B (89:44)
Let's not talk about that yet. Let's not talk about that yet. I sit on my couch and I do some soft tissue work, right? I, I get down on the floor. Another, another concept that I try to get people to do is build a relationship with the ground. Something that a friend of mine, Kador Ziani, he was the first professional dunker at 50 something years old. The guy can like, I'm pretty sure he can still dunk and he's like this five eight or five, nah, five nine guy from Israel. He, he's amazing. But Khador has amazing movement ability. He can still jump and like if there's a light above you, he can jump and he can kick his foot above his head and kick that light. He has amazing movement ability, but he's also very powerful. But a big aspect that he does that anybody can do is start to be on the ground more, right? Because the ground is its own form of tissue therapy. Of course you can have a tool that you sit on top of, on top of your glute, on top of your hamstring and put pressure into the ground and figure out where am I holding tension to my hamstrings, am I holding tension to my calves? And as, as you do bodywork, a big concept to think about is not too much pressure. People make this mistake of, I'm going to get a body lever, I squeeze as hard as possible, and I'm grimacing. And like, I had to work through that pain first. Relax your face when you do any, all of this type of work. And if you find that no matter the amount of pressure, you're always grimacing, take some pressure off, put the amount of pressure that your nervous system can handle and you can keep calm and you can keep breathing so you don't hold your breath, so you can actually get deeper in those tissues and learn how to relax under that pressure. Because this is the thing, tension when needed in when you're sprinting, when you're maybe lifting something, Tension when needed is not bad. The tension that's negative is the tension that you're holding when you're at rest that you take with you from the gym. I think that this is one of the reasons why so many large athletes have a level of sleep apnea. I don't necessarily think it's because of their big necks. And this is, this is not based in science, but it's just based on what I see when I look at these people and hear, oh, you have sleep apnea. I'm not surprised because I'm £250, I don't have sleep apnea. I know other people who are good at athletes who are large and they don't have sleep apnea. But these athletes are also not overly tense. You'll see certain athletes where they, you'll see them chest breathing all the time. They have shallow breaths. They don't deep. They don't breathe into their diaphragm because they want to keep their stomach super flat and tight, right? And they're holding all of this excess tension in their body, which means that when they're asleep, their body can't just relax. Their, their shoulders can't go down. They're still in a state of sympathetic tone, right? Which is fight or flight slight when they're asleep. So you wonder why you have sleep apnea. It's because you're, you're breathing through your mouth and you're super tense when you're sleeping because your tissues are still holding onto this Tension that you brought with you from the gym. Mark tells all these stories where, like, he's like. Well, he's talked about it when he was in the midst of powerlifting. It's like his workouts would stay with him for a few days. He would feel them for a few days. And it's because of the tension that he created within the. That session. He continued to hold on to when he went about all the other things that he was going to do, which affected his recovery, which allowed him not to be able to just, like, relax, because there were certain tissues that were still on when they didn't need to be on. So again, it's. It's. Again, this. It's kind of a yin and a yang when it comes to the. The. The tension that you hold, you got to be able to yang, which is energy light. You gotta be able to turn it on when it needs to be on. But when you need to relax, you need things like your own being, your own body worker and working on your tissues and finding those areas that are holding too much tension. And you need to learn how to put pressure into them. Relax, breathe. See what comes of it. Move. See how. See how you move through space. Which is one of the reasons why I really like the body lever. Because when you use it, you can leverage a certain area. You can put rubbing, massage, pressure. I love using it in the sauna because when your tissues can get really, really warm and your. Your body gets a little bit of sweat, you're able to really kind of get in on these specific tissues and really work on yourself. But when you move along with working with these tissues, you can get high levels of release in certain areas. And to go back to what we were talking about, walking with the feet forward, I didn't. I did things to train my foot strength, right? But I think the big reason that now I walk the way I do is because this is. I don't even know if I'm gonna be able to explain this. While on this podcast, I try to get people to move through their skeleton, almost like to think about moving like you don't have muscle. And the only way to move like you don't have muscle is if you're not holding excessive amounts of tension in your muscle. Because even if you look at the most inflexible person, like a Chris Bumstead. Now, I say this because this metaphor comes from Ron Pena, who was. He created Quest Nutrition, and we were visiting him one day, and he. This guy's crazy. He put his leg up on a Wall. Ron's like, six foot one. He put his leg high up on a wall, and he was doing, like, a stretch, like a Van Damme stretch while he was talking to us. And I was like, ron, what the hell? He's like, you don't think you're flexible in sema? I'm like, I don't think I could do the splits. He's like, if I shot you in the head, you could. I was like, whoa, whoa, dude. Like, what? He's like, well, yeah, if I shot you in the head, your body has all the range of motion my body would have and more. Because your nervous system isn't guarding you in any of the. Any of these positions, right? Your. Your nervous system pretty much tells your body what is safe and what is unsafe. So you'll see people that build levels of flexibility. Yes. Changes happen in the tissue and the tendons and the muscles, but also their. Their nervous system lets them know that I can now go into this position safely. I can get into the split safely and come out. So that's how. And that's by relieving tension in certain areas. And when you're dead, you have no tension. So that's why even the. The buffest, thickest person, if shot in the head, could do the splits, because now there's nothing guarding them from this movement.
