Ancient Spartan Training Secrets, The Most Biologically Badass US Presidents, Who Was *Really* The Greatest Athlete Of All Time & More, With James Pieratt

My name is Ben Greenfield. And on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life podcast.

The Spartans themselves had a very, very, very strong preference for game meat over cultivated meat, deer and wild boar and stuff. They also ate a lot of wild hare and birds, small to medium-sized game. They also, you may have heard of this, were famous for their Spartan black soup. And this was soup that was made from pig's blood, vinegar, and usually just some chunks of pork thrown in there also. The two things that stood out though were the blood soup and then of course Greek Mountain Tea. I drink it myself now.

Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Are you ready to hack your life?

Let's do this.

Check this out, this book by James Pieratt. James, is that how you pronounce your last name, Pieratt?

You're actually the first person in history to get that right, I believe.

Yeah, it's my long history of studying the written language and interviewing lots of people with funky last names. James Pieratt, folks, if you don't know who he is, you should. So, I discovered James I believe on his Instagram channel. I don't follow that many people on Instagram. And, by not that many, I suppose probably a touch above 100. But anyways, James has this Instagram channel. It's Wild Hunt Conditioning, Wild Hunt Conditioning. And, what attracted me to it is it's got all of these crazy epic workout routines and physical fitness histories of everybody from U.S. presidents like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington to the Spartans, the ancient Indians, the Chinese warriors. And, as a guy who's a little bit of a fitness junkie myself and who gets inspired by these tales of just crazy workouts and routines and mental and physical rigor, I just thought his Instagram channel was incredible. And then, I found out he just wrote a book. It's called "A History of Physical Fitness." "A History of Physical Fitness." I think you probably should have adjusted the title, James, and had it read something like "A Badass History of Physical Fitness" or "A History of Masochism." But anyways though, so I'll link to the book if you guys want to check it out and to James's channel at BenGreenfieldLife.com/FitnessHistory. BenGreenfieldLife.com/FitnessHistory is where I'll link to everything. But James himself, is pretty incredible. He's a wilderness ultramarathon runner and a record-breaking hybrid strength and endurance athlete. I'll let him explain to you what a hybrid athlete is. Pretty intense focus on functional fitness. And so, yeah, from the secret training halls of ancient Sparta to the Arctic strength-building methods of the Inuit to the underwater world of these aquatic superhuman tribes in the South Pacific, his book breaks it down. He studies this stuff. It's just fascinating. So, I'm super excited. So, I gotta ask you though because a lot of people might not really be familiar with what a hybrid athlete it is. How do you describe that?

Your baseline description of a hybrid athlete in the modern traditional sense would be someone with a pretty reasonable grasp on both strength and endurance. Now, this could be someone who just runs and is a bodybuilder and kind of divides time between the two or alternates blocks, but those are their main focuses generally. Juggling strength and endurance. My personal focus on it is a little more full spectrum. Like, when I think of what I strive for in my personal training goals would be like, what's the perfect guy you'd want with you in a war band like 5,000 years ago or a hunting party? Strength, endurance, technicality, cognitive development, a complete human being beyond that. But, so it's like—

Preferably can cook a backstrap okay also.

Oh, yeah, preferably. Clutch skill. So, yeah, for me, you know, it's my personal training. You know, maybe not to the extent that you have as far as I've seen. You've done pretty much everything under the sun in terms of training. But, I've dabbled, you know, my own training breakdown kind of has different elements of powerlifting, kettlebells, obviously trail running. I don't do much street running just because it doesn't really appeal to me. And then, for a long time, I didn't really have access to trails, so I got kind of burnt out on just running on flat cement in a smoggy city, you know. But, and then, you know, martial arts, jiu-jitsu, boxing, pretty much a little bit of everything honestly. And then, I like bow hunting. I actually come— my dad's an Appalachian bear hunter. Yeah. So, that's where my background would be. I'm, you know, son of a bear hunter. And then, my mom's Japanese and she's descended from the Minamoto, which is like one of the early samurai families. So, it's kind of where a lot of my interest in history comes from.

Yeah, that's a pretty good genetic makeup. With the hybrid athlete approach, I think in the past, I've seen some folks who probably fit into that category classify their proficiency at hybrid training by defining their deadlift strength and their mile time or their marathon time. Do you track anything like that? Like, how much can you deadlift and how fast can you run a marathon?

So, I remember a while back hearing there was that, I believe it was like a CrossFit thing that can you deadlift 500 and run like a sub-5-minute mile? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, I never intentionally leaned into any of that, but I did like early on my first actual, my very first hybrid test was I just wanted to be able to deadlift over 500 and then go straight into a 50-mile run and it just finished nothing crazy like time-wise or anything. And this was still pretty early. I'd been doing hybrid training for maybe 8 months or so when I attempted this. And I ended up pulling 520 pounds at Mark Smellybills Gym in Sacramento. Spotted by Andrey— Oh, yeah. Spotted by Andrey Malanchyev. Oh, yeah. It's a great gym. Spotted by Andrey Malanchyev, no less, one of the greatest powerlifters of all time, the guy that pulls over 1,000. And then, went out to Folsom Lake and the American River Trail kind of along there and ran a 50-miler. And, that was pretty interesting. Actually, honestly, everything went pretty entirely smoothly up to like mile 38, but I was still a pretty new ultra runner and I just spent a little too much time in the chair and my legs just never came back. So, the last 12 miles of the 50-mile run took the exact— almost the exact same time as the first 38. First 38. Yeah, dude, just dragging, like limping, you know what I mean? But, Got it done and had a blast. And, you know, so I never really looked back. And then, I think next after that, 1 or 2 after that was the world record thing, the weighted running world record, which was a complete accident. I was like, I didn't set out to break a world record. I just wanted to see, like, I was really experimenting with like completely unsupported nonstop running. So, it's like if I have everything on my back and like in theory, I shouldn't have to stop moving. Like, indefinitely, right? So, how long could I go for? And so, the pack on my back ended up being about 35 pounds because you need a lot more water and food and stuff plus a little emergency kit stuff in case something goes wrong.

Watermelons, sweet potatoes.

Yeah, all the stuff.

Yeah.

Well, you do try to get the stuff that gets you hydrated and calories in the same for the same weight. And then, I went for— so, ended up going for over 33 hours without stopping once without breaking locomotion a single time or even stride. And, in doing so, broke the weighted running world record, which had been like the guy had run 69 miles with a 30-pound weighted vest in Australia a year or two before this. And, it's pretty niche record. So, it wasn't— I'm sure it'll be broken many, many more times in the years to come.

Is that how much weight you have to use, 30 pounds?

His record was just like the specific record he set was 30 pounds for 69 miles. And then, I went 35 and ended up being 116 miles, I think, like that. So, I broke it pretty considerably with slightly heavier weight.

And, does the 35 pounds include the food and fuel that you're carrying?

Yeah. So, we had a variable, the weight would have varied between 32.5 and 37.5 pounds just based off the exact water volume that I was carrying. But, we had it set up to where I could refill water without stopping by tying water bottles, hanging disposable bottles from tree branches with a red ribbon wrapped around them so I could see them in the dark. And then, I mean, along the trail and I could just grab and switch out my bottles as we went. And so, it was pretty efficient. Well, I'm pretty slick at the time. I've come to mature quite a bit in terms of running logistics and backcountry stuff now. And then, I was also aided in that one by the fact that there was almost no incline.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, just thinking about that as you're talking, my mind goes to what I would select as fuel to get through something like that. I think If I had to choose, I'd probably go with something like Keto Bricks because those are 1,000 calories a bar, ketones just like some of those little liquid ketone shot bottles. And then, I'd probably, besides electrolytes, I'd probably throw in glycerol like Hyperhydrate body.

I like glycerol.

Oh, yeah. Creatine too. Yeah, yeah. Creatine would be an okay option. But yeah, I'd at least go glycerol. Keto Bricks and ketones. I think that would cover most of my bases assuming I had salt.

Yeah. So, actually, this is a perfect segue into— so, I got back late last night from the Sonora Desert. And, I guess this will be the official announcement for it. I have successfully run an ultramarathon through the hottest desert on the planet, which is the Sonora Desert, which by now with satellite imagery, we're able to measure surface temperatures the entire planet. And Sonora has measured as high as 177 degrees. Wow. And so it is officially, I mean, you could go, you know, there's the whole Death Valley air temperature thing from almost 100 years ago, but now we have pretty accurate readings. So Sonora now, so I got back late last night from right above the Mexican border, Southern California. It would be Eastern, Southeastern California, right above the Mexico border. And ran approximately 200 miles in about 87 7.5 hours. And, this was probably the biggest physical test of my life, but the fueling stuff specifically, we had to get really dialed in with. And, it might interest you what we went with. So, speaking of just on-the-move fuel in my bladder, what I had is a product called Scratch Recovery.

For people who think he's talking about his physical bladder, the bladder is like the CamelBak-style device that you carry fluids in.

Yeah. Yeah, I carry a 3-liter water bladder CamelBak in my back, which is bigger than the 2, you know, the traditional 2 liters that go out, but it's just, you know, give me a little bit longer range at the expense of a little bit more weight just to, you know, win-win or, you know. Yeah. But, so in that, yeah, so Scratch Recovery and that's— it's a car— you know, a glycogen— I'm sorry, just a carbohydrate, composite carbohydrate protein and electrolyte mix that uses milk powder as its base, you know, to provide and then they add in a little bit of dextrose, cane sugar. The one I was drinking was mostly horchata flavored, so they got some cinnamon and stuff in there too. Yeah.

Pretty precisely dialed in though because I interviewed— isn't that Alan Lim?

Yeah, yeah.

It's Alan. Yeah.

Yeah.

No, Alan. Yeah. So, Alan used to be our physiologist for Team Timex back when I raced triathlon. Oh. And, yeah, his whole Scratch Labs cookbook and his supplements are very well designed. Like, if you go try to mix milk powder and dextrose and salts on your own, The problem, and I interviewed Alan back in the day, I'll hunt it down and link to it in the shownotes, but the osmolality has to be very precisely dialed in. I forget the percentage that he uses, but if you exceed it, you wind up drawing up way too much water into the GI tract and get diarrhea and gastric upset. But, they do a pretty good job with formulation at Scratch. And then, I believe with that milk powder, you get the advantage of some of the similar components as colostrum that help to seal up the lining of the leaky gut, which I would imagine would be pretty helpful for gut permeability in hot weather like the Sahara Desert.

Ben Greenfield: Oh, yeah. And, he has a little probiotic strain, Lactobacillus strain thrown in that one too as well. But yeah, so they actually went out to Scratch a couple months ago and they did my personal electrolyte panel, tested my sweat and found that I am— Yes, I'm super salty. I'm 880 nanograms per mil, whatever the metric was. I'm like the normal person I think is in the 380 range and I'm 880. Yeah. So, I added additional— we talked about how much additional pink salt we should mix. I added creatine not just for the gut and brain health and muscle function, but also I recently saw some research that indicated megadosing creatine could really help offset some of the effects of sleep deprivation. And, I had played with that during a 100-mile training run when my training peak going into this and felt really good, so I stuck with that and I felt amazing. I mean, I felt great all the way through. And, I don't consume caffeine. Well, Very little bit. The only caffeine I got during this, the entire 84 or I'm sorry, 87.5 hours was Dr Pepper. I drank Dr Pepper pretty consistently during the daytime.

Yeah. My go-to was a flat Coke when I used to race Ironman just grabbing it from aid stations. Creatine, that's true. It's a good tip. I mean, obviously, you got to be careful because similar to too high an osmolality of fluid, the creatine can give you a little gastric upset if you exceed about 2.5 grams in your dosing schedule. But yeah, for sleep deprivation, it is true, 10 to 20 grams a day, more than the 5 grams a lot of people will load with for strength and power, has good effects on cognition and sleep deprivation. And then, NAD is kind of the second part of that stack if you want to upgrade a little more. Yeah, NAD and creatine are kind of the go-to. As a matter of fact, I had to get up this morning at about 3:00 a.m. Just with some intensive work duties I had to tackle. So, I've been on creatine and NAD since about 3:30 this morning. And, that's also interesting what you noted about Alan and your sweat sodium test because he came out to Timex and we did a similar analysis with the patches. I was very similar to you. I'm at like 3x the amount of electrolyte loss. And so, when he tested me, I guess it was probably 8 years ago, I increased my daily salt intake to 6 grams and it was a game changer for sleep, performance, for cramping, for recovery. And now, from what I've seen, even though I don't know if they're as good as getting tested by a physiologist or out of Scratch Labs or whatever, you can buy the Gatorade patches on Amazon now and do your own at-home sweat sodium analysis.

I didn't even know that. That's pretty cool.

Yeah. Yeah. So, folks could figure this out at home if they want to kind of dial it in. I don't know how good those patches are compared to the physiology lab measurements, but—

You could use the old method we used in MMA and jiu-jitsu, and it's just compare your gi after training and see whose is whiter, you know.

Yeah. It'll tell you fluid. It won't tell you the salt composition, but at least tell you your fluid loss, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, Ben, the more white crust on the gi, the more salt it is, right?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

For the white crust, absolutely.

We used to joke around, but honestly, that's Probably a pretty elite method if you were to, you know what I mean?

Like, you can play the game. It is except for the fact that salt intake drives salt loss. So, sometimes people will show no white crust but then if they're using a bunch of electrolytes, they'll show it. So, you got to control for that a little bit. But dude, man, you have done some crazy things. So, I ate chicken and played Scrabble last night and you ran the Sahara Desert yesterday.

Dude, no, no. So, it was from Tuesday morning to Friday night of last week.

Okay.

But still, chicken and Scrabble sounds— me and my wife were just talking about that. We're not really big socializers, we're kind of introverted homebodies and we live up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. So, we're just talking about kind of getting back into some board games. And, she gets more competitive than I do though ironically. So, it will go down, no doubt. But, I like simple things. I think it's important to keep your world small if you want to do big things.

Yeah. Well, speaking of big things, let's lead with the big stuff. In writing this book, we don't have time to cover every last population and individual that you looked into, but I'm just curious for you as the author, who is your favorite in terms of the population or the individual?

So, it's really hard to narrow it down obviously, but you're always going to have those 1 or 2 cultures that maybe kind of speak to you a little bit more than anything else. And for me, it's pretty much the Spartans and then certain Native American warrior cultures like the Apache and the Comanche. The Spartans, I think particularly I find them interesting because it's— I mean, you could argue there's eras and clans within the samurai era where maybe you can see something comparable. But for the most part, the Spartans are really the only time that we see in human history what is a culture completely devoted to war and to physical perfection and war look like. And I mean, it's everything. Everything that they did for centuries was just dedicated to becoming physical apex predators on the battlefield and in the Olympic Games. I mean, I think there was something like there were entire— it'd be like 80 years that passed where no one won a pankration gold medal except for Spartan. That's just an insult of dominance.

The pankration was the ancient form of MMA, right?

Yeah, it's literally just, I mean, no holds barred MMA, punching, kicking. There were knockouts. Apparently, the ancient records say that submissions were more common than knockouts, but knockouts were pretty common. And the thing was there were no time limits or weight classes, so you went until one guy literally physically could not go whether it was due to he was just too fatigued to defend himself and he got pounded out or choked out, whatever. But there were no rounds and no weight classes.

It sounds kind of like this football match that I took my family to in Italy. Yeah, the Calcio, the Storico Calcio, we went to it. It's basically— I think it's like 25, 30 guys on either side. And, the only object of the game is to get the ball from one end of the field to the other and throw it over the fence. And, pretty much anything is allowed: punching, kicking, holding, dropping, wrestling, grappling, anything. And it was a spectacle, man.

Dude, there's not— there's a very small percentage of the population on Earth that will ever see that with their own eyes. That's awesome that you got to.

Yeah, and of course there's ambulances and people getting drug out on stretchers throughout the game. It took, it took a good 45 minutes for the actual game to start due to riots and fights and, you know, the false starts. But once it got going, holy cow, it was incredible. I was just going to ask you a little bit about the way that the Spartans trained, if you've been able to dig into and find out what like an average training day would look like for a Spartan warrior.

So it's really interesting because this, like, what we have to understand contextually is that the Spartans were enigmas and mysteries even in their own time. They spoke a different language than the other Greeks. They were from a different, like, wave of immigration. They were, they were from an older population on Greece that was there, the Dorian Greeks, as opposed to the later Messenian Greeks that, like, say, you know, most of the other ancient Greek city-states were descended from. So Spartans really, they were kind of ancient mysterious, you know, in 500 BC and they didn't let people come into their country unless they were invited such as, you know, emissaries from other countries, you know, certain messengers. They were, they're extremely xenophobic in general or worse, but it was like, you know, they were very, they were very tribal, you know, clan-like in their own way. But they, yeah, no, definitely, definitely no open borders. And, but having said that, we know, well, my approach, like generally most people when confronted with this question would either avoid it or just kind of make some shit up. That wasn't good enough for me, not even as like, you know, as integrity as an author, but just my curiosity. So, I started looking at like, okay, let's start with what events that they won because they would compete against other Greeks, right? And, if you're winning an event, it stands to reason, you know. So, we started there. Then, I went to some of the visitors and some of the people that would go, particularly when the Athenians would be trying to court the Spartans to join a war against the Persians or against whoever, you know what I mean? They'd send messengers and they would see sometimes the Spartans would even do a little psychological thing where they'd arrange a training session in front of visiting dignitaries just to be like, "Yeah, this is what our guys can do." You know what I mean? And so, they knew that they were like wrestling, grappling were huge. I'm sure you're familiar, but many listeners might not know what a haltier is, which is a stone bell/kettlebell. They came in many different shapes, but it's kind of a unique hand weight carved from stone. And, the Spartans were big on using these for traditional, say, dumbbell kettlebell liftings, but their main thing they used them for was, or a primary thing they used them for was jumping weights. They do long jumps and high jumps carrying these dumbbells in their hands. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, very cool. In short, plyometrics were a big part of Spartan training.

Yeah, weighted plyometrics though.

Weighted plyometrics. And so, part of this, and a lot of people today will think, "Oh, you shouldn't load your joints under weight. And, I mean, maybe I'm biased as a weighted runner, you know what I mean? But, it's like anything else, you apply a gradient of progression just like someone shouldn't deadlift 500 pounds if they've never deadlifted or squat 500 pounds if they've never been under a squat bar. Obviously, that would be bad for your joints too. So, if you're building up to doing this the right way, and then of course, there was a race in the Olympics, the ancient Olympics called the hoplomachus. And, this was the Basically, it shifted a little bit, but generally, it was like a 200 to 400-meter foot race in full armor carrying a shield. And, the Spartans were dominant at this event. There's ancient records that they're dominant year after year. And basically, you're running in a breastplate and greaves with a solid aspis shield or an ancient bronze-covered oak shield on one arm. And, I've never tried anything like this, but I cannot imagine how hard it would be to stabilize the asymmetry and weight from, you know what I mean, having one unburdened arm and one arm carrying like a 22-pound oak shield and the size of it, the awkwardness, and then the actual armor. But, the Spartans were savage at this. And apparently, there's some rumor that this event was actually started with an ulterior motive in the Olympic Games. And, that was to get the ancient Greek hoplites very, very good at running across a 200 to 400-meter range, which is coincidentally the effective range of the Persian bow, which was the main weapon of the Persian armies that were their main threat at the time. And so, basically, the idea was like some clever guy was like, "Hey, let's create an Olympic event, but let's make it really, really convenient for getting our guys to run across to neutralize Persia's biggest weapon in case it comes to a fight," which it did. And, there are like the Battle of Marathon, That was a big part of what happened. They basically, the two armies, the Greek and the Persian army stood and looked at each other across like a beach for like 2 days. They'd line up, they'd just kind of mad dog each other and then be out there for hours and then they'd go back to camp and no one was really willing to make the first move. And then, on the third day, there was a Greek general who just like his omens, either he woke up and ate his Wheaties or the omens were right, whatever it was, But, when the time was right, they were standing there, he just gave his men the order to raise shield and he just said, "At them." Just 2 words, "At them." And, the entire Greek army just rushed and they just— the same thing, it's just a dead sprint, 400 meters across through the arrow fire and they smashed into the Persians. You're going to take losses no matter what, but you're sprinting across that space. It's only time for the Persians to get off a couple volleys and then you got armored guys who are bigger and stronger than you on you with spears and you have a wicker shield. A dagger and, you know, your bow is now useless. And so, yeah, that was a pretty cool story. And of course, that's the origin of the marathon too.

You think that— I'm just curious what you think of that 300 Spartan workout that was going around for a while.

I don't even know if I've seen it, but I'm gonna guess that probably wasn't a hugely historically accurate representation of how they train.

Yeah, it's like deadlifts and— I forget the whole thing. I did it with my sons. I told my sons that we could watch the Spartan movie, which I think might be based on that battle you were just describing.

It was. I love that movie.

And, I took them in the garage. I said, "You guys do the Spartan workout with me. If you can finish in an hour under, we'll go into the basement and watch the movie." So, they did the whole workout and then we went into the basement and spent half of our time down there with their eyes covered or with a blanket pulled up over it because I kind of forgot how how intense the violence and some of the other portrayal of graphic imagery gets in that movie. But, yeah, I think the workout probably doesn't come close to what you just described. I want to come back to whether or not the Spartans actually did eat Wheaties because I am curious what you found out about their diet. But, I was just thinking as you were describing the bow, I think a lot of people hear that or they hear you and me talking about the bow, maybe they've shot a recurve or a compound with the cams on it, which obviously makes the draw pretty easy, but you have a section in the book. And again, I do want to come back to the Spartans, but you have a section in the book where you describe, I think it was the English longbowmen and what it actually took to pull back a bow or what actual arm strength was required for someone who was an archer.

It was insane. Okay. So, for starters, these guys were not what you would call freak athletes. And, in medieval England, these guys are 5'6" to 5'8". They're in that 135 to 165, not giant humans. But the thing is they start at a very, very early age by drawing bows and those bows get progressively larger and heavier. And the English, so for instance, the source of the English power, military power during this reign, they didn't have the powerful like the huge armies of knights and French cavalry like the French did. A lot of the mainland armies had big pike formations and stuff. England was, despite being a world power, they were just kind of a small backwater and their main military asset was their longbowmen. They shot bows that, you know, these average-sized dudes were shooting bows that were 6, 6.5 feet long made from yew wood, which is itself a pretty soft wood, very strong under compression though. Makes an excellent, excellent bow, especially if you, you know, use the sapwood on the— anyway, long story short, if you construct it right, you can take take advantage of the natural properties of the tree and create a massive bow. They called this the medieval machine gun because it was fired with such force and it could be, you know, a skilled guy could just fire arrow after arrow after arrow. And so, to support this military strength, they emblazoned for their upper peasant class, the yeomanry, to basically every Sunday you had to teach your sons how to practice at any given opportunity. They had fairs with archery contests with massive prizes, purses, you know, heavily incentivized being good at the bow. And so, these guys got really good at the bow and to the point that it actually changed their physiology. And now, there's archaeologists when they're investigating medieval battle sites, they can pull skeletons out of the ground and look at a skeleton without any equipment at all and say, "Hey, that guy right there almost certainly was an English longbowman." The reason for this is because the bones in their arm, their shoulder formations, and the muscle attachments are actually so much more robust and thick not only than the average person but then they're on one side versus the other. So, it's like you pull it and the guy's right humerus bone is twice as thick, his shoulder is more robust, and you can tell all the muscle attachments were giant on that side.

Yeah, almost like if you were to dig up 100 years from now NBA basketball player, you'd look at the tibial tuberosity and know that they were a jumper.

Yeah, or even an arm wrestler like that guy Devon, whatever. One of his arms is huge, you know what I mean? But, it's amazing. Like you said, bone density, It's just so— it's super, super cool.

It was like 150 pounds, I mean, without the cams.

Oh, some of them got up to 200. That's the thing too. That's the thing. And they have guys now that can pull like accurate reproductions of these bows. But the thing is, these guys are like 250 pounds. Some of them are actual strongmen that they have there.

So it's just— I mean, and for anybody listening in, I mean, if you walk up to the cable machine, if you have the gym next time, just put the stack on at least 150 and try a single arm row and tell me how that goes.

Yeah, no, 100%, bro. It's like that. I recently did some online content. I've also, by the way, new news dropped this morning. I started my second book actually that will focus on warrior training specifically.

So, the book that you're writing now, it's basically more training program-based?

No. So, this will be like, this will be research-based academic but readable. So, it's basically I'm going to pick out maybe 20. I've got maybe 12 of them so far. I'd like 20 good warrior cultures, you know, the Spartans and gladiators will be in— oh, gladiators, I got some good stuff on them. Spartans and gladiators, we'll have Plains Indians, we'll have, you know what I mean, your Aztecs and your Incas, your samurai, and it's going to be a deeper dive into each culture. Whereas the first book, you know, it was cool, but it was meant to like introduce people to the idea of like, hey, like, you know, this is what I geek out on, this exists, like here's a little sampling of a million different things from ancient boxers to Spartans and Gladiators, like, you know, little sample platters so to speak. Now, I'd like to kind of really dive in and flesh out, you know, starting with the warrior training specifically. And, yeah, so it'll be, you know, it won't be sets and reps or anything like that. It's literally just be academically like, "Alright, this is how they trained. This is what they ate. This is, you know what I mean, the way they fought in battle and why they trained like this, you know, in this specific way." Yeah.

But, you do have a training program. I think you write about the book. It's like Rocky meets Muhammad Ali meets Mike Tyson type of training plan.

Yeah. So, actually, I believe last my people checked, I'm either— I'm in the top 3 functional fitness training program distributors on the planet. And so, I write and program training. It's training programs, books, and seminars are kind of like my bread and butter beyond the athlete stuff.

If somebody was listening and they wanted to try a training program on for size, what would be a good one to try?

So, over at wildhuntconditioning.com, I actually— one of my goals is to be also the biggest free program distributor in the in the fitness game. So, most of the stuff over there has at least you can try it for free or there's free programs. The most recent one just for example I put out is a completely free program based on berserker training, Viking berserkers. These guys were the guys that ate psilocybin, went into—

Ben Greenfield: I was going to say, does your book come with henbane and psilocybin extract?

You and me can discuss the legality of that and we find a workaround. And that might be. But, yeah. So, it's just basically— and again, these were like with the Berserkers themselves, it's not— they didn't leave written records. There's no specific workout things. However, we can also reproduce Viking strongman movements that were used broad spectrum. We can also extrapolate certain things based off performance factors like you ever hear a guy, the— there was a guy about 1,000 years ago who walked 3 steps carrying a 1,400-pound, 30-foot ship's mast on his back. And, it was a feat that all the modern strongmen tried to replicate. Eddie Hall tried it, failed. All these guys, Nick Best, all these guys. Hafthor Bjornsson was the only one who could manage it. And, we're talking 1,000 years before performance-enhancing drugs of the modern kind even existed. And so, it's like you can look at these and be like, "Okay. So, obviously, this guy's walking with something heavy on his back if he's going to train." And then, you hear training with ship mass, training with bags of rocks, all the— you just get little scraps of things here and there. And so, I pieced that together into a program that people can do for free at home. It's like literally you can do it with bags of rocks, buckets of rocks, it's branches, it's sticks, it's stones. You don't need a— the idea being that I could put out a primal cool training program that no one would ever have to pay a dollar for in terms of buying a or a gym membership or any special equipment or anything like that. And, that was honestly more exploratory because most of my stuff is like, "Alright, here's how to get strong if you have dumbbells, kettlebells, and/or barbells and you want to replicate the way that or integrate the way that—" One of my favorite books back in the day when I used to race Spartan was Zac Ebanesh's Underground Encyclopedia of Strength Training.

And, it was all just rocks, logs, Yeah, Zach's got a great— it's kind of like a big picture book but great training manual, kind of sounds like the type of training systems you're putting together. Yeah.

Yeah, pretty much. And then, so it's like— and then, I'll have like— so, my own— some of the training programs are based off my own stuff. So, it's like if I go do something, you know, like last year I ran across the state of— I ran the Oregon section of the PCT. It's 500 miles, about 9.5 days. And then, it's like after that, people were asking, you know, how do you train for it? What do you do? So, I just put out the training program and nothing crazy, not hundreds of dollars or thousands. Here's $40 or $50 or whatever. And, it's just exactly how I trained. It's the Apache breathing method I used, you know what I mean, which is filling your mouth with water and basically going for high-intensity hill runs without spilling a drop of that water.

Meaning forced nasal breathing.

Forced nasal breathing. Also, mental control because everything in your body is going to want to swallow that water. Don't swallow that water. You got to spit it. The Apache would have to spit it out for their instructor at the end. At the end of a training session, the young boys would have to spit it on the dirt and just prove that they hadn't swallowed that water the whole time either. And then, the longer you run and you get this weird thing where you're feeling thirsty yet your mouth is full of water and all you want to do is swallow that water and drink it but you can't. It's good mental control. It's good forced nasal breathing.

I used to have my sons follow me around on the obstacle course with a mouth full of water And, they have to jump in the ice tub while I was doing push-ups. This is back when they were 6 years old and they just chased Dad. And, they didn't have to do any exercise, they just had to chase me with a mouthful of water. No, that's awesome, bro.

And, I mean, yeah, with kids, you make it fun too and there's nothing that they won't just run straight towards. But yeah, so it's like I do stuff like that. I would do— the Incas were known for running weighted. The Incas and the Aztecs were both known for running weighted but not Like, well, some of it was for war, which is kind of cool. But honestly, a lot of it came from the fact that their rulers were like hyper-rich emperors. And like, so like if you're, say you're an Aztec, you're an Aztec emperor and you're chilling in what, you know, Tenochtitlan, what is now Mexico City, which is, you know, a highland mountain flat capital, right? But you're like, man, like I really, like me and my girl the other, we were in SoCal, we stopped at Nobu and got some sushi. And it's just like, We were willing to, shit, we probably would have driven down there and just eat there without any business being down there. But, if you're some Aztec emperor and you just decide that you want Nobu one day, all you have to do is send a guy to run 320 miles to the coast, get some fresh-caught sashimi and have it back. I have a relay of runners bring it back 320 miles in about 18 hours.

One DoorDash. Yeah.

So, same thing, they would do that with snow and ice. These guys would like emperors would want a snow cone and literally just send a guy to run to the mountains in relays to bring blocks of ice to be chiseled out. And then, of course, you're seeing they found cacao in the Southwest, bro. Think about that. Anastasia, cacao. Cacao comes from how many hundreds of miles away in the jungles of— you know what I mean? Yeah.

Somebody had to get it. You're right. Yeah. And, they weren't using horses?

No, no. Horses weren't even on the New World yet, bro. The horses didn't come to the Spaniards. That's why the Native American messenger runners were probably like in terms of ultra, ultra, your hundreds and hundreds of miles of runners, they were probably— they're the best thing that we know of in terms of history within the last several thousand years. Wow, incredible. Because they didn't have wheels or horses.

Yeah, yeah. I got to come back full circle to the Spartans because I promise. But, what did they eat?

You're going to love this. So, the Spartans ate pretty— so, like, and throughout the other Greek city-states, you had a lot of lamb, a lot of the same cheeses and olives and type stuff that we see today, a lot of figs. The Spartans themselves had a very, very, very strong preference for game meat over cultivated meat to the point that they would eat— they eat deer and wild boar and stuff, but they also ate a lot of wild hare. And birds and small to medium-sized game. And they also, you may have heard of this, were famous, had a very negatively mixed reputation but were famous for their Spartan black soup. And this was soup that was made from pig's blood, vinegar, and usually just some chunks of pork thrown in there also and essentially boiled and they ate it completely unflavored beyond adding some salt to it. And, but the Spartans themselves swear by this as a staple food, kind of like a strong peasant's food. And, they were also said to have blood sausage and stuff like that. But, I guess they were big on game. And then, the blood, so the two things that stood out though were the blood soup and then, of course, Greek mountain tea, which is still probably drinking myself now.

Almost everything you've just listed is very rich in coenzyme Q10 and you find that a lot in the game. So, you're basically just fueling up the mitochondria for endurance.

Yeah, that actually one of the sport, of course, Spartans above all, they were the best runner. Like, you know, there's the Spartathlon is one of the most famous ultras in the world that, you know, goes throughout part of the world. And, like, the Spartans themselves were just, like I said, they were no— and, oh, the other thing, they were without exception, without exception, they trained barefoot, ran barefoot, lifted barefoot, fought in battles barefoot, completely barefoot too, not like, you know, little leather slips, like, you know, which are fine. I wear like little simple leather, you know, kind of soleless type shoes, moccasins and stuff myself. But the Spartans are just pure barefoot. They made their children go barefoot, they trained barefoot, and they swore once your feet were adapted, you could run faster. And so—

Now, why would you pick them versus a couple of these other populations like the Indians or the ancient Chinese warriors who also seemed pretty impressive? Oh, no, they were all very impressive.

And let me be clear that the biggest thing in any scrap between any deadliest warrior matchup is always going to be the individual. You know what I mean? Like, you know, the baddest dude and, you know, but let's see, the way I think about it is like, let's say that two twin brothers at birth, you know, they take their first steps and each one trips into a separate time machine. One goes to ancient Sparta and one goes to ancient China. You know what I mean? If those two guys meet in some sort of battle, you know, the Spartan's going to win if you ask me. However, there's different, you know, there's different types of battle. You know, it's like if you're an aquatic warrior, you don't want to, you know, you don't want to get, you know, in a fight and on a sand dune against, you know, an Arabian horseman in North Africa or anything like that. But, taking just basically, for me, it comes under the level of dedication. The Chinese, the Indians, they've created some great warriors, some great military, some great military minds. And, let's be honest, heavily influenced the way we work out to this day. Having said that, neither one of them were a society completely and utterly designed to create the perfect warrior, which is all the Spartans were. They were the only one. Like I said, you could isolate some like the, you know, Takeda Shingen and his men in feudal Japan. They had a pretty badass clan that was pretty dedicated to being, you know, to war. But, like the Spartans, we're talking hundreds and hundreds of years and they just— it was just how do we make the perfect guy? And then, of course, how do we make that guy think like his entire life is just dedicated to the perfect death in defense of his nation?

That was their entire culture's identity. The interesting thing is that if you look at our current presidential candidacy, you would not expect a president to fall into any of the categories that you and I are right now talking about, but you have not one but two presidents in the book, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. Why did you put them in the book?

So, the truth is there was no ulterior motive. They were both just freak athletes just by coincidence. I mean, not by coincidence, obviously, if you read— they're hard men from hard times who got hard men to follow. Them, so obviously, they were capable of doing hard shit. But, the truth that George Washington was, I mean, you almost can't even credit for him, he was just born a freak athlete. Everyone who knew him, they just talked about everything he tried, he got good at quick. He had immense physical strength, his endurance, his ability as a horseman was second to no one in the colony, you know what I mean? Rode like a native. And, Abraham Lincoln was just a really good wrestler with crazy physical strength. Who did all sorts of actual wrestling matches, competitive wrestling matches, frontier wrestling matches, which would have been MMA, like kicks and punches would have been allowed in frontier wrestling. And, it went 301 propaganda aside, whether he actually went the Hickson-Gracie style 300 wins without anything going wrong, he won against every notable person that he faced even before he was president. People were willing to lie for him or or say, you know, exaggerating.

301. Geez. Yeah. And, the style of wrestling was a little different then. I read, I'm looking at this page, you describe it as a catch wrestling. What is it?

Yeah. So, that would be basically wrestling with submissions but also like I said in the frontier wrestling, a lot of times the matches would have strikes. Like, you would agree to the rule set but we shake hands with the guy and then you'd go do it and there could be very small variations. But, yeah, you could get choked out, you could get a heel hook or a toe hold that tore your knee or ankle apart. You know what I mean? Get knocked out. And so, it's like that can happen. Very, very, very, very few, generally no biting or eye gouging which were in rough and tumble fighting and a little earlier on in the colonies rough and tumble stuff they did allow like in colonial areas they did allow biting and eye gouging. In fact, there were a number of dead recovered from English governors in the New World sending them home to England basically just asking for help like they were coming back with like eyes gouged out and fingers missing and shit like that from all these, yeah, these rough and tumble matches in the colonies, Virginia and shit.

How strong do you think George Washington was?

Probably pretty, I mean, he was, he's known to be 6'2 or 6'3, like he was a tall dude, a big dude. But there was, you know, no, he didn't, he didn't leave any deadlift numbers behind or anything, but there was this like actual written account of these guys that they basically were screwing around one day in a field just trying to see who could throw this iron bar the furthest, which is literally like every— we've been doing this stuff since the first caveman picked up the first rock and his first friend saw him do it and wanted to try it too. So, these guys were just throwing an iron bar in a field and then they'd go mark it, see like, "Oh, this guy threw it how far?" when they mark it. I guess he just rode up on his horse one day and they didn't even really know who he was at the time. He just asked if he could try it. And, he just literally threw it double the distance of the farthest prior throw. And, they were like they couldn't believe, just punched into the earth. And so, he was significantly stronger than strongmen in an area where survival in time where survival required you to be pretty strong. Yeah.

But obviously, exercise science, supplementation, even performance-enhancing drugs, Adderall, et cetera, have come a long way since then. So, in a cage fight, who do you think would win, George Washington or Joe Biden?

George Washington. George Washington. George Washington. George Washington. All right. Pretty much anyone. But no, I totally agree. Don't get me wrong. I'm not like— it's it could be easy to overly romanticize the past and be like this and start believing things that are true or less than likely. I think I'm a big believer, I'm a big supporter in everything that science has done to advance athletic performance and nutrition and longevity and all this stuff in the last 100 years, let alone the last 2,000 years. Having said that, the one thing I think that we can't dismiss is the fact that our culture, well, actually, I mean, we've been alluding to this, but our culture, we are not a culture where our priority is health and physical fitness or martial prowess, no matter how much we like to believe it or think about it. We're a culture that prioritizes Kardashians and political elections and, you know, whatever else is going on. And, and that counts for a lot. When you think about the fact that there are cultures that even at ancient Greek levels of technology spent 500 years putting every resource of their entire culture behind creating perfect athletes and warriors.

Yeah. And, you're forced into it a lot of the time. I mean, you were forced into weather and inclement conditions, hard labor, outdoor labor. There weren't indoor cushy jobs. I mean, look at me, I'm walking on a treadmill right now while I'm talking to you because I literally have to fabricate a primal ancestral lifestyle as a podcaster.

So, I'm at least moving. No, you nailed it. That's what I always say. I'm like, it's the reason we have to go seek out these cold tubs and hot saunas and long runs and hard lifts and mobile lifestyles. Every time I'm on my laptop, I try to sit on the ground or do something else because it's just so easy to just get stuck in that chair.

Yeah, yeah. Now, how about this guy who you describe as the best all-around athlete in history, this Donald Denny guy. What made you choose him as the best all-around athlete in history? He might be.

So, the thing is that I can name a dozen people that could beat Denny in any one or two things. I just don't think that there is anyone who ever got— I mean, the guy literally, he ran legitimately fast times in 100-meter stuff, 200-meter stuff. He could throw like stones and cabers and shot puts. He could lift maximally like crazy, crazy maximally heavy things. He had some insanely like close to undefeated record and not just in wrestling, like in different wrestling disciplines and styles. I mean, I also think that he was a Highland Games champion and I think the Highland Games—

He was a Scottish, right?

Yeah, yeah. And, the Highland Games, especially like the earlier versions of them, I think did an excellent job of really, really demanding someone be an excellent well-rounded athlete. I mean, you had foot races, you had hurdles, you had heavy lifts, you had dynamic throws, plyometric type stuff, you had actual wrestling, you had strongman events. It's just a really good medium to prove like, "Hey, shit, I can do everything." Talk about the ultimate hybrid athlete, probably that guy. Was there tribal warriors that could run longer, Maasai warriors that can jump higher, sprint fast? Of of course. But, we're talking a guy, again, in the time before performance-enhancing drugs, at least the modern type, who's just eating. He's literally waking up, he's eating haggis. He's picking a few eggs out. He's drinking green milk.

I tried to make haggis once. How'd that go? I used the stomach of a sheep that I'd shot and ground up a bunch of kidney and heart and liver and kind of did my own twist on it. And honestly, when that stomach tripe fat melted in the oven bake over all the organ meats with some of the herbs I threw in there, it was actually super tasty.

That sounds pretty good to me. I like stuff like that in general though. I'm pretty meat and potatoes, meat and bones with my food.

Yeah, yeah. This definitely fell into that category. There was one guy that kind of surprised me though. I didn't expect to see a poet in the book, this Walt Whitman guy. I mean, he obviously didn't have to work out, but he did. Tell me about this guy.

Dude, Walt Whitman was crying. So, I didn't know too much about him as a poet or anything other than that when I came across some of his quotes talking about the ancient Greeks and how their performance in the gymnasium and the palestra would basically elicit the best version of a man. Physical training, competition, martial humbleness, these were key things that him in the late 1800s was already seeing were lacking in American society. So, he had a very, very— like, he's one too, we have his actual workout routine. Like, he wrote down, he left an actual workout routine of like squats.

Yeah, you got it in here. Yeah. You want me to read it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's got— it says, "In the evening, he wrestled a 12-foot oak tree for exercise every night well into his 60s. Even after suffering from a stroke, he woke nearly every day to do calisthenics for an hour, swim in a cold river." than eat a plate of unflavored lean meat with a chunk of bread and a cup of tea. And this daily calisthenics routine, it says he always did it outdoors. I'm assuming no matter what the weather was. He had a dynamic overhead stretch, planking, lunging, single-leg deadlift, fence hops, springing over a fence then back again, shadowboxing, and jump squats. And that's all in addition to his cold water swimming in the evening, rest, whatever that means, wrestling a tree.

I can only imagine. So, yeah, apparently, he would literally try to do judo throw, I mean, trips and throws on a tree and he would super hype when apparently he would be fully into it, high intensity. But, yeah, just literally trying to pull a tree out. I mean, isometrics, every sort of isometric movement you can think of, I suppose. But, look at that daily routine, that morning routine, that exercise routine, especially for a guy who's in his 40s, 50s, 60s, and tell me that's not excellent. You know what I mean? Tell me that your fitness influencer is going to do better than that today in programming something. Yeah. Yeah.

See, I like that mentality too because again, me, I don't have to work out. I wake up and I write stuff and I podcast, but man, you feel so much better when you go outside and you jump in cold water and swing some kettlebells around and chase through the forest for a little while and lift some heavy stuff. I mean, And honestly, a lot of this stuff, I actually had this documentary film crew at my house over the weekend. They're like, "We want to film you working out." So, they set up all the lights and stuff in the gym because they wanted some clean predictable single space whatever, dumbbell chest presses and goblet squats, which are great. But I told them, "Look, let's go outside and show people how to really work out." So, they wound up chasing me through the trees with their little camera stabilizer doing rope climbs and rock carries and balance beams. But yet, I think especially with this style of training that you talk about in the book and simulating a lot of these ancient athletes, I think it's unpredictability, inclement weather, undulating terrain. I think a lot of that is just as important as stepping into a health club and lifting heavy stuff.

Ben Greenfield: Oh, I think it's more important because— so, both the outdoors and the health club, they can give you hypertrophy, they can give you your energy systems training, your anaerobic, your aerobic, your creatine phosphate. You can do all of that outside. The only thing I would say is if you're really into uniform hypertrophy, you want to build a certain physique, all that, get some uniform stuff, get a couple pairs of dumbbells and light, medium, and heavyweight. And then, everything else you can do with trees, with rocks, with a kettlebell or two. I don't even have a gym membership. I can deadlift 550. I've run 500-mile ultramarathon and I don't have a gym membership. So, what does that tell you? You know what I mean? And right now, I do a lot of calisthenics every day. I was something, you know, I'm a former drug inmate and one of the things that really helped me kind of build was just daily routine. So, it's just your meditation, your Bible, or, you know, whatever your thing is in the morning first thing, then calisthenics, then you start your day. Like, don't even think, don't even do anything. Like, for me, that was just a very, very simple thing I could do. I still do that. But, right now, my workout, which I have like a couple kettlebells from my buddy over at Great Lakes Gear. By the way, he's, yeah, and those kettlebells are insane. He might be making tungsten kettlebells, by the way. Oh, that's pretty cool. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I've never even heard of that, but, and I do my, I basically, I reconstructed an old, their Soviet Olympic team and the Soviet Special Forces program, the kettlebell movement that they use. And, it's very, you know, similar but different to what you'd see like So, overhead presses instead of just being like, here, here's a basic overhead press like the Soviets did, like to do a clean and double press. So, it's like clean, press, press, one rep. Clean. Now, they do these stuff or alternating like press, press on one side, press, press on the other side, one rep. Instead of swings, they like to do like deficit, deficit high pulls, like stand on 2 boxes, get that weight all the way down, and then come all like a dynamic high pull all the way up high here, like that, you know, just like little things.

They don't really teach that stuff in the— because I did the RKC certification, that's pretty standard, swings, goblet squats. Where do you learn that stuff?

So, I'm unique on this. So, it's like Pavel, like, and all that stuff, he has a lot of good stuff, but this is different. I sat down with actual defectors and most of them old man now starting with one guy who was a fucking— it's like a 5-foot-4 sambo guy that was on one of my jiu-jitsu teams that was just giving all of us problems and he was like 65. We're just like, "Dude, what?" What is going on with you? And, it turns out he used to be a Spetsnaz guy, I'm sorry, paratrooper. And so, I started talking to him. I actually got my hands on a variety of different little clips of actual Soviet archival footage. Some of it, I got a couple of the exercises from clips I found on YouTube, although it's pretty sparing here and there. I dug up some of it from old training forums from Westside Barbell from 2011 or like crazy shit. Other stuff from a buddy, a couple buddies I have at Westside. Didn't get too much of it from Pavel because he speaks more in like principles and stuff like that as opposed to specificities. And, I don't know if he, at least I'm not sure.

Pavel Tsatsouline, former podcast guest for those of you wondering who we're talking about.

Oh, yeah. He's the guy that got me into kettlebells. I mean, Pavel's awesome. Me too. But yeah, just in terms of the historic geeking out, I just went and I was— So, yeah, I found all sorts of archival footage, interviewed 3 different defectors, and I'm actually— I went back and had a conversation with one of the guys and he told me some stuff that has me thinking I'm gonna try to build a sequel maybe towards the end of the year at some point. But, it was actually— I just released it for 24 hours only, the Soviet program earlier this year, and it actually sold more kettlebell programs than any except for—

I was gonna say, I wanna try it. I'm gonna have to connect with the afterwards and try this out.

Yeah, I'll send it over, bro. I'll send it over. It's one of my— it was one of my limited edition drops. It was only available for 24 hours and it outsold all but like the 3 biggest kettlebell programs of all time. So, I was like, well, there's interest there. It's fun. You know, they did a lot of lateral swings and stuff too, you know, staggered stance, split stance. So, just small variations on the shit that all, you know, if you've been using kettlebells for, you know, 2 years, you've seen swings, you've seen presses, you've seen Turkish get-ups. And so, this is just kind of a little flavor on that. Yeah.

I'm curious, you mentioned you read the Bible in prison and I was thinking about this before the interview because I was just reading a little bit in 1 and 2 Chronicles and I was thinking about some of these ancient Israelites because they were kind of a force. David had his mighty men. In battle, a few of them would defeat a few hundred Philistines. Did you ever dig into any of that like the ancient Israel training techniques or warrior tactics?

I haven't. Their fighting tactics but not the training techniques so much. They were excellent guerrilla fighters. So, the thing is the Roman Empire, they did in top— in terms of conquest and expansion, they did it better than everyone except maybe the Mongols. The Romans hated Judea. They hated it. There were no major armies. There were none of the traditional obstacles, yet they just could not— it was the one place they went where people just would bend the knee to them. It was like you could conquer a town or a city and then you would just be dealing with 70 years of guerrilla warfare after from that one group. And then, it was just over and over. So, they were expert guerrilla fighters, hit and run, very, very good at materializing to attack and then dispersing in different directions, very good at using improvised weapons. Obviously, we're all aware of David and Goliath, just what a sling can do. Anyone who's even played around with the sling and a little piece of leather or rock knows that That's insane.

Obviously, that was years of training from defending sheep, but yeah.

Oh, no, exactly. And so, that's the thing is these guys were lifestyle. Their physical traits came from their lifestyle, which is the further you go or the more hardscrabble you go, you see this more and more. But, it's like we exercise, like organized exercise generally is done as war training, as a community activity like a Celtic festival like the Highland Games or it's born from just your lifestyle of like if you're a Hebrew farmer, you're going to get really, really strong at lifting and sifting earth all day long. And, if you're a Hebrew shepherd, you are going to have crazy endurance from running around the mountains literally keeping up with sheep and then fighting off wolves and then scrambling here and there. You're going to be good with a sling. You're going to be good with a bow and a spear.

And, in rugged hot territory too. I did the Israman one year on the Red Sea. They say it's the hardest half Ironman in the world. And, my feet were all bleeding and blistered after the race because the surface of the ground was so hot. We had to ride our bikes up between the Egypt and Israel border. And, it was just stupid hot. And then, the terrain is just rocky and exposed and open and thistly and Yeah, it's a hard area.

Yeah, yeah. Sonora was actually kind of like that too. And so, it's like they say, there's a quote that I like, "The gods of the valley are not the gods of the hill." And, that means that it's actually a quote from the American Revolution from a guy named Ethan Allen. But basically, what I take that to mean and what he said to the British as a threat more than anything, it's like, hey, You guys live down here in the New York Valley, like you do your thing, you know, in a certain way. Me and my boys up in the Vermont, like we live, we were raised and we live a different lifestyle and it makes a different type of man. Like if you come up here, you're gonna find out, you know what I mean? And so I always take that to mean like, you know, hard places, hard lives, they make hard men.

And, uh, Israel for sure, man. Well, man, if you want to get inspired to be hard, this book, A History of Physical Fitness I'll link to it. If you guys go to bengreenfieldlife.com/fitnesshistory, you may have heard me mention some other interviews like the one with Pavel and some other resources. I'll put them all in there along with links to James's website, his Instagram, great follow, Wild Hunt Conditioning on Instagram. James, this is so cool and I may have to have you back on for part 2 when you finish this next book.

Oh, I will. I will be happy to come chat on that. I'll have a bunch more research by then too.

Yeah. Alright, cool, man. Well, folks, again, go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/FitnessHistory. The book is "A History of Physical Fitness" by James Pieratt. Until next time, I'm Ben and James signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com. Have an incredible week.

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