 Welcome to the School of Calisthenics podcast with your hosts, Tim and Jackal. We are in for a treat today because when you want to get strong and know how to get strong, you go and find the strongest guys in the world and you speak to them. We have got one of those guys, Mark Bell, on the podcast today. You're excited for this one, eh Tim? I was buzzing for this one because the first question I want to know is like, what do you even think about Calisthenics? This is a guy who's hit some incredible numbers on his powerlifting, main key list, his deadlift squat and bench press, like, offensively big. And I always said to Jackal before he would hit the call, I was like, what if you get on and be like, what do you think about Calisthenics? Mark, he's like, just for people that can't lift. But now he's on board. He's smashed him, pushed him out of the, during lockdown, so he's embraced lockdown and, you know, it was great to hear from him some of the protocols that he would, and some of the, I guess, lessons that he's learned over his life of himself getting extremely strong and also helping others get strong and he's got a phenomenal gym that he'll tell you all about where membership is free, you just pay in your blood, blood, sweat, tears and effort. It reminded me a little bit of Mike, from Mike's gym in that respect. You just want to try out, don't you? Yeah, they will definitely get on. My highlight and takeaway from this is you're going to come through and hear as you go through the podcast. It doesn't matter whether it's powerlifting, Calisthenics, CrossFit, there's the principles which are the same and we can learn from different disciplines, but actually the real things that lead to success, they're all pretty consistent, so it's just great to get those messages from a different environment with a little bit of extra context and texture to really kind of hit home and some of those messages will definitely land really well. So I'm excited for you guys to enjoy this one. Just before we roll into this amazing podcast, we just wanted to thank the sponsors Red Light Rising for sponsoring the podcast and if you are interested in improving your performance, your recovery, your health, your sleep or any of these parameters linked to the benefits of red light therapy, then we recommend checking out the products at Red Light Rising. They've got enough for having them for the listeners. They have, you can get 5% off any of their red light therapy products and you can find them at redlightrising.co.uk. Go and find them on social. Guys are absolute legends and we did a podcast with them recently so if you want to get into a little bit more depth of understanding how it all fits together and what the benefits are, go and check that out as well. And just if you want anything else, a ton of information on their website which is going to keep you healthy and performing well during these most challenging times. Yeah, and the code for that 5% discount is SOC5 that's SOC5 for 5% off at redlightrising.co.uk Roll the jingle. So an absolute pleasure to introduce Mark Bell to the podcast. Thank you Mark for sparing us some time and I'm super, super excited to talk to one of the guys who knows more about strength training than lots and lots of many people in the world to get his input on what it looks like to get strong and I'm sure there's going to be some absolute knowledge bombs plenty as we get into this. I don't know what I did in my career to end up on a calisthenics podcast but I guess reluctantly here we go. We've got to be strong in calisthenics. One of the biggest things Tim says to people all the time like you're just not strong enough when you can't do the thing that you're trying to do. Those toe touches and twists can be really difficult, right? I'm a rock. This is what I wanted. This is where I thought it was going to go. Just say that there's one person maybe that hasn't heard of Mark Bell. Just a real quick snippet. Could you just give us a real quick background of what you're about, yeah? Yeah, I'm a husband and a dad of two kids, both of them at which are teenagers right now. So during this quarantine, it's been a lot of fun to spend extra time with them. Although trying to get them to do their schoolwork has been a little weird. I spent a huge majority of my life in doing what I have been super interested in and that's just lifting weights and I got into powerlifting at a very young age. I saw Ted R. Seedy bench press over 700 pounds. He's the first guy to ever do 700 pounds. I saw him do that on a WWF wrestling program and I saw that probably at the age of like 11 and I was like, I don't know what that was but that was really cool. I would love to figure that out and I would have been a huge wrestling fan for a long time seeing, you know, Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Warrior and, you know, all those super jacked guys. I was like, I want to figure out how to be jacked like that. These guys look amazing. And so I got into, you know, I didn't know anything about bodybuilding. I didn't know anything about any other kind of lifting. All I knew about was powerlifting because at that time, the gym that I stepped foot into, everyone there was just there to get stronger. Like there was no fitness back then and it was just kind of gross gym. Like it had that smell. Like you guys know what the smell is. It just had that stank on it, you know, for whatever reason. And there was a lot of like rusty dumbbells and rusty plates and it was just like, you know, mainly men, there was really no, there was no girls to be seen anywhere and there was maybe a couple older women in there but there was no cardio pieces. It was all just iron and everyone in there had the same goal and I always loved that. And I thought like this is amazing. Like everyone in this building has the same pursuit and then later on in life, you know, fitness turned into what it, what it's turned into where there's so much separation between, you know, bodybuilding, powerlifting, weightlifting, CrossFit, bodyweight exercises, running and so on. But back then it was kind of all just, it was all one thing. And I fell in love with the sport and started competing at the age of 12 and competed for 30 years and retired kind of more recently, but powerlifting will always be in my blood and at this time this is really great for me because I shut my gym down and I could certainly still go into the gym and still do whatever I want because I own it and everything but I thought it was like, I thought it was like kind of being a trader to my team and to my staff to go in there and keep lifting and so I decided, you know, I'm gonna do bodyweight exercises and I'm gonna run. So I'm excited to be on this podcast today for that reason. Just one more thing I just wanna add and I think this is really important for everybody to understand. It's listening is that, you know, really follow your interests. Like what are you interested in? What's the thing that you like to do? Like what do you really enjoy? What do you love to do? Sometimes you'll hear people say, you know, kind of follow your passion and that can be cool too but sometimes people don't really understand what they're passionate about but it's like, what are you into? What do you like to do a lot? And figure out ways of doing more of that and then figure out a way to get paid for that and you're on your way to a really prosperous life because if you're doing this stuff, like people ask me about motivation all the time. I don't really, I don't need motivation. It's already there. I'm interested in what I'm doing. You know, like how much motivation, how much motivation do you need to go on a date with a really beautiful hot girl? Like you don't really need any motivation. You're going to get yourself cleaned up, you're going to shave, you're going to look the best you possibly can where the best possible clothes you have. You don't need a fucking speech from David Goggins to do that. You're like, wow, this girl's really hot. I'm going to, you know, certainly not for me because I'm married but I'm just saying. Anyway, follow, you know, follow what you're interested in. It's led me down the right path every single time. I'm just interested to get your thoughts on this current phase of training that you're in because your gym is a, if you've got time, we'll talk a bit about the gym because it's an amazing concept that you've done with it. How are you finding the transition from being sort of from a powerlifting background, strength training background, and now finding yourself in an environment where body weight training has become sort of like a very accessible and probably, like you say, in terms of the landscape at the moment, what's your favorite way to train? How's that? How are you finding that? Are you missing, are you missing getting out of a barbell or are you finding some challenge in your own body weight? I find it to be like super disappointing and like really pathetic that just getting on the, like, I don't know, think about it. I bench pressed 578 pounds, right? So think about getting on the ground and just cranking out 40 pushups. Like it shouldn't be anything. It should be, and it's not hard. I mean, I can pop out 40 pushups at any time, but how long does it take to do 40 pushups? Like it doesn't take very long or even 50 pushups. I could probably do maybe 60 or 70 in a row, I guess on a decent day. But my point is it's like, that seems like, that doesn't seem very impressive compared to a 578 pound bench press. And then this morning, I did 200 squats and 200 pushups and I did my 100 squats in a row just because I wanted to kind of see how that felt. And it was terrible. Like my legs started to burn, you know, and it's like, come on, dude, 100 squats. Like I weighed 235 pounds. I've squatted 1,080. You know, and here I am, you know, it's demoralizing how difficult it can be. And then you start to take other movements that have, you know, more complex movements that require a little bit more movement or coordination. And then you're really a dead duck. Like when you do something like a lunge or you do something like a burpee up, I don't think people understand how genius a burpee is, you know, going from like horizontal to vertical and the amount of like just dynamic movement that's required. And I know everyone hates them, the amount of dynamic movement that's required to do a burpee the metabolic cost of doing a burpee or even the metabolic cost of doing a lunge. I just think that these are things that we haven't maybe even thought about before, but now we're kind of forced to. Just going out and doing, you know, Corey Gregory, a good friend of mine, he talks a lot about lunges. He does like 10 minute lunges. He lunges a mile. I mean, he's a crazy bastard. But he also had, you know, he promotes and encourages people to do like an 800 meter lunge, you know, go lunge around a track twice. And that's, that kind of stuff is really brutal, but the metabolic cost of that and what that can do for you in terms of being lean. I mean, for, for one, it's going to help chew up a lot of, a lot of glucose, a lot of glycogen. Number two, it could help just burn a lot of overall calories and it might get your heart rate up. Yeah, it would definitely get your heart rate up enough to be in like a fat burning zone. So you're going to be kind of burning everything just by doing a lunge. I mean, that sounds, it makes this, at this time, this, this kind of stuff makes me feel a little bit stupid. Cause I'm like, why the fuck haven't I been doing this stuff all the time anyway? Like I've always loved push ups. I'll always, I've always done push ups. I've always done pull ups. I've always done dips and stuff like that. But I'm just thinking to myself, you know what, when this quarantine's over, you really owe it to yourself to make sure that you stay on top of these. I've been doing a minimum of a hundred push ups every day and a hundred squats every day. And I just see absolutely no reason why to stop it. So I'm enjoying it personally. That's awesome. And just to put some, cause I did some, you mentioned some of the numbers there, but just for the metric list is in the UK and you can give it the pound equivalence cause I actually didn't write the pounds down. But you said, what was your pounds squat that you did? A thousand eighty squat. That's four hundred and ninety kilograms for anybody who wants to in the translation you bench press. I've got down at three hundred and eighty seven kilos. Yeah. Eight hundred fifty four pounds and a three hundred and forty seven kilo deadlift. Yeah. Yeah. Seven. Yeah. Seven sixty six deadlift. Yeah. Unbelievable. So one, one thing we wanted to get into more was a little bit around that, that strength side of stuff. There's a lot of people that come into calisthenics. Like I said in the intro that we, we always prioritize strength. Things are much easier when you're stronger and there's a lot of stuff when you're like, you come into calisthenics and you sometimes people will look at it from the outside and handstand, for example, doesn't require a lot of strength. You don't need to be that strong. You just need to have good balance. Well, we like to do a freestanding handstand push-ups and we're quite into the kind of, how do we push the strength elements and components. But it's, it's one of those things where people are like, they come to a workshop and they're like, show me the drill or the progression that I need to do to do this thing. And I'm like, now you're doing everything right. I'm sorry to tell you that you're just not strong enough. And they're like, they don't want to hear that answer. They want to get, no, no, come on. There must be an exercise and show me something else that I can do. And I know you've got to go away and do three months, maybe six months of strength work because it takes time. Just give us a little bit of an insight into what a sort of a powerlessness training program, someone who's looking to get strong, what might that look like from a longer term perspective of what goes into, and obviously these numbers that you've got built over years, but what goes into a performance in terms of building a solid amount of strength? I think it's a really key component to being strong is adaptation and a really key component to gaining size is adaptation. And first and foremost, you know, if you're trying to get strong, if getting bigger is an option for you, that's a spot number one to look is just to eat a lot more food. And this is in regards to lifting weights. This is not in regards to lifting your own body weight or trying to run, or it's not really conducive to much else, to be totally honest, but it can be really productive in terms of moving weight. So if you're, you know, if you're under, you know, 100 kilos or under 90 kilos or something like that, then that would be a place where I would look, if you feel like you can afford to gain weight without getting, you know, quote unquote too fat, then that might be something to consider because that's going to be, that's going to get you strong faster than anything else. But you want adaptation, but you want to make sure that you don't have too much forced adaptation. And what I mean by that is you want to only be able to do what you can do. And this kind of brings me to something I've been kind of harping on a little bit more recently is that I feel like, I feel like hard work is not necessarily a myth, but I feel like hard work is a misconception. And what I mean by that is that you're, you should always be prepared for the next level of what it is you're about to do. And if you're not prepared for the next level of what it is you're about to do, it doesn't mean you're hardcore. It actually just means that you're dumb. It means that you're stupid because you're not learning the training process. Understanding and learning and being humble about the training process is really, really crucial. It's going to take time to get stronger. Sometimes when somebody comes to me and they say, hey, I want to improve my squat. They'll say, what can I, what should I do? And this is just somebody who sends me like a short message on Instagram and I'll say, do eight reps for a month and then do six reps for a month and then do four reps for a month and then do two reps for a month and then try a one rep max. I mean, that's months of training, right? But that's a very slow adaptation. The way that I would have somebody do it is I wouldn't even need to, I wouldn't even need to make it like exact. It wouldn't have to be super precise, but the basics of it would be, like week one, do something very, very manageable. Do something that is so simple and kind of feels easy. Week two, just bump it up from there. Week three, make it a little harder. And week four should be something that's difficult. And then cycle back through it again for those, those couple of months, but it's adaptation and it's not annihilation. And that's the key component right there is that you don't want to just go in there and destroy yourself every single day. If you, if you can kind of think of it this way, if, if I was, if I was teaching you, if I taught you every day that one plus one equals three, then anytime one plus one came up, you would always say three because that's all that you know. You're learning the, you're learning the incorrect facts. You don't have the correct information. And the only way to have the correct information in your body is to get the correct sensations and the correct message to your body every single time that you train and getting stronger is actually a really interesting process because you should be able to actually feel it. You know, if I had you guys do say like a workout where you did four sets of four reps with like a hundred kilos, 220 pounds on say like a bench press or something like that, right? Let's say that that's an appropriate weight for you. If you can do all four reps every single time and you can match the way that you did your last rep of your last set with the way the first rep of the first set looked, then we are on the right path. We're on the right track. That's how it should look. Your first rep should look, I'm sorry, your last rep should look identical to the first rep of set number one in for the most part. Now every once in a while, you're going to have, you're going to roll the dice. Every once in a while you're going to be competitive. Every once in a while you're just going to do what your body does, you know, but those things should be few and far between 98% of your training should be really, really clean, really, really crisp. And you should not be missing lifts. Jackie, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then some of the things, just adding on to what sort of questions that we would get or things that people struggle with would be, then like the frequency of that training, when they're doing strength training, we'll often get people, just because it's calisthenics, it's bodyweight training, they might think that I'm going to do X every day or whatever it may be. And it's actually, the thing they're trying to work on is like a handstand push-up, which is like, you know, your whole body weight in a vertical pressing movement. If someone wanted to get strong at just a military press, you wouldn't, we wouldn't suggest doing that every day because that's going to help you get strong at that. Where people sort of struggle with that over-training, what would it be, your sort of what's your recommendations for people as a various from person to person, but in terms of the dose of that, that looked like in a week for someone in terms of those, he talks about the rep, those sort of lower rep ranges, eight and below, but what would be, how often would you be doing some, you know, if you're wanting to improve your vertical push, your military press, there's an example. I think, you know, it goes back to what I said in the beginning of the show already was that, you know, you want to really lean into your interest. So let's say that you love doing shoulder presses. Well, if you love doing shoulder presses and I tell you to do them once a week, you already aren't listening to me. You're already off on your own plan with your own program. So the only thing I would say with, what I would suggest with something like that is, the more often that you're going to do something or the more, and or the more intensity that you're going to bring something, then you have to toggle those two between each other because having high frequency, high volume and high intensity all the time is a recipe for disaster at some point. You could make a lot of progress in the beginning with that. And, you know, most of the time, the odd thing about stuff like that is again, we go back to adaptation is sometimes people just survive it. They're, you know, really dumb in the gym. They're really stupid with what they do. And despite all that, their body somehow miraculously survived it and now they squat 700 pounds and they got, you know, 33 inch quads or something because all they do is over train all the time. So that's where people get excited and they're like, oh, I'm going to train like this guy or I'm going to train like this girl because this is what they do. And then they're driving up their frequency, driving up their intensity, driving up their volume. I think the best strategic thing is to play the long game and to say, I don't really care a ton about where I am in two, three months. I care more about where I am in two or three years because it's going to take you, it might take you a long time to really pass people up, especially on certain areas where you may be weak. Now, you know, going back to the example of a handstand pushup, well, a handstand pushup is a handstand pushup and handstand walks is a total joke to someone who's been doing gymnastics most of their life, right? So somebody who's been doing gymnastics most of their life, you know, a handstand like handstand walks is probably like, maybe part of like a drill in the beginning, you know, and same with like any like ring dips and all those things. I mean, crossfitters go crazy about some of the stuff that they have to do on the rings. But meanwhile, in an Olympic competition, when they do the rings, that's the starting position of everything else that they're about to do is just doing the muscle-up. Like the muscle-up is just to get yourself ready for it. It's not even that it's like walking in. Yeah, right, right. It's like walking in. And so when you start to factor those things in and when you look at like an ed cone and, you know, Ed only squatted once a week, but he would have been able to squat three or four times a week without any problem and his squats probably would have been even better than they were, even though he's the goat. And the reason why I say that though is just because he was built for it. So for myself, though, I would have to be a little bit more cautious. I can bench a lot more often, you know. So each person's going to kind of have their own. So what I would suggest on that is like, try something out about three times a week. Try to have a, and this is really simple, just try to have a light-ish day, a medium day, and a heavy day. Your lighter day, you can do a little bit higher reps. Your medium day, you can have a medium rep range bracket. And then your heavy day, you can kind of go for it. And you can kind of progressively increase all three of those over a period of time. And then maybe you can get rid of one or two of them, but it really becomes a lot of fun when you start saying, all right, I'm going to train the squat, you know, three times a week. I'm going to train the bench twice a week. I'm going to train the deadlift once a week. And then, you know, two months from now, I'm going to flip all that around. And I'm going to deadlift three times a week. And then you get to see how your body reacts to it. And it really ends up being, it ends up being a lot of fun because you end up, you end up kind of seeing like, like where you're good and where you suck and just learn from it. Try to learn from it. Take notes. Yeah. I mean, in fact, one of the things you said in that was around, I don't know if he's necessarily said the word patients, but you were saying for people to be in it for the long game and trusting in that and trusting in and embracing that, getting strong as a process. And that's something that we try to encourage people with when they, when they want the, like Tim was saying, they want the quick answer, the quick reason, like what am I not doing right to do, to do my handstand pushup or whatever it or my muscle. Let me just elaborate on that a little, a little bit more. So I've been lifting for 31 years and I can still, I can still do everything and anything that I want to do almost. There's a couple of things that I would, there's a couple of things I'm working on that I don't have access to yet, but 31 years and, and I was a professional wrestler for five years. I've spent most of my life playing football and you would figure that would be a lot more banged up and screwed up and messed up. And as I mentioned, those, those numbers earlier, I was a really highly competitive power lifter. I lifted all the weights that I ever wanted. I, you know, I pursued a 800 pound bench and I then, then it turned into me wanting to do a 900 pound bench. I wanted to do a thousand pound squat and that later turned into me wanting to do 1100 and I kind of just started getting kind of greedy with everything. But again, just think about, I can do any and everything that I want to do. I can do these body weight exercises every single day. I can go out for a run. The only thing that I'm missing that I would love to have that I just, I, I worry that I'm going to hurt myself is like, I don't have full access to like just going out and like sprinting. But it's like I'm so new to like messing around with any sort of running. And I'm just really taking my time. If I just go out and sprint, I'm going to probably tweak my hip or tweak my hamstring. I'm just not in shape enough to do that at the moment, but everything else, I can go like hell. Like if you guys were like, hey, you know, hit up some burpees with us. Like I think, I think you guys would be like, Holy shit. Like he's pretty, he's pretty quick. I can't move very good. Like my mobility is not, not great, but I can kind of overcome some of that with like some power and some explosiveness. I think it'd be fun for us. Hopefully we're going to get to America at some point, but we want to be on a little bit of a tour and we love to come and drop it and see if we can get you into a human flag. Yeah, you know, that stuff, that stuff is crazy. You know, that that's, um, there's just so many different levels of strength. Right. And I, I, you know, as, as a young kid that was, you know, banging weights in the gym all the time. I, I kind of always, you know, of course, when you look at that stuff, you're, you always hate on like whatever it is that you can't do. So I'd be like, ah, look at those, look at those wimps, man. Why aren't they lifting a barbell? What are they doing? You know, but like really it's, it's, uh, it's awesome to have that elasticity in your joints. And I think anyone that's, uh, you know, getting older would certainly, you know, be in total admiration of things like that. Like just being able to jump up on a box, you know, just off of one foot and then, you know, land on that same foot. Um, just simple stuff like that is like, uh, I mean, those are going to be things that when you're 60 and when you're 70 and you go to get up out of a chair, those are going to be the things that you wish your body was made of. Those are going to be the things. It's not going to really matter a ton that you're, that you squatted 700 pounds at one point. That's probably going to be more to your detriment than it will be to your benefit. Yeah. And, and, uh, well, we, we talked a lot about, um, about longevity and seeing that sort of talking about mobility and quality of movement as well as like, as well as strength, but just speaking of human flags, am I right? Did you have Ross Edgeley, um, on your podcast? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We had, yeah. We had Ross, uh, recently and, um, that guy is, uh, just unbelievable amount of stuff. Yeah. So he, before it was actually before he, we, we had a session with him before he did the Great British Swim, um, and it was a really good example of like, the guy is just like an incredible specimen and strength is, is something that is absolutely no problem for him. And we, we taught him how to do a human flag in 45 minutes. And he'd never done anything like that before, but it was a case of like, he had the strength there. And it was a really good example of like, when you've got strength and he does a variety of different training that then he could adapt to be able to use that strength in something that was, you know, the human flag people spend months and months and years potentially trying to, trying to be able to do in the calisthenics world. And he does it in 45 minutes because he had that, that bedrock of, of strength that he's built up over, that, you know, like he's built that up over a long period, a long, long period of time. You have to be strong for your body weight to be able to pull that one off, right? Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. They're getting big and eating just, just getting bigger in calisthenics. We have to marry that strength with, yeah, strength to weight ratio effectively. Being heavier. Yeah. Yeah. You can be heavy. You just have to be stronger. I just want to get into the, the, the, the, the, the coach inside of me and the, and the geek wants to talk a little bit on numbers in terms of training program prescription and some of the stuff that you've done. And there's just a couple of things I wanted to do before we get into that a little bit, just to clear up on, because it's something which we've, there's been some research papers come out with that recently and the onset of velocity based training is sort of started to kind of become more prevalent in a, in sports science and training systems. You mentioned before about you, the first rep should be the same as the last rep. So that's on set one. And then the same do you think would apply to set four. And what, where I'm kind of going with that, that is should we be training to failure and, or should we always be sort of like making sure that we can, we can meet the required target reps and sets that we've got on a program to create a specific adaptation because it'll be oftentimes people who fail a rep and like, is that a good thing or not? Or should we be just be keeping a little bit back so that we are consistent with the quality? You know, having, having the majority of your training come from quality reps, I think is crucial. I'm trying to think if I can think of, I'm just making sure this is 100% accurate. So I've never had anybody at super training gym. And so I'm just going to go off of my own experience. I don't have anyone at super training gym that lifts like shit and is what I would consider insanely strong. You know, so that's something to keep in mind. Like most of the time when people did a lift at super training, whether it was standing, efforting with a 600 plus pound bench or if it was, you know, Eric's photo bench and 675 for two. Or, you know, whether it was Stan, you know, pulling over 800 pounds or him squatting 900 or, or myself squatting 1,000 pounds. We've had many other 1,000 pound squatters in the gym. It was always like, oh, like, yeah, dude, you could do 1,025 easy, you know, you could do 1,050, you know, you could do. Now in training, there might be some like missteps here and there because, especially for us, because we utilized a lot of conjugate system where we had bands and we had chains. And so we may have in, we may have inaccurately figured out like, you know, where our max would end for the day. And so we may have been like off a little bit, but you can kind of gauge that as you get closer to your weights anyway. One thing to be cautious of with training is, you know, people kind of like, oh, you need to listen to your body. I would say don't do that. Because you're, you know, you're an athlete, you know, and you're going to always tell yourself like, oh, how do you feel? You know, it's like, I wear this like aura ring thing, right? This thing tells me about my sleep. But I'm still going to train hard regardless of whether the thing gives me a good sleep score or a bad sleep score because I'm an athlete. I'm kind of an idiot. You know, I'm not going to listen to, I'm not going to let anything slow me down or be in my way. But I would say, you know, that when you're, when you're training and let's say that you were going to go for, you know, a PR squat or something like that. And you just, you just weren't, you weren't feeling good for the day. I mean, that is an important time to probably listen to your body. But for the most part, you're probably going to usually be the opposite way. You're probably always going to convince yourself that you're going to be, you're knee is a little sketchy and you're, you're prescribed to do these squats for the day and, and you just go in and like, you know, force yourself to do it anyway. I mean, those things aren't, those things aren't really smart. So you, what I always did is I always had an intent of the day. I always had, I always had it kind of at least just mapped out in my head, like what, what was I going to do for the day and answer your question and bring it back. You're, you know, to clarify that you're, your, your last rep of even your last set should look like your first rep of your first set in my opinion. I think stuff should look really clean and really crisp. Again, you're going to be sending your body the wrong message over and over and over again. Another, another way to look at this is there's something in boxing called the, I did, I did some boxing when I was young. There's something in boxing called the sparring partner mentality. So the sparring partner kind of eventually becomes like a punching bag and he never really learns to like fire off combinations and never really learns to gain that confidence of like, yeah, I'm whooping this guy's ass now and he never, he never like truly learns what that other side feels like. He's just like an idiot. He's just getting punched in the head all the time. And so I think with your, with your training, you want to make sure that you don't end up with that sparring partner syndrome where you're just kind of always, you're always getting your ass kicked and you're not really, you're never sending the right message to your body in Rocky. When Apollo creeds people that when they call him into, to fight Apollo Creed, Rocky is such a loser that he doesn't, he can't even accept the fight with Apollo Creed because he's like, Hey, you know what, like to be honest, like at first he thinks he's there to be a sparring partner and you're like, you don't understand Rocky, like you're here to fight for the world championship. And he's like, Oh no, you know, I'm like a journeyman fighter, like it wouldn't be a good fight. Like he doesn't even understand because he's been sending his body the wrong message for so many years. And I see a lot of people kind of get into that habit where with their lifting, they think it's so important to go to failure all the time. I think it's so important to do that. And I just think you're continually sending your body the wrong message. Now, if we're talking about bodybuilding and we're talking about you doing stuff, even as a powerlifter for hypertrophy and you doing assistance work, that is a totally different story than I think that's where some training to failure can be really, really beneficial, both mentally and physically. Yeah, I think it's a really good point for in calisthenics though as well, if we're trying to do something that's quite technical a lot of the time, those reps, as you said, like having clean stuff and having stuff that isn't messy when you're trying to squeeze out the last one of a hands down pushup or a muscle or whatever, it's the same thing. I like what you're saying around the, you're giving your body or giving your brain the wrong message. Almost like this is an acceptable way to do this rep. If it isn't, then it needs not to be there. Let me ask you how effective has it been being in the gym and let's say that you're working on some jumps. Let's say you're doing a burpee and in between that you're trying to jump over something that's progressively higher or maybe you're doing burpees into a muscle up or something crazy like that. How effective has it been when you've struggled and when you've been, you kind of keep missing the rep, like you can't do it and then your training partner or another coach comes over, tries to show you, you still can't do it. And then how effective has it been to get really mad and like turn music up? Like it doesn't help solve the problem. Now, again, it's what you're interested in so it's okay to do some of that, but like most of your training shouldn't look like that. Like, hey dude, let me slap you in the back harder. Like, no dude, just stop. At super training, I always say that some of the strongest things I've ever seen people do is just take weight off the bar. I've seen people say, hey, you know what? I'm not lifting it the right way, right? And we're like, yeah, you need to hone in on your form and technique a little bit better. And so sometimes we'll take some weight off the bar, might take one of the big plates off the bar and they might do it better and then we'll work our way back up and give them another chance on their opportunity. But what I've always taught people at super training is you have to prove to me that you know how to lift that every single time. I don't care if it's 100 pounds, 200 pounds, 300 pounds. Every single time that you lift it, you have to show me that you know how to lift it. That's how we put more weight on the bar. Unless you show me that you know how to lift the weight the correct way. Awesome. I think what's really good about this is it's interesting, back to when you started at the beginning, Mark, you mentioned around finding your passion and following these different disciplines of power lifting or crossfit or whatever it might be. My background is in strength and conditioning and it's just so good that the same principle is just consistent through all these modalities. It's just how we express it. But the same principle is equality, it's managing your ego. From both a technical perspective of how we go about lifting, training, but then also the mindset and the psychology that goes with it. It's really just a positive. That's what I was hoping we're going to get from you today. It's almost been the same conversation. It's just that it finishes with you talking about weights on a bar, whereas we're trying to encourage people to embrace that same process. It's just the outcome is slightly different. We're moving our body. We make it rather than progressively adding weight. We just make it progressively harder rather than in terms of the body angles and shapes. We're making like a handstand push-up was obviously a much more difficult push-up. Not only because it's in a different plane, but there's the balance. If you're going to free-standing that your feet on the wall, there's that balance element to it as well. And there's a whole series of little progressions that we take people on in between those. So I think that's the same thing that we learn in the market about the idea of the trade mentality towards it and the emphasis on the quality of how we're going through that and managing who we go to. Yeah. It's good to hear the same sort of the same messaging. I think how to be good at anything is the same for you know, it doesn't matter what it is. relationships. I mean it's all the same mix mash of words you know and if we were to have you know 20 people in the room for seminar and say okay what do you think the keys to success are for lifting weights right and you know they would shout out you know five things and it you know might be a little disagreement about what those five things are exactly. There might be some different interpretations of what different words mean and stuff like that and then if you were to say okay you know what what are five things that are necessary for success with calisthenics what are five things that are necessary you know if you kept going through different things all the words would be the same pretty much I mean you might see a little interchanging here and there but the same thing that you could say for calisthenics would be true for lifting would be true for just about anything I mean there might be some physicality in there so like you know for example if you know and when if it comes to like making money somebody might not think you know being strong is related to that so or if you said hey what's the key to being successful and powerlifting you could just sum it up by saying you know being very strong but I'm talking more about the general words you know consistency you know those those are those are the things and then how do we get consistency we get consistency by having it be something that you're into that's the easiest way to do it if you're you know what what I think is important for people to walk themselves through you know what is it that you're really after you know do you want to have a faster you know mile time or something like that if you do then you're out there doing all the work that's necessary for it if you find yourself dragging your feet and not really wanting to do it a lot of times well that just tells you that you don't have the interest level that you thought you did and that's okay that's totally fine it's totally fine to have like a hobby that's like an a hobby a b hobby a c hobby right it's okay to put these things in different categories but just realize that you know that's where that's at I mean I used to spend when I was powerlifting I'd spend four or five six hours in the gym like it is it was irrelevant how long it took was not factored in I wasn't like oh man I you know I need to you know get this workout in in 30 minutes or or whatever it was never that way it was always like I'm staying here until I fucking figure the shit out I don't care how long that takes and it was because that that's where the interest level was it was just I wanted to try to be the best I could possibly figure out to be and I realized that that didn't take 45 minutes yeah you make it so I'm trying that you're making me think of like I like the I like I like thinking outside of training as well but which which you make me think and go in okay the the thing I like I love I love the the challenge of training and I've always loved training and you know I had a background in rugby before before doing this and understanding what makes me like using that thing that I really like you say using the thing that I really like doing and going what are the things that I do during that that are like really effective and make me be able to be good at it and see progress and have success in it and then go in like take those take those things that you do really well in that scenario Jacko and then go well what about these other areas of your life where you want to see more progress why don't you try and start applying those same sort of principles that you're doing really well over a year where you're training put them into some other areas of your life that you want to see progress in and and becoming your own sort of you know what works for you because you've got one area that's working for you like use them again in in other areas rather than I think sometimes we look at different parts of our lives and different things that we want to be good at or better at and and perhaps don't use the same sort of tools or principles that are making us successful in it in in one area I really you know really I really like that you're making one of the things really tick yeah good one of the things that really helped me as a power lifter and I think would set me apart from a lot of other lifters is that and and you know a lot of lifters do this but like I just talked a lot of shit you know I I was into like boasting up my own ego a little bit even at the expense of like hurting somebody else's feelings but it was just part of my game like I wasn't really truly trying to hurt anybody but a lot of people that lifted me at that time they were like fans it was it was tough to lift with you because somebody would do a lift on the other side of the gym they'd hit a big deadlift and everybody'd be super pumped for them and I'd walk over there and do it for 10 reps without a warm-up you know think things like that just just because I could do it you know but those were things that made me tick and those were things that like gave me a good challenge and I was like oh can I do that and then a lot of times I got smacked in the mouth hard you know when I again in training with Stan Effing I mean he used to kick my ass you know pretty much all the time I mean he's a tough guy to he's a tough guy to beat but if I look at those things and look at some of the characteristics that I had during powerlifting those are the same things that you guys see on Instagram of me like talking shit and saying hashtag be rich and I might make fun of all the other companies out there that make slingshots and hip circles and I mean how many how many companies have this you know I created this I invented this this came from this came from in here and this came from in here but every motherfucker makes this right and some of that like some of me calling those people out is it's just what I did in powerlifting so it's like that is that is it's not something I even truly believe in I don't really even care what other people do I don't care what other companies do we're gonna rock our stuff the best that we possibly can and we're gonna be the best at what we do the best way that we can do it and I'm not too preoccupied with what anybody else does but I also just I I am I'm amused by it like I like calling people out I like talking shit a little bit I like I like to stir the pot a little bit and that's been some of the stuff that I've been posting recently about the coronavirus and stuff like that and and just saying hey I don't think governments can really do much to stop a virus and it's just opinion and then other people you know they get flared up they get triggered they get you know super upset by by what I'm saying and that's you know I started like the race of zero followers just in again just it's just a way to get people to think like are you really thinking for yourself and also like if you're a fan of mine you're a follower of mine you've been a fan of mine a follower of mine because I've been posting out stuff that's of interest to me and then you found it to be interesting as well well I don't want my post just based off of likes and based off of comments I don't want my post to be edited by you because of the stimulation that I might get off of X amount of likes so if I post a picture about me and I talk about the carnivore diet then that gives me a certain result and it's gonna have the same result every single time it's always gonna work it's gonna cause a lot of conversation it's gonna help people a lot but then I'm not allowed to talk about anything else like I can't talk politics I can't mention my own views about the coronavirus I can't mention I can only talk about like training or powerlifting and it's like well powerlifting is just it's just something that I did you know it's not who I am you know who I am is I'm again I'm a dad I'm a husband those things are first and foremost to me and I'm a citizen you know I'm I'm a somebody who is in a community I'm part of my community just like you guys are part of your community and I want to see people thrive and I want to see people do well and so I'm gonna voice my opinion about those things I'm not gonna like sit on my hands I don't think that I don't think that sitting around and quarantine is like I just don't I don't think it's productive I don't think it's good at all I think the people that are unhealthy they should they should stay at a harm's way the best they possibly can but you know as soon as you go to view your opinions about stuff if you guys talk about anything other than calisthenics unfortunately people might kind of get upset and lose interest in what you're saying but they should understand that you guys are are humans and that you have your own your own thoughts surrounding many different topics other than just calisthenics whilst we know you are probably really enjoying the podcast there's something else that we think you will also really enjoy and that is the virtual classroom if you're a beginner we have got an eight week free beginners program designed to help you start your calisthenics journey where you're going to learn how to move better get superhuman strong and have a lot of fun along the way if you're ready to take your training to the next level and learn some of the iconic calisthenics movements like a frog to handstand or a muscle up then inside the virtual classroom you are going to find all the training programs and educational information that you need but rather than keeping you from the podcast for any longer than necessary head over to schoolofcalisthenics.com where you're going to find a body weight training resource which is different to anything else available anywhere Tim I think they're ready to get back to the podcast yeah I wanted to see you mentioned a word there but I really wanted to get a bit of input in it links into super training in the gym and I heard you speak on a podcast a couple of years ago actually I think and and your your gym setup is now free for members as I understand it what's the community like in terms of at your gym and the culture of your gym because it's quite a unique thing your background and your strength training experience with it has also got a culture of its own what's it like at your gym and is it the sort of place where anybody can just rock up on day one and and they can walk in and be like okay cool I feel part of this community or if you're gonna if you're gonna be on the sort of sniffing salts and you know it's I guess it's kind of like a like an unwritten rule is like that you need to be strong but that's you know that's people's own interpretation of super training but really you don't it doesn't matter you know and anyone can come in there and train the gym is free Saturday and Sunday from you know as soon as we get a quarantine Saturday and Sunday from 9 to 1 is when we allow guests to come in there and I made the gym free years ago it wasn't always it wasn't always free didn't always start out that way but the second that I had the opportunity to make it free I made it free I really love lowering the barrier of entry into fitness and engine strength I feel like it's complicated and you know again like just kind of going back to like where we're at now I think that we're at now with all these deaths and all these people getting really sick I think this is payment I think this is a this is payment for many years of people neglecting their bodies and people neglecting their nutrition I'm not saying that every single person that has died from the coronavirus is fat and or out of shape nor am I saying that they deserve it but I'm saying that something shitty always happens out of neglect and I just I don't like seeing people like that I want people exercising I want people moving and that's why I'm a big promoter of a lot of stuff that's free 10 minute walks push-ups squats they say the best things in life are free and I found that to be I found that to be pretty much true you know when it comes to you know these 10 minute walks it's like man you can just anyone just anyone can like walk you know and even even in terms of powerlifting I've found that anyone can power lift maybe not anyone can power lift the way that Larry wheels power lifts or the way that cone did it but anyone anyone can squat anyone can bench anyone can deadlift it's just a matter of like how much weight can they handle you know maybe for a squat maybe you know maybe somebody who's 75 years old and has bad knees and and a bad back maybe they can only do a quarter squat and maybe they can only do it with a six-pound dumbbell in their hands or something but they can still squat and that's what I've always loved about powerlifting strength training I've never in my life I've never met one person that doesn't possess the ability to get stronger I have not I have not seen that person yet I don't believe that person exists I think everyone it doesn't matter if someone's in a wheelchair it doesn't matter if somebody doesn't have any arms it doesn't I mean if you're alive if you're a living human being then you possess the ability not only to get stronger like forget the gym for a second just to get better period you know everyone possesses the ability to learn I mean it doesn't matter what someone was born with or what someone was born without I find that fascinating I think that's really cool and that's one of the reasons why I made the gym freaks I wanted to lower that I want to say hey let's not let's not worry about that you know I hear people kind of squawking that it's a hundred bucks a month or whatever let's just let's just get rid of that I don't have the gym to make money anyway and the gym was never really it was never set up to be profitable I never cared about the gym in that sense I just wanted the gym to be I wanted to be strong I wanted to be fun the gym was set up for very selfish reasons I just wanted to be as strong as I could possibly be initially and so and again you know going back to the interest like the gym is the gym was set up for selfish reasons a slingshot was made for selfish reasons I made a compression cuff for your elbow which a lot of other companies have copied I made I made that with the intention of it being for me like I made a lot of things for me and I set things up for myself and then it just happened to be like I was like okay well I could probably share this out with other people and this would be cool when I was recording a lot of the lifts it was the same thing it was for selfish reasons I wanted to get better at squatting so I'm like let me record these and I started recording them in 2005 and then I kind of a lot of the other lifters in the gym started squatting seven eight 900 pounds and I was like I gotta film them too because people are gonna be interested in this stuff this is crazy to see seven eight nine forty five pound plates on each side of the bar people are gonna freak out when they see this stuff and no one cared you know no one cared for you know a decade and and now people now people I think I think they enjoy power lifting and we're gonna see Hapthor Bjornsson go for a 500 501 kg deadlift on ESPN in about a week or so so that's that's super exciting but yeah made it free initially just kind of lower that barrier of entry and to set up the right environment you know I've learned from Louis Simmons that if you walk with the lame you'll develop a limp and I've never wanted to I never wanted to train with people that are gonna half-ass it so that is the one rule if there is any rule the super training gym is like I just I want to see you working hard that's what you pay with you pay with your your blood sweat and tears I don't care about the weight that you lift but I want you to contribute I want you to help load plates I want you to help spot I want you to participate I want you to yell at somebody when they're about to do a lift because we're all in it together it's very difficult to get stronger and let's figure out a way to make it easier to get stronger and I believe it's easier to get stronger and it's easier to get better at fitness in a group setting than it is by yourself yeah well you don't you're doing obviously doing some doing some amazing stuff there and you know it's it's it's inspiring to hear sort of not just the stories come out of it but they are what you're what you're doing with that and with the gym and then I just as we bring things to a close I had one final sort of thing to so it goes right back to you I really enjoyed the fact that you said you were you're doing your body weight squats and doing your push-ups and sort of enjoying the different challenge that that may may bring and just wondered whether you have thought about or have tried to look at any sort of progressions of of some of those more simple body weight movements that you've done so sort of rather than bushing out 40 50 60 push-ups do you play around with like doing a single arm push-up or any of the sort of push-up variations or rather than just doing more pull-ups looking at trying to do do a muscle-up on the bar is that something that you've thought about or during this time think oh maybe actually I could look at doing some of those things a little bit differently I think it'll be a natural progression because uh like it just feels better right so yeah um again you know I've been encouraging people to do these 10 minute walks for I don't know five six years now um and as I you know started I would do two or three 10 minute walks a day a lot of times I'd take a phone call and I'd pop on a you know walk and I would just walk for 10 15 minutes maybe well now I walk for hours you know and a lot of times during my walks I'm running and kind of same things happening here with the with the squats you know sometimes I'll squat onto a bench that's kind of high other times I might because I don't have great mobility in like my ankles and heels and stuff so sometimes I'll put something under my heels to do like an olympic squat and do a um I guess you would call like a hindu squat you know get a full range of motion squat and I might put a weight vest on and I might even hold a little bit of weight in my hands and try a hundred squats that way so I've been uh kind of naturally leaning into doing different progressions I've been doing push-ups with a 40 pound weight vest as well um yesterday I did 300 push-ups so it just it it kind of just uh depends but like I'm feeling so good as I'm doing it because I am and I'm encouraged to do it more and more because I'm feeling better and better all the time so as you feel better with it you get a little more uh like frisky you know you're like hey yeah I could try this so do some bananas the other day I was yeah the other day I was doing push-ups and I was like okay I think I can leave the ground on every single push up you know I was trying I was trying to do like 200 of them back and forth with some squats and and back and forth with some um we were running some uh stairs and I just wanted to make sure that I could do it the whole time you know so I did like 15 reps every single time just give myself a good little pop off the ground type of thing but I haven't really messed with you know transitioning into things uh that are too complex or too complicated but um I'm so far I'm feeling good I really would like to work on some more lunging just because like my knees are a little weird and I'd love to kind of continue to build up strength in the knees but yeah other than that I've been keeping it I've been keeping it pretty simple nice looking after the basics yeah you never never had never go wrong looking after the basics what are some of your favorites that you guys like to do oh that's a good question yeah but just I was just thinking push-ups wise when you when you're not gonna have that many number of push-ups thinking well what about looking at some some single arm push-ups um looking at some typewriter arch push-ups we sort of transition over to one side so one side's like the other arm out straight you know um it's just like loading the plunge variations I like you know if you put a real forward lean on it so it becomes a bit more like a decline press in many ways in terms of the position of the hands in relation to the chest but those get hard really quick and if you've got an opportunity to throw your feet in a set of gymnastics rings and then lean forward into that plunge position and then start to work in those kind of shapes you sort of a sudden you throw that instability into it and then it's just a different ball game all together and that we probably quite have a lot of fun with that sort of stuff a big a big part of us around calisthenics is um is play as a play with movement and if we can get strong and play at the same time and we like the variety and and just trying out different sort of things um and the same with dips as well like the basics of just like russian dips or um or korean dips and just just challenging yourself to move in a different way and if you when you're doing that with strength and you can do 10 and as you say put a vest on and we start playing around a bit more with tempo or um putting super sets together and um yeah that's probably like a bit of a we we often get distracted by playing and not enough actually getting on with the with the other reps and sets sometimes but it's uh that it's uh for most as you mentioned before it's a it's a passion it's a mental health thing the the the freedom to play with movement is just a really rewarding thing I think the push-up is such a like a foundation like pressing movement like it is so good but for a lot of people once they can do quite a number of the it be a bit stagnant and a bit boring and actually this you can be there's so many different options and being creative with it that it can it can be not only just like challenging from a strengths perspective you think of what some of those single arm progressions look like but um it's fun like Tim says it's it's fun to do that and I don't know depending on where people are out in their mindset for their training like if I'm having a good time while some training as part of it then and as long as it's still challenging me that sort of it keeps me a little bit more engaged probably whereas if you said I'm just going to do a hundred push-up normal push-ups in a row like well I'll probably automatically start moving my hand position look at some diamonds look at some wider ones like just just give myself some different movement options I think the shoulders really enjoy that but also it keeps my brain engaged. It exposes your weakness as well I think that's a real powerful thing in training like I want to know what I can't do and let me do more of that because that's the the weak link in the chain so yeah challenging myself in in in those positions it's we always talk about calisthenics it's something you've mentioned before as well about ego like it's massively humbling you look at people look at a muscle-up and they're like I should be able to do that I can do pull-ups I can do dips well I can't do muscle-up I'm like well it's because you're not fast enough and you've now got to go away and go start to develop some speed because you can't pull explosively but yeah I enjoy being humbled by my training and realizing there's still stuff that I've got to put ground working for. How do you guys define calisthenics? Well that's a good question it's probably most closely if you were to kind of give it a label as gymnastics strength-based work but without the artistic elements of calisthenics yeah and we're not so much on pointy toes but it's it it can take number of forms of freestyle calisthenics where they'll have battle of the bars type things where it becomes very sort of acrobatic based and then you've got all the end of the spectrum you've got the the sort of the real strength-based guys that just want to do 32 kilo muscle-ups and they go after the sort of like numbers of just that sort of stuff and then our kind of focus is probably somewhere where we just enjoy moving well moving clean getting strong and having fun with training and it's what we find with calisthenics is it's it just there's there's always more progressions there's always something new to learn once you've done a handstand we can now you can start working on handstand push-ups and that kind of puts you back at day one again because you've got to go and earn the right to go and go and play at that level. So yeah bodyweight training but we've had this jack-of-his conversation before like it is a bodyweight squat when you put a weight vest on is that still calisthenics or are we now doing weighted training because what's the difference between a weighted vest and barbell in terms of load it's the same thing we're just overloading the system is a weighted pull-up now calisthenics or not so it's all like you say I think this is kind of brought us full circle it's all the same stuff right it's just the expression of like I can't put 387 kilos on a on a weight vest and do I do my push-ups so you guys uh you guys track your heart rate and stuff you do check on that a little bit I do jack-of-his you don't do so much to you but I've got a I've got a heart rate monitor that I wear in training that I just quite enjoy seeing what I'm doing I think over the years I've got a fairly good intrinsic monitor I know when I'm at zone five let's call it that or 90% I know when I'm probably roughly around 60-70% just from from years in doing it but I do like to sort of see but the big one that I like on my heart rate is my recovery I sometimes use that for rest periods like when the heart rate drops I'm going to go again um it's just an interesting one. Jack have you got any thoughts on that? I'm tracking a waking heart rate at the moment actually not just not during training times I was going to say something on um I've forgotten now it's about those progressions what about something so like I you know I I tell people about these you know walks all the time and I've been trying to encourage people to you know occasionally run and stuff and I'm like checking my own heart rate and stuff and I'm not trying to get my I'm not trying to like make my heart rate go crazy here and there I'll do like a hill sprint and stuff like that trying to get my hamstrings used to some sprints but maybe there's a couple good exercises that you know someone could do during a walk I mean it seemed like you know I've been so every time I walk past something that I can do like a box squat onto I just automatically squat on it now because here where I'm at like there's a lot of hills and so obviously walking the hills gets your heart rate up but you walk downhill quite a bit too so sometimes I'll just stop and I'll do like a squat like what are maybe some good ways to you know get your heart rate up maybe not even just for a 10 minute walk but just maybe in between I don't know in between doing a bodybuilding back exercise or something you know what I mean like just something that's obviously a burpee I think is is like kind of the classic go-to just kill your heart rate but what you guys have a couple suggestions for that because I could I could easily implement some of that one on here yeah I think there's some interesting stuff and I'm kind of aware that there's a conversation in the straining word about whether we should be using plyometrics for conditioning based work but if I wanted to go heart rate and I've so I've got a I've got a small guard and if I'm going to train and I want a metabolic session I'm just going to go on back to back so it might be pull-ups, dips so let's say real simple I'm going to do a set of rounds I'm going to go 10 pull-ups 15 dips 20 push-ups back to back and if I want to maintain heart rate within those then I'm going to go and do lunge jumps or vertical jumps or something like that something where I've got an explosive element or or a plyometric push-up variation and I think I'm not one for sort of an advocate of let's do a hundred sort of high intensity plyometrics because you've obviously got a this is stability of movement quality issue to throw into the mix a bit as well but I think you can't if you want to get heart rate up in a short amount of in a small space with body weight exercises if you if your rest periods are going to go circuit style throw some something explosive in there and it will do the job yeah like a split jump split jump or just like a squat jump or something like that yeah and the split jump goes back to your lunge pattern like what we kind of talk a bit about longevity and what are the sorts of things I want to be able to do when I'm 60 70 years old well I still like to be able to run a little bit and I kind of want to have a lot of reactive stability and strength that I can jump down off a curve if I need to or jump out of the way of a car and these kind of let's write in inverted commas like in functional patterns of being able to to move explosively in a split bipedal kind of pattern I don't think some value in that sort of stuff and and being able to do it when you're tired is a it is also you get what you're trained for right so and we we should train the things we want to keep yeah and even with those lunge patterns like you know not just staying in that sort of sagittal plane but looking at some lateral movements as well like when you start to feel more confident and comfortable with those positions is definitely going to help um if in terms of your uh your burp is talking about burpees a burpee with a box jump is an absolute destroyer if you want to really get get your heart rate up that's pretty disgusting uh even yeah pull up doesn't have to be there but don't mean it doesn't have to be very the difference between if you do a burping like a little jump you end up being like when you give yourself the outcome of like whatever box or step or whatever it may be don't do anything too like crazy high but something that's making you have to like put that extra little bit of explosive work in to get onto something that always that always does I remember the thing actually that I forgot then when it was about um what so calisthenics comes in two Greek words callous and stenos which mean beauty and strength so ultimately like with with using your own body weight to be sort of that beautifully strong which just made me think of some of the stuff you were saying about clean lifts like it should look good your first rep should look as good as your last rep um there's there's some real nice there's real nice similarities and crossover and philosophy on that my last point on that one just the other thing that we introduced over the summer which I want to get back in my program is when myself my wife just went into the 25 30 minute sprint session um and and just I think running hills short hills short bursts 10 20 30 meter sprint efforts like you said before about going back to having the the um the base level kind of stability move range and movement stuff is important but like again a human humans are designed to to run and if we run fast it gets the heart rate up and it's a great conditioning tool um I think those are those are some just you try to push ups and some stuff in with some sprints you're going to know about it I reckon pretty soon so have you guys been watching any of the crossfit stuff that's like on Netflix you know now that you have maybe a little bit of downtime I've watched a couple of them actually yeah well bits of yeah you say to me it's yeah it's like it's unbelievable um I find some of the exercise and the stuff they do just to be crazy like a you know walking overhead lunges like with and and I mean I I don't I forget what the kind of weights are the girls are using but man I want to say they had like a 53 pound kettlebell or something I mean that's just yeah I don't know how they're it's embarrassing to me because I'm like I can't do one of those and they just went a whole football field you know like it's unbelievable and the bodies on on the women and and the men are just like the physiques people are just they're really jacked and they're really able to move really well it's pretty damn impressive yeah they make they have to do a bit of everything don't they so um yeah it's hats off to them it's uh you won't be seeing me at a competition these days I don't think like that these days okay I used to think we like when I played rugby we had to do you know you had to be strong you had to be fast you had to be agile you had to take impact um used to think we had to do quite a lot of various different things in our training to be like quite a good all-round athlete but but yeah it's still um it's still nothing like what those guys have to do for the next but even in CrossFit it's been interesting to see them introduce strict form movements so strict hands down push up strict muscle ups and it leveled people to start off with all of a sudden they just couldn't there was there was athletes there that are insane at everything else but they couldn't do a strict ring muscle up and I think that's one thing I admire CrossFit for is they are very very good at continuing to challenge the athletes and change the game they're like they don't stand still um you can't get good at CrossFit really to a level that is outplays where CrossFit can take the the realms of that sport there will always be something which they can do to to to catch people out just make it just make it out yeah it's impressive yeah yeah it's impressive Mark we're going to wrap it up mate thank you so much for your time it's been an absolutely brilliant conversation and um yeah it's just absolute fantastic shared knowledge in there and we really thank you for for giving us that time and and wisdom appreciate it man thank you guys so much so once again another fantastic podcast thank you so much to Mark Bell for being our guest this week we have nothing else to say apart from until next time class is dismissed so thank you so much again for listening we don't take it lightly that you give up probably an hour of your time to listen to these podcasts and we really do appreciate that we hope you got a lot of value out of it guys and we would if you did we would love you to do a couple things for us one of them is tell other people and share it if you thought that we were adding some value and also if you want to pop over to iTunes or wherever you listen to this and give us a five star review we like five stars four stars not as good keep it five are the best five of your best stars please and if you would like to find out more about the school of calisthenics and see the best of everything that we 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