GMB (00:01.982)
Okay, so today we're going to talk about something that's really important because I think so much of fitness discussion is based on the idea that you show up, you give it 110%, do your best, right? And that's how you make gains. But what happens when you can't do that? And I think that it's unrealistic to expect that you can operate at your max all of the time.

So then it begs the question of what else is left and for too many people, it ends up being nothing. So we have this all or nothing, on off kind of approach to things. So we're gonna talk today about how treating your training like a light switch is not ideal, right? And that there's a whole spectrum of things in between that are valuable and useful that can help you.

make more use of your available capabilities to keep making progress without waiting for the days that you can be at your best.

Ryan (01:08.974)
Yeah. Now this is really good and actually right before we were recording this, we're talking about it and it really hits with me because earlier in my days, I did kind of live on the edge basically of trying to just be on all the time. I was a lot younger, know, doing a lot of other things and let's just be honest, not as intelligent as I am now.

No, actually, was just the fact I just didn't have the experience. anyway, Andy's being quiet there. Andy's being quiet there.

GMB (01:42.835)
Let's just pause there because... Alright, I will grant that perhaps you have gotten smarter.

Ryan (01:52.11)
A bit more experience, let's put it that way. But what we were saying actually, or what I was saying actually is that I live, the majority of the time I actually live in the middle. So it's not even on or off, it's simply in the middle. And Andy wrote something earlier where he was referring to it as a dimmer switch and knowing where that in between place is.

GMB (01:54.036)
Hahaha

Ryan (02:20.238)
But coming back to that on switch, I think that a lot of us out there think that it has to either be on or off and thinking that training should be like you said, Andy, know, 110 % which obviously doesn't exist. But rather than looking at it that way, what we're going to discuss is how by living in that middle zone,

gray zone, if you will, that dimmer switch in between is actually going to allow you to be able to judge whether or not you even need to go 100 % or not. And I think that's another question that a lot of people don't even truly, truly ask themselves is do you need to go 100 %? I haven't needed to get 100 % in quite a long time. And thing is, I'm doing pretty well.

And so I'm not saying that you aren't the kind of person who might need that, but in training in this gray zone and using this dimmer switch, it is going to give you not just the results, but the feedback that you need to know of exactly where that 100 % might be if need be. And the most important thing here is that it's going to help to keep you to continuing or keep you to continue to train in a way that's going to be good for you so that

you don't have more off days than you do training days.

GMB (03:51.73)
Right, and so just to sort of set up the metaphor a little better, if we look at on, full on, and going at your hardest, doing your best effort, giving everything you have every time you step on the mat or go into the gym or whatever. So that's the idea is that you are full on all the time. And.

What happens is if you give your full effort is you also need a full recovery, right? And so the more often that you give close to your full capacity, the longer you're going to need to recover in between those things. Now, of course, anyone who's done any training and gone close to their max will smell bullshit at this point because it sounds like a false dichotomy because what happens is

you go 100 % and then the next day, your 100 % is less, right? So you do 100 % of what you can, which is less than it was the fully recovered day. So it's not all or nothing, but every time you give 100%, then it's still based on whatever you have that day. Okay, that's great. So you can say that 100 % is still variable and flexible. Well, what this is setting you up for is a situation where

You can't plan how much you're able to train. You can't plan in advance which days you're going to be working on building strength or building skill. You can't plan in advance which days you're going to be training different exercises based on your capacity because it's always reactive to how much gas you happen to have in the tank that day, which is always a delayed response to what you did the day before or two days before. And so it's not saying that

the total amount of energy you have is either 100 % or 0 % because we all know that's bullshit. We all understand that there's a gray zone. But we treat it like we go to the max. We hit the pedal all the way to the metal until we run out of gas. And it just depends on how much gas we show up with each day. So that's also not as good. And so what we're saying is that we want to be able to

GMB (06:16.659)
use the full range of the pedal, right? We want to be able to use the full range of grays between fully off zero, 20%, 50%, 70%, you know, 100 % and be able to make use of all of those different types of days. Because, like Ryan, in your experience before, like you said, going too hard for too long, this is where you hear stories of people who have legitimate overtraining, not like imagined overtraining, but real overtraining.

Ryan (06:40.76)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (06:44.706)
Yeah. Yeah.

GMB (06:47.154)
People who push themselves so far that they let chronic stiffness or aches and pains become a full-on like tendonitis or an injury that now they can't train because they have to actually rest to recover from. You blowing out your Achilles tendon, you know, messing up your shoulder joint or the slap tear or something because you tried to do things that your body wasn't prepared for. And we like to think that these are things that happen to other people.

Ryan (07:01.794)
Right, right.

Ryan (07:10.722)
Right? Yeah.

GMB (07:15.868)
but that's an idea we're going close to 100 too often without learning how to take those back off days, right, is going to force you to have an extended period of zero. And if you've never been there before, just allow me to tell you definitively, there is no better way to completely halt your progress than to not be able to train.

Ryan (07:47.147)
It sucks.

GMB (07:47.292)
So that's kind of like the setup of like why we're talking about this and yes, it's not fake math. Yes, we understand that the amount of energy you have is variable, but when you treat everything as a response to how much gas you have in a tank, when you need those breaks is kind of up to chance and other factors that you can't control and plan around. So as an alternative,

Let's talk more about the middle and how you can identify and plan for what you have available so that you can make better use of all that time.

Ryan (08:24.142)
Mm hmm. That's good. So, yeah, if we are looking at the middle, then as we're discussing, you can look at it as a dimmer switch where there are certain percentages of the time where you'll be using that energy. And here in GMB, we call that auto regulation. And so this is really allowing you to understand what's happening in your body that day in that moment so that you can adjust. It doesn't mean that you're.

not going to work out because you're tired. It doesn't mean that you're not going to push yourself because you know you feel really good. Yes if you feel good you can push yourself harder. If you're not feeling it you just don't push yourself as much. You regulate your intensity based on how you are doing that day. This doesn't happen before your session by the way. Let's just be honest there are days where we don't

feel like working out. Those are some days the days that we should, you know, show up. Those are some of the days I've actually had the best practices of my life is the days I didn't feel like doing it. I started my prep, warming my body up, ended up having this fabulous session. So your mind is tricking yourself. And so. When we can, however, understand the concept of auto regulation.

and that auto-regulation happens when we actually step on the mat in order to assess where we are, then we can start using that dimmer switch again, auto-regulation and say, all right, you know what? I stepped on the mat and I just, really didn't sleep well last night and I'm feeling it. And I don't think this is gonna work. But instead of trying to do, you know, my PR that was written on a piece of paper that said that today is my high intensity day,

Instead, I'm to back off a bit, maybe do my mobility session so that I can go back tomorrow and see how I'm doing, maybe hit that PR. So again, it doesn't mean that you completely stop doing what you're doing. It's not that on or off. It's regulating how things are going based upon how you're doing that day. Autoregulation. This allows you to continue to get in skill work. It allows you to continue to build that strength.

Ryan (10:47.886)
Because of this and thanks to this, you will have fewer setbacks, which means that you're going to be able to, as Andy mentioned earlier, step on the mat, go to the gym, but, you know, do your activities and continue to do that because you are continuing to do that. That's the important thing. When you're ramping up 100 % all the time, there will come a time when you're going to just have to take a big break. And mentally, that's not going to feel good.

But if you're able to use this auto regulation to help you to determine what you need to keep you going, that's how you see results. Again, it's not 100 % all the time. It's different percentages done in a consistent manner that allows you to actually make progress.

GMB (11:34.468)
Right, and the thing is, is there are different kinds of training and different attributes you develop that actually can work quite well at different levels of energy or recovery, right? So for example, building complex motor skills, you really want your central nervous system to be as close to baseline as possible, right? Because that's when your balance, your agility,

your nervous system altogether are at their most efficient and you're able to build new neural pathways and develop motor patterns that stick better. Also power development. A lot of people love to talk about high intensity, but what they mean by that is high intensity cardio training and they forget that some of the highest intensity training you can actually do is power development. And we're talking things like jumps, throws,

you know, really like super maximal kinds of things for a very short duration. And these things happen, you can only really train these when you are as close to recovered as possible because they recruit the highest amount of muscle fibers as well as use a lot of neurological help to get all of that fuel used. So,

These are things that you really can't do when you're tired, but you know what you can do on a 70 % day on a 50 % day. You can do a lot of reps. You can do a lot of work that's going to stimulate muscles for growth. You can do a lot of hypertrophy training on days that are in your like 60 % range. And you know what you can do when you're at 30 and 20 % a lot of long slow distance cardio kind of things. So

The fact is, is it's not a matter of when you can train and make useful training and when you can't train and it's not worthwhile at all. It's a matter of understanding that there's different things that you need to develop as a well-rounded individual and that these things can work at different times very well too. And so we've organized these in our programs into, you know, we have our five P's, prep, practice, play.

GMB (13:58.937)
push and ponder. And we use these to organize the different kinds of training over a sequence of sessions. And this is part of the way that we do programming is that no one training session is an island on its own. It's always related to the session that came before and the session that's going to come after. So all of these things are built into our programs already. You don't really have to think about, well, today I should be able to do more power training or whatever. It's all.

baked in and a good program it is. So all of this stuff, you can use that well if the programming accounts for it. And if you learn how to organize it and how to use and adjust the amount of energy you have available. And so also, this is not just for skill training or movement training or something like that too.

because I think a lot of people are probably hearing this and saying, well, that maybe that works for some of the GMB stuff, but I just want to put on muscle. One, if that's the only thing you care about, why are you listening to this? And I'm asking, I'm genuinely asking because we do have people that listen to these things and read the emails and reply to things and say, well, I'm just trying to get bigger. Okay, well, I appreciate your esteem. so here is why you should still be listening because

Ryan (15:02.84)
Ha ha ha.

GMB (15:20.098)
We actually know what we're talking about. If you are just trying to build strength, if you are primarily working out with weights and stuff like that, which I know some of our clients, that's their main training. Actually, you should check out a book called Easy Strength that Dan John and Pavel Satsalim wrote, Jesus, almost like 15 years ago now. But this is something I think, I don't know, Ryan, if it was you or Jarlo that found it first, but then all three of us read it we're like, holy shit, this is good.

Ryan (15:38.744)
Yeah, it's, yeah, it's a back.

Ryan (15:49.07)
Yeah, it's great.

GMB (15:49.472)
And this is a book that chronicles basically Dan John's experiment with doing strength training at the 60 to 70 % range every single day. And this was basically a challenge. Yeah, this is a challenge that Pavel gave him to be able to make strength gains without pushing his body to the point where he was getting injured, which was a problem for him at the time. And you should read this book.

Ryan (16:04.398)
Bench park sessions, baby.

GMB (16:19.213)
But basically this is an analog of the same thing of basically what Ryan was talking about before he started recording of his training currently of living in the middle. And so if you're a lifter and you want to know what that looks like, read that book. If you are or not, Ryan, why don't you tell us a little bit about what that looks like for you now?

Ryan (16:30.477)
Yes.

Ryan (16:42.124)
Yeah, again, the past few years have basically just been living in the middle and my goal is high quality practice period. as you were speaking to high quality practice doesn't just mean, you know, 100 % on this particular day for this. It's looking at that day. OK, if it's power, what does high quality practice mean today? If it's.

for my skill work. What does high quality practice mean today? And I've actually not pushed that 100 % in a very long time. Really lived in the middle. But what I found is that every three months, I give myself a test. Now this test, it's not that I'm working towards the test. The test is to let me see where I am. The test itself also isn't even

quite 100 percent. But the cool thing is that I find that when I'm performing the test, and by the way, every three months it's a little bit different. I find that my base capacity has increased and the quality of the things that I'm doing has also improved simply because I spent more time being able to perform these things at a high quality every single day. Now, I say every single day because

seven days a week, I'm doing something, whether that be my martial art, whether that be currently doing a lot of kettlebells with a lot of locomotion. But again, it's done in a way where it's in the middle so that I can continue to do it. It's pretty amazing that for the past two years, at least I've been doing this and I keep improving. And it's funny because for other people, it would look boring.

To me, it's amazing because I just keep doing what I'm doing and it's working and I feel good. And that's really the important thing about this is that you don't need to kill yourself to get the results. I want to say, please don't kill yourself thinking that you're going to get results. You're actually not. You're just going to kill yourself. So, so really look at first off, what do need?

GMB (19:00.413)
Hahaha

Ryan (19:06.878)
And that's the most important thing, because just because I might, you know, I might have said kettlebells right now doesn't mean we think that you should be doing kettlebells and, you know, locomotion. mean, I think everyone should do locomotion, but but you need to figure out what's why you're doing this. What for? In my case, it's for my judo. It's very, very important. I want to be able to continue to get on the mat and perform at the level that I want to perform at without getting injured. And so the way that I'm training right now allows me to do that. So when you have that, why?

It's extremely important. But if you're pushing yourself to a point where it's hurting you, literally hurting you, you're breaking down, that's not helping you at all. So take a step back, look at really what you need and give thought to this concept of auto regulation that we're talking about. It doesn't have to be on or off. Should be able to do the things that you want, see improvements and do that all in a very high quality of practice.

so that you can continue to do that as long as possible.

GMB (20:10.891)
Quality is super important and we talk about this a lot, but it's one of those things that when you have this message blasted at you all the time that you need to be giving it your all, it's very hard to focus on quality when you do that. It's just like when we talk about how we don't like counting high numbers of reps, we don't really like things like AMRAP, as many...

as many reps as possible and stuff like that. And then people come back and are like, well, what it really means is as many reps as perfect. Right. Like you can't start with as many as.

Ryan (20:48.206)
Yeah, I don't think so.

GMB (20:54.442)
As long as you say as many as, some part of your psyche is going to ignore whatever that last thing is, right? You're gonna keep going far past perfect. This is just human psychology. And for the 1 % of you Buddhas out there who wants to be like, well, I always stop when it's not perfect. Like, okay, you have ascended samsara, good for you.

you know, you're not trapped in the Samadhi with the rest of us and you can see the truth of your reps, but the rest of us are going to push harder than we should under those circumstances. Okay? You can't argue with reality. Now, this is a thing where I think it's important to understand that there's a lot of different types of training. And so Ryan, you mostly train every day, right?

Ryan (21:51.81)
Yeah, right. Yeah.

GMB (21:52.297)
And you've developed the ability to do this over a long period. And I think that that is a very viable approach. And it's actually what a lot of our, any one of our individual programs is based on the idea that you should be able to basically, for example, elements, you should be able to do elements forever.

Ryan (22:16.077)
Yes.

GMB (22:18.023)
You don't have to, but you should be able to do elements forever. Yeah.

Ryan (22:19.843)
But.

That's right.

So with that in mind though, just because I say that I work out, exercise, practice every single day, again, doesn't mean that I'm going super hard. If you were to look at the intensity, even the duration of my sessions compared to three, four years ago, I would say half, half. And it's working.

It's doing exactly what it needs to do to help me for what I'm after right now in my life. That's what's important. So being able to do elements every single day doesn't mean elements 45 minutes a day. It doesn't mean crushing yourself doing elements. It means doing elements and showing up to your prep and doing that and saying, where am I today? What do I need today?

then looking at that session and going through that session and adjusting according to the intensity. I'm not saying change the session. It means adjust the movements to match what you need that day. This is what we're after. And by doing this, it will allow you to do something every single day. I really, my hope for everyone listening is that you're able to build a body that is capable of handling movement exercise.

Ryan (23:49.881)
whatever you want to do every single day. But if it is either yes or no, on or off, you're not really building a body that's gonna be able to handle life to be perfectly honest. so I would encourage you to start to look at, right, once again, what can you do in order to be able to do something every day that's going to lead to building more capable.

a more capable body so that you can build more physical autonomy to be able to do the things in your life and just basically live life in the way that you really want to. That's really what I'm after right now. I don't care about doing particular skills and tricks or things right now. I just want to be able to enjoy this stuff that I'm doing and do more of that without getting injured. And the way to do that is by using auto regulation.

and really finding the level of intensity is going to be appropriate for me and for you, whoever is this thing. So, yes.

GMB (24:59.718)
Right. And that's the thing about when we talk about, you know, physical autonomy and capability for our regular lives is

Part of it is we don't know what's gonna happen later today or tomorrow or in two days. And if I have absolutely destroyed myself today and if something happens tomorrow, you people talk about like, I need to be able to carry my wife out of a burning building and lift a car off of a child and dodge bullets at the same time. Like, all right, like I get that you've got your post-apocalyptic prepper fantasy life and that's really cool.

Ryan (25:15.074)
bright.

GMB (25:42.744)
I hope that you've got your dried food stores and your ammo and all the things that you need. You and Rogan have a good time with that. But here's the thing. What if the zombie apocalypse happens the day after leg day? What if, my friend, you are gonna be one of the first eaten?

Ryan (26:03.662)
because you're still going to be sitting on the toilet. You're still sitting on the toilet because you can't get up because of that. That's right. Yeah, that's right.

GMB (26:04.104)
Let me just like... You're gonna be stuck on the toilet when the zombies come in. You're gonna be like, can't stand, send help.

Ryan (26:13.144)
Can't stand, but that was a killer leg workout.

GMB (26:17.529)
Yeah, yeah, your quads, your quads are going to look really good when some zombie is flossing with them. That is how it goes. But I mean, you know, I was going to say I'm joking. actually not joking, but I'm completely serious. But this is the thing. So where Ryan and Jarlo and I come from a martial arts background and we talk about this periodically is like, you don't know when you need

Ryan (26:30.85)
Yeah, you're not joking. Come on now.

GMB (26:45.17)
to yourself. And it's not even from a hypothetical bad guy, right? Being able to defend your life is also from environmental threats, from anything that happens, right? It's the proverbial runaway shopping cart, it's the bus you didn't see, it's somebody tripping and falling into the person next to you and knocking them into you. It's not like situational awareness won't always protect you from these things, but.

You need to be able to have the physical capability to respond to these things. And if you just did a killer workout yesterday and you got 20 likes on the gram, that doesn't excuse you from being able to perform today. That's not how life works. So the point being is that you need to be able to know that you can perform when you're at 70 % or when you're at 50 % or when you're at 20%.

And this is where what Ryan was saying earlier about a test. The test isn't necessarily something that you prepare yourself for the test. A test is just like a check-in, right? But you need to be able to test yourself at different capacities. You need to know what your body is capable of the day after your hard training. And the only way to do that is to move and find out regularly. And so you need to get better.

Ryan (28:08.878)
That's right. That's right. That's

GMB (28:13.231)
at the skill of being able to surf these different available capacity ranges, as well as then that gives you the ability to be able to plan them in advance and to know, well, if I push harder than this today, tomorrow I'm not going to be able to do the things I think I'm going to need to do. If I feel like this today, I can push myself harder and know that tomorrow I'll still be able to do X, Y, and Z.

And this is why we like to say that it's a learning process rather than just a do as much as possible and find out later that you could or couldn't. It's not just a throw yourself at the wall process. You have to be aware, and this is why we have the reflection, the ponder after every session, so that we have a built-in structure to learn how to be aware of how we respond to the training and what we have left.

and what we can do the next day because this is where the real applicability, the real practical nature of training comes in. Everyone's like, well, that exercise is practical. No, no, exercises can't be practical or not practical. Exercise is training. And your ability to learn both physically and neurologically and as well like mentally from that exercise is what makes it practical or not.

So can you learn the lessons from your training that allow you to be a more capable and effective physical entity in your life? And that's like the real lesson for us from martial arts, but for anyone practicing to be able to be effective through training, it's not effectiveness in terms of being able to lift five more pounds with your pinky finger.

That's great, it's impressive if you train that stuff, but then you have to be able to translate that to things that matter. And so that's why it's not just that taking days at different intensity ranges is good training, it is, but it's also that it trains you to be able to not just train at these different levels, but to be able to perform when tested at these different levels. And that's...

GMB (30:32.571)
what it really comes down to in terms of this stuff being real and practical, and this is making you a better person.

Ryan (30:42.232)
Well said, that was good. So what are you benching right now? What are you benching recently?

GMB (30:45.572)
Man, it's like I spent like, yeah. I have been on the bench for a few months now, so I am not benching. Yeah.

Ryan (30:54.424)
Yeah, yeah.

GMB (30:58.33)
I don't know, haven't in quite a long time. When I was last lifting, I was really just doing like standard eight to 12 rep stuff. Dude, it was like two years ago, I don't remember. Nothing impressive though, I tell you that.

Ryan (31:10.776)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Well, you know, I'm half joking, but the thing of it is, is just to bring back the point that, you know, every movement is actually functional. It just depends on how you're using it according to what you need in your life. so, yeah, think about that. And we can maybe, you know, end with that is everything you're doing serves a purpose, but is it serving a purpose for you or not? That's really what it is. And so, yeah, yeah.

GMB (31:42.755)
Right. Is it serving the purpose of making electrolyte drink supplement companies richer? Or is it serving a purpose of making you better at living your life?

Ryan (31:49.102)
Yeah, or is it sir? Exactly.

GMB (31:55.938)
This podcast is sponsored by nobody.

GMB (32:01.764)
so with that said, thank you for listening.

Ryan (32:05.198)
Thanks everybody.