there we go it's a little bit better there
we go we're on it's it's weird saying hello again after we just said hello for the purposes of
facebook hello steve how are you sir good morning gentlemen well it's even in here it's 10 o'clock
10 a.m there isn't it i believe oh you're right um wait 12 hours difference uh you're at 6 p.m what
eight hours for new york so three more hours added to that because i'm pacific standard times right
right yeah if it's 10 a.m out there it's 6 p.m here so you're talking eight hours eight hours
difference so yeah there you go to give us a bit of context before we go into anything in detail
steve i just want to as always run through like a timeline of your life if we can and start right
back at the start and i've read somewhere that you started training in fifth grade and i had i had
to look up what age fifth grade was and it was is that about 11 years of age in the us yeah
uh like 10 11 i was like a year behind all the other kids because uh i was born in december
december 3rd right so that put me almost a year back in age for most of the other kids say
well for example when i started university i was only 17 years old okay what date does the school
year start in america then uh well she could help me my mom could help me back but she just went i
just went ahead it starts in september all right okay so i was like a year birthday behind
a lot of the other kids i got yeah and then you went you got into training at age
11 which is pretty early i mean i was my sports then were soccer for football over here
and i couldn't imagine lifting weight were you lifting weights at that age did you get your first
ball yeah my father actually bought me a barbell set uh uh we were just down the road from york
pennsylvania york at the time was the mecca for olympic weightlifting and physical culture in the
united states it was run by a fellow by the name of bob hoffman who was the olympic coach and in
those days olympic weightlifting was very popular but the old timers did everything they did
olympic lifting gymnastics uh bodybuilding training regular barbell training and um so it
was a little old-fashioned even in the 60s when i was growing up but i started with the with
the old york system the old york barber my dad was down to york barbell i met some of the greats
like john grimmick uh bob hoffman was still alive i uh i met robert benorsky who was like the last
world champion from the united states in olympia in an olympic weightlifting so that's who actually
showed me how to do the basic olympic lift okay what sort of training was it was very
popular in those days but then the olympic lift fell on the favor and power lifting took over
the us everyone got into power the squad bench and uh they were did you deadlift them so yeah did
your dad lift was he interlifted no no he didn't uh he he was always athletic he he grew up in a
farm in west virginia uh he grew up almost like like the amish i mean they had no electricity
when he grew up and everything was you know uh wood stove uh his mother cooked over a wooden
stove um she just saw the wood pile they had i mean the wood and the west virginia winters are
pretty so they would spend a lot of time getting firewood and they they had horses to plow the
fields i mean his father would pick him up in a horse-drawn sleigh in the winter because the cars
couldn't drive couldn't drive the roads there was no snow plows so it was very old old-timey and to
escape the farm he was an only child he joined the u.s navy as a he was actually too young at the
time he had to have his mother's permission i think he was 17.
He joined the u.s navy for world
war ii and fought in the pacific uh he was on a uh destroyer escort and uh he was like you say
he was very athletic he played football baseballs he boxed very good little boxer and he was the
pacific flyweight champion uh in the u.s navy the navy champ they would they would put a ring
up on one of the aircraft carriers or one of the bigger warships and then all the ships would like
gather around the guys would be up in the rigging watching the uh the boxing tournaments during the
war did he get you into it he was very much into that so uh he taught my brother and i boxing from
an early age but i didn't like it very much and uh for that reason then he literally
made me go out for wrestling we had boxing matches in the backyard as a kid
and uh i get so furious i throw the gloves off and tackle the guy he said because i hated getting
hit he said you're no boxer you're a wrestler i'm you're going to go after the wrestling team
and under great protest that i went and uh it was like one of those things
where i was an instant success it was just like one of those sports i just had
a knack for it wasn't particularly good anything else you know in those days it was either
football basketball or baseball or wrestling and i just found that i had a real knack for
it and all my training was geared to making me a better athlete as opposed to like a lot of
young guys that just want to get swole you know big or weightlifting as a sport you know to see
how much they can live for me it was all about performance becoming a better athlete so all my
endeavors with the weights was to make me a better athlete as far as wrestling is concerned and that
does change the training protocols quite a bit yeah i would imagine so what sort of chinese
protocols were you following at that time well i started with the york basic
barbell system the simplified system uh they had a whole bunch of different
systems and they were actually pretty good for what they were and then later i became aware
of other things my i started finding uh the muscle magazines of the era that was where most young men
got their information there was no internet there was no cell phone there was nothing like that
so young men would find these muscle magazines and i i found this one called uh iron man
now the modern iron man is a far cry from the old original one the original
one was this little square magazine and it was written by a fellow by the name of
perry raider a midwestern guy very simple guy perry and mabel raider and it was a real homey
down home kind of thing but the articles were excellent and i saw the 20 rep squat program that
perry raider recommended and i was really in trick and i followed that 20 rep squat protocol and from
the time uh i was a senior in high school from the time uh i was a junior i'm uh yeah junior in uh
college i went from about 160 pounds to 205 pounds on 20 rep squats so and the protocol was you would
use a weight you usually get about 10 reps for yeah and somehow you would make yourself
do 20.
Like using rest pause stuff yeah do a squat come up take three big breaths you're
down take a squat three it was just excruciating like a death march it was like one of the hardest
things i mean you're literally laying the floor off your dog just knackered completely finished
and then somehow drag yourself to your feet and finish the workout and uh i would do that twice
a week and i would drink a gallon of milk a day in addition to three meals now imagine a teenager
how much he eats anyway now imagine a gallon of milk on top of three meals i gained i grew
like a weed i got huge grew out all my pants but uh you know of course i put on a lot of body
fat too at the time it was like uh in those days they used to use what they call bulk up routines
where you would bulk up and then you would have a cutting phase that was like the popular
bodybuilding jargon of the day but i just wanted to get big and strong as strong as i could
and uh it certainly worked but uh once i uh went to college university i was a physical education
major it was almost like being in the military in those days they had separate doors for girls and
guys you know nowadays it's like pro-red dorms those days it was separate you had hair rules you
couldn't have your hair very long you couldn't have mustaches or beards you had a dress code you
had to dress in an actual uniform as a pe major you know we learned marching and drill and
everything just just like being in the army very interesting but i loved it and they had
a lot of old-timey physical culture things that still included in the program for example i
learned how to swing indian clubs as a pe major there was one part of the curriculum where do you
find that today no one knows that anywhere do you no and at that time i started getting into the
power lifting thing you know uh i started with the uh maybe you heard this guy red park a very famous
south african bodybuilder strongman mr universe he uh he created the 5×5 protocol for
you know five exercises five reps uh for five sets the first two were warm-up sets
and three work work sets now there's different versions of it but uh i made real good progress
in that and then uh i discovered arthur jones in his oh well there are some other guys too
that i followed there was a guy by the name of bradley steiner he was a martial arts guy who
had some really real interesting ideas about heavy leg and back work as a way of getting really
really strong there was there used to be this monthly call john mccollum uh keys to progress
that i used to follow some of those routines but uh i kind of graduated towards power
lifting a little bit got real interested in seeing how much i could lift in those days
the idea was you know the more you can lift you know the better uh we know now with
current research that this is simply not true but in those days you know it was
all about how much weight you gave or how many reps did you do but then i read about
arthur jones and his upper body squat in the his nautilus machines i got really intrigued jones
was quite a good writer and i read a couple of his articles in athletic journal as well and uh i
sought out the very first nautilus gym in the east coast other than florida it was in a place called
drexel line shopping center in brumal pennsylvania and i went there and there was two guys that were
running this place both bodybuilders one was a former football player for pittsburgh the other
guy was a karate karate guy but also a bodybuilder and i learned under those guys i remember going
in and i was wrestling ncaa division one which is a you know that's the highest caliber of
wrestling in the u.s outside olympic team and uh i made the mistake of telling these
guys yeah i'm a wrestler and i'm in great shape you know i want to work and i
did a hard workout man they [ __ ] killed me i was so devastated from that nautilus workout
that i literally had to sit for about 30 minutes before i could drive up that's how blown out i
was what did that was it was all about intensity and anyone that thinks that those nautilus
machines don't work this complete poppy car i think is a miami dolphin football team i think
was it 72 or 73 they were they're the only team to go undefeated in the nfl and win a super bowl
and they were all training on nautilus machines so for sure machine training works now it's all
about functional training which is also a bunch of bunk i've brought in for a while but i realize
that functional training is dysfunctional training it's certainly not a sustainable way to train
is there anything after the nautilus thing it was an easy progression then to go to uh
super slo that was created by ken hutchins and that created a huge backlash there was a lot
of people really upset with this idea super slow and they made fun of the guy he's been the
research now just within the completely vindicated god was right the whole time a lot of people are
vague in their face you know that made fun of the system and said it didn't work and this and that
and the other thing and even more so ken got into isometrics and isometrics are very popular also
when i was a kid i remember doing isometrics as a supplemental training with my wrestling all along
the barbell now isometrics is the big thing but you know i i had an old york isometric exerciser i
used to use all the time when i go on vacation or when i would go on trips and also use it as a
supplement to my barbell training so everything's kind of come full circle for me it seems okay
it's what you prescribe now really isn't it the uh the the static stuff well one of the one that
one of my big mistakes was buying into this russian training you know eastern european
and you know russia was always a mysterious thing for me uh first of all i admired the russian
wrestlers tremendously they were always an enigma you know in all the olympics the russians that
have these real stoic faces no expression and uh they were just such a marvelous athlete and uh
i was always intrigued by the training methods and uh i i can remember this must have been
in the mid 70s i wrestled victor silverman in the montreal open wrestling tournament victor
silverman was the east of the european champion russian olympic team took i think he took a
bronze medal in the world anyway he kicked my ass but after the tournament i had a chance to talk to
him through an interpreter and at the time he was trying to uh defect to canada so it was a lot of
controversy but somehow i managed to talk to him in the locker room while we were changing through
an interpreter because he didn't speak english or not much and i couldn't believe he he told
me that he only lifted weights once a week and i said why and i had the guy repeat himself
because i i couldn't wrap my mind around this once a week training but apparently that was
true he lifted once a week and i was just really intrigued i was you know like wow how
do they train you know later i found out but uh i read uh some sometime in the late 90s i
read an article in milo magazine by pablo setholi the guys that kind of got the kettlebell
movement in the united states going and uh very good article uh it was vodka pickle
juice and kettlebells in the morning as a russian cure for hangover very tongue-in-cheek
article i was so intrigued i actually had one of my at this time i i had started the very first
jiu jitsu school in the eastern united states uh brazilian are we in the timeline
here steve what age are you roughly i was in my late i guess i was 40 38 no i was
in my 30s how was it how long did you bring it how long did you 37 38 how long did you
wrestle for when did you stop wrestling um i started let's see i guess 64 through 74 then
i wrestled the freestyle circuit for a while after that but it was too hard being a family guy at
that time i was working full time as a fitness director at a club called society hope club
uh running a nautilus program it was just very hard to find time to train i would go to some
of the local universities like the university of pennsylvania or drexel university in town
but even that was hard you know because their college wrestling practices are right in the
middle of a working man's day i just found it hard to sustain i also quickly realized that
wrestling is a young man's sport you got to stay up with it you know it's a lot of injuries
in that sport because it's pretty rough sport so i kind of just got away from the wrestling
and was looking for something to replace it and right about i guess 1989 i discovered the gracie
brothers and gracie jiu jitsu the brazilian jiu jitsu and uh what's different what differentiates
gracie jiu-jitsu from brazilian jiu-jitsu it's just the way it's taught and the major emphasis
on self-defense and stand-up self-defense elia gracie uh well his brother carlos was
obviously the first of the brothers and uh there's five brothers that learned from a
japanese immigrant in brazil this guy asada maeda was handpicked by [ __ ] okay now to spread
the idea of judo all over the world in those days judo and jiu-jitsu were pretty much simultaneous
there was no differentiation of the technique it's just that at the codicon when they formed
the original judo they just got all the different schools together and they they came
up with this curriculum where they they just drew from all these different jiu-jitsu
stuff and and created judah it was very effective the old style judo superb uh some people call
it cosine judah uh basically the nawaz it was terrific you know stand up throws they had weapon
defenses against stick knife gun i mean everything just as they do now and carlos gracie
and his younger brother elliot learned directly from the japanese and created their own
little style you know polish it up but uh master eliot himself i spent a lot of time with him
actually lived with him on his ranch in brazil for a short bit he told me that he didn't invent
anything but the japanese had everything developed but unfortunately when juno after the war uh
all martial arts were forbidden by the occupying forces the u.s and australia uh juno kind of
changed into this form of jacketed wrestling and lost a lot of its original uh self-defense
aspect but in brazil it was like a little time capsule and they kept developing jiu-jitsu as a
fighting style as a self-defense and a fighting style and that's what i learned directly from
the old man nowadays jiu jitsu has become a sport kind of like tae kwon do you know uh it's
lost most of its effectiveness for real fighting most guys they think they need krav maga or wheat
high or boxing as a standard of self-defense but there's not a very sustainable model especially
as you get older or if you're a small guy like me no way i'm gonna be punching it out
with some big giant guy you know it doesn't make sense but the original stand-up
self-defense from elliot gracie is only known to people that practice gracie jiu-jitsu and it's
based on the original judo old school before it became diluted in an olympic sport but they had
to do that or they weren't allowed to practice so the you know the disguise judo is a is a as
a form it's just a sport which was allowed under occupied rules and then once it became an
olympic sport juno lost most of its prowess as a as a fighting heart that's not to say that
judo players aren't tough are incredible condition and aren't bad asses against you know someone
you know they could easily use those techniques but with the gracie jiu-jitsu it's already the
techniques are already there you don't have to you learn it right from the get-go on how to
defend yourself so i'm not bad-mouthing journal i practice it myself i like it as a matter of fact
the very first martial arts school in the usa was the philadelphia jitter car it was before the
korean taekwondo before karate before anything the philadelphia jitter club was started by a
japanese immigrant in the 40s and it's the oldest ongoing martial arts club in the united states
and i ran into space to those guys they lost their lease at the ymca and they were looking
for a space and i had in my school my jiu jitsu school i i had like all this raw space it was
like a warehouse really right in the middle of the city and uh so we we would have uh we
we would uh have like a grappling day where the junior guys and the judiciary guys would
get together and we had all this cross teaching back and forth a lot of my guys competed in
junior tournaments and um some of those guys uh got belts in jiu-jitsu and would compete in
jiu-jitsu tournaments it was really good uh it was a real good relationship i had with the
philadelphia junior corps and of course judo attracts people from all over the world so
we would get these czech scenes and russians and romanians all these easter european guys
coming into the philadelphia jitter club to to practice and to train so we got a lot of eastern
european style judo influence also a lot of uh former russian wrestlers would come into the club
so i learned a lot about the russian conditioning system and the russian wrestling systems as
as well as you know a really good education to judo and jiu jitsu you know there's kind of like
this little rivalry but there's no reason for it it's it's all grappling it's all good you know
any technique that makes you better is is worth worth learning and keeping you know like bruce lee
yeah take what is you know what what is useful and discard what isn't so that was kind of like the
history and all the while i had this business going and then i had my personal training
business i had mostly uh nautilus hammers strengths equipment uh barbells dumbbells and
some body weight stuff going on but right about late 90s i started getting disillusioned
i was going through a midlife crisis a lot of people don't realize that once you've
been training for about five six years what you see in the mirror is what you get you don't
have this unlimited capacity for getting bigger and more muscular and stronger if there's a
ceiling and it's set by your genetic limits and a lot of people don't want to accept
that and i certainly didn't want to accept it and i started looking at other things
i'm thinking well i've kind of hit my the ceiling here with this high intensity
training i'm going to try something else i started investigating traditional systems of grappling
training like the hindu wrestling or christie wrestling system can do squats into push-ups
neck bridges you know uh club jewelry swinging i looked at the iranian traditional wrestling
system uh with the zircon a also using clubs and push-up boards very similar to the custody
wrestling system and then i looked at the russian system and kettlebells and all that stuff but in
retrospect that was a mistake it's not sustainable and you get a lot of wear and tear
on your body wrestling's bad enough just as bad enough when you add club swinging and
all this other stuff you just wear out your joints not that it doesn't work it certainly works but if
you have two systems right two systems of training and they're both eventually no matter what you do
it doesn't matter gymnastic in the hood workouts you know the what is it convict conditioning
kettlebells power lifting barbells whatever you know swinging a sledgehammer i mean
you can eventually hit your genetic peak and it's going to take you to whatever
limits you have on size and strength everyone has that limit you're going to reach it
and not usually in my experience five to six years and then that's it you know you then you're
maintaining certainly by the time you're in your 40s unless you've never trained you're done and
that's a hard thing for guys to admit it was hard for me to admit so if you if every system pretty
much is going to take you about the same place pick the system that's safer pick the
one that is less strain and wear and tear because a lot of these systems literally
create micro trauma in the joint and you don't feel it's like smoking a cigarette
you know at first you can smoke you can smoke a pack you know and not even feel it for a few years
but it eventually kisses up to you it's the same thing with this type of training you're doing all
this micro trauma and damage to the joints and eventually you develop osteoarthritis or you just
get an acute injury and that's what i found with the kettlebells it was like a sub-acute injury and
it's really funny because my ex-wife dc maxwell was the third american woman in the us to
get a black belt in in brazilian jiu jitsu she said to me when we for she was also one of
the pioneers in kettlebell movement for women in the u.s she was uh she's on the cover of that uh
publicity selling book from russia with tough love the kettlebell book for women anyway she said like
pretty early on wouldn't it be a kick in the pants if we discovered that this stuff is bad for us and
i said hush your mouth i didn't want to hear it but she was right and unfortunately she's had a
hip replacement surgery as a result of kettlebell training and it's no accident that most of the
people including pavel himself brett jones the ceo of uh strong first uh dan john one
of his early partners they've all had or he dan john had double hip replacement
surgery apollo said both elbows surgically and one of the reasons he came up with simple and
sinister and some of these other more simplified streamlined kettlebell programs i think uh on
the recent joe rogan parker as he mentioned that he only does dips and swings because he can't
do anything else he didn't want to admit that his elbows are all [ __ ] up and why kettlebells
man whatever what is it about kettlebells and the clubs that that might it would you say that
that's the same for weightlifting as well absolutely yeah absolutely and i cut my teeth in
olympic lifting i have you know i got i was taught by a world champ i i know what good form is but
it doesn't matter if you're using good form or not it's just the momentum of this implement think
of it this way uh i've always been a tiger wood fans i'm not a golfer but i just always
thought tiger woods was like a pretty cool guy and he's had major back surgeries
just swinging a freaking golf club every tennis player and i i've trained some
pretty high level tennis players i'm currently uh training attendance prayer right now uh i
do this online i do online personal training this guy has had continuous elbow problems
and i you know i've had to work around it i used to work a lot of tennis players
for the philadelphia tennis club at my gym exercise they all have these elbow problems
and you're only swinging a racquet that weighs half pound maybe i mean i don't know how much a
tennis racket weighs but it's really light if you can get tennis elbow from swinging a racket or you
can mess your spine up from swinging a simple golf club and i've worked with pro baseball players
whose elbows and shoulders are all screwed up from you know the repetition of you know hurling
a baseball or swinging a baseball bat and you know even swimmers with you know the repetition what
do people think is going to happen when you're throwing a 24 or 32 kilogram kettlebell you're
literally throwing it over your head repetitively they're not thinking of the shearing force in
the spine and all that force is going through the elbow you know i i i read somewhere where you
know pablo claimed that it toughens your ligaments and your tendons this [ __ ] it destroys it
destroys the joint i found out the hard way i started developing osteoarthritis in my shoulder
my shoulder is pretty jacked i i didn't want to do surgery try to avoid it and now it actually i
can do most of the stuff i like to do i can still i still get an amount of 68 or we'll
be 68 in a couple months and i get in the mat and i still roll i just have to be
really careful pick my partners carefully but i can do everything i want pretty much
but just the momentum and that the force of throwing away i'm very much into slow
controlled repetitions with controlled speed i still work out very hard i still like to
push myself to momentary muscular failure and you know you don't need to go to muscular
failure to get good results but we know from exercise science that you need about 80 percent
effort push yourself about that but what's 80 i don't know it but i know what 100 is so
for sure if i go 100 i've created a training response i got to give my body a reason a reason
to hold on to what muscle i have it's like tap each workout is like tapping into your survival
mechanism so now there are other systems that work you know i'm not saying that they don't work i'm
just saying that if you have two systems and one has the potential for creating injury take
the safer one if you have two systems and one requires you to work out five times a week but
one requires you only to work out twice a week go with the shorter one unless your hobby is just
working out or you know you have a lot of time below hand just because someone gets success
with a particular system does not mean that they couldn't have got just as much or more success
in a safer manner using a different system just because a guy is a real stud and looks
amazing doesn't necessarily even knows what he's doing and it doesn't mean that he couldn't have
done the same exact thing so what i discovered in my journey is that it really is better
to stay with controlled high tension reps not use momentum no jerking no kipping no
hauling yanking swinging throwing and so forth one i think one of the biggest myths in
training is this created a lot of this functional stuff is this idea that
you have to somehow duplicate a work type of movement you know like a sledgehammer
swinging or tire flipping or whatever you know and this is simply not true there is a
thing called general strength that transfers into everything else a lot of these exercises
that take a tremendous amount of skill and technique those skills and techniques
have no transfer in anything else if you don't believe me just study motor learning
research it's called specificity of exercise one skill does not transfer into a different
skill so getting really really good at you know doing barbell cleans while stable
while staying on a stability ball would have no transfer to anything else the thing
that would transfer would be the strength but this idea that you can selectively recruit
fast twitch muscle fibers that's not true it's not true at all you can go slow you can
even do no movement at all and recruit all the available motor units that are available
no movement with ice metrics or slow trading fast training slow training it works i'm not
saying it doesn't i'm just saying slower safer less stress less micro trauma to the joint more
sustainable because you know everyone's looking to get small and big and so forth or see how much
weight they can lift but it's it's just simply not a sustainable model as you get older now some guys
say well i'll do it to the point where i can't but by that point the damage is done uh i saw a really
interesting documentary on west side barbara i think it was on netflix and they were looking at
all these former world champions in powerlifting including uh louis simmons who runs west side
uh for those that don't know westside barbell is like the mecca for strength and powerlifting
in the us uh these guys are screwed up man uh a lot of these guys that were interviewed
said they were in terrible pain they could barely move to get out of bed in the morning a lot of
them were became addicted to opiates uh just awesome just terrible double pain now you know you
have to ask yourself is being a world champion in powerlifting worth the price i can't answer that
but it's a real spectrum a lot you know a lot of this stuff will really wreck your joint now i'm
in a dangerous sport as it is you know jujitsu a lot of people would question my
sanity about even being involved in that but you know it's what i do it's part of my
identity i like to do it as long as i could but the jujitsu sport is dangerous enough now add
a dangerous training style now you're getting a double whammy i discovered this the slower
high tension reps single set momentary failure one and done a couple times a week is every
bit as productive as anything i've ever done to say and you don't need to lift fast to
be explosive you don't even need to lift at all a great way to build a springy
explosiveness is just doing isometric so that kind of lies in the face of muscle
magazine wisdom and and bro dude science asking from a selfish perspective steve if
you for someone who is training jiu-jitsu how would you train as a supplement would
you include strength training weekly and how would you factor that into the program if you're
training in jiu-jitsu a couple of times a week it all depends on a what type of um what
do you want to do with your jiu-jitsu if you're a competitive jiu-jitsu player you'll
have to go to tournaments you like to compete that's a whole different ballgame from
a guy that is doing it for self-defense a lot of guys like jiu-jitsu for self-defense
it's really excellent in fact i'm going over this afternoon to a young fella here in town and we're
going to practice uh pistol disarms with a real gun and uh we're gonna practice nike and stick
disarms so that's one aspect for that you know you can do your regular strength training
a couple times a week i i found that really you don't get any more benefit more than twice a
week with the type of training i'm talking about you don't need to train more than twice a week if
you do you you risk over trading because remember it's really intense it takes a couple of
days to for your body to kind of recover now if you're on the tournament scene
and you like to go to tournaments and uh you know right now there's not
much going on in the way of tournaments because of the covet but it's you know at
some point it's going to open back up again so that's very strenuous that type of training
and you're going to have to limit your strength training or you're going to be burned out you're
not going to have any energy to practice or train most of the time should be on the mat
and that's one of the beauties of this high intensity training the workouts really only
take between 20 and 30 minutes which gives you a lot of time to do what you need to do get on the
mat because jiu jitsu is an extremely high skill type of sport you should be spending the majority
of your time practicing drilling your moves and then you got to get the specific conditioning
for jiu-jitsu and riding an air dying bike and doing cannibal swings and doing hill sprints it
doesn't have that as much transfer as you think the best way to get in shape for jiu jitsu is
do jiu jitsu more effective drills is the shark bait drill maybe you're aware of shark bait you
keep putting a fresh man in every couple minutes or first points everyone lines up against the
wall you take your top three or four players and put them in the middle of the room and and
whoever gets the first point you rotate people and whoever gets the first point stays in the
middle and you know the loser goes back in line man by the time you're done
with 10 minutes of that you feel like you know you did a
10 minute match with roger gracie i mean it's brew training it's like very specific
for jiu jitsu so the best thing to do general strength training with no skill in their moves
you know like chins or pull-ups you know dips push-ups or you know it could be barbell
training you know like uh overhead press weighted pull-ups chest press some type of row
a squat a deadlift work your neck with a neck harness or isometrics work your grip in your
forearms make sure you work your feet and your calf muscles very important keeping your ankles
strong and maybe uh throwing in an abdominal movement that's all you need you know you don't
need to work every little muscular function you know a lot of people have this idea that they
need all these different exercises for example your bicep there's five major movements i mean
five different functions of the bicep brachii supination flexion elevation circumduction
adduction elevation but you don't need to do all four of those movements if you just strengthen
the bicep in one of its main functions which is either deflection or supination uh all the
other functions will automatically get stronger so you see people you know spend a lot of time
wasting time trying to hit every little major function you don't need to you just hit the
major function all of the muscle functions will increase in strength simple as that so you
don't your workout shouldn't be lasting more than 30 minutes if they are you're
probably wasting your time we also know in exercise science that you don't get really
uh much more benefit from doing multiple sets which sounds like heresy because all bodybuilders
use multiple sets but there are a bunch of bodybuilders that don't you know mike menser
was like one of the more famous ones but there was plenty of guys you know boy or co casey bhr
you know why these guys uh achieve the highest pinnacle of success in bodybuilding using one
set to momentary muscular failure but the key is uh form and you can use really shitty form and
get great results you can throw the weights around but it's the sustainability over time so
everyone's always thinking about how big and how strong can i get but they're not thinking about
metabolic and cardiovascular function because you you get quite a heart a lot of heart benefit from
weight training strength proper strength training i'll talk about that in a minute uh also mobility
and improve range of motion if you're doing it right uh also uh protecting your joints from
injury you get a lot of joint toughening when you train properly and it doesn't involve throwing
weights around that breaks down the integrity of the joint but the soil movement will protect your
joints and and and and make them stronger and you don't want to be spending you don't want to be
a gym rat if you're trying to jiu jitsu you need to be on the mat that's where the majority of your
time and energy needs to be spent because the high level of skill whatever specific conditioning you
need for jiu-jitsu you'll get from doing jiu jitsu but you if you're really really good you may have
to artificially you know fatigue yourself like i was a trainer for shanji ibero
alexander rivero maybe you know that name he's one of the few guys to beat roger gracie
multiple times i think they went back and forth i watched sanji beat roger in the world championship
in the absolute division i was a strength coach and uh shanzhi was just was so good and so
much better than everyone in the room we had to get him tired just to push it because his
skill sets were unbelievable so we would do you know we'd do things to fatigue him you
know multiple partners shark big drills you know just to make him work hard so that when
he did face a guy his equal you know all things if if the skill sets are exactly equal both guys
have the same exact skill sets well then the stronger better condition guy will win that's
where the strength and conditioning come in so you want to be as absolutely strong as
possible and as conditioned as possible how are you training your feet steve oh yeah how
how do you do that oh how do you train your feet you guys do takedowns it's the it's the riskiest
part of combat sports throws and take downs that's where most of the injuries happen that's why a lot
of schools just stand on their knees all the time which is you know for a recreational roller
that's cool but you should practice your basic throws you know even if you're just doing
it as a drill just as a self-defense measure and if you're going to enter a competition you
absolutely need to practice throws and take-downs as a college wrestler i was a quite a takedown
artist so i always had really good high crotch doubles and singles which worked great
in jiu jitsu and i could usually bested a juno guy with my wrestling skills a lot of
times the uh junior guys had a lot of trouble with leg attacks i had really tricky leg attacks i
would fake upper body throws and then go for a leg which all this stuff would be illegal in judo
of the step i use but it works great in bjj or even mma having a good good solid detail
anything to add gas we've talked about the strength training but i know you sean you you're
more experienced at jiu-jitsu than i am i know another carryover and and we haven't mentioned
it is when i've seen steve doing the isometric training we're doing the breath the burp like
the burst breathing but and for me that has been a really big carryover when i've been doing jiu
jitsu just just the breath control in itself not getting tired when i'm rolling just up and then
just keep calm through the breath one of the uh one of the things that was a real eye-opener to
me was discovered breath work in general my first experience was of course in yoga pranayama and i
was taught by a very high level yoga instructor proper breathing while stretching but you know
there's there's breath work when stretching there's a type of breathing for strength
training uh there's a type of breathing when you run or walk and there's also breath work that
you need when you're doing a combat martial art or sport and unfortunately a lot of us were never
trained to breathe you know you don't think about it it was always about cardio work oh by the way
i mentioned that strength training can improve cardio health it does so by improving the blood
flow to the heart it's called cardio profusion because of the venous return you get a lot more
blood going into the heart and then you have what they call ejection fraction your heart while
strength training pushes more blood per beat so even though your heart doesn't elevate as high
it's actually beating harder their heart muscles contracting harder during strength training
and i suspect the same thing might be due uh happening in jiu jitsu too especially if you're
you know engaged in muscul uh muscular strain how's this relate back to the breath well
you can control your heart rate somewhat through proper breathing because you want
to keep your heart rate down and you want to part of the skills of jiu-jitsu is expending as
little energy as possible and making your partner expend as much as possible it's one of the skills
learning to use your weight and just being very conservative and you know that you're you're using
too much strength in to do when you run out of breath when you start to get winded then you know
you're using too much power you need to back off and you need to recover and that
burst breathing you talked about so through the nose through the
mouth can really help a lot uh another another thing that you can do is you
can let the breath uh out in a little burst like i learned that directly from the gracie
brothers hexa would use that type of technique when you use and you start to get
winded you feel that pressure in your chest and you just keep that perpetual breath going
uh a lot of young fellows will hold your breath very harmful shaves yours off the end of your life
and that makes you really tired spikes your blood pressure it's a you waste a lot of energy with
that breath holding so you want to avoid holding your breath that's one reason why isometrics
have such great transfer to jiu jitsu because you learn to contract your muscles really hard like
i'm curling against the table right now but um it's the same exact way i
breathe when i'm doing jiu jitsu same exact way i try to breathe nasal in and out as long as i can and then when the cr2 starts to
build up i'll start to exhale through the mouth i would say a really good
book for everyone to read um a fella in ireland his name is patrick mcewen
he wrote the oxygen advantage it's probably one of the best books on uh breathwork i've ever
read really good fellow back i was we were on uh youtube together did like a little we did
like a little podcast thing together very uh knowledgeable i would tell all your readers
buy that book the oxygen advantage it's uh it's based on the buteyko method of breathing a russian
breathing rather by the way i've been to russia eight times i got ruined in systema now a lot of
people make fun of system because there's a lot there's these youtube videos of michael riadco who
was like one of the founders of riyadko systema and he's doing i i know the video really
turned a lot of people off because he was like kind of doing he was claiming he was psychically
controlling people with his mind and he would just show the fists and people fall down like this fake
aikido videos you know that everyone makes fun of and uh it looks really stupid to a person that had
never done systema but i knew what was happening basically all those people in that video had
been hit by him they had been struck by him and this guy could punch really hard i felt his
punch like i said i've been to rush eight times i've been to moscow four times and i took part
in the summit of the breath masters and i had the the pleasure of taking a punch from michael
riadco and i i was really skeptical but man that punch went right through my body into my spine it
was like a one-inch punch it was just like little and the power he generated it was horrible i i
mean i couldn't breathe i was just on my back and uh they taught me a restoration technique
basically i had too much tension in my body the more tension you have the the greater the impact
and the injury the strike will do and the the relaxation your body can be set through the breath
learning to breathe through but at any rate uh the reason the guys were falling down in that video
and the jiu jitsu community jumped all over that is saying uh system is fake it's because that
video maybe you know the one i'm talking about yeah what he was doing was because these guys had
felt that painful punch all he had to do is this and they're like whoa you know you created like a
little psychological reaction that was the point that once you sting somebody really hard and
then all you have to do is this you know you're you're controlling them at that point they're
kickers they're punched you know mike tyson could do the same thing imagine taking a shot to the rim
for mike all we'd have to do is this and you'd be whoa almost falling on the floor right that's all
that was but it had nothing to do with the actual system itself and uh systema makes a really really
good uh partner with uh with brazilian jiu-jitsu uh because it's it's principle-based it's not
technique-based jiu-jitsu's almost 90 percent uh well maybe not 90 80 technique 20 underlying
principles whereas systema is like 80 percent principle 20 technique they don't teach you if he
does this i do that if he does this i do you know it's not that way because each time a guy grabs
you could be all these different angles if you get hung up on a technique nothing's to work because
no one's ever going to grab you like a given class you know it's like there's a keto guys you
know no one comes at you with a straight line you know it looks really spectacular but
you know it's just not real most of the akita guys i've messed around with in my justice school
it was pretty easy pickings you know it was easy to defeat them because they they just didn't know
what to do in most situations a good couple like tackle and get them down on the ground they
were pretty much lost you know what i mean uh i'm not saying that there's not some benefits
to aikido i'm sure there must be some high level masters out there somewhere but it takes so
long system is the same way you know it's all it's very much principle-based and you can
take these principles into your jiu-jitsu and make a really soft relaxed jiu-jitsu
and that's where i have to go at my age now i'm not gonna beat anybody anymore you know and
perhaps you've heard of the boyd belt system have you heard of this the buoyant belt void
belt system it's the gracie academy i'm very good friends with henry and hitler and gracie
i've known this guy since they were we small ads their father was my first teacher and uh their
uncle helsing gracie was the guy that gave me my black belt almost 21 years ago i got my black
belt i'll be eligible for coral about here beerus and um at any rate one of the instructors at
the gracie academy an older guy in his 50s like 55 he got bested by a bluebot i think
he got tapped and he was really disappointed on himself and he said man i should quit i suck
i mean how could this guy give me such a hard time i couldn't do anything with him and it turns
out that the guy was like about 40 pounds heavier and like 30 years younger you know a young
guy like in his 20s big strong athletic guy size and strength matter a lot bigger stronger
you know in the animal world it's all about size and strength same thing even in jiu jitsu or
even a technical sport okay yes i know there's little guys that beat big guys but for the most
part there's a reason why there's weight classes it's really hard for a little guy to beat a really
big strong guy it can be done marcelo garcia did it a bunch of times amazingly well i've seen john
jack machado uh take heavyweights to the absolute limit i watched an amazing i was in abu dhabi and
i watched him uh get a clinic uh against mario sperry it was just amazing this little tiny guy
against one of the best heavyweights in the world but the point is size and strength matter
a lot and for every 20 pounds in every 10 years of age it's like the guy has a
belt so imagine what are you a blue belt what's your right i'm uh four strike why
belt i am just be like okay but let's imagine one of your peers also a white belt
yeah but he happens to be 20 pounds heavier yeah okay he's a blue buff yeah
and let's say how old are you 30.
Okay let's say he's like 18 or 19. that's like
another belt it's like you wrestling a purple bow not that he has the technique or the
skill but it would be like he would be like a purple level above you it'd be like
you wrestling a purple butt at your own weight right your own weight would be like going against
the purple belt except he's making up for his lack of technique with size and strength it'd be very
hard for you as a as a white belt to deal with the guy bigger and stronger like that because you
don't even have the skill set and even if you had very high level skill set it can be offset a lot
by size and strength that's what i was running into it's a real ego buster man in the beginning
you know i have this training partner that's about 190 pounds and this guy is freaking strong he was
very much into powerlifting for a while but i've gotten him off of it he's getting in his 30s now
and he was starting to manifest joint problems and i was telling him you don't need such heavy
weights you can be just as strong lifting lighter weights i'll tell you why but uh this
guy's a beast and i can't do much with him really i can't i'm he's faster he's more mobile you know
he outweighs me uh he's 40 years younger than me so i you know but great training part it
teaches me uh patience and i have to relax and if i i can't use power or strength you
know so very good for my ego to kind of put me where i need to be and you know it's
a real lesson in reality and it's really good for me to be underneath a big strong guy
like that and you get really good defense i used to train with master elliott when he
was in his 80s and uh he was still getting on the map and uh he wouldn't do much he'd
just play an old man's game of just playing defense but he couldn't do anything to him you
couldn't catch him even if you try to use force you know how did you do that how did you try
when you were younger with the graces was that intense was that uh physical or was it more
controlled than technical uh it was physical it was physical i used to grab the gracie academy
remember i came from wrestling so it was all one speed on off zero zero to a hundred miles per
hour and you know i didn't know how to relax and i was very strong for my size and i bested a lot
of guys with hustle conditioning strength you know not a good thing to do because you
don't have that forever that goes away you know if that's what you're relying on you
know what are you going to do when you get older or you meet a guy with more
strength and conditioning than you but the technique of self-defense you can
keep yourself from getting caught but yeah this practice used to be very intense because
there's a bunch of guys like me you know they're going in there and we all wanted to get the
belts so we we felt the best way to do that is you know by beating everyone in the
room and that soon got beat out of me how long did it take to get beats earlier
well one major traumatic incident happened uh i was with hoist gracie i i brought hoyce out
to my school and he uh he stayed with me for about a month and a half we got snowed in that's where
i introduced him to his uh was now his ex-wife but uh his wife i think he's had five kids with that
woman she was one of my uh fitness instructors really good looking girl real pretty she was a
uh studying to be a a doctor at the school of podiatric medicine and those two just really hit
it off and uh i had a pretty close relationship with voice horian would send him out to stick and
uh one day i guess i was probably a purple belt and i really pissed hoists off just
using power and just being rough you know and uh he said to me you know he says i really
don't like the way you trade you're really rough and kind of crude you know apparently i
grabbed and pinched the skin through the ghee and i kind of bumped my head into his
which is kind of a wrestler tactic he says he goes to the clock i was saying in a private
lesson it was like 10 minutes left with that lesson he said united states the next 10 minutes
are going to be the most terrifying of your life and then he proceeded to beat the [ __ ] out of me
man i mean he just ragdolled me all over the mat it was really sobering and a real wake-up call
he showed me what it's like and then after we got done he said how's that feel and i was almost
in tears because my hero voice basically just really just trashed me he says how does that feel
steve he said that's how other guys feel when you train with them how many students do you think
you're going to keep if you train with people like that and how long do you think you can keep
that up says what you're doing is is not based on technique he said i just trashed you with pure
technique and it's true he was doing stuff almost in slow motion but the timing the precision was so
good i would see it but i couldn't stop it that's really high-level jiu-jitsu and uh afterwards
i was like really chagrined man as a matter of fact i got the flu he beat my ass so bad i got
sick my immune system glover yeah no i missed like a couple he was there doing seminars i was
so disappointed i couldn't partake cause i had a fever i was sick i just felt you know the stress
of getting my ass beat like that bad i mean it was pretty bad he would squeeze me in every kind
of you know diaphragm freezes and all sorts of chokes and even when i tap he won't let go yeah he
really put me through it but i was deserving of it the same way i didn't know any better that was the
old wrestler you know so that was a wake-up call wow i gotta start being gentle and using you
know more technique and not just trying to smash over people and uh that was the the beginning
of the new steam actually took me a while you know old habits die hard but you know i did
finally get real gentle and soft and relaxed but it was a good lesson i mean in retrospect
now it was needed badly needed and uh who better to do it than the great royce gracie absolutely
did did you used to get lined up for the greater challenges were you involved in that at all
oh yeah yeah and we have challenges at the uh my gym mattress house was really
interesting because right after that ufc a lot of people's eyes were open like whoa who's
this skinny brazilian kid kicking everyone's butt how's he doing some people say oh it's fake or
the matches were set up or the guy threw the match they couldn't they just couldn't
wrap their mind around the fact of the efficiency and effectiveness of brazilian jiu
jitsu as a combat martial war and unlike most schools we used to practice a lot at the gracie
academy they would put gloves on guys and then there they were they were instructed to go
after the partner and hit him and kick him and we were taught how to get the clinch and
the takedown to bring the fight to the ground almost like uh you know like uh mma it was mma all
the practices were like mma it was pretty rough you know some of the newer guys would get punched
up a little bit and you know we'd have to pull him out pull the guy off of him and everyone would
get a turn with the gloves to see what it's like to try to punch and it was you really got your
confidence up because you learned pretty quickly if the guy's trying to hit you you can clench him
pretty good you know if he's really actively going after you now it's not like modern mma where a lot
of the strikers are running the whole time right they're running away we were instructed to pretend
we didn't know that takedown was coming and go after and if a guy really comes after you it's
not as hard to take a guy down as you think and even in mma there's a lot of takedowns and that
these are all professional guys that no wrestling no striking no jiu jitsu so i figure if it
works against pro mma fighters it certainly is going to work against you know an
untrained striker that doesn't know grappler and we would get guys coming in to maxercise and
they would say hey man we want a style comparison that was always code we said well what do you mean
style comparison i mean you want to fight oh well i want you know style comparison i just want to
test my style against yours oh you want to fight and then their eyes would get real big and i
would set up a video camera in those days we had the 8-track tape i set up a video camera
on a tripod so no one could claim any untoward things going on there you know they couldn't
claim that we unnecessarily brutalized them or that they won you know it just there
would be no question about what happened it protected us and it kept them
from talking [ __ ] afterwards and uh we would do it man many many guys came
in the easiest guys were karate and taekwondo simple simple simple i i would salivate when the
guy told me he was a thai cornbread or karate i love that i used to get kind of scared when
wrestlers were coming in because those [ __ ] are tough a wrestler that knew boxing i knew i was
going to be in for a long day man and sometimes judo guys would come in i also knew that was going
to be a tough tough match you know other grappling styles but the strikers easy peasy we would
even have other japanese jiu jitsu guys come in that was pretty easy too because they just didn't
have the elements that brazilian jiu jitsu has aside from judah there was a traditional japanese
jiu jitsu that's been going on for a while and uh not very effective not as a combat
martial art in my opinion the key to guys easy you know simple single leg double leg take
down boom down they're helpless you know and uh we never lost never you know we probably
had i could conservatively say maybe 30 35 challenge matches come in we always filmed
him as i began to get older though i started getting sick of this stuff so i started having
my younger guys that i had trained my some of my real good purple belts a couple brown bucks take
the challenges and we we used to have a rotation where we would just rotate who who takes the
challenge but it was pretty common especially uh after that first ufc in 93 uh all through 94
95 96 and then not so much anymore we didn't get so many people coming in anymore a couple of the
times uh hoist was there when challengers would come in i remember i had this wrestler come in man
this guy was really yoked he was a weightlifter and a wrestler he was a division three ncaa champ
and uh he wanted to fight so uh i went almost 45 minutes with this guy before i finally caught him
in an arm triangle i felt like i was in a blender at that time i weighed 158 pounds soaking wet and
this guy was like 210 of raw muscle he just threw me like a rag go all over the map but he couldn't
do anything to me couldn't do anything to me he he broke his hand on my head one of the things that
uh we were instructed this is a hexane gracie technique when a guy throws a punch he had bought
his hand he broke his hand early i i he didn't he didn't say it but he kept shaking his hand his
hands swam he stopped punching that's all you know and he tried to wrestle me and squeeze me and do
all sorts of weird [ __ ] like grab my throat you know and cover my face and put his elbow in
my neck you know to make me quit he couldn't do anything and eventually i caught him in an
arm triangle took a long time took a long time hoist was there i almost felt like giving up
a couple times because he got me a couple of vicious headlocks but he couldn't finish me and
i thought about tapping but hoist was there so and then it hurt i was hurt my black eye i was
[ __ ] up but if you know i was in my mid-40s and this guy was in his 20s and raw straight
so i figured hey man if a middle-aged guy like little guy could defend himself against a guy like
that and prevail that's a pretty good martial art i can't think of any other martial art that would
allow me to survive like that i cannot think of one and if you know someone were to come and show
me that i would start taking that immediately even system as good as it is i would still rely on my
jiu jitsu for sure especially if the fight went to the ground and when you're small like me you don't
have any choice anyway man you know people say well you can't do it on the concrete [ __ ] you
can learn to be very comfortable in the concrete i have my uh teaching certificate in in my team
soft system colonel alexander maximsoff was a former military guy in the soviet army and then
later in the ukraine he developed his own systema system and he was a uh he was a colonel with the
uh special police kind of like a almost like a uh paramilitary group in ukraine and i went and
trained with him for three months and guess what we did we learn to fall and roll on concrete
and you start out by just laying on your back and on your side and on your stomach
and you just learn to get comfortable lying in all these positions on concrete
then the next step is to fall from sitting forward back side you learn to
protect your neck and your spine the next step was to fall from your knees fall
from a squat fall from a crouch fall from standing i learned to do that on uh marble floor concrete
asphalt kind of hard in your clothes the asphalt you know you want smooth concrete or you can [ __
] your clothes all to help you you'll run through pants and t-shirts and shirts and i'm telling
you man colonel maxime saw himself he would do four rolls down three plates of concrete
stairs as easy as you would do it on a map you would do backward rolls on on concrete
i didn't develop that i still have a way to go you know but he learned to use walls so what
i'm saying is you can learn to roll on concrete but even before i knew systema i got in some
fights and filming in the street where we went to the ground in the concrete it was fine there's no
big deal you know i'd have a little brush burn or whatever but the other guy looked way worse than i
did when we were done so this idea that you can't roll on concrete that's not true you can roll and
gravel you might get some brush burns but you'll be fine you know you are you can learn how to fall
and be comfortable in concrete it's one of the uh maxine uh like i said there's different systems
i've trained is voice systema with mikael grudev uh maxim's office systema uh a ukrainian guy
i've trained uh vasilia systema up in toronto uh i stayed up there for three months one time
and trained um i had a chance to train with uh who's the other guy it's a pretty
good guys uh have you tried it okay what's that have you tried with more tim
wheeler no but uh i understand the guy's quite excellent and there's another guy
too uh the guy the guy in toronto uh uh down my mind's blank yeah martin will has a
great reputation he's kind of combined elements of jiu-jitsu but there's another guy oh kevin kevin's
secure secure i think i'm saying that right secure yeah he he's also uh uh jiu jitsu and systema
combo guy's awesome his website is great really good stuff and uh that's the guy i like to meet i
like to beat uh meet both martin and kevin shakur here in uh and this part on this side of
the pond yeah my point is jiu-jitsu works on concrete on any surface but you know for people
interested in self-defense i i recommend that they they train in ice and snow concrete you know uh
on grass you're not always going to have a mat anything you want to do yeah the reason is
tell me a system a book i think it's called um the why of the system a warrior and and
the guy in there recommends training on like different levels you know slippers that was
uh vladimir vasilia that wrote that book where the warrior where the king where the warrior i
think is called yeah and then there's systemic guidebook and then there's uh met every breath
it's about uh systemic breathing which is based on buteyko breathing good it's all good it's all good
stuff i i recommend people just kind of diversify themselves there's certainly nothing wrong with
learning kickboxing boxing karate mcgaw you know anything that you can use to quit yourself but in
my age and my body weight and size i just don't see myself punching it out with somebody you know
i i learned a tummy open hand strikes palm heels blade of the hand elbows back of the wrist head
butts i would i would prefer to strike with these parts of my body as opposed to my fist plus you
know um i'm a pretty strong little guy but you know if someone's big and strong pretty hard to
uh match them punch for punch you get punched up uh also i'm pretty good at throws and take down so
i i can throw most guys that are on train pretty hard on the concrete that takes the wind right
out of them man it's pretty much done you know most people can take get punched or kicked in the
head you know but very few people can get take being thrown in their head so when did you take
this on the road steve you started traveling first you first joined a camper didn't you in america
and then you started traveling internationally hold on one second i'm going to turn off my
heat it's getting awfully hot in it one second we were talking earlier the temperature here
in washington state is very similar to the uk it was cold enough this morning it
was chilly man yeah it was like 47.
What that is in celsius are
you guys still using the uh the old english measures you know uh pounds pretty when i say 47 or 48 degrees you know what
i'm talking about yeah yeah we do yeah yeah and here it is what just early september yeah
absolutely yeah we i've always been a minimalist uh pretty much my whole life and then i
went through a phase where i kind of was a householder when i was in my early days uh after
college i taught health and physical education and coach wrestling and then i went through
a period of time where i was doing a kind of job jumping around but i always had this
rule that if i couldn't move in 20 minutes and if i had more stuff that could fit in my car
i had too much stuff so it was the 20 minute rule i should be able to move my entire apartment
all belongings and it needs to fit in the car if not too much crap you know and uh i
did that for years then i met dc maxwell we bought our first home together and i started
accumulating i got into bike riding i used to race mountain bikes and bike riding and uh you
know bike racing and all that and i probably at one point had six bikes all worth you
know well over three thousand dollars on a bike order once i got jiu jitsu i sold all
the bikes i just kept one for transportation i didn't care about biking anymore i was so into
jiu-jitsu but uh once i got married and developed a household uh i started you know collecting
and uh then i had a gym that it was two floors i had a lot of equipment and then uh once i got
uh we our building got condemned in philadelphia we had to move everything out and
boy i weeded out a lot of stuff from moving that gym was just really traumatic wow and
then it was enough to almost it broke my marriage really the stress of the business plus we were
having personal problems uh after my divorce i weeded way down and moved in this little tiny
carriage asking where the carriage house is it's like uh one there's three rooms on top of
another you know it goes vertical it's like a small little room and then another room another
room with a spiral staircase it's kind of cool man i liked it it was a little bathroom and in
the oh it was like four stories because uh underground basement where the kitchen was but i
got a contract to work with a baseball player out in scottsdale arizona so i decided to get rid of
everything i know i just threw the keys through the mailbox and just [ __ ] left and i called up
a couple friends and uh who had spare uh one girl had a spooky i said hey look take all my [ __ ]
do whatever you want with it my tv my furniture keep it sell it get rid of it just could blaze out
i took just enough clothes and a backpack i went out to arizona one of the conditions of employment
was this guy was going to get me this camper van i always wanted to live in a camper van it was
like one of these really cool uh mercedes well actually it's a dodge sprinter which is a mercedes
it was a mercedes motorhome basically and um the baseball player got it for him i mean those
guys have a lot of money as baseball players and uh i lived in that camper van for three
and a half years it was really nice it was like harking back to my early days and i just
drove all over the u.s you know all over the us i would stop at different judiciary schools i
i was teaching jiu-jitsu in phoenix for a while i was training at the university of
jiu-jitsu solidarity school in san diego as training at the gracie jiu jitsu academy also
in san diego run by my good friend jesus celebrate who was probably one of the finest teachers i've
ever met um yeah i drove back and forth across the continental u.s eight times c to c really and that
was kind of cool everyone took it further around the only round i didn't take i wish i would have i
wouldn't i would have liked to gone across canada that would have been cool but i i went across the
u.s eight times and just had a really good time at that time i still had affiliations in
philly i sold my gym to one of my students and the i gave my jiu jitsu let me just sit here
take it over to hedges library and my ex-wife was still there and she was kind of um she she
she also uh was no longer an owner but she still maintaining office and would work clients
and um it was good i i liked the camper van and um even more amazing than living in a camper van
was i actually talked a girl into living with me don't find too many women like that teresa
blasey man we struck up a friendship back in my kettlebell days with the dragon door group back
when i was a senior instructor and we struck up a friendship and then it became a romance and then
we lived together she's still with me to this day but what what happened was i did the boys are
back seminar with mike baller in las vegas and i started getting a call for doing seminars and uh
somehow so much so that i would be gone for months at a time and what do you do with the camper van
you know you can't just leave it you've got to maintain those vehicles or they become worthless
you know you get like mice that go in and eat up i mean this is very common with stored vehicles
uh mice and rodents get in and eat the wiring and you know totally destroy the vehicle so i decided
i was gonna sell it so i sold my camper van say it unseen to a guy in l.a it was in storage
in seattle so the guy drove up i mailed him the keys met him and then he wired transferred money
into my account uh in the meantime i had a friend of mine go and clean the camper van out of all
my stuff and i was living out of basically one big bag and the first my first trip to europe
was to the uk and i had this huge roller bag i mean this thing was huge and i had all this
stuff in it and i added from the airport i had to take a train and then i had to switch
trains three times dragging this [ __ ] bag man dude it was like wow i have too much crap
so i went to um what is it caught's world yeah in london and it came like a camping place
and i bought this really cool small osprey and i just weeded out all the non-essential stuff and
i just left the stuff right there in my hotel room when i left bag and all i gave some of it
to my host actually some of the better stuff i got it down and then from that bag i went to an
even smaller bag eventually i had like a 40 liter tom bin travel bag and like a little man purse
with my identity papers my birth certificate social security card uh cash stuff like that um
all that important stuff keys um well actually i didn't have any keys i don't know key because i
didn't own anything and i traveled like that for damn near 12 13 years i guess a long time country
to country you know one seminar to the next staring staying in hotels and then airbnbs i would do the seminar and that would pay for my
living expenses so i wasn't really making money so much from the seminars it's just paying for living
expenses because i had to live somewhere and pay rent somewhere so that would pay for the living
expenses and then i developed my online personal training program where i would help other people
with fat loss programs strength training programs uh sports specific conditioning program
and uh i also started getting into doing video downloads i i had done a bunch of dvds
with a guy up in rochester new york he was into doing fitness and martial arts dvds but i quickly
realized that dvds can be burned and copied and it's hard to you know protect your stuff but
with downloads it's a lot easier to protect and uh so i have tons of downloads on
my website videos of different programs isometrics uh breathing i just did a breathing
one the sixth essential breathing exercises or essential breathing exercises and i just did a
whole bunch of time static contraction isometric program and then once i was actually warned ahead
of time about this pandemic uh i i got roundly roasted at the joe rogan show
about the use of an astrologer but i'm telling man that astrologer
has done really good service for me and uh he had warned me almost uh a year in
advance about the uh 2020.
He recommended i find a place and get off the road and go back to
the u.s my country of origin boy am i glad i did man can you imagine being stuck somewhere during
this pandemic so uh we we came back to the u.s and i bought a tiny house in spokane washington and
hauled it here to this little olympic peninsula uh i'm only 30 miles from the olympic national
forest at the olympic national park i mean it's pretty loud i mean we have raccoons and uh someone
one of my neighbors saw a bear the other day someone saw uh matt line and cougar and uh
i i made friends with a mother raccoon with two little babies two little kids score you know
the uh the douglas squirrel herds of deer i mean really beautiful bobcat the other day i saw
so i'm leaving tiny house out in the olympic peninsula i need to ask you something on that
then steve have you ever seen a bigfoot no not uh all those people that
seen it they're not all crazy you know there's just been too many people that
have seen feed him steve don't feed him this well you know it's the same thing with uh aliens
you know uh there's there's been now the united states and the us air force no longer deny
they just say what we don't know what it is there's been enough evidence come out
that yeah there's something out there we don't know exactly what it is but there's
strong evidence that uh we we're not the only ones oh yeah because he's all over this he reckons he's
watched every bigfoot documentary that's going oh yeah it's pretty cool yeah no i mean i think it'd
be really loud to uh to actually meet mr bigfoot big beat i have no doubt that they probably
exist your wrestling might come in handy if you come across one if you've heard
it now sean steve says that big exists it's just been too many sightings you know
i don't know what they're saying but it's certainly not like a normal animal whatever
it is yeah i'm in the perfect place for it i'm not so sure i'm not sure where's
the best place you've been steve oh man so many places and where's the
word yeah i tell you one of my favorite places was uh right there in the
uk um um the place near manchester help me out here i'm having a memorable
um where all the canal boats are um i was really intrigued with those canal boats i just
thought that was the coolest way to live you know some people actually live full time in this little
canal boat that opened up manchester uh what's up seminars there uh there's a gracie jiu
jitsu school on the outskirts of manchester out in the country there's a
little tiny town a little hamlet and uh i thought that area of the
uk was just absolutely beautiful man very rural very beautiful lots of wide open
country uh you know uh cattle and horses grazing uh there's beautiful canals going everywhere i
just thought that was so cool i'll think of it in a minute it's on the tip of my tongue but i
like that part of central uk uh i love the coast of ireland i thought that was absolutely gorgeous
scotland is breathtaking i love the inner ebergees i even took notice that they were um paying
people to go to one of the islands there in the hebrides i thought wow that'd be pretty cool
man for a couple years you know y'all live there i don't know just make sure that they have to
have good internet though that's the other thing with the modern day you have to have good internet
now austria austria is gorgeous you know anywhere anywhere near the pre-ops or the alps just
some of the most beautiful place on earth uh germany has beautiful spots down there munich
is really incredible uh there was another place called tuchelingen i thought it was just beautiful
in uh south uh western germany gorgeous down there um you know beautiful spots everywhere i really
liked russia you know i went to krasnodar to study uh with uh cadet oh another guy started with uh
alexi kardashinkov the creator of the military system wow that was beautiful down there crescendo
krasnodar absolutely isn't there so she where they have the olympics you know yeah but uh in korea
the island of victoria in the greek islands fantastic just really really beautiful so i've
seen some great sites you know no one place has you know the monopoly and beauty there's been
places in canada like vancouver british columbia amazing vancouver island the little town of
victoria that's another place uh just last weekend i went to orcas island which is like
probably i guess it's the northern most point of the u.s it's right off the canadian border you
know the ocean the international line it's right on the edge of that orcas island just beautiful
pristine natural uh surrounding so i mean there's a lot of really pretty places places in northern
california just unbelievable uh even the the uh us midwest like uh montana idaho if you like outdoors
stuff you know just gorgeous so i've seen a lot of really i've been very very fortunate to see
absolutely beautiful beautiful places australia uh i i loved australia uh some of the big cities
are just really incredibly livable high quality life new zealand so it's hard to pinpoint any one
area but i do like kind of cool weather you know that's why i like washington state i would do well
where you your lads are at yeah yeah or in here are there any places that you've been to where you
thought oh i'll never want to come back here again china really why beijing shanghai horrible
pollution right yeah bad illusion and even though i have many chinese friends uh i found
as a culture the modern culture of china not the old culture um just rude man you know
mean insect mine however taiwan is like the old china you know people are beautiful nice
friendly kind considerate respectful very mannerly everything that mainland china isn't taiwan
is beautiful there man and uh the guy that taught me chi kung is uh stanley tam who was
a shanghai resident even he hates china i mean and you know he had like six or seven schools in
china he got me a really cool gig job with the police university in shanghai they have a very
famous police college where they train police officers probably one of the best equipped places
i've ever seen i went in there and uh did some fitness stuff for the chinese police cool guys
you know with all this anti-police rhetoric uh i'm definitely not into defunding police i say given
more funds train them better train them better so they don't make mistakes you know i i think it's
foolish to uh throw a law and order out the window and anarchy rule because i don't want to get
into politics but i keep out of all that crap yeah that's why i'm here in the olympia peninsula
i'm just going to rise this way about just kind of float i think the best way that we can influence
what's going on in the room is by being the best person we can be send out as much love and
good positive energy to people as you can help people in your own way as much as you can
and then that will have a ripple effect you know the you know you get this the love vibe
and hopefully you create a ripple effect so you don't have so much anger and all that good
stuff going on for sure a bad axe and doing bad things and violent things never has a positive
outcome never never never never never you know so we got a message in for from alex who says
the tone is marple marple marble yes thank you man i love that place i just thought that was
absolutely fantastic yeah lovely place and then you know when you go to these places
steve do you feel that certain cities are not as healthy as others i asked this question
because i was i was listening to a podcast with ed sheeran actually the other
day and he was talking about living in london and it being concrete and it's
this man-made material where he's not in nature it feels like it sort of brings him down the energy
levels i wonder if you felt that across the world well i was always kind of a city guy you
know i spent many years in philadelphia and uh that's not particularly healthy but see the
thing the thing about london i love london by the way it's like one of my favorite big cities
uh all those parks just beautiful greenways everywhere you know and i'd always managed to stay
in uh airbnb or hotel near hyde park or near uh um what's that big park right
in the center of the city uh in my mind right now there's so many places so
many places i've been but anyway there's so many beautiful green parks in london i mean really you
just go anywhere in london and you have this big open greenway that really makes it quite a nice
city you know what's that big park by you know by um you know the uh where the queen lives that
the buckyham palace there's a beautiful glory let's have a look what is that i stayed near
there in a hotel literally right across the street from this just fantastic park from
james's park where was it from james's no it was something else parks no buckingham
park well yeah it was adjacent to buckingham park yeah but yeah i mean it's just just beautiful
so yeah i mean i agree on park hyde park corner well uh yeah i stayed near hyde park at
one point and that was really fantastic but there was just so many different uh places
in london so yeah i mean as far as big cities go it's certainly not the worst the worst would be
beijing or shanghai the portion level you can't even see across the street there's a cloud of
smog so bad you know i mean you have to wear not just a face mask but a respirator just to
keep these particles from getting in your lungs it's really bad just the worst ever um but yeah
i mean i now that i've been living here in the olympic peninsula out in nature it would be
hard to go back to city living i think yeah i'd agree with that with me personally living
where i live i'd struggle maybe a little tiny city you know like a tiny town if you've got
parks around it i suppose it's a bit better but yeah if you're in the middle of the city i
think i'd struggle too i'm going for six weeks to charleston south carolina i have actually three
guys i'm going to possibly promote the black belt you guys have been studying with me for years
on and off online and uh their test will be the master texas jiu jitsu i'm going to randomly pick
like 30 or 40 techniques uh out of that book and they got to demonstrate the the gun defense
the knife the stick punch you know kick just the defenses against this stuff uh different grabs
throat grabs choke from behind yeah bear hug they gotta show me those releases then i'm gonna watch
them roll and i'll roll with them a little bit and uh part of that will be to see how gentle they
can be you know the sign of a really master's is a level if you're wrestling with a little guy or
an old guy or a woman or a kid you bring your level down i'll see if they can do that if they if
they place you up then i'll know that they're you know they're not probably black out material but
i'm sure they are so i'm going to be down there outside of charleston and this little
barrier island called folly beach beautiful place and at some point i may live there
i don't know yet i'm looking i i love it here but i really like the east coast of
the u.s also so it's a little easier to travel because once this pandemic lifts
probably in about two years i'm guessing you know we're going to be under restriction for
a while uh i may start doing some travel again not like it was before but i i'll definitely
have a home base you know so before i head up free spirit it's already
minimal getting your black belt i've read somewhere that did you have like
a two-hour examination and a hundred and something techniques that you had to go through
with helsinki on the 65 in front of master house and gracie it was a red belt now and he sat
there and um he would whisper the technique there was three alternating attackers and they
would come up and then just do something i had to react uh i messed up a couple but uh you
know i uh for the most part i reacted well and it's good it's a good test it shows whether
you have knowledge or not you know everything was a surprise so i had no idea like what
what they were going to do and then i rolled with a bunch of guys and um yeah i was pretty
exhausted afterwards man that was really tough absolutely so what does a normal day look like for
you now well i usually rise around six without an alarm usually um uh because the daylight uh the
days are very long here in this part of the uh the world uh so long days and in the winter they're
pretty short because we're pretty far north and um i i do a whole routine of dallas yoga
routine as i told you before it takes about 30 minutes take my ice cold shower then i have
my coconut water coffee then usually about now i would have already been walking and doing breath
work outside and then i come back i work on some personal training or usually i do that
even before i walk i'll answer some emails i do online personal training i answer
my uh clients send me training logs when questions and so forth and i take care
of them go out have a really nice walk uh i was going to the uh jiu jitsu school in the
afternoon uh working with the proprietor but that's shut down the guy had to go out of
business unfortunately the the pandemic put him out of business so i have masks in my garage
now and what i do now is i just invite people over people that are asymptomatic and uh we roll i
get my practices in i usually strength train uh twice a week if i'm doing a lot of
rolling i stream trading only once a week i've had good success training once
a week when doing a lot of rolling if i'm rolling more than three times let's say
four times a week it's too much i i can't recover not if i'm adding strength or anything so and my
age i'm not going to get stronger i'm not going to get bigger i'm just maintaining it's easier to
maintain than build but like i said if you've been lifting four or five years you know for the most
part you pretty much reach your genetic potential you're probably unless you've been over
training over training is a real big problem with younger guys in particular thinking
that more is better it's not it really isn't you know when i was saying that weight
and resistance aren't the same thing a clever fellow can use a lighter weight even just
body weight and make it very very hard so that the actual amount of resistance is higher than if
you're lifting a much bigger weight than using mutual form so you you can take exercises and
create a leverage disadvantage see if i'm trying to lift as heavy as i can like a weight lifter
the only people that should be concerned about the amount of weight are power lifters olympic lifters
maybe crossfitters or people involved with strong man events there you gotta lift heavy because
that's the that's the game that's the sport it's you know but for general strengthening that
transfers to martial arts and every other thing in life you don't need to be concerned about
the amount of weight you make a lighter weight seem heavier by limiting your range of motion and
in some cases creating a negative leverage factors so it's much much harder and so
the resistance is actually higher even though the weight is way lighter so
resistance and weight are not the same thing but your muscles don't know the difference you
know they just know how hard they're working now would that make me let's say for example i
but uh i do push-ups in a way that makes them incredibly hard so that i can barely get more
than 70-second time under loan would that make me better doing bench presses no i would have
to practice the specific lifted bench pressing the balance getting used to the heavy heavy load
but that wouldn't have any transfer to jiu jitsu certainly the strength would transfer but it
wouldn't have no more transfer than my push-ups so why load my joints with that kind of heavy
weight there's no advantage unless you're aware that's something that's hard for people
to wrap their mind around everyone's been schooled in thinking that heavier
is better more is better more sets more weight more reps more times per week and
i'm here to tell you it's not true i've been studying this for a long time but you don't
have to take my word for it there's plenty of research new research james fisher james
steele brian schoenfeld there's a lot of guys out there that have been doing some really
really significant uh research on this subject and i i like to read it of course research isn't
everything i mean you know everything can't be proved with double blind studies and stuff
like that you know some things you just have to use logic or common sense or look at empirical
evidence you know or how you feel at times can i ask you a question on the isometric training steve
yeah um i train quite a lot of our elderly people brof stayed away from the isometric stuff because
a lot of them have got um elevated blood pressure what what what should i do in that situation
can i use isometrics or would that raise the blood pressure especially the time static
contraction method uh like for example uh i work out teresa's mother who has made tremendous
physical progress since i started trainer with time-steady contraction isometric program see
most traditional isometric programs are very short high intensity wraps you know six to ten seconds
holds various positions it's unnecessary if you hold the mid-range and i hold it between 90
seconds to two minutes and they have to breathe and the first 30 seconds is a 50 ever the next 30
seconds is 70 percent ever which is arbitrary you know but she's training whatever mental emotional
capacity she can and then the last 30 seconds my decline is a minus to train as hard as they
dare not as hard as they can necessarily it might be as hard as they can but as hard as they dare
you know i don't want anyone to produce enough muscular force to hurt themselves and this this
woman 83 years young unbelievable i mean she goes out in the yard now she used to lay around the bed
complaining about her back all the time she used to be kind of cranky now she's cheerful she can
take the lids off jars she goes out and does uh lawn and garden she gardens all day sometimes
like six seven eight hours and unbelievable i never saw a woman she squats like like an asian it
says beautiful deep squat and she moves around the only thing that she has is kind of like me she
has a bum shoulder from just doing stupid stuff in her younger days but i also have a guy my
age 68 and uh he has a whole bunch of litany of health problems made tremendous progress with
his isometrics and i've talked to the inventor of the time study contraction method ken hutchins
and drew bay who was probably one of the best authorities on uh tom steady contraction method
he wrote a really cool little book about it and he's trained many many people of all walks of life
the secret to keeping the blood pressure down to an isometrics is breathing and not holding the
breath and i i've had very very good success of a lot of my online clients mixing isometrics
with body weight makes a great combination great combination what's the drew brian yeah book
called steve uh i think it's just called time standard contraction you can go to his website
drewbay.com or drew bay high intensity training worth checking out very good
little book i'm actually in it i created a way of doing a time static contraction
squat with a uh with your jiu jitsu belt because all you need to do for time static contraction
is have a strap most people use forearm forklifts like just moving straps but any strap any
loading strap you can get an unbelievable workout it's the minimalist dream and it's very effective
i put a bunch of bjj guys on it and all their training partners say holy [ __ ] you feel so
strong usually that's a backhanded compliment if you tell a guy in jiu-jitsu wow you're really
strong that usually means dude you're using too much strength you're not using technique but you
know one one of the benefits is being as strong as possible in jiu jitsu is you know usually you
want to use about 60 of your strength most the time so you don't get tired but imagine if you
if you're massively strong you build yourself up to be massively strong sixty percent of your
strength is like a hundred percent of most people so yes i feel crazy strong but i'm only
using a small percentage of my total strength huge advantage but i find that for joint people
with any kind of joint problems spine problems knee whatever you can safely find a way to do uh
tom steady contraction i'm working with a guy that was really morbidly obese this guy was so fat i
mean his stomach it looked like he had a giant stability ball in his gut i
mean really really pitiful he just and he's he's a lawyer and he ate himself
into obesity and i was really worried about this guy because his health is a little sketchy you
know his varicose veins very costly to the baby but in the month and a half he's
been on tom steady contraction he's already dropped 30 pounds and he said
he feels better his clothes are fitting loose he's moving so much better uh it's really
amazing and all we're doing is strict dieting still podcasting so uh anyway by the the true
purpose in the fat loss program of strength training is to prevent
the body from indiscriminately taking muscle tissue it's well known in the diet
industry that you can lose just as much weight dieting without training at all than dieting
training and it seems like if you beat yourself up with a lot of aerobic stuff like you know
that's like the popular thing high intensity interval training or going out and running and all
this stuff it's unnecessary uh the best success i've had is the strength training and diet and of
course being active not just sitting on your butt getting out and walking but it doesn't have to
be crazy it seems that if you do real intense uh cardio work it makes you too hungry you just
get ravenously hungry and you break your diet so the diet is already a stress the strength
training enables you to keep your muscle if you diet without any training you'll
lose weight just as much as if you did train but you lose muscle and fat the strength training
allows your body to selectively get rid of the fat while keeping your muscle is you know you'll lose
a little muscle but you'll keep most of it and then if you're just moving around you know like
just getting through a couple of walks in during every day i get people doing a little breath work
that's the best of all possible world people will get rapid results from that it all comes down
to the diet there's no way around it you cannot exercise fat enough not effectively anyway it's
very hard not unless you're an olympic athlete like michael phelps or you're you know like you're
um one of these tour de france uh bike riders i mean they burn significant amounts of calories
but unless you're doing something like that you're not going to burn much in the way of calories
through cardio work you're just going to make yourself beat up and hungry so all you need is
walking strength training strict diet which diet don't matter whatever you can live with all dyes
work the same you know i do recommend that people kind of lower the carbohydrate level down get rid
of all sugars simple sugars and stuff especially soft drinks get rid of all wine and uh alcohol
the alcohol shuts down the fat burning mechanism and just sometimes those little steps alone make
a huge difference three basic meals lots of raw produce you can't go wrong eating fresh fruits and
vegetables preferably organically grown preferably indigenous to your area you know doesn't
make sense for nordic fellas or celtic fellas to be eating pineapples and bananas from guatemala
it was in your area plums apples pears peaches in season berries grow everywhere and then off
season you know you substitute something up now i i do eat some starch because i burn a
lot of calories during the day but uh if i wasn't as active as i am i probably would cut my
starches way down i just don't need the starch i want to be respectful of you pretty simple
actually it's simple but not easy yeah yeah absolutely we say all the time it comes up on the
podcast every week virtually that it's simple but not easy something that we all need to take uh
as i said i want to be respectful of your time so i've got a few quick fire questions for you steve
if you don't mind a few answers here um firstly who are your mentors where would you go to to
to or recommend people that you would go look at and research a lot of them are dead you know
one of one of my mentors was arthur jones and ben bottalis he was the one that
re-popularized the the uh the nautilus but all the protocols worked equally well for barbells
body weight you know high intensity training is a is a system of training it's not
dependent on any type of equipment at all uh ken hutchins the same guy that trained drew bay he certified me in his super
slow system and super statics superstatics is the time steady contraction
method uh fantastic resource you can series exercise dot com or ren x is another
website um drew bay high intensity training i think it's drewbay.com those are good and
of course steve actually maxwell sc dot com s for strength c for conditioning maxwell i
see i have tons of videos uh other mentors uh well certainly in jiu jitsu and wrestling
uh dale bonsal uh ncaa coaches hall of fame uh i i all of my uh judiciary teachers
el master elliot gracie jordan gracie helson gracie boyce gracie spoiler gracie
hulker gracie hillian gracie kaiki enrique uh solo ibero sean g barrow absolutely hedges library
one of the best teachers i've ever had hedges is right up there with one all-time best um these
are all my mentors in jiu-jitsu uh andre andre uh um trying to think his name is uh former ukrainian
five-time uh wrestling champion five-time national wrestling champion part of the soviet olympic
team uh andre brennan taught me so much about uh eastern european wrestling style like really
amazing uh i really applied a lot of that stuff to my uh to my uh jiu jitsu i had two great
yogi yogis that made profound influence andre lapa our ukrainian other master and chandra ramite
shadow yoga that's worth checking out great yogi um peter stereos in santa monica fantastic
yoga made a big big influence on my life then there was uh my systema teachers
vladimir vladimir vasilyev michael grudiev alexey uh alexa [ __ ] kadeshnikov and his
son arkady kardashian cough eugene forums uh um alexander colonel alexander maximsoff and
he lives in the canary islands but he's from kiev a major major influence in my way of
thinking about training and breathing so these are my measures to go from there
um just another quick one you mentioned when you're walking you do your breath work what
is that breathing ladders that you're doing when you're walking all sorts of stuff one is
breathe like to breathe right uh box breathing in four hold four out of four holds warm
um the breathe like to breathe right you just take as little oxygen as you can you
almost feel kind of suffocated that that you decrease your sensitivity to
co2 uh which is very important um you're trying to limit the number of times you
breathe per minute most people over breathe and it's interesting by over breathing you
actually get less oxygen to the working muscles so that's not good you want to
breathe as little as possible uh breath holding on the inhale breath holding on
the exhale uh high altitude simulation training there's a beginner wind and advanced one uh all
these are on my recent video that i just shot all these exercises that you can do but i love the
high altitude simulation training really really good also uh one i call drown proofing it's like
kind of i've heard it referred to as endogenous breathing where you just take as little air as
you can and prolong the exhale as long as you can so there's a lot of different
ones i have used breathing ladders there's a lot of techniques coming from the
oxygen advantage aren't i david tony sent a message he said uh loved your new breathing video
he says when you come when you're coming back to ireland he says um i hope so man as soon
as this uh you know this covoid thing is is done yeah i i want to i want to come back i'd
love to uh love to get you guys over here too i have a place for you to stay that'd be
awesome i got bats in the garage mats in the one more question from our audience um how
would you recommend me and hip pre rehab sorry uh well isometrics are fantastic uh especially
since hip replacement surgery and knee replacement surgery of the two leading surgeries for people
over 50 years old uh i as i said my ex-wife had hip replacement surgery i know a lot of former
powerlifters that you know sling you throw the weight around with momentum uh ended up with
hip replacements so you know so far i've avoided any kind of surgeries i hope to continue you
know never the need because there's always ramifications and you know the doctors always
make it sound like a walk in the park but the rehabilitation of these major surgeries
is really bad and you know just the uh the the type of uh gas that they used to knock you out
the um really bad man really bad for your system you know the the uh when they put you under
anesthesia very bad so hip bridge with abduction hip abduction hit adduction with a yoga block
are fantastic uh time steady contraction wall sit squat if you can't do that you can just
sit in a chair and act like you're going to get up out of the chair isometrically it's
harder than it sounds there's a bunch of exercises like that and i would use isometrics
to rehabilitate any kind of hip knee problem and i have i've had great success doing it it's
not rocket science you know you don't need fancy physio or any of that stuff
basic isometrics work extremely well and then once you're out of pain you start
working range of motion with mobility and stretching and then before you know it you're
just moving around like you're kidding me have you got anything to add guys
anything to finish off i mean i feel like just doing this interview i feel
like thanos in the uh the marvel films when he he clicks his fingers
and everybody else has disappeared and it's just it's just been a great
opportunity to talk to steve face to face you have me on the show thank you you've been
such a great influence on on my training on and how i train other people as well uh
ever i've first heard of you on the um live life aggressively podcast with mike
muller all right right right right ready i remember kind of debunking kettlebells
and those guys were like what well ever since then i've followed everything
you've done and and you've just been such a big influence on me not just my training
in my life as well so just want to thank you for that steve well you're very welcome
and i appreciate you know you tell me that you know everyone likes to know that they're
reaching people so it's you know it's it's always nice to hear that kind of stuff so thank thank you
for that have you got any final words for anyone steve anything to take away from people anything
to add uh no not really i mean you know go to the web look around see if there's anything you like
all my videos are really really uh priced very low i didn't want to you know get a price gown
i mean i see some videos that wow they're just ridiculously priced but all mine are very
affordable you know look around see what you like i'm still selling some kettlebell stuff i haven't
taken it down because i know people are going to lift it whether i tell them to or not so you might
as well learn to do it the right way absolutely yeah yeah but uh this new isometric stuff i'm very
very excited about very simple matter of fact one of the guys i just trained recently um probably
five months ago was the olympic uh the the u.s national olympic judo coach he's the strength and
conditioning coach for the u.s olympic judo team and he's gone to isometrics now for the usg was
very exciting it's a it's it's located in boston uh under the auspices of jimmy pedro who was a a
world medalist i think he took silver or whatever you don't usually see u.s guys do that good in
judo you know usually u.s does good in wrestling but not so much in judo but he was one of the
rarity and uh now they're training the judo guys with the isometrics it works great for this type
of grappling sport so anyone interested in finding out more about isometrics i have some awesome
videos and i have a new one coming out also well uh i have one for elderly people uh table and
chair workout if you want to check that one out for your clients you're talking about uh really
good i mean i literally work some people out just sitting in a table and chair
because you know they're immobilized or they're elderly that's how i work out the
uh my the the lawyer with the weight problem he just sits at the table and chair and gets a
fantastic workout drenched in sweat when he's done awesome so for anyone who's listening who
wants to find out more or any links or mentions on the show it'll be on my home
vitality.com we'll do some show notes from everything that we've talked about today so you'll
find links there and this is wonderful again soon see you guys walking my breath works yeah
you like i can't eat lunch until i do it good morning all right bye bye guys see you steve
