Underground Strength Training Secrets: How To Get Strong And Stay Strong Using Training Secrets Of The Athletic Elite.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And my guest today is Zach Evanesh. And Zach actually just wrote this new book called the Encyclopedia of Underground Strength and Conditioning. He's one of my friends and he's actually one of the few guys who I really consider to be an absolute beast when it comes to physical strength. And in his book, Zach gets into this about how he wasn't always so strong and how when he was a kid, he had self doubt and low self esteem and depression and career ending injuries. And eventually he got to the point where he learned that he was put on earth to make people strong. And his actual book is Making Me Strong just because it's so freaking heavy. But I went through it and it's actually a really good book and it's got a bunch of stuff in here from like sandbags to working out with stones, to tires to freaking kegs to a bunch of things that we're going to talk about in today's show in which you are going to learn, whether you're a guy or a girl, how you can use a lot of these underground strength training methods that go way above and beyond just the gym to get strong and to stay strong. So, Zach, thanks for coming on the call, man.

Hey, dude, this is a big honor for me and I know people always say that when they're interviewed, they're like, it's my honor. But I'm serious. I listen to your podcast all the time. It's amazing. And of course, as you know, but people listening, I've hired Ben to coach me with nutrition. And I really love what you do. I think it's amazing, not just with your podcast, but I love seeing the stuff that you do with your family and how you're raising your kids. It's really inspiring. So, I mean, I am really honored to be on your podcast and help all the listeners. I'm really excited.

Yeah, I actually, I posted to Instagram one of my boys, like lifting this, this book, this encyclopedia that you wrote over my head, over his head. And I'm like, this is. This is how you become a beast. So the kids are actually into that kind of stuff too. Lifting rocks and carrying these rocks around. We went to the tire store and got them little tires that they flip around the house. So it's. It's pretty fun. But, you know, for you, I know that you haven't always been into this form of strength training. Can you talk about how you got into this specific style of using a lot of these weird tools to get strong?

Yes, absolutely. So a little bit of my background is kind of similar to yours. You competed in bodybuilding, and I'm a little bit older than you. I'm 38. I'll be. Actually, I'll be 39.

You're ancient?

Yeah. I feel like people, they're like, you're that old. I feel great. And my training knowledge started in the late 80s. And back then, if you were getting training information, it was from really the select few bodybuilding magazines out there. And the stuff being written was pretty much fabricated by the writers. They would kind of interview the bodybuilders, and then they would, you know, take all kinds of amazing photos and they would fabricate stuff. So I followed those workouts and, you know, in a nutshell, without dragging on the story, you know, you. It's like, you know, you got beach muscles and you're all show and no go. So I trained like this bodybuilder. I did train extremely hard, but it didn't have a carryover to my sports, my competitive sports. I was a high school wrestler. And it also did not give me the confidence because as I would compete and go against guys that looked like they almost didn't work out yet, they would be stronger than me, or I'd, you know, be in the middle of a match, or only, you know, through the first period, which is two minutes. And my body would start to kind of break down, and I'd feel this tremendous fatigue. Then in the back of my head, I'm like, how could I train so hard and feel so weak? And it just. One thing led to another, and I basically, it was, you know, I did not have a strong body. I did not have a strong mind. Maybe for the onlooker, they say, wow, Zach's pretty strong. But when it came to putting it to use, it was like, it was just kind of beach muscles just useless. And it really got me mad because I worked so hard. And it really. I talk about the two pains in life, the pain of discipline and the pain of regret. And that's why I'm always so inspired and passionate about helping people truly get strong. So it has a carryover to life, a kind of Training that builds your confidence. So, you know, fast forward through the years in college and then post college, I continued to stay involved with wrestling. And then in Those early and mid-90s, Jiu Jitsu and mixed martial arts came out. But back then they were just calling it like shoot fighting and no holds barred fighting, call it mixed martial arts. So I began getting involved with that and my training was evolving a bit more to be modeled after. I had some old books from, you know, the golden era of bodybuilding, the late 60s and the 70s.

So I began the old, the old Schwarzenegger stuff.

Yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I mean these guys would deadlift heavy, they would bench heavy, they would do, you know, weightlifting, like clean and press exercises. And I paid more attention to that. Like Arnold's book. You'd see him lifting these, he'd be. There was like stone and ice lifting competitions and deadlifting competitions. And I saw how they were built and how they were also able to perform. They were very athletic at the same time as strong. A lot of the world's strongest man competitions from the early 80s were the bodybuilders. And you had guys like Franco Colombo who could hang upside down from a chin up bar by just flexing his feet, flexing his shins and his feet would hang on the bar. I mean, tremendous strength. They were carrying a lot of odd objects. So I started paying attention to those things and I started having a bit more success as a competitive athlete. And most specifically I was into combat sports. And what kind of really set me, set me to the next level was I competed in one of the earliest tournaments of the Grappler's Quest, which is now like, you'll go there, you'll show up in the morning and you'll be competing until nine at night. But back then there was like just shy of a dozen or so competitors. And I lost after just two weeks of training, a really close match in overtime to a judo black belt. And here I was, you know, a kid that only wrestled in high school and I only had two weeks of training. And when I lost to him, I was like, wow, you know, I had such confidence when I competed at that time. And I, and I learned it because when I would train in a global gym back then, I was doing things that nobody had really seen before. This is like 2000 or something like that, or 2001. I was doing things like dumbbell farm walks. I was doing lateral jumps over the benches. I was doing things like heavy bench press, heavy dumbbell cleaner press. Then I would sprint on the jump rope for a minute, sprint on the treadmill, and everybody in that gym was bodybuilding. And I started training in a way that was pushing me physically and mentally. And it boosted my self esteem and my confidence beyond anything I experienced. So after I lost in overtime, the coaches were just blown away. They were like, holy crap, that guy was a judo black belt. And in the back of my head I said, you know, I lost in overtime to a black belt. Now I'm going to train so hard. You know, I took the Dan Gable philosophy of like, outwork your competition. And I was just pushing myself like crazy for an upcoming tournament that was probably like a month away. And I tore my ACL during one of the practices. And that really set me off because before that I had some serious shoulder injuries, neck, back. I already had a knee surgery at the age of 19. This was going to be my second one. But that surgery just set me off and I said, I'm going to research the ways of the best combat athletes and the best wrestlers in the world. So I started researching.

It's weird how injuries can do that to you. They put you in this whole new mindset where you almost get like this desperation to change course.

Yeah. And you know, as a coach, it makes you smarter. It's like the unfortunate way to teach you how to get smarter. But setbacks I've learned.

Yeah, I completely agree. I've learned some of my best lessons about getting fit and about getting strong from having to fight through injuries and figure out new ways to train.

Yeah. Because you have to truly learn the science of listening to your body. And then of course, you're a coach. You coach people all around the world. You have to learn to treat people individually. You don't just. You learn that there's no such thing as a cookie cutter program for everybody. So this is at this time of this injury, my ACL, I was a fourth year or fifth year teacher. So it's like 2002 or so 2003. And when I started researching how the Russians would train, they were very athletic, they were high level gymnasts. They could do back flips, they could do backhand springs, they could do handstand walking. Yet they weren't gymnasts, they were wrestlers. And when they trained, they would train outside, they would train inside. I was lucky enough, I came across videos because I started reaching out to coaches that I knew had competed in Russia. And they shared with me VHS tapes of Russian wrestlers training outdoors. They were like chopping wood. They were training outside on gymnastics, like playground equipment. They were even doing their skill work outdoors. So I noticed that they were truly doing a cross training method to build athleticism. They were building strength, they were building power. They trained their endurance in different ways. They would. I saw them doing water polo, they were playing basketball, but it was more like basketball, rugby, you know, they started doing. They. Basically what I learned was they weren't setting rules. They weren't like, we will only train with kettlebells. We will only train with body weight. I saw that they did not discriminate against these different ways, the many ways to get strong. And so that gave me the idea. It inspired me to really stop going to the traditional gym. And I started using all of my surroundings. So in the backyard, when I live with my parents, they had all these stones that were lined across the middle from where the backyard got raised up. So I started doing things like stone carries, clean and press, bent over, rowing. I started chopping wood in the backyard. I started going up to the woods and doing sprints through the trails mixed in with calisthenics. And my body felt way more, you know, I hate to use that word, functionally strong, but I had a much, much different fitness than when I was just bodybuilding. And granted, I did look good when I was bodybuilding, but, you know, the bottom line is I was not performing. So that was my beginnings of becoming a coach. I started training neighborhood athletes for like five bucks. One kid I actually traded, I told him, I go, hey, if you borrow your dad's car to help me go buy all this used gym equipment. We went to a barn where it was being stored. And even all those things inspired me. Being in the guy's barn, I started thinking, like, oh, man, I need to have a gym in a barn. So I picked up some dumbbells, I picked up a chin and dip bar. But we trained outside. And those kids, my first athletes, just started beating the crap out of people. We had a basketball player that he wasn't really strong or fast, and then in the end of the summer, he was able to slam dunk. He was the team captain. Then we had another wrestler who had lost, I remember a match, and two weeks later, he wrestled the same kid and made your decision him, which is when you beat a guy by 10 or more points, which is basically, you're dominating, you're crushing that person. I started paying attention to how training without following the perfect rules, the perfect workout, squeeze the muscle, all of those things I followed as a bodybuilder actually worked against them. And I also learned that physical Strength is one thing, but if they are not comfortable being uncomfortable, they will not get to the highest levels when things always go wrong. And I've read so many of your articles, like you're running a triathlon and your stomach is killing you. And I think if you trained always in that perfect setting, you would have quit. You would have quit, but you trained your body and your mind at the same time. And that's basically what I do, is when I train athletes, I'm not worried about perfection. You know, I'm certainly very dialed in. There's a scientific approach to the training, but there's also a huge mental component to the training. And this doesn't have to be. When I say athletes, I'm not talking about a high school or college athlete. I'm talking about anybody who exercises. I look at everybody as an athlete, and I train them to be athletic. And we have adults that train at the gym. And a big thing that I do with them is we train them to kind of overcome the challenges, the physical challenges. And then I tie it in with the mindset and essentially I'm telling them, you're going to use these lessons and apply it to your life. All those little struggles that you overcome through training help you overcome the challenges in life. And that's, you know, when I. You hear people say train for life. Train for life. That's truly what I mean. Because when I'm training, I'm not just thinking about getting big biceps or trying to get, you know, I don't know, get ripped or something like that. That stuff's not at the forefront. That doesn't inspire me. And it doesn't change people for the long run. And that's what I'm interested in doing.

Yeah, I like how in the book you call it farm boy strength, which is a great way to describe it. Like that functional strength that lets you just move things and get things done. I want to delve into some of the nitty gritties here because you've got all sorts of different methods of training that you talk about in the book. And one of the places that you start is body weight training exercises. And a lot of times when I look at body weight training exercises, websites or books, they've got the same old bodyweight training exercises, push ups, variations on sit ups, variations on planks, et cetera. What are some of your favorite bodyweight training exercises that you rarely see people doing? Like, some of the unique ones that you think people don't talk about, but that are super effective and kind of fly under the radar, right.

So I agree with you. People always talk about, you know, push ups, sit ups, pull ups. But you know, one thing that hit me hard is that when I was in college, my gymnastics instructor was also a former two time all American college wrestler. And he, when we would train, he would always have us walking on our hands of all variations. Your partner would hold your ankles, you would walk on your hands, partner wheelbarrow. We would walk on our hands on the parallel bars, forwards, backwards, we were bear crawling, crab walking. And then we would do wall walking, which is when you put your feet against the wall and your hands are on the floor and you walk up, down, you walk side to side.

Yeah, I've been doing that one since I read your book. I've been basically in my gym. I'll kick up into a handstand and rather than doing like handstand pushups, just like walk sideways along the wall. That's a really good one, dude.

It is tough and I'll even do that stuff. My daughter, I know your kids play tennis. You're a big tennis player. My daughter is just crazy with tennis. So she will usually warm up at the tennis court that has the wall, the half court, and I'll usually do some training there. I do a cartwheel to kick my feet up onto the wall and then I walk sideways, I walk left to right. And if your feet are up higher, your upper back and your shoulders and your triceps get worked. If you walk your feet lower and your hands are further from the wall, your abs are basically in a plank position while your upper body is also working and you walk side to side. And all the bodyweight training is a big aspect of my warmups. And the warmups move into more plyometric jump training. So I do this stuff a lot when I'm training wrestlers or a lot of times coaches have me come out and train large teams and they just put me out on the grass. And I remember the first time coach was like, he's like, we're not going to be able to use the gym. The basketball team is in there. I've got 70 something kids. We're going to be out on the front lawn. Are you going to be okay? And I was like, that sounds right at home for me. So we do a lot of broad jumps of various types. We do them with our feet close together. We do them jumping high, jumping low. We do them with our feet a little bit wider apart. We call those frog jumps where your fingers touch the floor and you're jumping forward And a lot of hand walking, I would say, is the unique stuff that people don't really do. And all the different jumps of not just up and not like, you know, squat jump, lunge jump, but also traveling forward jumps and mixing them in with some very basic gymnastics work such as jumping a couple times and then on your last jump, go into a forward roll or do a backward roll and push through into a handstand, push up. So those are the things that I like to do because you're developing your mobility, your flexibility and it's a great way to build overall athleticism. And the reason why that's so important, especially if somebody's a competitive athlete. And for the coaches out there that are especially listening, I think sometimes people just focus on strength. And then you have these guys that could lift a lot of weight in the gym, but they're basically what I call strong and useless. They're strong. They could squat, bench and deadlift a lot, but then you tell them to sprint and then they're exhausted for the next 30 minutes. You know, they don't have that. You know, I know they talk about this with you guys at Kokoro Camp is they don't have durability, they can't handle ongoing exertion of speed, power, strength, as well as mental toughness. You know, when your body starts to feel beat up, your mind wants to play tricks on you. So it's important that when you train, you do things that challenge, Challenge your, challenge your body, challenge your mind.

Yeah. And you know, another thing that they have in here that I really like is the whole idea of getting fit with nothing but a picnic table. And you've got this one page where you're just like doing double handed and single handed picnic table presses. Just literally doing presses with a picnic table. And you know, you've also got hand walks with a picnic table and squats and push ups. But it's pretty cool that like the things that you can do that people don't think about, you know, you've, you've got this other page where you pretty much have a towel and then like the monkey bars at, you know, the kids playground where you're just like doing grip strength and pull ups with the towel. Really cool stuff. And I love this kind of stuff that gets my wheels turning because I can bring my kids to the playground to play. They can have a good time. And I'm over there, you know, getting myself better in this case for things like Spartans. So it's really cool.

It's. I do exactly what you do, like on the weekends, my kids, we have that tennis court and the playground is right near us. So I'll play tennis, then I'll go up on. It's not meant for dips, but I jump up and I'll do dips, I'll do leg raises, I'll do hand walking on their parallel bars and I'll play tag with them. And all those things, you know, they get your body going. And if you want to intensify it, like you said, you could throw a towel over the bars to do pull ups and those picnic tables, you know, I have a video, I'll have to send it to you. You could share it. Where I was supposed to train some pretty high level wrestlers inside a wrestling club and we got locked out. So I went on my phone and googled the nearest elementary school and it had a very old school type of playground. And you see these guys just crushing the workout. They're like jumping, they're doing box jumps on and off the picnic table, they're doing split squats or push ups with knee tucks with their feet on the swings. Then I had them wrestling, doing pummeling drills, and I've even had football players do that pummeling drills. And all of those things help them build, build the athleticism. And for people like yourself that are into doing spartan races and all these challenges, like now you see what's his name, Steve Austin doing the broken skull challenge. And a lot of that stuff is you're wrestling, you're sprinting up a hill carrying objects. He's really shocking the people that go on that show that are kind of bodybuilder. They look big, but I watch them compete and their bodies basically shut down on them or their mind starts to get kind of out of that comfort zone and then they shut down. So all these different trainings that will challenge you mentally, I think that's important no matter what your age is because of how it makes you feel. You feel awesome. And that has a big carryover to life in general.

Yeah, if you send me that video, by the way, I'll put it up as usual. For those of you listening in, I take pretty extensive show notes. So in this case, I'll put all the show notes for this episode over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Zach, that's Z A C H. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Zach. Zach. I want to talk about some other things that go way above and beyond body weight, but remember to send me that video, by the way. So I can put it in the show notes for people. Sandbags. You talk about sandbags. I've been using sandbags lately, actually, since I read your book. That was the day I started using sandbags. But what if people don't want to go, like buy a sandbag from Rogue Fitness or one of these websites that sells sandbags for stupidly insane prices. How can we make our own sandbags? And as a follow up to that, I'm curious, once we've made our own sandbag, what your number one sandbag exercise is. If you're going to do one exercise with a sandbag, what it would be awesome.

So making your own sandbag. And it's so funny because some sandbag companies emailed me with some. They get pretty angry at me that I, that I tell, that I recommend to just go and use what's called an army Navy bag. You go to an army navy store, you could go on Craigslist ebay and you could buy old army navy duffel bags. So obviously the bigger it is, the more you could fit in there. And there's various ways to load them up. If you want to make a heavy one, you're going to have to go and pick up some sand. Even though they come usually in like 40 or 50 pound bags, you could, you know, slice open a sandbag and fill up a contractor bag with 20 to 30 pounds to make, you know, smaller size bags. So let's say you don't want to make a hundred pound bag. You can make a 70 or 80 pound bag by cutting one bag in half and filling it in a contractor bag. So once you use that's actually, that's.

What I did was I got contractor bags.

You need a couple of them.

Yeah. And I made one for my wife too. And for me, I filled like three contractor bags with sand and put those inside that army style bag that I bought based on your recommendation. And then for my wife I had like one and a half bags of sand in there. Yeah.

So you want to make sure that you, I would say triple contractor bag them and then tape them up a little bit. Not too, too much because then it kind of gets away from the odd nature of being able to grab the bag. So that's one way you could use sand. And then even though they're called sandbags, I've had many friends that have made their sand bags filled with mulch. So it's not as messy in case it ever does break. And some people have used wooden pellets I guess for what you would put in like a wood burning stove, but they still wrap them up in about three contractor bags. And then every, you know, if you're going to use that bag a lot, you're going to have to open it up and kind of rewrap them because they take a beating. And I listen, I love those army Navy bags because there's no handles to grab onto.

Exactly. Like when I went down to Seal fit that they have, they have the, whoever makes the bags and they've got handles on them and everything. And I actually thought it was pretty easy, like, because I'd been using this burlap sack where you got to figure out where to hold it so it builds your grip strength. And I actually, I filled my contractor bags just because I went to my local hardware store and this is what they had with pea gravel. And that actually worked pretty well. And yes, yeah, double contractor bagged it with, you know, pack those up with some duct tape, fill them up with pea gravel. And those are my sandbags. And I like them better, frankly, than the bags with handles just because they're a little bit more hardcore and you gotta figure out where you're gonna grab them. And so they get you fit, in my opinion, a little bit better than the ones with handles.

Right. And it, listen, it, look, I know the sandbag companies out there are gonna be mad at me, but it just doesn't make sense. We're using an odd object and then we're putting all these handles on them. And I understand that you do it for like all these rotational exercises and all that stuff, but I love, you know, the whole idea behind an odd object is to use something that's really challenging. And I remember, I remember from the first time, like using sandbags and the kids were struggling because they had to crouch down very, very low, stretching their hips. It wasn't this perfect motion. And the kid looks up at me, he's like, this thing is so hard to grab. I go, exactly. That's the point. Because they're used to perfect. You're going to squat down, pick up this barbell, pick up this dumbbell. It's, you know, it's perfect. And a friend of mine, a very strong friend, he competed in powerlifting. Bang. They squatted a thousand pounds. He goes, zach, come on, how heavy does a 130 pound sandbag feel? I go, dude, it doesn't feel like 130 pound barbell. I'm going to tell you that right now. It is a whole nother world when you're using a sandbag. And so If I was to say what's my favorite movement? I would say go with a clean and press where the bag touches the ground every rep, where you pull it up to the to in front of your chest, and then you press it over your head. Or if anybody has shoulder issues, you could do what's simply called shouldering, where the bag is in between your legs and you pull it up extremely fast and get it on top of your shoulder. So they're both full body exercises, but the shouldering allows you to save your shoulders a little bit if they don't feel that great for doing a lot of overhead work. And for the advanced people out there listening, you would do. It's called the Bear Complex. So they would do a clean into a front squat, then they would press the bag overhead, put it on your back, do a back squat, press it over your head again, put it down so it's clean into a. So it's. Clean it. Front squat, overhead press, back squat, overhead press, put it to the ground. That's one rep. So I like to do things like 10, 8, 6, 4, 2 with that. And after maybe each one, if you want to push it, you could do things like pull ups after each set, or you could do a sprint or a farmer walk. I mean, you could really push yourself. And I've done workouts with just the sandbag to just get my body and mind tough.

I love it. I've got this. So I keep the sandbag because I just moved into this new house and it's got three flights of stairs. So I've been keeping the sandbag in my. In my gym, which is in the basement. And I have this workout I've been doing, which is five of those cleaning jerks, just like you described, with the sandbag, where you're cleaning it and then pressing overhead. And then after the very last one, I have to bring it down into like, that. That Zerchercher squat position right where you kind of like cradling the sandbag into your chest. I got to climb all the way up to the top of the stairs and come all the way back down the stairs. And then I set the sandbag down. That's my recovery. But that's just it. That's the whole workout. And you do that for like 20 minutes. Five cleaning jerks. Bring it up the stairs, Bring it down the stairs. Love the sandbags. I'm glad I discovered those.

What I call that, and I never did it upstairs, but I call this loaded conditioning, which is very similar to what you do. And Man, I have this old, old DVD I created. I'm gonna have to like try to pull it and just put it on YouTube. But we would do something called Loaded Conditioning. And we would train out on the field of an elementary school during the summertime. And this area of the grass was about 75ft. And depending on the athlete, I would kind of cater it to their sport. So these wrestlers, I would make them do something like five reps of a clean and press. Then you have to carry it to the other side of the field. When you get to the other side of the field, you're not allowed to put it down. You do five squats, carry it to the other side of the field, three reps, shouldering each side, carry it to the other side, do bent over rows or reverse lunges. So they must carry it for a little bit of time. Then they do like five to six reps of an exercise and they keep going for time without setting it down. And it builds just crazy amount of mental toughness and strength, endurance. And as you know, you did kokoro, you guys, when you were crushed, you had to do a mountain.

Yeah. Had to freaking carry logs around. Do the mountain marathons. Yeah, Nuts.

It is so different. And listen, I was just in Vermont this weekend. I took a bunch of coaches up to Joe Decent, his house, and we did basically a mix of business life. And Joe had his training, training. And our training was doing all the mountain work. And then on the last day, we had them work on the farm for an hour. And you know what? They were splitting wood. They were inside the garden area and just like using like this garden hoe to clear out all the old vegetables. And they were just sweating bullets. I mean, they were working and you know what? Nobody. They were having a great time. And I've always remembered seeing the guys that did manual labor, the people that were physical. They had a very unique energy to them, meaning they didn't get tired. And I pay attention to those things. Like when we bought our first house, we had an Italian, old Italian mason built our stairs. And they didn't break anything. They had no machines, they didn't have a jackhammer. They did it all by hand. And the father was in his early 60s and it was his son who was maybe late 20s, mid-20s. And then there's a couple helpers and the father broke everything by hand. He used sledgehammer to break down all the stairs. He did it all by hand. And this guy, I remember looking at him at the time, I don't even think I was 30 years old. I may have been 30 or 31, and I couldn't believe how strong he was. Then he took all the stones, threw them in the car. And then during the lunch break, the thing that hit me the most was the father never stopped working, and all the other guys were sprawled out on the front lawn and eating pizza. The father, just like he was unstoppable. You know, it was just amazing. Yet the generation that grew up with traditional training or kind of, you know, not really having to overcome tough obstacles, they were, you know, they were taking a break. And it reminded me a lot of my grandfather, who he also was, you know, a manual worker. And he was very tough. I write about him in the back of the book and the dedication.

Nice. You know, you've got. We've talked about body weight, we've talked about sandbags. And then, of course, as you alluded to Zachary, you got rocks in there, rocks and stones. And I've got this river rock that I went down to the river and got from my house that I basically just carried up down my driveway from my mailbox up to my garage. And then I'll set it down and run around for a little bit and let my grip strength come back and then do it again. You've got lots of different rock workouts in there. But I'm curious, if you think back over the years to the hardest workout you've ever done with just a rock, what would you say your hardest stone, your hardest rock workout is?

Look, you know, I wish I could pretend and shock people with a lot of fancy stuff, but I'm a firm believer in the basics. But one of the things that you can do, if you're training out on a field and you're not doing this in your yard, instead of just doing a traditional clean and press, you would do a clean and throw. And you do this for distance or for time. And I heard about it first. Long time ago. I spoke with Juan Carlos Santana, who I'm sure you know, and he. He kind of lays low now, but he was telling me about when, in the 70s, his martial arts instructor brought them on the beach. And he said, man, we would do. We took a stone and we had to do. He said we had to throw it. And I can't remember what the distance was, but I remember it being something like they went for, like, 20 minutes. Pick it up, squat and throw. Pick it up, squat and throw, he said. Then we went and ran through the water, but with the water at, like, right under your knees. So you're constantly curling up your legs. And he said we were, you know, kicking trees. He's like, this was before Van Damme and Bloodsport. We were laughing so hard. And him telling me about those stories always inspired me. I always pay attention to the unique ways that open minded coaches want to talk about training because I know, like I said earlier, from my experience, you follow the rules and you kind of train in this perfect environment, you become actually more susceptible to injury. You don't develop that mental toughness. So for stones, do a clean and throw or do some of that loaded conditioning that I spoke about earlier. Do five clean and press, then carry it 50ft, do five squats, carry it 50ft, do five reverse lunges each leg, carry it again, five bent over row, carry it again. And then maybe finish with five clean and throws. And you could do that for as many rounds as you want. You could do it for 15 minutes. I'm like you though in the way where most of my workouts are short and intense. And then once, maybe twice a week, I'll just go and really work my ass off. I'll go to the state park, which is pretty close to my house and no water with me. And I don't really pay attention to the trails. I'm not like the best guy with directions. So I'll just run and run and when I find a rock, I might pick it up and carry it and then I'll drop that, then I'll run and then when I find a low hanging branch, I'll do pull ups. So I love to, you know, train with these no rules. And you know, the big thing is the Russian way, the eastern block training methods. And listen, that's all great when you don't have a boyfriend or girlfriend and you don't have a family and you live on a training camp and they cook for you and you don't have a phone. I mean, all those people do are they're not exposed to anything besides training, sleeping and recovery methods, where people today, they think everything needs to be perfect. I think we want to optimize and hack things like you say. But with the training, if you truly want to develop that inner strength for life, you want to do some workouts that actually don't make perfect sense. And that doesn't mean do poor technique and don't warm up. It means you're still training smart, but you're really breaking the boundaries of what a traditional workout would look like.

Yeah, and that reminds me, you were talking about one Carlos Santana splashing in the water. That's actually one of my favorite workouts to do. If I'm not using the river rock up by my house is the Spokane river stays cold. It's at like 50 to 55 degrees on a warm day. And so one of the workouts I'll do is go down to the river and on one side of the river, just pick up a rock, like the heaviest rock I can find, and do five squat to overhead press. Then you swim across the river, you find another rock and you do five squat to overhead press. But every time you swim across, you're getting colder and colder. Right. So you're trying to squat the rock and press it overhead while your muscles are just not cooperating as they get more and more cold. Fantastic workout. And again, like, you just brought up the idea of like, working out with traditional equipment inside a nice, you know, heated or air conditioned gym having the capability to make you soft or even more susceptible to injury as you get used to lifting symmetrical objects. And, you know, I hope that folks, if you're listening in, you're kind of getting the idea here that, you know, this is the stuff that doesn't just make you strong, it makes you hard. And I think that that's really important. It's a big part of Zach's book. Zach, I got just a couple more questions for you. And I know that we also. I know you have some bonuses and things like that that you want to give to anybody listening in who, who picks up your book, but I'm not done yet with the Q A because you talk about something else in the book. I used to work at a coffee shop and pub in college, and we'd have to bring the kegs back in the back to get them filled up and then carry them back. And I remember it was just the most awkward thing on earth to carry. And so I'm reading through your book and you start talking about kegs and how you can use kegs for a workout. Can you get into that a little bit? Like how you actually use kegs and like a way other than just carrying it around that you could use a keg to work out?

Yeah. So back when I was finishing up grad school, I would work Saturday nights at a old school shot and beer pub. Old school, real blue collar town. And I remember during the summer I filled in for the guy that worked in the morning, believe it or not, this bar would open at 7am I'd have to get there at 6. It was right near a GM plant, the car dealership I think that had shut down some years ago. But he on like Tuesdays or Thursday or something like that, he had a double shift. It was like 7:00am until 5:00pm and I remember at like 4:00 clock at the end of the day, I was so, you know, you're so exhausted that like every, every beer ran out of the keg. And this place was so old. Most places have this kind of basement with all these kegs. You walk downstairs and all you do is you like remove. I don't even remember what it is. Whatever the hose is that, that connects, that connects the keg. But this bar was so old school that you had to go outside, you had to go into the basement. So the sidewalk had one of those kind of doors that you would lift from the ground. And the stairs were completely broken downstairs, so you would barely be able to walk up these stairs and you're so tired. I remember it was like one keg after another. And this was a beginning to me. I remember I carried three or four kegs upstairs in an hour, up those stairs, then inside. And I remember when I was done, one of the guys said, zach, you should have let us know. Usually we go downstairs with, with whoever's working the bar. We put on, we put down two, two by fours, we stand behind you, you roll it up and then we've got a hand truck. I just crushed myself, but I felt awesome. I felt so liberated. So when I started training athletes out of my house, I went to a bar that my old, my former wrestling coach, his family owned it. And I told him, I said, you know, I used to wrestle with your son was my coach and your other son was the team cat when I was there. So I said, can I, you know, get two kegs from you guys that are empty? And what I do is I fill them with water or sand. And there's certain. You could go on YouTube to find out how to open up your keg. You got to do it safely, so you have to be careful with that. So I really recommend everybody watch those videos and you fill them up with water or sand. The water is much tougher because it moves around so much. So we do, you know, the keg is more, I believe, something for somebody who's advanced and has good knowledge of exercise technique. Meaning, you know, when I started training athletes in like 0201, there weren't all these TV shows. You didn't see 70 year olds flipping tires. And I don't think that's truly the safest thing for them. So for Somebody who's going to use kegs. They're extremely awkward. So we do real basics. We carry them and we do clean impresses with them if they're not too, too heavy and they allow you to have good, you know, pretty good technique. We do various squatting techniques. And I also have, I guess they're like half kegs. They're, they're like a shorter keg. You could take them and throw them. And I'm a big believer in not just lifting or carrying, but throwing objects because you develop power when you throw. There's no, you're not putting the brakes on when you're extending arms or throwing it.

So I have to recruit so much more muscle. Once you decide you're going to make something move that fast.

Yeah, you have to just, you know, you pick it up fast, then you throw it fast. And what's crazy is one of my gyms is next to a globo gym and they're really cool with us and I use their front lawn. And we'll have the guys stand across from each other and they'll take, we have like heavy medicine balls or those sand, or those sand filled kegs. And they will, you'll see it in the book. They clean it and throw it. And I'll sometimes say, everybody's got to do 20 of them or I'll do some sort of a circuit. And I make them clean and throw it for time. Now, obviously, nobody's catching it. The people stand far away from each other. So when you throw it, yeah, I always got to warn people because, you know, you always have that guy that's like, if you don't give him the exact direction, he's going to call his buddy and say, we need to throw kegs and they're going to try to catch it.

Right.

You got to go. And you could train alone. And, you know, I know people probably in the back of their head, Ben, are saying, well, guys, I don't live where you live, Ben. I don't live out, you know, in the wide open. Zach, you live near the beach or you have a field. Well, listen, that's what you got to do on the weekend when you train. Go to an empty school playground area or to the empty field and go get a sandbag and go get. You could even throw dumbbells. Like, you could do a clean and throw it like you're punching and just obviously make sure nobody's around you. So on the weekends, that's kind of how I started doing it. Me and my friend would put A sandbag in the back, a few kettlebells, a sled. And we'd go to the playgrounds and kind of set up our own little torture session. And, man, it was just awesome. There's nothing more awesome than training out in nature. Like, when I hear you talking about training, you know, out in that river we did that Sunday, we took a real intense mountain run, and we had to cross through a creek. And to me, there's just something powerful about training in nature. And I felt better than I ever felt just being able to run and go through that cold water. And one of the kids, actually, who ran with us, he's 8 years old, and I read your book, the Building Tiny Superhumans. And the kid, he's in the middle of the creek, and he just started drinking the water. And back of my head, I said, there's a tiny superhuman. And this kid, look, that hill was so steep that at point, you're like, on your hands going up, it's. And that kid just smoked us. And he's 8 years old, he's ripped, and he was fresh after, you know, it was about two miles up, two miles down, and I see him eating the. Drinking the water from the creek. And I think just training outdoors, it's powerful. All people should do it, even if you just do it once on the weekend. And it's okay if it's the wintertime when you're doing it. It's okay if it's very hot out when you're doing it. Just. Just, you know, get out there and train in the fresh air. It's extremely powerful and liberating.

Yeah. And I have yet to get the keg, but I've already. My mom owns that pub, so I already contacted her and told her, next time one of those kegs gets available, I want it. And that. That thing will be getting filled up with sand, and it's going to go in my backyard. So. Okay. Just a couple other things. You talk about tires a lot, and most people are used to just thinking of tires as something that you could get, and you could flip it, like, back and forth, just flipping a tire. And, you know, it's certainly very easy to get tires. I just went to my local tire store and drove in there and asked them if they had some heavy tires I could use. And I picked up one for my wife and one for each of my kids, and then, like, a heavier one for me. And they helped me load them up into the back of the truck, and then I brought them home and unloaded them and they're out there in the backyard. You know, we flip them. I actually have one of these battle maces. This company on it makes maces and they sent me a mace and I figured out you can actually use the mace to hit the tire, like in the same way that you chop wood. But what's another really good exercise? If you had to think of one good exercise that someone could do if they weren't going to flip a tire or hit a tire, what else could you do with a tire?

It depends on the size of the tire. So like you said, if you've got a tire that's big, mainly you're going to be doing tire flips. Or if you've got a partner that's kind of equal size and strength, you do partner battles where you push it back and forth, which is like you're standing up and your arms are moving in a push up position. But if you've got a big enough tire, sometimes we'll have those tires outside and those big tires that we use. So the guys will do a couple tire flips, then they'll do a couple box jumps, then they'll elevate their feet and do push ups and then they'll do split squats where the back foot is elevated and it's a stationary lunge up and down. So if you have a big tire, you would be using it for those things if you've got a smaller tire. That's how I made my first dragging sled. I drilled a hole through the tire and then I put an eye bolt, which is basically, it looks like a, it's a hook with a circle at the end. So you drill it through and then I put toe straps through it. So if you have a smaller tire, you could use it for the sled drags. And then next to one of my gyms is an auto garage and on the side of his garage he has just car tires. So they're, you know, regular sized tires. And again, we've done all different types of throwing to develop because I train a lot of power athletes, a lot of football players, wrestlers, tennis players, sprinters. So we will do one arm throwing, like rotational throwing to develop rotational power. We also do tire kind of like tug of war where you could the tires there and each partner grabs the tire and they have to pull it kind of like they're dragging it backwards. You could do it with two hands, with one hand. And this is really. It's like you're training like a warrior, you're training like a gladiator. And people that never do that stuff, you know, of course they think we're crazy. Listen, I'm right next to a global gym where, you know, a lot of people are inside, you know, checking their hair in the mirror or sending text messages. Like, for us, that's just something I don't want to be part of. But listen, I was in that kind of that old. That those days, training those gyms, but I always thrived on intensity. I love in that kind of atmosphere. And we've done these unique things, because a lot of the people that I train, it's not so much that they're just weak or undersized, but they're lacking confidence tremendously. So parents come to us with kids lacking confidence. And that, of course, hits home to me, because that's the kind of kid I was. You're just scared of the whole world. You don't have confidence yourself. You don't believe you could do it. And we start little by little, getting them out of their comfort zone, you know, and it could be as simple as them dragging a sled, as simple as doing kettlebell farmer walks. But then they get to a point where they're wrestling with other kids on the front lawn, where that takes them out of their comfort zone, because they're only used to wrestling on a mat with a referee. So we do all these training methods that develops strength, power. We use the basic movements, such as squatting, lunging, pressing, clean and press. But we just add unique twists to it. The basics always work. One of my things that I like to live by is I say, listen, the amateur always wants the gimmick, the flashy, shiny object. You're trying to just impress people with something that looks weird. But the expert sees the beauty behind simplicity. So when I'm using these odd objects, I'm not trying to rewrite the book. I have books from the early 1900s that are some of my favorites. And these are like some of the strongest men of their time. And they just did things like clean and press snatches. They did a lot of gymnastics training. They walked on their hands. They ate healthy. They would start their day with a morning walk. They would meditate. They trained in fresh air. They would sleep. They would sleep at night with always the window open to have fresh air. It was just like this simple way. And we kind of got. Got to a time, I guess, with the Internet and whatnot, that people just try to shock people with flashy, crazy stuff. And that's not why I train the way I train. I do it this way because I've done the stuff that doesn't work and now I'm just. All I care about is results. And I love, I just love what the training does for people. I get the emails from the young ones and from people that are much older than me telling me how the training, just how they just feel so much more invigorated and more powerful and energetic. And I love to hear that stuff. It just makes me feel great.

Yeah. And you've got, you know, I won't go over it now because we're getting close up to an hour here and there's so much more in your book that people just need to go read it. But you've got on page 384, like you outlined these 11, this 11 step workout that you used to get some wrestlers that you were training extremely tough. And it may be very similar to that video you're gonna send me for the show notes. But I mean, just like, you know, pushing a truck across a parking lot, sprinting up the hill, doing a sled drag, doing the picnic table, military press to the monkey bars, nuts. Yes, it's online.

Yes, that's the original. That's back when I was training athletes out of my house, we converted the two car garage to a gym. And we would basically do about 20 minutes in the backyard carrying tree logs, climbing a rope, swinging the sledgehammer. Then they do about 20 minutes in the garage in the gym using traditional free weights and kettlebells. Then I take them to the elementary school down street and they did that circuit there. And it sounds very much like stuff that you do. I saw like on Facebook, somebody was like, he's like, I'm going to train with you. You're like, dude, my weekend training is a two hour puke fest.

Yeah. He's like, I want to come do this workout with you. Only two hours of obstacle course training. I'm like, you don't understand those two hours. You're ready to quit. You're ready to quit 11 minutes in. So yes, it's fun stuff. Well, Zach, again, for people listening in, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Zach. I'll put a link to Zach's book, to some of the other things that we talked about. You're gonna send me that video so I can put it in the, in the show notes. Zach.

Yeah, and I'll send you that video and I've got, you know, plenty of stuff they could show and you'll have the link for the book and all that stuff. Or we're gonna take good care of your listeners. You really got an amazing podcast, and it' I can't wait to share it because I want people to listen to all your stuff. I've changed my nutrition since listening to you, and I feel really good. And health is just, I always tell people, I go, your health is number one. If you don't have your health, you have nothing for the parents out there. This book, Ben, was written because when I started reading books in high school, I was so inspired by books like Arnold's Education of a Bodybuilder, where he didn't just talk about training, but he spoke about how he overcame life's obstacles and how he, you know, how he truly went after his dream. So this book is out to inspire people of all ages and to educate them. So I'm really pumped that you that you gave me the opportunity to be on your show.

Yeah, and I'm pumped you came on too, man. And again, if you're listening in, Zach is a friend of mine and he will take care of you. So if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Zach and you order over there, I mean, I think I don't need to tell you as a podcast listener now that it always helps the show out when you order books through the show notes over in the podcast. But you'll also, in this case, get a bunch of extra bonuses from Zach. So check that out@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Zach. And again, the name of the book is the Encyclopedia, and it is a big, big book. It's an encyclopedia that you could probably throw and do some farmer, farmer walks with if you get two of them. The Encyclopedia of underground strength and conditioning. So check it out@BenGreenFoldFitness.com Zach and Zach, thanks so much for coming on the call, man.

Cool, Thanks a lot. Thanks, everybody, for listening.

All right, folks, we'll talk to you later.

This BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

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