The Fastest Ways To Unleash Unstoppable Strength For Your Body and Mind

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And my guest today is an expert at building strength, increasing vitality, and at achieving what he calls becoming the strongest version of yourself. His name is Elliot Holtz, and he's really one of the world's experts when it comes to improving your strength, but doing so in a way that really expands your life and your health. And he goes way above and beyond just putting some extra muscle on your body or something like that. So, Elliot, thanks for coming on the call today.

Thank you for having me, Ben.

Well, you've got a pretty rich history in the field of strength and conditioning, and you also kind of spill over into a lot of life philosophy. And even I've heard you talk about fertility and things of that nature on Sean Crockson Sexy Back Summit. What I'm curious about is how you got started in all this and how you've kind of grown in this field.

Well, if I could say that strength and health is the soil from which I've grown my entire life, I would. Essentially, since the time I was a child, I've been in environments and have had mentors, teachers, my parents, all heavily invested in health and strength. I mean, to this day, my father says, you can take everything away from me, but give me my health and strength and I'll be okay. And it's just been a philosophy that has just pervaded every area of my life. My parents are both from Belize. They're from a third world country. It's in Central America. It's considered a Caribbean country because it's English speaking. But anyway, they grew up in what we would call a natural or organic environment. You know, the country wasn't really industrialized when my parents grew up there and my dad lived on a farm and his dad was a pig farmer. And my father literally spent his days just walking through jungles and eating fruits and roots and walking barefoot. It's funny because we have all these different diet and exercise fads that come and go in industrialized nations. But my father literally grew up barefoot running. He didn't need Vibrams or Vibrams. And he ate what we now call Paleo just because that's the way people ate, right.

It didn't have a name, right.

When I introduced a lot of these ideas to him, he kind of laughed at me. He's like, well, why do we have to eat organic food? He's like, isn't that what food actually is? And he was being facetious because he realized just how damaged our soil is, our food sources, how polluted it is. But he kind of scoffs at the idea that we have to go out of our way to, to do what he just did naturally, growing up in Belize. So he and my mother moved to Brooklyn, New York, of all places, when they first came here and were thrown right into the concrete jungle. And it took them a while, both of them, to adjust physiologically, psychologically, emotionally. It was quite the culture shock, but also shock to their bodies and. And over time, they grew roots and they found their place in this country and moved out to Long island where they had me and my three other siblings. We grew up on Long island along with my mom's brother. My mom's brother, growing up in the same country as my mother and my father was tremendously healthy and strong and vibrant and vital. He was still a young guy, so he, he participated in lots of sports, including gymnastics, martial arts. He ended up becoming a bodybuilder. And you could just imagine being four years old and living with a guy who can do standing backflips and chop bricks in half with his hands. And all the tremendous things that he did that most people think that only a superhero could do, he was doing in front of me. And I basically grew up believing, well, that's just what people do. They do backflips and chop bricks and are tremendously strong and vibrant and vital. Of course, DNA had a lot to do with it, genetics, but the environment also embedded itself into my consciousness and gave me a courageousness with regard to approaching health and fitness. Almost an audacity associated with what's capable, what's available to us with regard to health. And he began mentoring me at a very young age, me and my brothers. He would show us how to do push ups and sit ups and chin ups and cl, climb rope and do splits and all types of different martial arts activities at a very young age.

How old were you when you were learning how to do those type of things?

Oh, I have one memory of being in kindergarten and my first day at phys ed. In kindergarten, the teacher was teaching us push ups and we went in and I was the only kid in the class that had done this before. The rest of them Were like, this was brand new. It was like, oh, we're going to do something called push ups. And their bodies were so weak, unable to lift their bellies off the ground. It was just to them, this was one of the hardest things they've ever done. It was a mess. And I remember just banging out 10, 15 push ups in kindergarten and to me it was. And I'm doing them with good form, mind you. My hips are height on my head, my core's engaged and thinking like, wow, there's something different here.

Yeah, it's crazy because it's almost like we protect our kids in a way these days. We don't want to, you know, fracture their growth plates or stunt their growth or something like that. And you know, you talk about you just kind of accepting the fact, you know, with backflips and breaking bricks with his hand that that was like what the human body does. And it's almost like we're, you know, we're breeding a weaker generation in a way is what it sometimes seems like.

Oh absolutely. And mind you, this is like I'm 34, so this is like 30 years ago. It's gotten so much worse now where my kids are in phys ed and I don't know why they even call it phys ed because there's nothing physical about the lazy crap that they do.

Yeah, yeah, interesting. So you were in kindergarten and you were learning all this stuff and where'd it go from there?

Well, again, my uncle had a huge impact on my adolescence because he started bodybuilding and powerlifting and he taught me, my brothers how to do the same. So we played football, I played football and of course being athletic and having great DNA genetics, I excelled at the sport. But a lot of it had to do with the fact that I again was like the only 14 year old who was doing squats and deadlifts and bodybuilding and powerlifting when all the other kids were going home and playing video games. And I wish I could attribute it to some special inclination towards hard work in my mind, but it really was the fact that I had tremendous, a great environment and tremendous mentors like my uncle to teach me these things when I could have been playing video games. So I earned an athletic scholarship to college. I excelled in college football, won the double A, I played and studied exercise physiology in graduate school because I knew from a very young age that this is what I was going to do. I was going to grow stronger and help other people grow stronger. It just was the way of life for me, nothing else Made any sense. So I turned it into a career and I opened my own gym, which I have now. And I also got involved in the sport of strongman. Now this is kind of where the story takes a big turn.

Strongman, like is that like the world's strongest man competition that you see on TV or.

Ah, good point. Yeah, it's kind of an obscure sport, something that most people have never even heard of. It's literally the pinnacle of functional strength and ability. You've got to be agile, you've got to be strong, you've got to have good endurance. You really have to be quite an athlete to be able to flip 600 pound tires for as many times as you can in one minute. So not only are strong, but you got to be agile. You also have to have the endurance to be able to continue doing these exercises for extended periods of time. So lifting 400 pound stones, flipping 700 pound tires, carrying things like refrigerators on your back are things you'll see. Or pulling trucks. You'll see this on ESPN if you ever watch it on Christmas Eve or something. They've got these behemoths moving around all these odd objects. And I took a liking to the sport and excelled at it, did really well. It was a lot of fun and allowed me to express all of my natur gifts. And I took it too far. I was at the point where I was poised to be the strongest in America. In my weight class. I had been winning, I had been winning, I had been winning. And it was like I became pro and it was like, man, I can really become the best at this. And that's very enticing. When you get that taste in your mouth for becoming the best. There is a tendency to do whatever it takes. And that's where I was. You know, my life was, was just beginning. Family and business and stuff. It wasn't as good as it could be because I was investing so much time and effort into the sport. And I decided to sacrifice my health by using steroids, essentially performance enhancement drugs, to take it just one step further. I didn't need it to win.

And that's all legal in strongman, right?

Oh, it's a part of the sport. It's not like there's a certifying body that checks you. It's not like the Olympics. It's an amateur sport.

It's so much different than, you know, I race as an amateur Ironman triathlete and we can't even take aromatase inhibitors, you know, much less, you know, andro or Any testosterone precursors or creams or injections or lotions, we have to have a therapeutic use exemption and be diagnosed with clinically diagnosed, like andropause or hypogonadism to even. Even touch that stuff.

Yeah, a lot of guys will do that. They'll get prescriptions and stuff. So it's quote, unquote, legal, but again, it depends on the sport and how they want to go about it.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So you got into strongman and you did well.

Yeah, did well. And like I said, poised to take it all and. Right. I guess I'd say about three or four weeks before the defining event of my career, I popped my bicep. I torched clean off the bone. And it wasn't even during training. It was while helping my dad pull up some old trees in his garden. It was after training, but I knew that the pulling up of roots wasn't. It was kind of like a straw that broke the camel's back. I had been living an unbalanced lifestyle. I had been training in an imbalanced way, meaning that I was just pushing, pushing, pushing harder and harder, more and more for longer and longer, to the point where my body just snapped. You know, it wasn't just the physical event of tearing my bicep. It wasn't just that devastating injury. I literally recognized that moment as a. As a burning of the phoenix, if you will. You know, that was a time to destroy that character. Because the minute that happened, I knew that I had to change my ways. I had to become a different version of Elliot Hulse in order to really maximize the potential that is laden in all of us. But that, I knew was in me, that was being squandered by what to the world would seem something that's very commendable. You want to be a winner. We live in a world and in a society where winning is everything, and I was a winner. So at that moment, I had to detach from that winning character and begin a new journey. And this is what I teach people, because even prior to that point, I was a strength coach, and I was teaching people how to become stronger. But the attitudes of a coach always are reflected in his students. And I wasn't the best coach I could be. Even though people were getting bigger, stronger, and performing better, What I now have come to learn because of that experience is that strength goes beyond just the neuromuscular. And when I say that, I mean it's not about how well you physically perform. So even if it's triathlons, Even if it's swimming, biking, running, or if it's powerlifting, bodybuilding, whatever the case may be, there is a physical manifestation of what we do. But there are deeper layers of strength that make up who we are. And I invite people to consider and focus on developing who they are. I've created a system to help people navigate this journey of becoming what I call the strongest version of themselves. And it consists of three other layers just beyond the first, which is neuromuscular or athletic, if you will. The second is physiological strength. You know, we like to pay attention to things like diet and lifestyle, but usually in a very focused manner, especially for athletes. It's all about what can I do to increase my performance in that sport. But what I invite people to do is to literally step back and look at how it's affecting your health. Are your hormones balanced because you are living a balanced lifestyle, or are you over training? I know several endurance athletes, and they tend to be some of the most catabolically stimulated people on earth. The amount of stimulation because of the volume of work that they're doing is so imbalanced that many of them have recurring injuries, muscular imbalances, they're always getting sick. Some of them, I look at that are they perform well, but I look in their eyes and I can see the dullness and the lack of vitality that's there. It's because there's this lack of concern for the physio, for the organ health, if you will. So I invite people to look at that, and I have constructs to support them in that way. A step beyond that or below that, if you will, is what I call energetic strength. Your energetic strength is. It's a fancy word that I use to describe your psychology, your emotional lifestyle, how you respond to your environment emotionally and psychologically. Because we would all agree that what's happening in your mind is going to manifest itself not only physiologically but also physically. Neuromuscularly, your muscles will take on the form of your psychological profile. You don't have to look any further than to observe someone who's fearful or depressed. Their body looks fearful and depressed. The shoulders will be hiked up physiologically, the heart rate will be depressed, the respiratory wave will be depressed. In order for the respiratory pathways to be depressed, there's a restriction of the musculature across the chest, across the belly, across the pelvic floor, often in the throat and the neck. I call these neurotic holding patterns. Because we do it. We create these holding patterns that affect us through our mind, into our tissue, and also physiologically. So that's really the one that I tend to have the most passion towards and the one that we really need to consider more so than the others. The others will be a outgrowth of how we see the world and respond to the world. The fourth layer is, what are you going to do now? I think it becomes a bit narcissistic for athletes of all sorts of. In their pursuit of becoming stronger, you know, whatever it is that your sport is. But I invite people and my students to consider how they're going to serve others. And I see that as a form of strength. I call it presentable strength because it's. How are you going to. It's a play on words. But how are you going to offer yourself as a present to the world, a gift to the world? How many other people are you supporting? Because, you know, the bottom line is we all die. We're here for a short period of time. You're gonna pass away. How many people did you support on their journey of becoming stronger? And the way that looks is the way you present yourself. And there's an entire layer that I invest my time and energy into in teaching other people how to grow that I call presentable strength. So that's really been it. And I'm on that journey right now in developing it in myself. I make claims. I never assert my correctness in any way, shape or form. Everything to me is an experiment. It's based on your experience. And we're dynamic creatures, consistently growing. And while I'm doing that for myself, I share with other people so that they can continue to grow stronger themselves.

Very cool. That's an awesome history and right off the bat, tons of helpful information in there. I especially like what you say about being able to look into somebody's eyes and see whether the vitality is there or not. And I don't know about you, but I find that for me in my training, especially when I'm preparing for something like an Ironman triathlon, I can do that to myself. I don't even need a trainer or coach to do it. I can look at myself in the mirror and look deep into my eyes. And while there's certainly some quantities, quantitative measurements you can take, like heart rate or heart rate variability, or even going out and seeing what your heart rate or how your power and your speed responds, looking deep into your own eyes in the mirror and just seeing what they look like, you can get a pretty good kind of horse sense for where you're at. And I think a lot of people just kind of ignore that and don't even take a good long look in the mirror at. End.

The.

At their own eyes. So it's interesting stuff. I want to jump into some of the nitty gritty with you, Elliot, if we could, because you're an expert on strength. And I think that when most people go to the gym, the average person, they go do circuits or they lift 12 to 20 repetitions at kind of a medium intensity, or they do lots of, lots of kind of aerobic exercise maybe in between their weight training sets or before and after, or they do a weight machine circuit or something like that. I'm curious from a strength training standpoint, how you feel about that kind of workout and what you feel when it comes especially to building strength and this vitality that you talk about. What's kind of ideal for somebody to be doing when they walk into a weight room?

Well, the very first question is always, what do you want? Right. So I would never give broad advice. There is a uniqueness to each one of us, but there's also a uniqueness to what we want to achieve. I'm going to approach this with the assumption that the majority of your listeners are endurance type athletes. Correct.

A lot of endurance athletes and also a lot of people who, who just want better bodies, you know, people who want to lose fat, that type of thing, you know, probably more of that than we get a lot of, you know, like pure football players and strongman and people of that nature.

Okay. Well, with that in mind, one of the things that we have to end up, one of the things that we've got to do with our training is to undo a lot of the damage that we've done with either different forms of training. You know, for example, if you are, if you're riding your bike for four hours a day. Right. I don't know what's typical, but if you're riding for several miles a day, what you don't want to do is to go into the gym and work the same energetic pathways and the same muscle fiber as that which you already have an overload of. Not only is there a pattern overload by repeating the same patterns using the same muscles when you go to the gym in the same fashion. And make no mistake, we always gravitate to that which we're best at. So if you tend to ride a lot, you're going to go to the gym and you're going to want to do a lot of legs, leg presses and leg curls and leg extensions. Because you're probably good at it. Because your nervous system and your muscular system have grown to become efficient at it. And then the energetic pathway, the energy systems are going to, you don't want to repeat again. Because if you're riding for four hours a day and you go to gym and you're working in the 15, 20, 25 rep range, you're basically being redundant. You're doing the same shit. And not only is it a waste of your time, but you're further facilitating the imbalances in all of the, all the systems of your body, your muscular system, your nervous system and the energy pathways. You want to do something completely opposite so that you can. In baseball terms, this is what pitchers typically say, unw the body. You want to undo the damage of pattern overload.

That's a very useful way to think about it. So you're basically trying to step outside of whatever comfort zone that you've created in other activities that might be predominating your life.

Absolutely. That's why we go to the gym. You know, we have this tendency to do what everybody else is doing, but we've got to look at who we are, what we are, what we've been doing and how to approach it most effectively. And if you're an endurance athlete or you're somebody who's used to these ideas of doing high repetitions and long, enduring, low intensity type activities, which I think most people who get involved in exercise, even who want to burn fat, that's usually where they begin. They begin with low intensity, high volume work, either running or biking, jogging, and then again they go to the gym and it's like lightweights with lots of reps. And there's nothing wrong with going to the gym. And the gym is my temple, if you will. When you step into the gym and I'm there, I will act as the priest of what should and shouldn't happen. And I've stepped into that place with authority. Because when you're doing your sport, when you're out there riding your bike, I don't touch it, nor do I look to, to change anything you're doing. You might want to talk to the priest of that sport, which would be your triathlon coach or your sports coach of any shape or form. When you come to the gym, my invitation is to leave all that behind, leave it at the door. Now, let me look at you, see what you've got and proceed from there. And really a lot of times it ends up being a session of undoing damage. Right. So there's going to be a lot of. I know you asked me about strength and I'll get there because I need to take you on this journey a little bit because there are some things you got to consider before you just start deadlifting and bench pressing, especially if you've got a lot of pattern overload. Very first thing is we've got to reduce the tension in those muscles that have become tonic due to overuse and stimulation. For endurance athletes and most people in general who sit and drive their car, there's a lot of flexion activity going on. The hip flexors tend to be tight. The upper abdominals tend to be tight. The sternochlamastoid, these are the muscles in the neck, the front of the neck and the front of the shoulders. A lot of muscles in the front of the body become over developed and overstimulated because of just our activities and the tendency for the human being to move towards the position from which it came. Which is the fetal.

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you. That's that defensive position to which you're referring.

Yeah, it's the fetal position.

Right.

It's our most closed position.

I think what's interesting, and this is something I'm certainly cognizant of, just because of the amount of time that I spend hunched over on a bike or running or even swimming, you see a lot of internal rotation that takes place. There is. You're constantly in that defensive position and you're constantly in what you call that fetal position. So you're saying you're kind of trying to undo that?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Imagine that your tendency is towards that fetal position. Right. And then you go to the gym and you purposefully stimulate the muscles that push you further and further into that fetal position. I mean, did that make any sense?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. You know, and it's interesting. Like one of the best moves I ever made, this was a couple of years ago. I installed a pull up bar in the door of my office. And so, you know, every hour my rule is I got to do five perfect pull ups on this pull up bar. And that it always feels like that opens me up. It keeps me, you know, it keeps me out of that hunched position during the day. And sorry to interrupt, but it's such an important thing keeping your body open like that.

Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, among all of the other aesthetic qualities associated with good posture and the lack of injury associated with having structural integrity, because that's really what you want. You want to be able to last a long time in Your sport. And you want to last a long time in life by being able to keep all your joints in their axis of rotation where they belong, as opposed to poor posture associated with moving them out of their axis of rotation. Amongst that lies what I believe is the most important, which you couldn't disagree with me on this one, because if you don't do it, you die. The most important function of the human being in order to retain its vitality, its life, is to breathe. And if you're. If the muscles across the face, the jaw, the neck, the chest, the belly, the pelvic floor are tense and tight, your torso is not going to be supple enough to allow a full respiratory wave. And that respiratory wave, which, if you look at a baby who's laying on its back, you'll notice the belly extends, expands, and it moves up towards the chest and the hips and the head almost move in concert with the torso. If that respiratory wave is damaged, if it's dysfunctional in any way, shape or form, you're going to experience both physiological and psychological disturbance. All you have to do is to. Here's an example of what I mean by psychological disturbance. Let me start there, because this one is very obvious, and I've got a good example. I was watching a show not too long ago on television, and it was all about being an alpha male. So essentially, they were like, they were showing these men how to be strong and assertive, grounded and having good energy so that they can attract people and be a good leader. Well, in that show, there was one exercise where they had three guys. There were six guys split in half. Three of them were in a fetal position, basically tucked down and squatted on the floor. And there were three other guys who were standing up tall. But not only that, they had their hands over their head like a Y, and they were leaning back slightly with their mouths open and they were breathing deep. Now, this is an exercise that I've been using for years. I've been teaching people. I call it the bow. But in this show, they had the people do that very thing, which actually puts tension on and stretches, opens up all your extra respiratory muscles. And by asking them to breathe deep at the same time, they're allowing this person to really get the full benefit of the respiratory wave, as it should be. And all six of them were standing at a cliff where they were at one point going to be asked to jump off of. I think it was like it was bungee jumping or something. And when they sounded the whistle for the six men to jump the men that were standing with their bodies open and were breathing deep, it took them an average of about four seconds to make the decision to jump. They just leaped right off. It took the other group an average of something about 24 seconds to build up the courage in order to jump. That is a direct flag. That's a red flag showing you. That's a finger pointing directly to the fact that the physical postures of these people directly impacted their psychology. The courage associated with jumping off was afforded those who had deep respiratory waves and open bodies. And the lack of courage, and you could say even fear stimulation in those that were hunched over, crouched down in that fetal position was evident by the choice that they made when the whistle sounded. So you can see right there, that's just one example of how not breathing deep by having the neurotic holding patterns and the musculature associated with the respiratory wave will not only look bad because anybody with poor posture, it's not attractive, really. You will not only also have a proclivity towards injury because all of your joints are maligned, but you're not going to proceed in life with the courage that those three that jumped off immediately did. You're not going to have the character virtues associated with what is potentially in you. Those three guys, if they put them in front of their respective bosses at work that have been treating them poorly, or they've been wanting to ask a raise for the three that were in poor posture, are going to be too scared. They're going to just kind of put their tuck their tails back between their legs and bow their head and do as they're told. Where the other three are feeling pretty damn good about themselves, they're feeling confident and courageous, and they might tell their boss where to go, or they might ask for that raise, or they might approach that girl in the bar, or they might start that business venture. They're going to do the things that lead them forward in life because their bodies are positioned to allow them to do it.

It's interesting because actually, in the past few episodes of this podcast, the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, we've been talk a lot about deep breathing, nasal breathing, rhythmic breathing, and even focusing on proper breathing while you are whatever, cycling, running, lifting weights, that type of thing. And it's amazing how when you are aware of breath, how much differently you feel after you've finished a workout. And I've even found that when you don't pay attention to breathing, you actually find yourself more in, like this fight or flight mode after workout, you know, where you're not paying attention to your breathing and you're just huffing and puffing in and out through your mouth versus this deep, nasal, focused breathing deep in kind of your belly. Whether you're riding a bike or running up a hill or lifting a weight off the ground, you feel differently after the workout. You feel more like you've just finished a relaxing yoga session rather than like you've just run from a lion for the past hour.

Yeah, I'd imagine. And I do believe that the goal for us is to be able to proceed in our entire lives, throughout our entire lives with that feeling. I think that's always available to us. It's just a matter of re patterning the way we breathe, really everything associated with it in order to carry that with us.

Now, for people who are listening in, for whom even stepping into a weight room might kind of be intimidating right at first, you know, aside from maybe surfing over to the weight training machines and kind of doing a circuit or something like that, what would you say if you were to want to give somebody like a, like a. And I know, I know you're not into targeted prescription, but just a general rule, you. If, if somebody were to walk into the weight room and just want to at least get started in getting strong and taking advantage of some of these concepts that you talk about, what are some of the best moves that they could be choosing when they're trying to get started with this stuff?

Well, the very first thing is that my invitation is to exercise organically. And that means use the body as it's been designed to be used. And if you tend to, like we all do, tend to have a lot of muscular imbalances due to pattern overlap, load sitting a lot, or participating in activities that create the muscular imbalances, my invitation would be to begin experimenting with movements that are completely contrary to that which you've been doing a lot of. So if you have a tendency to always move in the sagittal plane because you're running forward, that's what, what the sagittal plane really is. It's moving forward in your running, in your biking, in your swimming, then I would invite you to do some lateral lunges, move laterally, move backwards, move in the transverse plane, which basically moves sideways, twist your body. I've seen some of the most rigid endurance athletes and newbies to the weight room because it's the first time they're ever exercising, unable to fully twist around. You lay them on their backs with their arms out like a tight, raise the legs up in the Air and basically just say, hey, keep your arms down on the floor and lower your legs to one side. And they try to do that, and the entire body flips over with it. There's no rotational capacity. There's no suppleness of the tissue throughout the torso that allows a good rotation. Just imagine how much you're losing physiologically and like we described, psychologically, with the inability to move laterally and in the transverse plane. Movement is what is essential, not necessarily the stimulation of more muscle or the muscular system so much as your ability to move. In what Paul Check calls primal pattern movements. You should be able to squat deep with your feet flat on the floor. You should be able to sit your butt right down between your feet, because that's. It's one of the most important primal movements that a human being can produce. I mean, up until the advent of the toilet bowl, this is how we took a shit. You had to sit down into a hole. You should be able to do that. Let's say the toilet perhaps was invented a couple hundred years ago. Even if you say a thousand years ago, it was invented. Okay, fine. But we've been here a lot longer than that, and we've been doing it for a lot longer, that all of a sudden now human beings can't do that. Oh, and by the way, we have to take all this medication for constipation all of a sudden. All of a sudden we've got to take all this. We've got all these bowel disorders and bowel issues. Just imagine that the rigidity of the musculature associated with defecation, all the sphincters and the pelvic floor, how rigid and tight they are, and your ability to fully defecate, to empty your bowels, you're totally going to be compromised. And so many people grow sick, and there's so many autoimmune diseases associated with people's lack of ability to fully move their bowels. I invite people, instead of taking medication or getting surgery to squat, sit down, and soften the muscles associated with letting your poop out. It sounds strange, but what I'm trying to get you to wrap your head around is that what's happening muscularly is going to affect you physiologically. And if you're constipated, guess what? You're not a happy person. So psychologically, you're damaged because you're not squatting. You see?

Mm.

Yep.

Yeah, it makes sense. So, by the way, I gotta ask you, do you use a squatty potty?

No, I actually Just there were. There was a time where I was just standing on the toilet.

Yeah, that's actually what I like. When I'm at airports, when I'm traveling, when I'm at hotels, when I'm not. When I don't have a squatty potty, which I have in every bathroom in my home, I actually jump up on the toilet seat and squat. And that's how I defecate when I'm traveling.

That's awesome. I gotta get one of those. It's funny, when I first came across these ideas, there was nothing available. There was no squatty potty. So I kind of like abandoned and I was like, I'm just gonna have to stand on the toilet. And I got used to that for a little while.

I have a few extra off to get your address after the call and I'll just shoot one over to you.

Oh, great.

So squatting positions, opening positions. So if somebody walks into the gym and they're trying to just like, let's say somebody's sitting here listening with a notepad and they just want to go right now and do some of the best moves, what's it going to look like in the weight room?

You really don't even need the weight room. Most people really don't even need to sit down and squat right now. As you're listening to this, you'll notice whether or not this is something you need to do. You could work up to 100 squats, you know, 10 at a time. I guarantee you that's going to be more of a workout than you would ever need with machines for leg extensions and leg curls. My real invitation here is to recognize that you have everything you need already attached to you in order to exercise efficiently. Unless you want to be a bodybuilder or powerlifter, that's a totally different story. But really just being able to squat down to be able to lunge with your own body weight. Most people can't lunge properly. That's basically where you step forward and drop your back knee. Most people collapse all over themselves just trying to lunge. Most people can't bend properly at the hips. They can't extend properly at the hips. Learn and practice how to bend down. Picking things up, pushing. How many pushups can you do? Most people can't do any pushups. And most people probably should begin with the opposite of push ups would be like inverted rows or chin ups. I mean, how many chin ups can you do? If you can't do 10 chin ups, then forget about the circuit training Machines at your gym, go and learn how to do some pull ups.

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of interesting how I think a lot of people do think you need to step into a gym for this kind of stuff. When, for example, I've taught clinics before specifically to endurance athletes and triathletes where we've got bodyweight circuits that we do. And it's amazing how many movement deficits and movement disorders go on in people's bodies. Just trying to do something like a lateral lunge, for example, or even a step back lunge, or in some cases, just a squat. It's interesting. So, Elliot, you have so much information. I mean, I could pick your brain forever on this stuff. And you also did some great presentations at that Sexy Back Summit too, where you really got into this. The whole concept of fertility and libido and hormones and a lot of what you talked about kind of stemmed from us being in that constant defensive position and kind of teaching your body how to open up. But I know that you've got a lot of resources out there. If people want to learn more specifically about this whole concept of opening up your body and that type of thing, where would be the best place for them to go as far as resources that you have out there?

Well, I've made so many videos about this, and there's only so much that I could offer through videos and great podcast like you're providing people. But the very first thing I would do is invite you to explore some of the videos that I've offered people in order to break down and really feed you in a consumable way. The ideas of Wilhelm Reich and Alexander Loewen, they're really the people that I've studied the most with regard to what I call energetic strength. If you search YouTube, and this is going to sound funny, but if you search Elliot Hulse, Breathe into your balls or Truth about Deep Breathing, you'll find some of my videos where I'm actually offering you techniques and exercises and stretches that support you here. But like I said, also, if you're really fascinated with these ideas, the core from which I received them are from Wilhelm Reich, who was a student of Sigmund Freud's who realized that talking to people doesn't help. You know, it's not about what's happening in their heads, it's about what's happening in their bodies. And he really delved into the autonomic nervous system and how our psychology cannot be transformed until our body is transformed. And a student of his was also Alexander Loewen. And I really love Lowen's work. What I've also done is I've taken a lot of the concepts that I've learned through them and also some of my mentors who I see regularly. And I'm developing an advanced course that I call Advanced Energetic Strength, and that will be coming out probably in another month or so.

Cool. Cool. Well, if you shoot me an email when that comes out, I'll put it up on the Facebook page for listeners. And, you know, I gotta tell you that I kind of thought we were gonna talk today a lot about, like, you know, dumbbells and barbells and, you know, how to press properly and deadlift form and all that stuff. But this whole conversation kind of ended up taking a turn towards what I think is a lot more useful information for folks from a starting standpoint, because you can, you know, you can. You can find some of that other stuff kind of a dime a dust around the Internet on whatever T nation or bodybuilding or wherever else. But this whole concept of getting yourself out of that defensive position, opening your body, and also not getting stuck in those movement patterns that you're comfortable with, I think those are some of the. Some of the big takeaways from the conversation that we just had for people. And if you're listening in, I'd encourage you to take this stuff to heart. And I'll also also put a link to some of Elliot's resources, you know, his YouTube channel and his website and everything in the show. Notes to this episode over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com so check it out if you're listening in. Elliot, thanks so much for coming on the call today.

Oh, it was great. It was a lot of fun, Ben.

All right, well, cool folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Elliot Holtz, and we're signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

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Sam.