How To Get In The BEST SHAPE Of Your Life TODAY! | Robbie Stahl

If you, if you feel like that, you truly, truly believe that you have infinite inherent value and you do breath work and you're using positive mantras, breathing in and exhaling the negative mantras, just doing those, that'll change your life.

I want to jump right into the content because, you know, the more and more I study your career, the more and more inspired I am that I've probably been working out and not achieving my fitness goals because I'm doing it all wrong. Why are people not actually achieving many of their goals?

Well, the reason why many people aren't achieving their goals is for a couple big reasons. One is it's just not matched. Their exercise plan is not matched to them. So, you know, so many people, because of shame, they get into exercise like I want to, I want to, I want to decrease this body fat. I'm not happy with the way I look. I'm not. And so they go with it with shame. And it's all based on emotion. And they try to over train. So it ends up being too difficult for them. And what ends up happening, Steven, is they lose some of that, that excess pain, let's call it that excess pain. And once they lose that pain, that £20, the motivation goes away and then they quit or maybe even way before then because they think it's way too hard. They're trying to push themselves too hard. So really it's not having what we call at the fitness doctor an optimal physiological dosage. Now, that sounds really complex, but we're really saying is just perfectly matched exercise plan to the individual.

No, I like that a lot. You know, I'm one of the, I'm a gym rat by nature. I always have been, historically. A good friend of mine's got me doing DDPY yoga now, which has been kind of fun, you know. So I'm trying a lot of new things. So this, this whole industry, this new level of thinking is really inspiring to me because I am the overtrained guy. I'm the one that goes into the gym. I work till failure, and then I still won't be happy. So I'll wait two days and I'll just do it again. Which means the muscle never really recovers. And my, my flexibility began to be more and more limited. I began dropping weight and cutting down in a variety of places, none of which were the primary ones that I was trying to locate and stuff, you know, And I've tried intermittent fasting. I've tried all these different things to try to showcase or not showcase, but try to showcase what my expectation is. But, you know, you have this, this concept called negative. How do you, how do you. Negative, not negative. It's not a negative result. It's negative training that you brought up. I thought negative result. Yeah, negative result. It totally like, like flip my script. So break down negative result for everybody.

Yeah. So what most people don't realize, which is why they see someone buffer, super fit, like, oh, are you in the gym four hours a day? And it's like, well, no, if they're in the gym four hours a day, they'd be way over trained. And of course, there's some athletes who do exercise that much. But, you know, here's the thing is exercise is literally damage to your body. That's what exercise does. Your, your body's in balance, it's producing fine. We're sitting here having a conversation. If I get up and start running, then things are going to get completely out of balance. My body's going to be under load and stress. I'm drawing in much more oxygen. I'm producing all this waste product and my fuels, my cells are getting totally stressed out and my tissues are beginning to break down. And then the immune system actually creates some inflammation after that. So there's all this breakdown. So what people, I think, really need to understand in terms of getting results from exercises, it starts with negative results. So you better be careful of how much negative results and what type of negative results you start with, because you can get more negative results from exercise than positive. And that's what people don't really talk about.

So, yeah, I was going to say that on that point, one of the things that even I'm struggling to fully comprehend all the way is, you know, we've been taught this entire time that, yeah, you're supposed to break down muscle. Yeah. You're supposed to do this. Yeah. And so it's supposed to be part of the process. But when I hear you talk about it with all your experience and everything you've been studying for all, gosh, what feels like a decade or more. One of the things you're, you're telling me now is like three decades. He says three decades. Right. Is, is this, is this understanding that you can choose the negative result that you're willing to kind of use.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so, okay, so here's the thing. Let's, let's take like, so you listening to the show, regardless of where you're at in your fitness level, you're going to fall in one of three categories. Either you're a beginner so you have zero months to about six months of exercise experience. And you know, this could be true for like aerobic. Maybe you only do aerobic and you don't do weights or you only do weights and you don't do aerobics. So whatever category of exercise you're doing, you have zero to six months of that exercise. Intermediates about six to 18 months, and then advanced is going to be beyond 18 months. So depending on where you're at, your body has three different phases of or three different capabilities of outputting energy and performing. Okay, so one, the first phase is what we call adaptation phase. And so what that means is you have this window where you know, you're not going to really get much negative results. It's a level of exercise that your body's so used to doing that it's not really going to break down. It's a very small amount of stimulus. So it has beginner that might be getting up and going to the fridge, right. As an intermediate that might be doing a light walk to jog. And as an advanced that might be doing, you know, 10 minutes of running. Okay, so that's adaptation. Then we have performance capacity. So first we got that adaptation zone, next we got performance capacity. So that's like, you know, at the end of performance capacity is, you know, the maximum amount you could do. Right. So for a beginner, let's say they can run five minutes before they're totally exhausted. Intermediate, they can run 20 minutes before they're totally exhausted in advance, maybe 40, 50 minutes before they're totally exhausted. So in this case, then what we have last is fatigue state training. So the fatigue state is your beyond performance capacity. And now you're getting into just full breakdown. Negative results have. Now, you know, if we look at negative results on like a graph that's starting to come up like this positive results peak. And as you get to your performance, that negative result line passes. Now we're going into that fatigue state training and fatigue state training. You're just breaking down. You're just in sheer breakdown. At the end of fatigue state, you go unconscious. You can, you can you die. You can have extreme traumatic. So when you start thinking about like putting exercise load and stress on those continuums, then you start to realize like, oh, okay, so how do I get the optimal results from exercise? So it's typically by training between in that adaptation and under your performance capacity. But you think about that. Most people go to the gym, right? Yeah, I've been in the gym before and there's trainers with clients. And I asked and I, and I see them doing force negatives, which is where they like push down the bar, right? Yeah, push bar while doing a curl and make the negative or the deep, the dropping of the weight even heavier. And I asked the guy, hey, how long have you been training for? Oh, a couple of weeks. The client has been training for a couple. So we're going into fatigue state training in this example, straight out of the gate. Yeah. And you know, so, so that's a horrible example. An amazing example would be like the Russians. So the Russian wrestlers are known like. Right. Khabib Nurmagomedov. Right. He's an amazing example. One of the best, the best in my mind, UFC fighter ever, pound for pound. So, yeah. And Russian wrestlers and what they do is they typically stay in adaptation and under that performance capacity, whereas the American wrestlers are always pushing the envelope and kind of go way too far and go into the over training state. And this is talked about a lot in the athlet world. Whereas, you know, too much of those negative results, too much over training is actually going to impede your results. So now you think about the normal person. Now you listening to this podcast, you're probably not Khabib Nurmagomedov, Right. You're probably below that, right?

Yeah.

So what should you do? Well, the first thing I'll tell you is you shouldn't. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. So as a beginner, just because you can go in and do eight different exercises and all these sets and do cardio. No, just go in there and find your comfort zone. So you should literally start exercise with your comfort zone. So now, Steven, we're tying back to what you said in the beginning, which is, you know, where do you think people go wrong? Where do you think they go wrong with their neck? And this because you don't have to go that far out of your comfort zone. You only need 10% outside of your comfort zone. Now, if you play that game for months and months, you're going to always have amazing results. And then once in a while, you should even back off from there. So if you, if you do that, you're going to have amazing, you're going to enjoy your exercises. Never going to be too much, you know.

Yeah. I mean, does it seem like the, the reason we're not able to operate or in that optimum zone is because of impatience? Maybe like we're, we're trying to get to our results quicker than they actually going to take shape because, you know, you know, one of the things that I've heard a lot, especially I was listening to some of your, your content as relates to jiu jitsu specifically, is, you know, you a guy that's like super built and rocking, you know, rocking guns everywhere, and he gets on the mat and he gets taken by a guy half the size in a heartbeat because of the way they're training. But it seems like the guy that went into the gym to get cocked, Diesel, thinks that that's the appearance of strength, you know, not realizing that strength can be used against them. Right. So, so what, what keeps us from even searching for. I mean, I don't, I wouldn't even think that most people even understand what our optimal zone is, because it seems like it would be different for everybody. Correct?

Yeah. Yeah. So let's make it really simple. Now that, that beginner, the adaptation is going to be about 30% effort. What do I mean by effort? So if you lift the weight and it feels like, oh, I've only expand 30% of my effort to do this, that's adaptation for a beginner.

Okay?

You, as an intermediate, you grow a ton. You grow all the way to about 60% would be about the end of the adaptation zone. And as an advance, you're only going up another 10%. So you think about like going out for a walk or a run, like, what percentage of effort? If you're a beginner, you should only spend about 30 to 40. 40 to 50% effort is going to be your maximum results where you get the optimal positive results over training your body, you're not wearing your body down too much, you know, because here's the thing, here's the thing that I'm not saying is when you do that now, you're going to enjoy it and you're going to be so consistent that you could, might even work out twice a day and you're going to absolutely love physical activity and you're not going to end up so pain and dysfunctional and stiff and all these other things that happen that end up setting a plateau and pushing you backwards. So because of the consistency, then you get greater result. Because what, what the science says is this, is that, you know, the stimulus or that bout of exercise, even small or moderate, that's the huge stimulus, right? That that's do. Just doing it is the huge, like, let's take Nike, right? Just doing it is, is the, is that's where you get the huge results. Overdoing it is not where you get the huge. It's the consistency. It's the consistency that produces the results, you know, and that's in the clinical research. What's happened is they look at people that are just active throughout the day. And the interesting thing, health wise, people who are active out throughout the day get much better health results than gym rats. Much better.

No, that's very true. I mean, I'm, I'm. We got a live event facility here in Raleigh and you know, I can get my steps in just by walking around the facility. It's because it's, you know, about 27,000 square feet. And it wasn't that long ago my son's fiance came to visit us down from Charlotte and she had just happened to do leg day. Like before she popped down here, she literally could not walk for three straight days, including around this facility, around the house, like it was, it almost incapacitated her. And so I guess that would be the definition of over training, right? And just being impatient to get a result.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And if, you know, if you're, if you're getting paid millions of dollars to play in the NFL or UFC fighter or something, you know, there's a place for that because your sport asks you and requires you to function at that level in the cage or on the football field. But most of us, that's not the story. And if we were going to talk about, that's another conversation. So then there's like, then there's minimal dosing of that extreme. Even those guys, right. I have a bunch of friends who are professional MMA fighters and the best way to do that, they have short little bouts of extreme intensity, two weeks at a time, then they back off one week at a time, then they back off a little bit. It's not, you know, it's, it's not what people think it would be. So, you know, if you're, if you're not a pro athlete, then you have no reason, like you want to feel amazing, have great energy, make millions of dollars and, and like be there for your family and be super functional, go on vacation and like enjoy life, right? All the things that mean for you to join life, to enjoy life, then exercise in a way that matches your physical activity goals, right? Yeah, but I think most people don't do that, right?

Well, I think, I think we're all. Because we're all trying to compete with something that we don't even, we can't even articulate what we're competing for. Maybe it's the guy and the girl in the gym. Maybe it's, you know, where I want. I'm an aspiring MMA fighter, so I need to. I need to train like my favorite person I aspire to be. But they don't realize that person is doing two weeks on, two weeks off. All they see is the video of them, you know, doing the kicks, doing the guitars, and all kinds of stuff. I just, I think it's really interesting, you know, that your, Your approach is so holistic, because I don't think people go through the process of breaking it down the way you do, which is one of the reasons why, you know, the fitness doctor has been. Come become so successful. I want to pivot for just a second because I think there's something that I haven't heard many people talk about, that I know you talk about and you get a lot of insight on, which is the importance of posture. Like, most of us are not paying any attention to our posture. How does, how does our posture carry our physiology, and how does that shape us either negatively or positively?

So the posture is huge. And here, here's the thing. You're. Let's. Let's take your body and fitness and health and all these things. Let's put it. There's two categories. One is your body mechanics, right? So, like the posture, the position you're in, that's. That's totally your mechanics, right? That's your mechanical alignment and function of your body. Then there's the physiology. That's like how your cells are processing and producing energy and even how big your muscles are to be able to withstand the metabolic stress you put with strength training and that type of thing. So there's two areas, mechanical and physiological. Think about this. To optimize the physiology, which is really what a lot of us are after, you have to go through a filter or system of mechanics first. So in other words, you have to use your body's mechanics and motion and muscle usage to have an effect on the physiology. But here's what happens is people don't pay enough attention to their posture, to their alignment to their body, and then they end up with negative results in the form of dysfunction, in the form of pain, stiffness and injuries and all these type of things as they start to really push that physical fitness envelope and, or just over training or having burnout or affecting their sleep because of the amount that they're training. So if you, if you use your body's mechanics, starting in posture is one of those things. You know, I think most people think about posture, it's like the position of your spine and aligned and how you're holding your shoulders. So, you know, if you, if you don't have optimal posture and you start really training, you're going to have a. You're going to have a body that's out of alignment.

Yeah.

And just any mechanical structure. If you try to put a bunch of load and stress and force on a misaligned mechanical structure, that thing's going to break down. In this, this case, that thing is you. Right. And so as you down, then guess what grows? Your can't do list. And as your can't do list grows, then you start, then you're getting older, and then what happens is you're not able to be as functional mechanically as you age. And that is what most people who are actually fit actually bites them in the butt, is that their mechanics start to really become dysfunctional, even though they want to take action in fitness.

Yeah. You know, my grandmother was 4 foot 11 her entire life until about the last decade or so of her life. And by that time that she passed away, she was 4 foot 5 because she came further and further being hunched over. And then I also had this image of people that I've worked out with that didn't have great posture. They worked out like crazy. Built a lot of solid muscle, which I would assume reinforced their negative posture, but either their poor posture, and as a result, they kind of walk kind of like this, like they're. They're jacked.

Right.

But they kind of look like they've got like, stuff in their back kind of holding over. And, you know, that's why I wanted to hit on that so much because I feel like it's something that I'm constantly trying to keep in track of. I'm constantly, like, even replacing my tennis shoes to make sure I've got good soles on my feet to make sure I'm not getting. You know, I don't know if you. About you, but I've worn shoes down so far where you almost have a slant on a, on a, on a, on a shoe sole, you know.

Right.

And I finally realized that the more I walked on shoes like that, the more I. My back would hurt.

Yeah.

You know, so then I got to where I was replacing my shoes about every four or five, six months, you know, and then my, my posture began to stabilize.

Yeah.

And then I started doing lower resistance style workout, which I know that you're. We've been talking about a little about. And I actually found I got stronger with the lower resistance than I was when I was lifting, you know, probably 30% or 40%. Heavier weight.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yep, exactly. Exactly. So did you play sports in high school or what was.

I've played a few sports. I've played baseball, soccer. Well, depending on what country you're in. Soccer here, football and the other places.

Right.

I dabbled in MMA stuff for a little bit. For a hot minute. I was. I was a striker, not. Not a jujitsu guy. And I kept getting my butt handed to me by jujitsu people. So I kind of pushed myself out. Um, you know, and then I did some hockey, some ice hockey. So those are kind of my. My genres of. Of, you know, kind of like sports entertainment, I guess you could say.

Yeah, it will. That's awesome. And it's interesting that you figured that out with the feet and the shoes because, you know, our mechanics start in our feet, really. Because most things that we're doing, we're doing in some form of standing position and we're walking all the time. Everything we're doing a. Requires, you know, the feet first. So, yeah, you know, the feet. Depending on the positioning of the feet, then that's going to affect the ankle, affect the knee and the hip. Right. It's like the old song, the. The, you know, the knee bones connected to the hip.

That's awesome.

So, yeah. And, you know, the feet really start. And you know, what I suggest is, you know, so if people have like hard floors in their house, it might not work too well to just go straight barefoot. But because. Because it's kind of can beat up the feet because they're not adapted to it. Right. Everything you do has this level of adaptation, whether you're adapted to it or not. So what I do suggest is people can walk on a mat, walk in sand, walk on carpet, but walk, use your feet without that artificial device called the shoe, because then it starts to really strengthen the feet and then that changes and improves the mechanics up the chain. So, you know, I'm a big fan of wearing barefoot shoes. So, for example, especially like if you're doing a leg day at the gym and you're not going to be running on the treadmill or doing ballistic plyometric type motion, it's a great idea to go to the gym wearing barefoot shoes because you're really going to strengthen your feet and that'll strengthen your entire nervous system. The other thing that happens is you're, you're. We have two different forms of nervous system in terms of motor control or movement in action. You have the sensory or the afferent, so sensing the positioning and the alignment and the load and all these things. And, and then we have the motor action. So sensing and then coming back to the motor action. Well, if you're not wearing a shoe, then your feet can sense better. And when your feet sense better, then they're able to have better muscle control and usage in the motor action. And so, you know, that's why it's so important to exercise legs sometimes with barefoot or bare shoes. And the same thing goes for your hands. It's actually a good idea to use your hands when you're weight training to like put on your pelvis and control, touch your shoulder while you're moving. Because this, our hands have the greatest sensory perception out of anywhere in our whole entire body. So that adds, yeah, motor, motor control.

I never would have thought, I never would have thought of that at all. You know, it's, that's so interesting. I'll have to get me some of the, the weird shoes. I, you know, subconsciously I'm probably, I'll probably keep my shoes on because I'm, you know, I'm five foot five, so, you know, I need the extra inch. Right. Kind of thing. But no, I've never thought about that. I, you know, I learned, I discovered that being barefoot assisted with my balance quite a bit. Like starting when I started doing some of the ddpy yoga stuff that I've done with, with some friend me and friends. And you know, I learned that my balance is getting better because I'm largely barefoot. I didn't, and I didn't, I didn't correlate the two until you just actually brought that up as a, as a whole. So that's really cool. You know, we've talked a little bit about muscle and like exertion. We've talked about posture.

Let me ask it this way. How important is breath work?

Oh, it's crazily important. It's crazy. It's an 11. It's an 11 on a 1 to 10.

Wow, that's so surprising because, you know, I feel like no one. Again, this is one of those things that no one's paying attention to. They, they assume because they're living, they're breathing. But I know that when I'm under considerable stress, I will actually pull back and literally just breathe in deep, breathe out deep. I've also discovered I have a deviated septum on one side of my nose. And at times it's difficult for me to breathe.

In its truest form. And as a result, I've had to take more time to control how I breathe and I get a semblance of. These are the two things I feel. All right, so number one thing I feel is I feel a greater sense of focus and clarity if I just sit still and kind of like. I also feel like my heart rate comes down. I can't. I'm not wearing a heart rate monitor to kind of justify that, but I feel like my heart rate stabilizes and comes down, and as a result, I'm put into a place of peaceful performance, I guess is the best way to explain it. Is there science to back up what I'm. What I'm saying?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. Here's. Here's. The thing is, like, you know, most of us had some kind of trauma from childhood. Right. Whether you had a Marine Corps drill instructor father like I did growing up, or.

Me too.

You did.

My dad was a Marine. Simplify.

Nice. Nice. That's awesome. So whether you had that or whether you, you know, whether your parent was a doctor and expected you to, like, do certain things and, you know, you felt shame, maybe didn't want to go. Whatever your things are. We all have trauma from childhood, and we all live in this world where mostly it's not that physical in our daily life. It's a lot of mental stress, which causes our. You know, we have two forms of the. On an autonomic nervous system, which is really the kind of the nervous part of the nervous system that controls what state you're in. In other words, whether you're active or whether you're resting. Okay. And so you have the sympathetic nervous system. And so things like trauma, ptsd.

Anything that's really caused you a negative experience, it can activate the sympathetic nervous system. And then what happens is we form our thoughts in neuro associations through the nervous system and the brain, forming these memory systems. And then when we go through daily levels of stress, then what ends up happening is, is we trigger into those certain thoughts, and then that brings up maybe shame we felt from childhood or all these different things, and that can start to build. So if we're not careful and unfold and start taking off the layers of the onion, we just. That's why in the US and in other developed countries, we have, you know, anxiety and depression is so high because people aren't dealing with it. And then they're looking for escapes in the form of drugs, alcohol, work, workaholism. Yeah, I mean, anything. Sex, whatever it might be. So breath work. So if we simply breathe and relax and process, we become more mindful, and that gives us a moment to be more mindful in that our ego voice in our head and all those thoughts and all those motions circling and what I call release the negative energy and recharge your superpowers battery. Because you all have superpowers. And the only way you're going to do that is to get in touch with yourself. And there's an amazing. Doing breathwork is an amazing time to do that. And so the way that psychology and breath work ties in with physical fitness is oftentimes that pain that you might feel from a workout is literally just your body receiving the exercise as trauma. So you went to do a good workout, but because you're stressed and stuff, the science actually shows that if you're really stressed, you shouldn't go and do a crazy hard, extreme workout. It should actually be much less. It's actually, there's higher risk of heart attack and all kinds of stuff. You go and try to really drive yourself when you're super stressed. But if you go and do like moderate activity, you do breath work, you start to release that negative energy, you bring down that sympathetic fight or flight type of tone of the nervous system, and you start to relax. And now everything becomes better, including exercise.

I love it. I love it. You know, it's funny, I was thinking about the subconscious side or the trauma side. How much of that is subconscious and how much of that is conscious? Like, do we realize we're actually going in and out of that?

Yeah, no, I think most people do not. You know, like one of my favorite books, I've been a personal development junkie for 20 plus years, and my favorite of all time is Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now. That's, you know, if you have never gone through that, that's, that's an amazing, amazing resource.

So are there any techniques or any tactical ways in which we can use breath work to begin to release some of the things that maybe is. Are kind of hidden in our subconscious that you've seen has been successful.

Yeah. The biggest things that I see is anything that you're wanting to achieve. So whether you're, maybe you're wanting to have a better relationship with your spouse, if you want to have a better relationship with your spouse, then what are the affirmations you want to tell yourself? So, you know, maybe you don't. Maybe you have trouble connecting, maybe you have trouble being forgiving. Maybe whatever the issue is. So what you want to do is say a positive mantra. You can say it out louder to yourself and you breathe in that positive mantra and you Visualize breathing in that positive mantra. And then there's always something that's like, yeah, but my dad was always a, you know, whatever.

Yeah.

Or whatever. Right. Yeah. So then how am I going to be able. So whatever. That negative. Then you exhale the negative mantra. So whatever you're wanting to achieve in your life and you know, the mantra you want to absorb, like an affirmation. You say it, you breathe it in, and then you exhale what it. This process is like, very simple, but it's crazily beneficial. Yeah, that's, that's one thing I see that's, that's so helpful. And I think, you know, and I think the big thing too, that, that I've seen time and time, because I've studied psychology quite heavily too, and I've been very invested in that process as well. And so what happens is, you know, I think we all start to see, especially in the US there's a lot of disconnect and people put up walls, you know, and that's, that's the reason why I think they probably drive for certain levels of fitness, like let me build my, my, you know, a lot.

Of more powerful to keep myself from getting injured kind of thing.

Yeah. Like, a lot of buff guys are just scared little boys in gorilla suits, you know.

And so they're building that shell of wall around them. And, and, you know, and, and, you know, the thing is, is, look, you have infinite inherent value. You have infinite inherent value, and we're all part of the same universe, man. So, you know, if you, if you feel like that and you truly, truly believe that you have infinite inherent value and you do breath work and you're using positive mantras, breathing in and exhaling the negative mantras, just doing those, that'll change your life. Like, that'll literally change your internal environment, which then changes your external environment.

Yeah. I believe, I believe in many ways, life is a series of programming, programming others are doing or your environment's doing to you. You would talk about that growing kind of like on the early onset, you know, as a. You're not really choosing your parents, you're not choosing your environment, you're not choosing the city or the, you know, the cultural different, the various things you may have to grow up in and around. And, you know, it never fails that we use certain tonalities or slang or accents or whatever as a relate kind of as we're coming up. And then I had an epiphany about a decade ago that at any given time we're programming like we're being programmed.

Okay.

The choice is, are you programming yourself or are you letting your experiences program you? And I kind of was like, I was pondering that and pondering that and pondering that. And I'm so glad you brought up the example of a tactical of the breath work, because I found that that's been very successful for me. I had. I don't know if much you know about my backstory, but I've had a tremendous amount of difficulty growing up. From homelessness to suicide attempt to all kinds of stuff growing up to get to this place in life. And so much, so much of making that ultimate transition came down to how I was being programmed on a regular basis. Was I believing the. What I refer to as life lies? Was I believing my limitations? And then if I was, how did I separate that and that it came down to telling my. I literally used to look at myself in the mirror and just say, you're worth it, you're worthy. Go after it. You can do this. And I would, you know, and it's funny, when you're staring at yourself in the eyes and you're actually looking at yourself and you're. And you're breathe, doing the breath work, and you're looking at yourself. You know, there's this old saying, the eyes are the windows to the soul.

Yeah.

Like, it's like it like fast forwards the programming thing, and then all of a sudden now you're operating at least at an emotional higher level, a mental higher level. And then I've found that that encourages me to then go in and seek the physical higher level.

So how did you break out of that, Stephen? How'd you go from this level of homelessness and kind of extreme negative mantras, being surrounded by that and breakthrough. What was some of the most pivotal things that happened?

I think my audience knows this already, but one of the most pivotal things that happened to me was I was very fortunate to meet a mentor who was my dad's employer. And he pulled me in his Jeep Grand Cherokee. I was a teenager at the time, and of course, my family had been struggling off and on my entire life. And inside of that Jeep, he said, what's the difference between a rich man and a poor man? And I was like, well, duh, money, of course, man. It was money. He's like, absolutely not. It's the way they think. The next question is, what spurred the idea that there could be more, like the possibility of the curiosity, which was, do you want to think like me or do you want to learn to Think like your father. And this particular man was incredibly wealthy, incredibly generous and he was, for some reason he decided to take, take, you know, a 16 year old kid, 17 year old kid off a framing crew and put him in the jeep to talk to me. And I later learned, now this is a number of years later, but I later learned that one of the reasons he did that was because apparently he saw himself and me, because someone had done it for him.

Oh, wow.

You see what I'm saying? So, you know, I'm a big believer that the greatest purpose in life is serving the person. Used to be where that we all find our calling kind of hidden in that zone. And ultimately that was the catalyst to say, okay, there might be something more. And then that might be something more turned into how to win friends and influence people. And then that, that turned into hung by the tongue. Right. And then that turned into meeting another mentor. And then, you know, now I've, I've had the pleasure and honor of being mentored by some of the most amazing people on the planet. And many of them don't even have platforms. Like there's, there's several that I get mentored by even now that I would choose their mentorship over, over people, some that have established platforms. I've also got people that are mentoring me now that have established platforms. You know, at the end of the day, like your work specifically, I think optimal life performance is a choice. Right. They can either, they can either choose the path and choose to take on the wisdom that you've been sharing all day today, identify it and use it. And you know, one of the best ways I know that they can take advantage of that and I would encourage anyone, anyone listening or watching to follow your programs is to possibly look into your mastermind group that you got cooking. Talk to me a little bit about the mastermind that you've got cooking right now.

Sure, yeah.

We teach people there's 11 different crucial things that should happen during exercise training that most people don't realize. And if you learn these 11 things, what I call, it's kind of technical, but the 11 crucial motor control factors, 11 different things of how to keep your body in alignment during training. So we start with that, that we do a bunch of mindfulness and mindset training along the lines of what we talked about here today. And then we actually teach our clients how to biomechanically optimize their body during training. So instead of just going out and like lifting more weights and doing random different exercises, we actually teach you based on a Million different case studies of meta analysis and the mechanical function of the body. We teach how to align and optimize your mechanical function of your body during exercise and which then leads into higher performance levels of training and endurance and strength. And now you're mechanically functional. Because see, the thing is, is oftentimes when you do exercise, what will happen is the joints get a little misaligned and you start to lose the force through the joint going into what's called shear stress. So the short joint kind of starts to grind and then the execution of the force to the bar, to the platform, to the ground, you lose, you start to lose the strength and it goes into the joint. So we teach clients how not to let that happen. And then what we do is we teach, we take clients through a guided process of analyzing all of their body's major mobility ranges of motion so that they can find out exactly where their unique body is misaligned and show them on how to align their. So now mechanically and strength wise, we're aligning them. Mobility wise, we're aligning them.

Yeah.

Give them mastermind meetings and meetups. We have a bunch of doctors actually in our, in our program now and, and it's an amazing, it's an amazing system because they learn all these things. We do guided sessions so they come online with us and we guide them through the sessions. They're doing the training from the privacy of their own home. They don't have to go to the gym or anything.

So it's really good for people that especially. Or maybe a little, maybe a little self conscious right now. This is a great tool or resource.

Yeah. Perfect for Covid time period. And you know, haven't been to the gym for a while and like they want to do something amazing, get the right start. So. Yeah. And you know what's really cool is we start our system for two weeks. So we have, we have like waiting groups so to speak. And like every about six weeks we'll do a two week, a two week free program.

Oh, that's so cool.

Yeah. So they can jump into the program, get the full education, start for free before they would actually decide if they wanted to go forward or not.

So you know what I've discovered is in order to those that will allow you to test drive something for free often actually have the thing that works.

Yeah.

You know what I'm saying? It's those, it's those that don't want you to test drive it. They just want you to pay the money and whatever. It's oftentimes that's the stuff that doesn't work. I think that's one of the reasons why, why I'm so in love with what you're doing. I think a number of people need it all over the place.

I'm grateful that you accepted the call because this is, I mean, the amount of research that you've put in and the time and energy that you've put in is to me nothing short of miraculous. I mean, there's a ton of information in just aligning these things, putting these, putting these 11 pieces together to say step one, step two, step three, step four, step five. And I feel like the step by step approach is what's missing from the marketplace. Like everybody's a little bit different. Everybody's got their own starting point. Everybody's got their own, you know, various traumas, maybe already, maybe they got a bad elbow right now or knee that's giving them fits or whatever. And it's so good to see a program that actually takes the human right, the person into consideration without trying to force fit them into a mold. And I love the way you and your team do that and you do it with excellence. And for me to you, I'm grateful that you guys put this together. Right. I know, I know spots are limited. I know you guys don't, you know, it fills up really fast. But if, if people from our audience want to check out and find out more about that, where would they go?

You can go to fitnessdoctor.com so go to fitnessdoctor.com you can find out more about our systems. You can message us from there. And that's a great place to start.

Rock on, dude. Well, dude, I'm loving it. I got a couple more questions for you before we wrap up if it's all right. In fact, I know I'm take a 2, 1, 1 other minute from you.

If I can, if I can share with you really quick.

Come on. Yeah, we're buddies now. Let's roll.

So here, so here's another thing I didn't mention is that, you know, this whole thing that we talked about in terms of beginner, intermediate, advanced and like adaptation and perform, we actually have a very detailed process where we take in our clients information and we figure that out for you. So good. Yeah. And it has to do with how fit you were as a kid, which actually has a lot to do with how you should put your push yourself or not as an adult. How fit you've been over last 18 months. Your nutrition, your aerobic fitness scores has to do with your sleep, your daytime energy, your stress. You know what is cool is that for like business owners and entrepreneurs, it's amazing because as your stress levels change and maybe your nutrition gets off or gets on, it's really doing better. The training plan, the training, what we call our physiological dosage, in other words, how much effort you should do in different training zones per week changes to your exact lifestyle that week. So we have a cool. We have a tech that automatically adjusts and keeps telling you exactly what to do for each week unique to your lifestyle. So we actually include that in our Mastermind structure as well.

Dude, that is so freaking cool. That is amazing. Oh my gosh. I was thinking about that earlier on the show. I was like, I said, am I in? I know I'm not a beginner, but am I intermediate? Am I like, where am I at in the process? I'm going to have to take you up on it myself.

I think, man, we'd love to have you, man.

Rock on. Well, I'm going to ask you one more question and I asked this to a lot of my guests that I, that I believe that are having a meaningful impact on the world. And it's a question that's close to my heart. And the question is this, what is the legacy you're trying to leave behind?

Love. My legacy is love. You know, it really is. Yeah. My legacy is love. Yeah.

Yeah. I had kind of enough a rough upbringing and you know, I think that God's given me a gift to understand at a very, very, very deep, innate level what a human needs to have a thriving body in life so that they're not plagued by the trauma and pain. And so, you know, the things that I've shared in terms of not how to put over push yourself, it really has to do with love. Because if you start your, your life and, and your exercise plan and everything you do with loving yourself, which is really what I'm helping people do, I'm teaching them how to love and take care of themselves. Because if you do that, guess what happens? You share more love with everyone else around you. And by doing that, you know, everything gets better. So that's love that I'm even getting teary eyed here, man.

I mean, but people need the real man. People need the real nowadays.

That's really it is sharing, sharing love like that. That's what it's about. I hope everyone, I want to give people a guaranteed foolproof way to make themselves amazing and being able to make fitness and mindset, fitness as well absorbable and Foolproof. Like, all they have to do is decide and it's guaranteed that the results are going to happen. That's my legacy, is to leave that behind for the world to have that greatness.

I love it, man. I love it. We're definitely kindred spirits. You know, we're doing it in different ways. And I have a feeling we'll be joining. Joining voices, voices, forces and voices. I put. I guess we're going to be joining both. Right. Because, you know, there was a study that wasn't. That was done during COVID that said about 97% of people in America that they surveyed would say that they. They're not. They're not really in love with who they are in. In a. In a variety of different ways. They're, you know, they're not. 99, 97. 97 of people would say that they're. There's there. In other words, they would find more wrong with themselves than more right with themselves. And they're the judge. Right. We're. We're our own self. Own self. Critic. And the fact that your programs help people discover who they really are.

Yeah.

Like at an optimal level, I think it's just. I think it's beautiful. I really do.

Thanks, man.

Rock on, dude. Well, Robbie, man, thank you so much for hanging out with me today. I love the conversation. And if you're okay with it, I'm going to have to get to our mutual friends. Like, dude, can Robbie come on? But every three months.

Yeah, absolutely. I would love to, man. This has been a real pleasure.

Rock on. Well, let me ask you this. Where can anybody else find you?

FitnessDoctor.com. that's the best place to find us and reach out. We have our. We have our 101 training systems there and we have our newly launched a mastermind structure where, you know, it used to be about fifteen hundred dollars a month to work with one of my professionals and I charge 4,000amonth to work with me directly. And now we have this mastermind structure which is only around $400 a month, so. Oh, gosh. Yeah, yeah. So we can get like world class level.

So what you're saying is people get direct access, but your CFO's mad at you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

I love it, man. I love it. Well, dude, thank you so much again for hanging out with us. I can't wait to do this again.

Me too, brother. Much.

All right, take care. See you. If you love that interview, go ahead and check out this next one right here.

Just existing existence, sense that we need.

That we need to feel like we're.

Part of something bigger.

Because otherwise, what's it all for?