time to get shot. Do you go to Woodson? I thought you're flipping kidding. Like, I had to arrest when I got to the end. But it really made me realize that I read at the same time I was reading a book by Chris McDonnell, I think I've got a name right called natural born heroes. And it came to this idea to blog about it around hero training. And if I needed to swim for my life, could I? And I was like, no, like I would drown. So having this like this base level of the sorts of things that you're able to do is like, you can do triathlon, you can swim, you can pull a car. Like I think that having that athletic ability and diversity in your training, and you can bench press out as much you've got strength training in there is a thing that we can learn a lot from. I look at my training go, I'm missing a massive part of it. And there's a number of different reasons. We can't do everything all the time because of circumstance. But I do think that you take it to the extreme. But what your general sort of person like who's just involved in fitness, having that rail, that foundation of different attributes, and that's something that we should cover in your book, about actually going back to first principles of fitness. Tell us a bit about it because there's some amazing information in there. Like what's the concept behind it? And what are you trying, what's the big sort of message you try to get across? It's very similar because I know we all, we geek out when we all catch up. It's basically I was sitting there going, how could you systematically train the body, human body? So I wanted to create almost like a user's guide for the body. It's like you're given a body, how do you use it? And I don't know, we were talking about this, Jacqui, like so many people when they're in the gym, you know, they'll go in and they'll kind of go, oh, yeah, I'm going to do bicep curls. Oh, no, I forgot to squat. I forgot to do my legs. Oh, cool. You're on the, on the cross-training out of the cross-training. Air bike, wee. And it's just like on a cellular level, what signal are you trying to send your body to adapt to? And this is all over the place. And so it was really to bring some clarity. A lot of what's in the book, I mean, human biology hasn't changed for thousands of years. We've known about this, you know, the laws of thermodynamics when you start looking at your diet, you know, macronutrients, it's all been there, but no one's ever put it into this framework, a cohesive framework. And so with this, I want to say it's like a literary buffet in that like, once you read it, you can go, I want to get strong, brilliant. There's a whole chapter. Andy Bolton, the first guy to deadlift £1,000 helped me write that chapter. I want to get quick, you know, next month, you know, we were saying, have a clear direction. Cool. I documented everything that I learned from Linford Christie to Lovebury University and everything, you know, there is no better coach really than someone like Linford Christie. I want to learn about endurance, brilliant. It documents all of my time with the Sand Bushman where we were running in Africa over an ultra marathon a day. And then I came back as well and started to learn from a lot of fel runners like my friend, James Atherton, who's world obstacle racing champion. So it's like you've taken like this melting pot of genius, which says, I know what we always get on. That's what we throw around. I'm like, imagine if you could just create an athlete who understood body weight conditioning, like you guys, endurance, like the Sand Bushman, you know, and compile that all into a book. And for 10 years, like I said, it's taken me 10 years. I think it was all well. You said, you know, how dare you sit down and write when you haven't stood up and lift. And so that's why people love it. Why is it taking you 10 years? And I'm like, because that's, I mean, when I handed it in, it was 200,000 words and they were like, this is ridiculous. We commissioned you for 70. And I was like, well, I've got a lot to say. So we've had to completely, you know, sort of get it down and condense it into this, this framework. But, and this is certainly how I came to learn about you guys at the very start, that if you, if you imagine a pyramid of priority, as I call them, so this hierarchical way to run your body, so it doesn't matter if you've got this strength, speed, stamina, there'll always be something at the base of your pyramid that you should start with. So we were talking about this because, you know, for those listening and probably seeing on videos, Tim possesses an unbelievable hand spam pushup. It's just obscene. So to get strong, it's like, what must you do? But then you were saying that your military press, it felt a bit weird and a bit different. So absolutely in terms of that strength, pyramid of priority, strength is a skill. People don't realize that you have to drill the movement. There's no point putting loads of weight on the bar when you're just drilling bad biomechanics. If you've got good genetics and raw strength, you might be able to muscle your way through certain movements, but there'll be kind of a time when you just completely platter. And it starts to look at then work capacity. So again, coming back to the fact that, okay, if we're designing a program for you, and we say, right, you want to get good on deadlifts, cool, you know, 10 sets of 10 during the volume training, and then all of a sudden your body's going, well, what was that? It's like we didn't have the work capacity to tolerate that. And then we even covered that today when we were talking about there will be a point where neurologically you're recruiting all the muscle fibers, we've all seen it to put it in sort of simple terms, you know, those sort of quite lean smaller guys who are insanely strong climbers. Exactly. Climbers is the best example. You know, neurologically, they're recruiting all of their muscle fibers, you know, possible, and they are like stupidly strong. And then they'll get, you know, some guys are huge, but not very strong in proportion to how big they are. And that's all around their strength deficit. And there becomes a point where if you are looking to get stronger, if you can honestly say like neurologically, I'm using my full potential of my muscles, then muscular hypertrophy is your sort of only other option. You need to get bigger. It's like almost like you need a bigger engine in your car. Yeah. Just as simple as that. And again, I think what's nice about the book is it gets people to think outside of that. So, you know, hypertrophy is not, it's not a bad word, you know, boy, it's bodybuilding. I'm trying to get bigger so I can get stronger at, you know, body weight conditioning. That's that's all. It doesn't make me a bodybuilder. And we were just talking about this as well. Yeah, people like wanting labels. I mean, that's probably going to be a little bit too deep outside of fitness. So people wanting to like, we almost want to label like I'm a bodybuilder or I'm a calisthenics or I'm this, I'm that. And now I live and I play rugby, I was like, I'm a rugby player. And it's like, well, what happens when that's taken away? And that's not the, what's the reason? What's the why behind your training? You're doing what you're doing? It was, you know, one of my first questions I'd feel like, why, like these crazy things you're doing, like, why are you doing like, what's the reason behind it? It's the same question that the example you gave in the, of someone in the gym going from one thing to the next thing. And then I was a squad that they don't know. They don't know why they're the only way they're going. Yeah. Like, what's the reason for it? I remember a guy he had, he reminded me of being, when I was looking for a two training, and there's a guy done like a massive chest bench session before the day before, and then he wanted to come to the gym with us and he was like, oh, he didn't, oh, he didn't chest as well. He's like, yeah, I'll do chest as well. It's just like day to day back to back, just the, the why was like, the why was because my mates are doing that session. Yeah. Yeah. Not like I'm trying to, he was a rugby player. It was a hard bit. It's like he should have been trying to improve himself physically for the, for that purpose. But it was sort of lost. And I think a lot of us, we all go through that. And I think as a general sort of, if I'm, if I'm just, I'm not professional athlete, I'm just like my training. And I know it's good for me to work out and stay fit and healthy. Like having, having understanding why you're doing it and what are your sort of goals and what's good to have goals. Like, that can really help sort of not just motivate you, but channel your energy and your time and, and so you're being effectively training. But yeah, I think, you know, on, on the idea of actually, you know, being so easily influenced and jumping from one thing to the other and understanding like, you know, am I a bodybuilder? Am I a sprinter? And I think that's what's so nice about the book. It was so heavily influenced by Ralph Wildo Emerson and who, one of my favourite quotes is, you know, if you teach a man principles, he can create his own methods. And I think there are so many methods out there, diet plans and workouts that you are expected to, to blindly follow. Like, you know, to use, you know, gym volume training, you know, five by five. And, you know, these are all methods. They're great. But if you learn principles, so as we were talking about, let's stick with, you know, increasing muscle mass. So, you know, the three principles and increasing muscle mass, you know, hypertrophy, mechanical tension, metabolic stress and muscle damage. If you learn those three principles, it doesn't matter about the workout because you understand how to actually create your own. I think we probably frustrate people sometimes because we get a lot of questions. And when you come from an SNC background and you've developed programmes, you've always got that goal at the end of sort of working towards something and it's a season long or for us, it's actually four years long is this cycle that we're prepping for. And people are like, should I do this exercise or should I do that? Or how should I go about training for a handstand? And we're like, well, depends what you want. And there's so many times we have questions going, well, the answer is it depends. And you feel bad because you want to give them a really simple answer. I want to tell you, but the truth is like it depends. We can't hide that even though it's frustrating to hear that probably. Yeah, it's exactly that. So again, you know, he was an economist, but one of my favourite authors, Nassim Talib, you know, one of my favourite quotes of his was, you know, as humans facing limited knowledge or as a result of prescribed ideas and narratives. And it's so true. He didn't mean that for fitness at all. But it's so true as humans facing limited knowledge. So when we don't really understand how to train, how to diet, we resort to these prescribed ideas and narratives. So we just want to be told, oh, that's the workout I'm doing today. But that's just not how it works. It's not optimal. You know, it will be like a comfort blanket. And you'll go like, oh, yeah, you know, I'll just follow this diet. But you don't understand the principles. So it will come unstuck. Don't you think that our access to information today, like technology and our fingertips and the prevalence of people's voices, but also the medium in which people have got it easy for people to communicate has just completely clouded up. There would have been a time back in the day when we didn't have social media and the internet, where if you wanted to learn how to get bigger, you had to go and go to the library and get a book and read about it, or go and speak to somebody in the gym. You didn't have, you might have one, you might have gone to the biggest dude in the gym and gone to help me to get bigger, or the thinnest person, whatever you were trained for, the best marathoner. Tell me what you've done. And that person would have taken one of them and to be fair, that was probably some of where the bro size started to come from. But actually, you were indoctrated or you were following one person's thought process, which actually probably yielded quite good results. But whereas now you can follow, well, a limited number of different people's ideas and people have interpreted fitness and they're what their theories are around it. So all of us, and I think it's become a massively complicated thing. And that's what we've tried to do with our framework is gone. These are the principles that you need to understand if you're going to learn any calisthenics movement. So you need to prepare for the session you're going to do. You're going to teach yourself the skill component. You've got to get specifically strong and you've got to build that engine of capacity, strength. It doesn't matter if it's a pistol, a squat or muscle, same principles. And then you've just got to be, there's a little bit of art in that about which exercises you're going to use and understanding what your body is currently able to do and where your weak links are. You may have kind of performed on my shoulders. I was actually reflecting on the way Heron a little bit about it. And I was going, I started to learn to handstand because I've got a bad shoulder and because it dislocated and I had surgery on it. And it was, that was the meanest. The reason was if I can handstand my shoulder stable. The irony of that is, and I think it's probably from a lot of cases, yours is probably similar, but you then turn that into your biggest strength. That's the thing I'm best at. It's actually started with the thing that I was weakest at when I began. I just think that that's probably aside from the point of the exposure. We've got some massive amount of information that people get confused and they don't actually know what to do anymore. That's what I love about your book is you've gone back to first principles of fitness. Because it's not, these things aren't black and white. Like there's more than one way to get strong, for example. And in the past, before the incident, before the incident, before social media, if you were going to read something, it was published, paper, no one can just write what they want and it get passed by through to actually go into print. So there's been, there's been like a consensus that this information is valid and therefore it's been published in a research paper, for example. Whereas now I can write a blog and I can write whatever I want. It could be a little touch, but people might believe me. And it makes it more, it's already confusing without that and then it just makes it so much more... But there are countless examples of people that are putting out information like that and they sound like they talk the talk. But when actually, when you look at it and we've benefited from a number of years in the game, you've actually got some context to put that under. It looks convincing, but you dig into it and you're like, I don't know, this is, I'm not sure. And we have to challenge ourselves and go, well maybe you're seeing things differently. What can I learn from that? And you are constantly critiquing as we do with research papers. But there are some things that, and that's why as I go back to what I like, what you've put in the book, is actually nobody in sports science is going to argue. And actually you've gone back and gone, yeah, these are the laws and the principles that we need to follow if you're going to create a physical adaptation with the level of understanding that we currently have about human body. Not to say that's not going to change and we can't tweak it. But those things, like you say, have been around for a long time. They've been trial and tested by athletes in all different endeavors, sports, recreation, whatever. Stick to those. And the thing is, a lot of the extreme cases, like you're an extreme case of what you would do, but for 99% of people, actually we just need to follow some really simple basic principles. And they're all the same. That's what I find as well, that the laws that I've identified in the book have been around for thousands of years. So it doesn't matter if you want to take them to the extreme like me, so the law of more and work capacity, it will be exactly the same for a beginner. And we address that in the book. So I say, if you're a beginner, amazing. I was like, oh my God, I'd love to be a beginner. Because can you remember, every week you put on muscle, your bench press would just go up, like you didn't 5kg, your rate of improvement was this. And we say that. But again, pyramid of priority within the book, like to take strength as an example. As you move up, so you've learned the skill, you have the work capacity, you have the adequate amount of muscle mass. And we start moving up. That's when you can start to look at bands, chains, looking at greater force development. And you can start to get real creative with this. But that's at the top of the priority. You can't do this until you've got the base of the pyramid set. And it's exactly the same with everything. But I love what you said there too. And that's what I said about the book that I want to create an army of experts, not followers, because you will be your own best expert. So looking at Eugene Sandow, the father of bodybuilding, if you've ever read any of his books, it's written in sort of ye olde English. So it's kind of hard to follow and stuff. But what's amazing, and I've sat through so many pages of it, and that's covered in the book, but he believed in just self-empowerment. And I'm going to butcher it. But he talks about this one point where he says, you know, I used to often ask to, you know, when thy best time to train and, you know, when the moon sets in the sky. And it goes off on one. But basically saying, I'm often asked when the best time to train is. And then he starts going off on one, but he's intricately talking about hormones and the circadian rhythm and your body's 24 hour biological clock. Now your circadian rhythm, everything in the physiological, everything like this, and how testosterone is higher in the morning dips in the, we all understand that now. But what Eugene Sandow was talking about, an 18th century strongman, the father of bodybuilding was still true. It's exactly the same. We've just got nice terms now and we'll apply it and you can see it. And so I'm really clever. But it doesn't mean that, you know, what Eugene was describing was exactly the same. And what I love about the book and what I encourage everybody to do is, Aristotle, he basically, the term is an epistemic. And it's, it's, he wanted everybody to hold knowledge, including their own in such kind of suspicion, you know, so just question everything, be a critical thinker. And at the end of the book, I say, you know, question this book, question me, question yourself, question everyone. Because that's the only way that you'll, you know, ask questions. I bet your best students are those who say, like, why? Yeah, why am I doing this? Because you go, oh, you know, let me tell you why. And that's what I want from, from this book that there are workouts in there. There's workouts for every single goal you could ever want to achieve. Lose fat, you know, the recipes are amazing, you know, to build muscle, develop speed, improve endurance. But the reality is, once you've read all 320 pages of it, you can actually write your own. And that's what I want people to do. I'm like, this is, here is a workout, but please adapt it to your own biological individuality. That's what we do all the time. We've always been fighting with our, like, like we'll, and you see it with all the graduates and we love, we love them when they come through and they've learned the thing that they're working towards, the goal they've set themselves there impossible. And the guys to take people through them, some people find it difficult that we haven't actually just gone on day one, you do this and day two, this and three of this, because it's just not realistic. We have no, everyone's day one is different and everyone progresses at a different rate. So trying to educate people to be able to like understand, like you say, understand the why and what you're doing and then be able to write your own program. I think some people think, oh, well, I paid you to write it. Actually giving you the information to write your program, this one and the next one, and through infinity, isn't that worth more than just having one that runs out into it? Yeah. Well, it was on week number seven. Yeah. So we always, if you don't know, if you don't know how to say, if you haven't got the ability to write your own training program, you haven't got the principles, you can't create your own methods, actually then just become reliant. And I think that's part of the problem. I get it, I understand why people are like. I totally get it, get a bit frustrated by that. Yeah. But you tend to see them to jump around a little bit. And actually, I think if you, if you took, if people took a little bit of time to read, you've written it really well, like anybody could pick that up and read. You don't have to be a sports scientist to read a book. Not to look at the pictures, it's Lexie Day. But if people took the time to educate themselves in a way which is, which is easily accessible, you've still got the option to go around and go, which training modality do I like? I like your style, I like what you're trying to teach. It might be calisthenics, it might be bodybuilding, it might be powerlifting. But when you're in that, you're actually understanding the bigger picture of where that sits. There's one thing I just want to touch on about what you're talking about, like 18th century people talking about bodybuilding. I look back at the, at this, the old circus strong man. And like we've seen some photos of calisthenics back in like the early 1900s, late 80s, just those dudes were huge. We've seen pictures of these guys with probably 15, 16, 17 stone and the one guy doing a single arm handstand on top of his other mate, who was about 18 stone. And the only reason he's on the bottom is because he's a stone lighter. But he's not a small dude. Like, and we just look at him, we're going like people got strong, people were functional. And yeah, we, because there's probably a much bigger context to that, but they arguably knew less, but did more with it. Whereas we know loads. I think I, I even, I over complicate my training sometimes. I don't train hard enough because I'm like, I'm doing this complicated thing. Like I don't, and I don't put enough work in sometimes to get. And then I go, I'm changing, but actually there's two basic principles do work, train intensity. You're challenged by that today, aren't you? I've been on set with Ross and then I'm like, I've wasted 10 years. Why am I not even bigger? Oh yeah, that's right. He's been trying to apply you to a friend here, five, but he said, five more. We're just doing this crocs there, we're in Tim's face, Tim had squeezed out his last breath and Ross went behind him and went, five more. And then collapsed on his face. At that point I was doing handstands on, sorry, I was doing push-ups on my knees. But you were so right, and that is, again, within the book, the law of progressive overload. And I detailed that, and I wrote that entire chapter from the Royal Marines as well, that was just the one thing that the Royal Marines understand is stress and stimuli. You know, that you are only going to get fit as strong and quick, it doesn't matter from stress and stimuli. 1936, Han Selvia, he coined that general adaptation syndrome and it's just like, it's going to be uncomfortable. And I think now it's marketable to say it's easy, this isn't going to hurt, you can vibrate yourself, fitter, take this, feel it, it's easy, you know, stuff. And it's just like, you're fitter in 30 seconds a day. Exactly, exactly. You can stay on it until then vibrate yourself. Exactly. Do you know what the Royal Marines is? Like the PTIs, they are foremost experts at stress and stimuli. And it goes back to that, it just goes back to exactly that, that you can have all the knowledge in the world, but unless you apply it with, you know, I mean, looking at it again like Dorian Yates and his high intensity training, if you've ever seen some of the videos, you're like, oh, that's what it takes to grow muscle mass. You know, it's the same, you look at some of the gymnasts we were talking about, you know, Sam Oldham, you know, a friend of mine, he's just, I remember when I was talking about the Pommel Horse and I was like, I was like, how did you get good at this? And he was just like, oh, you know, when we were a kid, we would just get on the air and put our feet in a bucket, you know, and then they'd just leave us for 20 minutes. I was like, 20 minutes. So when you talk about time under tension and stuff, it's like they would just leave you in a bucket and they were like, yeah, just swinging. And it's like, what? So for all of the intricacies of let's break down, it's like, no, put your feet in a bucket and spin. You know, yeah, yeah. Just spend a lot of time from a young age doing this. Yeah, it's exactly that. Right, so I want to touch on one of the sections you put around body weight training in the book, because I'm interested how you see it fitting into the bigger picture. And it's particularly the bit that you talk about around mechanical energy. Just talk about mechanical energy and then how you see body weight training being a benefit around that concept and feeding into whatever else it is you want to do from there onwards. Yeah, so looking again at this pyramid of priority, so if you're listening on the podcast, kind of imagine, you know, this pyramid, and you've got the five laws. And the very first law is the law of body basics. You have calisthenics, body weight conditioning. And it doesn't matter what you want to train for, what sport you want to train for, where you are on your journey, it doesn't matter. You need to understand how to move your body weight before you even think about running a marathon because running a marathon is a body weight exercise, you know. If you want to go and shift the barbell, you want to be a power lifter, well, you better learn how to move your body before you move a barbell. It doesn't matter. You need to have this foundation. And this goes back to a Soviet Union training principle. I mean, Soviet Union sporting principles, one of the greatest sport in successful nation. I mean, obviously, you know, a few Urgagenic aides in a few days. I don't know if you get any revelations. I don't know. And there has. You know, and it would be wrong of me not to sort of, you know, point out. But when you look at people like Verkyshansky, who pioneered plyometrics and the depth jump, you know, that was during the time. So the depth jump, for those people not familiar, he, you basically, Verkyshansky understood that if you wanted to jump on a, you know, do an ordinary box jump, or you were doing a long jump, that if you were to jump from another box, land and use that kinetic energy, so you land, your quadriceps, your hamstrings, everything, bend, elastic energy, eccentric contraction, that the concentric contraction, so as you jump, is more powerful. He understood that during a time, when all other athletes around the world at the Olympics were like touching their toes and, you know, doing jumping jacks, you know, that's how pioneering he was. And so, so sort of, yeah, going back to how the Soviet sort of sporting nation understood how to take an athlete and make them amazing, they understood what was general physical preparedness. So when you were a kid, you know, if I'm like a Soviet coach here and I've got, you know, a young Tim and a young Jacko standing in front of me, you know, fresh face, five years old going, I want to be an Olympian. And I'll be like, right, I don't know if you're going to be big, strong, I don't know if you're going to have like stupid, strong shoulders or an amazing flag. I don't know, because you're just kids. So what I'm going to do is this idea of general physical preparedness. I'm going to get you to crawl, run, jump, pull-ups, you know, calisthenics, body weight conditioning. And what that's going to do is lay such a strong neurological foundation that you will understand how to move your body that later, when we go, oh, hang on, you know, remember that kid, Jacko, he's quite strong, you know, maybe you stick him into rugby, but he has the neurological capacity he understands how the work capacity as well, the law of more. Everything when it's what he understands and he can then apply it to the law of specificity. And I think when we were kids, like what we used to do is we could go out and play all day and like just mess about, play football, swing on trees, you're doing that like via just exploring the world and just your little world as a kid, if you know what I mean, but it's naturally doing that. It is exactly that that's been suppressed these days. Well, I saw a guy in the UK SCA speaker, Avery Faganbaum, and he was, he actually flicked up a picture of an amazing kid's play park and his big thing is around getting kids and youth development of bringing back athleticism, bringing back basic fundamental movement skills and movement literacy in schools. So actually we're working with this youth population, junior population, it's not all about top-end because obviously we know if we build the youth, the top-end's going to get better anyway. We fixed up this great picture of a play park and he goes, if we build that in your neighborhood with the kids come and play, and everyone's like, yeah, yeah, it's amazing, what a great play park to a room full of SCC coaches who wouldn't like to ever go themselves. And he goes, no, the kids won't come because they're not strong enough to use it and it's monkey bars and it's stuff to swim on and climb on. And he's just like, kids are not that physically able anymore. And then they throw that contrast with pictures of sort of high school gym classes or PE classes, physical education classes back in the day and they're doing calisthenics. They're climbing ropes, they're swinging, like I'm glad he ate his, I hang tough, but we don't do that sort of stuff and all. And we would look at that and go hang tough, like swinging from one ring to the next. And we were like, that is single arm active hanging. It's the primary movement that we use in shoulder stability. Like now we don't touch that stuff enough. Yeah, that is essentially some body weight training or the law of body basics. If I can open the world's fifth book. And sorry for those listening on the podcast, I'll try my very best to kind of sort of paint a picture as you're listening. But if you imagine a pyramid, a priority, so this goes back to your body's user guide, so how you can systematically program your body. And at the very base of this is the law of body basics, which is just calisthenics, body weight training. So it goes back to a Soviet Union sporting principle. So, you know, one of the greatest sporting nations is, obviously, possibly using a pharmaceutical... Yeah. ...erbogenic aids. So, moving on. But worth noting is a lot of their principles that they were pioneering. So the depth jump, Verkyshansky, one of the, probably the creator of Playa Metrics, as we know it today, ballistic training, speed training. He came up with the depth jump, but it was very simply, if you were to perform a box jump, and it was a jump onto the box, he found out that by jumping from another box, so you land, store that kinetic energy, eccentric contraction, in the legs will then produce a more powerful concentric contraction, so you'll be able to jump higher afterwards. He was the one who actually pioneered that, and this was during a time when, you know, some of the world's best athletes were touching their toes and, you know, swinging their arms and doing jumping jacks. And everyone was looking at these guys, jumping off boxes, going, what are some of your guys doing? Look at them, and they were jumping further, running faster than anyone else. So sorry, to come back to that, so mechanical energy, I state that the law of body basics forms the absolute base of this pyramid if you want to systematically condition your body, you know, how do you become a better physical human? And all that is is just, you know, before you specialize in any sport, it doesn't matter if you are an expert or a beginner, male or female, it doesn't matter. You have to understand how to use your body because it's this mechanical energy and it goes back to this Soviet principle of general physical preparedness. So, you know, like I said, the very base of the pyramid, if we were here, I was a Soviet Union coach and I had a young Jacko and a young Tim, you know, before me, five years old and, you know, your parents handed them to me and said, train them to be future Olympians. And I'd be like, look, I don't know if he's, you know, Jacko's going to be big or small or Tim's going to be like quake or good at endurance. So what I'm going to do is teach them body basics, calisthenics, body weight conditioning, general physical preparedness, doesn't matter what term, it's the same thing. I'm going to teach them to run, jump, crawl, pull-ups, press-ups, squat, hit a full lunge because they'll then develop this proprioception, kinesthetic awareness, they'll understand how to use and move their body to then lay a neurological foundation to specialise later when we know that Jacko's going to be a beast and it's like, okay, he's becoming quite big, okay, send him into rugby. Oh, you know, Tim, you know, he's going to be an amazing swimmer, you know, whatever he's going to do, you know. Then we can specialise, but we can only specialise once they're developed, as I said, mechanical energy, proprioception, kinesthetic awareness, general physical preparedness, doesn't matter what you want to call it, it is the law of body basics. You know, and that's what we stress in the book there. You have to start with that. And I think now, I mean, you were touching upon, you know, even looking at, you know, kids nowadays, you know. I don't want to be that like, like, oh, it's better when we were young. I just think that I look back and, like the old school gyms, when I was at infant school either, like we had a rope and we had like the war bars and you would get on them and you would climb up them. And I think there's just a certain amount of, you see videos of it of high school pee and gym class, and it was just general, like I said, it was general proprioception training. And they were like swinging on climbing ropes and how many people can climb a rope these days? Like it's not easy. And when they were doing that swinging from one ring to another, and we would start that as well, that's the foundation of our human flag training is actually going to single arm active hang. And that's this foundation of scapular attraction, depression and shoulder stability. And being able to do that, there's some really interesting thing about what happens when you're gripping, how that interacts with the shoulder, we're going back to these basics of their human, natural human movement patterns, but they're incorporated in exercise I just think that says a lot for just building that foundation level. Whereas now, I don't know a huge amount of what happens in pee at infant school apart from what I hear that actually probably not a huge amount of time dedicated towards it. But it's more games based, but I think we've probably lost the strength component of it. And we take parts now safe, aren't we? Because they want people to fall off stuff. We did just play. I don't know whether there is less of that now for various different reasons, but we'd go out all evening and come back for tea and that was what we'd do wherever you want. And a lot of that would be messing about and playing about. And where the kids now do or don't have the opportunity to do that. I remember being, we were in a queue to get on the ferry last year, we were driving. We had a retreat in Morsy and I had to drive to take all the equipment. And we sat in the queue for the ferry and everyone had been pulled out. The kids had climbed the walls in the cars. And then a few of us would get out of the car. And then actually there was a family that had a few kids that there was just like a big pot, big bar that's crossed the road like hip-high. And they were just, they were skinning the cat. They didn't know they were skinning the cat, they were just playing. They were trying to do a muscle point and they were getting like that. They were just automatically like, I was looking at the cat, I said, the cat thing, don't cut the sticks. I was going to talk, I was going to coach them and train them and it was like, no, just let them explore. And they're like, they're just not quite doing it. Like, like, actually let them play and explore. They're having fun. And I think just giving people the opportunity to do that rather than, I guess, taking that opportunity. That is it. And in many ways it happened by accident. Yeah. And with The World's Fittest Book, it's just taking sometimes what happened by accident but making you very aware of it. And they're having fun. Yeah. And they're smiling, they're enjoying, they're laughing. Yeah. But, and that's a great book. And everyone went, five more reps. Slow or the esoteric. But it's such a good point until I stepped in. Yeah. But it is looking even at adherence. So actual, you know, sort. And this is, you know, for everything that you can put down in theory, what happens in real life is sometimes very different. And genuinely, I'm not just saying it, but that's what I love about what you guys do in that, you know, because it is the school of candidates, but you teach people the principles. So they're able to actually then go forth. And if something happens like, you know, they've got to take the kids to school and that messes with their program. And they didn't manage to do the work at that day. It's fine. Because they understand the principles. They can just rewrite the method and rewrite the work out plan and it's fine. It was still going. But it's those people, and you know, Ralph Aramson, if you only understand principles, you will come unstuck. And so those people are going, oh God, you know, I missed today's, you know, a school of candidates, you know, yeah, the human flag guide. I miss one day. What do I do? Do I start on day one? And it's just like, don't panic. I understand. And genuinely, that's what I love about your guides. You know, once you've read it, you're equipped, you know. So what you do with it is up to you. And you can modify it, you know. And that's what's so nice. I think when you're just touching on adherence, like, enjoying what you do, like, we all just laugh them and with them. Like, when you're laughing, when you're smiling, we're enjoying the things that you do. Like, everything else becomes easier. And adherence to your motivation to it. Like, I don't know how much of it you sort of touch on that within the book, but if you enjoy what you're doing, you're going to be so much more successful or happy at the end of it. I think one of my things that I can take away from today is that there's an opportunity there to start to... Yes, we can specialise. We've taken the Bodyweight Basics to a more extreme level. And not that it's like, extreme makes it sound like it's perilous. Extreme? We need to know what we need to do. Extreme guys. I'd say it's extreme because it's all we do. But what I think, and you're actually much better at this than it may have been, I also need to have some time and creating some space for the other things which I know, but I enjoy when I get time to do them. Like, so it might be trying to get back into a bit of swimming because I liked, you know why I like swimming? Because it was hard. And it pushed me to do something which actually made me feel really uncomfortable. But I knew that swimming was actually really complementary to my calisthenics because my shoulders were getting tight and stiff. I could feel my stroke length decreasing and actually getting into the water and driving out is almost like active stretching. If I'm not swimming at intensity, I'm just driving out nice distance per stroke, long stroke length, and I miss it. And I miss that hurt locker that you were talking about before because when we train calisthenics, we're nearly quite challenged and we're mentally quite challenged because we have endless frustrations. We're trying to teach ourselves these different positions and moves and whatever else. And we hit the plateaus and you can find yourself in a real kind of frustration around it. But I miss that bit of being put through the mill like I did when I was playing rugby. And I don't create that for myself anymore. I think that's something that I need to find some way of doing something that I enjoy that I can't hear to. And it's that thing like I could go to the gym, I could do a class or something, I could hate it, but I'm sweating enough. But I can find that enjoyment in something that I enjoy and then I'm going to do it for longer because it's actually become something which you get actually, I'm looking forward to doing that. And I know I'm going to hurt, but I'm going to feel great when I finish it. I think I've said it before, I think it's important to Harvey. Like how we train, and this isn't any disrespect to how we train now compared to how we train in rugby, but I guess it's a bit different because someone else was pushing you because you're not a coach and all that sort of thing. And you were paid to do it. I used to train so much harder than I do now. And I'm not now saying this, this isn't BS, I'm not saying it because Ross has sat here with me, but it's literally the conversations of the day have challenged me exactly the same to go like am I mentally like telling myself like, oh you can't do too much, and am I holding myself back and I'm going to challenge, I am going to challenge, definitely, I'm the type of guy that I'll do this now for two days and then I'll forget about it. I'm going to try and carry on a bit longer, but I'm training tomorrow morning and I'm going to have a few beats to it. I'm going to train now, Harvey's going to do it. Harvey's going to do it. He's so due this, I've got something like it. I'm going to tag you in. Like an air bike or intervals, and you know when you like, you think, oh my God, my lungs are on fire, but honestly in that moment, like everybody listening, when you are absolutely on fire, because a few people, when I was, you know, on that 100 kilometer swim, which was only meant to be 40 kilometers, and there was a moment when I was getting stung by jellyfish, you know, I was still pulling the 100 pound tree, I was cramping up, like the sun was beating down on me, it was in the Caribbean, and I simply just asked myself repeatedly, like kilometer after kilometer, and it's, you know, not to sound morbid, but I was like, what's hurting? Honestly, Ross, like take, like, I know, oh yeah, it's hurting, but what is actually hurting? I was like, my shoulder's a sore, I'm pretty badly sunburned, and I'm like, okay, cool, be honest with yourself, but is there anything stopping you swimming 100 meters more? No, it's just a bit unpleasant. Yeah, yeah. Then swim 100 more, you know, and sometimes it was actually like going like, I don't know, this sounds a bit morbid, but like, are you dying? And my answer was like, no, I don't think I'm dying. It's like, you keep going there, what are you doing? You know at some point, that hurt's gonna end, right? Exactly. There's one thing I, and then she didn't get to the end, oh well, I'm more full of me. My favorite tennis player is Rafael Nadal, because he just gets in a dog fight, and he's like, Federer is so graceful, he makes it look like, oh, tennis, I shall beat you. Nadal comes out and he's passionate and he's firing, and I love it, but I've seen it, I've read a report from him before, that he approached his games when he was in his peak, he's like, all I've gotta do is outlast you. Like, the pain's gonna stop, the discomfort is gonna stop, I just need to last longer than you can. Yeah. And it's a real simple principle, but the other thing that I watched and read the book, and took you to the void, quite a few years ago, this guy, like mountaineering story, the guys were on K2, I think it was, I might be wrong with that. Actually, my sister in South America, he ended up falling into a crevasse, his mate cut the line, he dropped down, and he crawled in the crevasse, he couldn't get, or broken legs, couldn't get out, so he just was like, sat there for a day or so, then when I marked him, go down into the abyss. So he just started, I'm gonna die anyway, so he starts going down into this crevasse, and he actually sees a piece of light that comes through the snow, he crawls out, and he's got two broken legs, pretty much, and he drags himself down his mountain to survival, and he's literally like, he would set a thing about a rock in front of him, and he would crawl by his fingertips two broken legs, like, in a really bad way, but he pulled himself off the mountain, and you're like, actually, and you wind up backing, it made me think before that you're going, it's almost that thing, those are the extreme examples, but I remember doing like, bleep tests and fitness tests when we were training, you drop out, and literally 30 seconds afterwards, I could've done more than that, you know it. Yeah, 100%. And you're disappointed because you now lost that opportunity to go and do that little bit more. They are extreme examples, but it will happen daily. The amount of times, should I get out of bed right now? Yeah, get out of bed. What's stopping you? You know, dual workout. You know, you call them hammer intervals, imagine an air bike or a hill sprint where you'll wait until the final one, and then you'll push hard, and then you'll finish, whereas hammer intervals, and this is one thing the Royal Marine PTIs do better than anyone, it's just in the middle of it, they'll just go go now, go hard, unquestionably, go hard, and you will, but then like, and then they'll go right, and now you've got five more, and you'll be like, oh man, I thought that was the last one, there's some science around that, but actually, I sat in a thing, it's all going to go, it's five reps, and you go, all right, okay, cool, I'm going to do five reps, and then actually then you see what can you do when you have five more. Yeah. And there's really, there's actually some research around athletes who are so repulsive, and if that wasn't the answer, I'm stuck into that now. So you can do that as a coach? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to do five, oh yeah, right. There's also one where they put plastic bags on the weights of a barbell, so you don't know what weight is. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Right, I'm going to draw this, because this conversation forces you guys to be on more close. I've got a real question. I can smell the ribs. I can do that mental thing pushing when I'm running, like CV, so like I do like part one, 5K, and I have that same conversation with myself and I'm like, going, can you not go a bit faster than this jacket? Like exactly like what's hurting, compared, you know, in order, I find it much more difficult though, if it's like a pull-up session or maxing dips or whatever. And is there anything, is there any, is there anything that you found like trying to get at, like trying to get into that place from it when it's strength compared to when it's more cardio? Yeah, I mean with cardio and stuff, so when you look at strength, that strength is your body's ability to generate force. So quite often, you know, if you were absolutely wired, that is, you know, at capacity. Yes, granted, there are stories of, you know, mums lifting cars off their kid's traps and you know, so there is that potential that we're not locking into. So for that, you know, it just comes from, you know, smelling salts, your friends slapping you in your back, Jack is still not forgiving you. But there is that, and it's a very different mindset to endurance, and I think that's one thing with all of the best ultra marathon runners I've ever met. You know, they're not getting wired, they're not on the start line on smelling salts, because they're like, wow, this is going to take it. So it is very, very different. However, if you're training for, you know, muscular hypertrophy and you're using metabolic stress, where it is a horrible, disgusting, drop set, you know, ask yourself afterwards. Yeah, if you could do another set after that one, that wasn't hard enough. I think there's something in calisthenics I was thinking about, actually, after we left the session today. And sometimes we're like a pull-up set, doing one more rep or two reps is actually hard. If I'm at fatigue or I'm really afraid, you've got lactic acid build-up, like you're just not functioning and actually trying to do another rep of the same thing is actually almost impossible because you're not strong enough to have maxed out. But then the example we need today we're going to handstand push-ups, feet elevated to push-ups into push-ups on the floor, into push-ups on knees. There was four different progressions there with each you could move from one to the next. And one thing I think with that, with the pulling sessions, we need to try and create overload and stress like that. You've got to plan your session a little bit more, so actually you can go pull-ups, but the band's already ready and I'm going to drop down from the band, from the body weight and I'm going to go to the band and it might then be that I go horizontal row. But having that structure to you plan and go actually, this is how I'm going to move through and I've created the conditions, I love the Oscar Wilde quote of, success decides that you create the conditions, you get the result and you then go actually, I've created the conditions, I've now facilitated that, rather than jumping down from a set from a pull-up and going that's a bit, I don't know, I can do any more. I might have just had my two minute rest period which is often what I do. It all goes back to, Laura Progressive Overload, it doesn't matter, is it a pull-up, is it not, can I apply more stress to this situation? Less rest, more weight, eccentric contraction, can I apply more stress? And sometimes for me, with swimming at the moment, I'm going to do 10K today and I'm going to do 20K today, can I apply more stress? Get tree. But some get tree resistance or like the other day in Glasgow, swimming in two degree water, it was chilly. How is the stress? Does everyone else in the pool that David Lloyd say when you walk in with the tree? He's more the picnic of food. Just an eating competition with a bit of swimming. Well I think, Jack, what we can take away from today is that we can hold ourselves when we're trained together, accountable for maybe dropping in eight sessions, because we haven't got some quite specific goals, we're requesting one session. We should have one session where we just do a glimpse. Let's say it's tomorrow morning, tomorrow morning, and this is our live, is it? We'll talk on the live about tomorrow morning, a bit of what I like is a, what is it like? What's the word I'm looking for? When you're, like, accountability. Yes. So I'm going to say it tonight, live on IG, it's going to happen. Like, if you make me do, my demonstrations, works when everyone's watching is so much better than if I was just training on my own. If you take a shirt off. Yeah, just the expectation of like, yeah, you've got to do this right. It might not, in my head, it's just what I'm telling myself the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you get a discount from Oh, your money back from Thompson holidays. We didn't meet, we didn't meet the beach. I did. We used to have a beach company. I was still looking for the beach. I said it. We'd normally finish our podcast by asking our guests what their current impossible is, but I think with Ross, it's almost a wasted question. Unless there is something you think possible for us. I know, is there anything that you particularly look at and you're going, do you know what? That's the strength. Couldn't be as skilly as us. That's as important as four ribs. I sometimes think that you I've got stuff in my impossible box. But I look at it and go, well, it's only that temporary. Nothing's firmly rooted there anymore, but it's just something I can't do. So if I try and do a single and pull up a moment, it's impossible. All I need to do is pull up a bit. It's hard to move that out. So is there anything that you currently look at? You go, actually, these are big audacious, horrible, nasty thing that I want to do. Yeah. It looks like it's impossible, but I'm going to start the process using great books, such as your own. Just guide you to the goal. Yeah, there is. There is actually something Is this an exclusive? Well, I'm not allowed to say it yet. It's a part of this thing. No, but I'm going to actually chat to you guys off air because I actually need your advice on this. So genuinely, I can't say it, but you will be, well, you will be the first to know about it, but you'll also be the first to broadcast it because genuinely, I want to do some really cool stuff. And I'm not just saying it, but I think a lot of, I'm talking very cryptic, but basically a lot of stuff that you've spoke about and what you are actually genuinely pioneering at the moment in terms of your shoulder mobility strength, rehab and everything like that. I am going to need in, in sort of bucket loads and stuff. So, yeah, off air, we'll talk, but on air, you will be the first to know what my impossible is. Well, I think that's actually, you've been able to stand against the wall and be back flagged. Yeah, I can dream. I can dream. What's the shoulder mobility? Yeah, there's something there. Jacko and I can beat him at shoulder mobility. That's our reason. It's bad. Right. You also know how to wrap this up, don't you? The sign up. I do. That's dismissed. We're going to use the guest to get to finish this off. So thanks for joining us, guys. It's been a longer course for us, but we don't get the opportunity to pick a guy's brain, like Ross on an everyday occasion. Rad Jack and I would ramble on forever. But having somebody here who wants to give you a little bit more value. So, on that note, Jacko, anything to add? Well, just if you are interested in finding out where you can find Ross, if you don't follow him on his social, or you don't, you haven't seen his book yet, all the links will be in the description, obviously. So make sure you check him out and give him a follow-up. So until next time, class dismissed.