The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Nsima Inyang, Mutant and Movement Coach — True Athleticism at Any Age, Microdosing Movement, “Rope Flow” as a Key Unlock, Why Sleds and Sandbags Matter, and Much More (#816)

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Nsima Inyang (@nsimainyang), a strength athlete and movement coach and co-host of Mark Bell's Power Project, one of the top fitness podcasts in the world. He is also one of the most freakishly athletic humans I've ever met. He's a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a professional natural bodybuilder (placed top five in the world), and an elite-level powerlifter (750-plus-pound deadlift, etc.)—but what sets him apart is how he blends all those worlds with unconventional training tools like kettlebells, maces, sandbags, and rope flow. After nearly 20 years of lifting and martial arts, Nsima has developed a unique way of helping people build muscle, move better, and stay pain-free for life.

Nsima is also the founder of The Stronger Human, a growing online community focused on strength, movement, and resilience. With hundreds of thousands following his YouTube content, Nsima's mission is simple: help people feel powerful in their bodies again—without relying solely on machines, cookie-cutter workouts, or the fitness industry's outdated rules.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

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Tim Ferriss: Nsima, nice to see you.

Nsima Inyang: You too, man.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks for being here in Austin.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah, thank you.

Tim Ferriss: And I thought we would start with a little setting of the table, defining of terms. What on earth is powerlifting? You are an elite-level powerlifter. What does that mean? What is the sport of powerlifting, and what are your totals, and what does that even mean?

Nsima Inyang: So the sport of powerlifting is concentrated above the three big lifts, the squat, bench, and deadlift, right? The holy grail of traditional lifts. In a meet, you have three attempts at a squat, three attempts at a bench, three attempts at a deadlift in that order. Ideally you're aiming for a nine out of nine. There's a geared powerlifting where you have suits, but that's not as popular nowadays. I did raw powerlifting. Mark Bell, who's the host of the Mark Bell's Power Project, he was a big geared lifter and then he did some raw at the end of his career.

For what I managed to get, I think I got eight out of nine at my last meet. I got a 622 squat, a 396 bench. I wasn't credited at 405, and I never got 405. And a 755-pound deadlift. So my total was 1,758. Not on record, but my gym lifts for powerlifting, still never got the 405 bench, but I managed to squat 645 a little bit after that meet, and I believe I deadlift 775 after that meet.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Nsima Inyang: So, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So you lift.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I lift. And I still like lifting, contrary to popular belief and some of the things that I've put out. People think I don't think lifting is good for you and I don't like lifting. Lifting is good for you. You just be careful.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. I was surprised how much jazzercise you do and how many celery sticks you ate at lunch. I'm kidding.

All right, so you have some bona fides, and actually I was joking earlier, it's not so much joking, reminiscing that the first time I went to Super Training Gym with Mark Bell, who's an old friend, I've known Mark for a long time, amazing character — 

Nsima Inyang: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: — in Sacramento, I saw you doing deadlift workout, and I was just like, “What the hell is happening over there?” For people who may have gone to a gym before, maybe even have put on 45-pound plates, what are we talking in terms of numbers of plates? What does it look like when you're deadlifting your current personal best?

Nsima Inyang: So at that time, I was probably deadlifting in the 700 type of realm, so working sets would be maybe five, six plates. So that's 495, 585 above for sets of triples, doubles, some singles here and there. It's a lot of weight. Not weight I'm working with right now, but it's a lot of weight you're working with when you're focused on powerlifting. You're focused on moving as much weight as possible on a barbell. So yeah, it's a load.

Tim Ferriss: Now, the way that I found you was through a video on YouTube. You have an excellent channel, and very thought-provoking content, and that's what grabbed me. So what was the headline of this video?

Nsima Inyang: The LIE of Traditional Strength Training: Why I Moved On.

Tim Ferriss: The LIE of Traditional Strength Training: Why I Moved On. And I was like, “Well, that guy looks pretty jacked. I wish I had those abs, and I wish I could tan as easily, but boy can dream. Let me at least find out what the lies are,” and clicked through. It was actually sent to me by my friend Kevin Rose, and I certainly owe him a debt of gratitude for that. Maybe you can describe for listeners a video that grabbed my attention, and it was video of a man, I believe it was, with no arms and legs?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. What is this video?

Nsima Inyang: So Serge Gracovetsky is the guy who wrote The Spinal Engine, which is a book that I referenced in that video. It's a video that he showed of a man that's moving through space with no arms and no legs. And when most people think about typical human locomotion, it's thought that the arms and legs are the driver's locomotion. You swing your arms, you swing your legs forward, you move forward through space. Well, this pretty much torso is rotating through space without arms and legs, and you can see the rotation — 

Tim Ferriss: And he's sort of “walking,” right? I mean, he's moving forward in space.

Nsima Inyang: Yes. Yes, yes. But you see that natural figure eight rotation of the spine that's moving him through space. So in that book, The Spinal Engine, and Serge's theory of locomotion is that the spine is the driver of movement and locomotion. The rotation of the spine helps swing the arms and swing the legs through space, and for efficient human movement, you want to maintain access to that spinal engine. 

And what I was getting at at that video wasn't that we shouldn't train with barbells or we shouldn't train in a neutral spine, but with the focus of traditional lifting being in the sagittal plane, usually forward and backwards or within that one plane, we are always training the neutral spine and maintaining that neutral spine through everything we do.

So when you're doing that all the time in the gym, and there's also a lack of breathing, which we'll probably get into later, but you train this system, when you want to potentially go and transfer it into something else, you might not have as much access to that spinal engine as you used to. Over time, that can potentially degrade if you actually, maybe you never really had that, and it gets worse by training in the gym. And the examples I gave in that video is examples from sports that you see this type of training a lot in. It's powerlifting, bodybuilding, Olympic lifting.

Tim Ferriss: You're talking about the sagittal plane stuff?

Nsima Inyang: The sagittal plane.

Tim Ferriss: Now, can you just help people visualize what that means? Sagittal being like, let's just say you're standing in a very narrow hallway with walls on either side, and you're bending forward, you can extend backwards.

Nsima Inyang: Divide your body in half, like in half here from the nose, right?

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So you've got a line going from your forehead down your nose, splitting your body in half.

Nsima Inyang: That is the sagittal plane.

Tim Ferriss: Got it.

Nsima Inyang: Right? So when we think of a squat, when we think of a deadlift, when we think of — a forward lunge is also still in the sagittal plane even though it's a unilateral movement, right? These are all done in a sagittal plane with a neutral spine, and these are, most of the movements you think about doing a pull-up, a push-up, right? The frontal plane divides the body in halves from front and back, so we would imagine from the head to the toe on the side of the body. That would be something like a Cossack squat, lunging to the side, a lateral lunge. Those would be the frontal plane. And the transverse plane of movement would divide the body in half from our torso, our legs down, torso up. So that would have this rotation of the spine.

Those would be those three planes, but then we can get into other ideas of rotation, which is the things you get into with rope, et cetera. But gym movements are primarily done when people are training in the sagittal plane with a neutral spine. There isn't much flexion or rotation of the spine. You're strengthening this neutral spine, which is good, but overdoing that can degrade the ways that you want to be able to move as a human being.

Tim Ferriss: And the way that can show up, I mean, this is very personal for me, and part of the reason it was very attention-grabbing is, as we've discussed earlier today — if people want to get a good laugh, you can watch me trying rope flow and throwing around a pink kettlebell in a giant sombrero. We may link to that.

Nsima Inyang: I wish they made the pink kettlebell another color, because I was like, “Man, this doesn't — yeah.”

Tim Ferriss: It was kind of perfect. It was kind of perfect. So if people want a good laugh, we'll link to that as well as our earlier movement practice. But the story that I shared with you is three years of chronic back pain. And pretty localized to low back. Who knows? I'm sure there's some referral happening. But by and large, lumbar, this sort of grand central station of musculature called the quadratus lumborum, the QL, and external obliques and all this stuff. I basically get locked and spasmed in the low back, and that can be triggered in any number of ways.

Now, on top of that, when I watched this video, it made me think back to when I was much younger and actually ran cross country, and you have that contralateral movement, right? It's like if you walk, it's like, okay, your left shoulder moves forward as your right leg and, I guess, probably hip move forward at the same time, that contralateral movement. And to emphasize that, you had video in your video, so footage in your video, showing what everyone has seen, which is someone who's done a lot of lifting who's walking down the street and they have no contralateral movement, or I shouldn't say they have no contralateral movement, but it looks like their upper bodies are frozen.

Nsima Inyang: It's a block.

Tim Ferriss: It's a block. And you could potentially say, well, that person is muscle-bound, but that's not totally accurate in the sense that, correct me if I'm oversimplifying this, but it seems like they are plane-bound because their movement patterns are so limited that — of course, what you train for, you're going to get more of. So they have done one piece that is maybe, let's call it necessary but not sufficient if you want athletic movement.

And you talked about also resurrecting or improving your own running, right? And just seeing the difference and not having the expectation that I'm going to become a competitive cross country runner. But for a very, very long time, and this goes back to even like 2004, 2005, when I was in Argentina doing tango. Trust me, there's a tie-in here. And a bunch of people would laugh at me and they would be like, “You have cintura de pollo,” or “cinta de pollo,” which would be like “You have the waist of a chicken,” which if you try to think of a chicken, doesn't rotate, doesn't rotate, and in tango they want you to disassociate the upper and lower body, and I had a lot of trouble with that. So they were like, “You have the waist of a chicken.”

Now, I would like to overcome this waist of a chicken situation — and watch the video. One of the exercises you have in that video is rope flow, which I want you to talk about, but I'll give people just a teaser, which is, saw the video. I was like, “Logically, this makes a lot of sense to me. Biomechanically, it makes a lot of sense.” It's addressing a deficit that I have, but it's a scary deficit because when I have tried to really embrace rotation before and the sheer forces involved, very often I either overdo it even with very low dosing, and in some cases the back spasms, I'm out of commission for a week or two, like I really can't sleep. And so I've really stayed away from it.

But you showed this rope flow, and I was actually visiting Jake Muise, who's been on this podcast. He's the CEO of Maui Nui Venison. And we went to this outdoor gym in Hawaii that they'd put together for the team over there, and there was a rope. I was like, “Huh, look at that. Okay, let me try it.” And I felt so good after training. I mean, training's a bit of an exaggeration. After playing around with the rope. And I was like, “Okay, I want to pay attention to this,” right? Because when I was really young, it's like, “Okay, let's do some metabolic conditioning,” like if I'm not puking into a bucket, I didn't train properly or hard enough. But then I started training with people like Jerzy Gregorek, who we spoke about, amazing world record holder in Olympic weightlifting, at least he was, masters, and other folks where you actually can feel better after the workout than you did beforehand.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So what is this rope flow as an example, and how does it demonstrate or develop the kind of stuff that we're alluding to?

Nsima Inyang: I'm really happy that David Weck, he's the guy who started, invented rope flow. He has — 

Tim Ferriss: The progenitor.

Nsima Inyang: The progenitor. That's on air, David. Go in and clip that, David. He's going to love that. He's the one who developed, popularized, that got the moves going. I mean, he came onto our show and he showed these videos back in like these 2006, 2005-style videos of him doing rope flow on like a roof in, I don't know, San Jose or something, or San Diego, and he came and he showed it to us maybe — 

Tim Ferriss: On a roof.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I'll bookmark that for later, yeah.

Nsima Inyang: I've got to send it to you. David's a character. He's great. And I've learned so much from him, by the way. I love that guy. Continuing to learn from him, too. But back to rope flow. He came and showed it to us maybe four years ago. And when he mentioned it initially, I think sometimes when you have a certain amount of experience in training or whatever, you hear something new and you're like, “Okay, trendy,” or, “What's swinging a rope through space really going to do for you?” But through having so many people and talking to and learning from so many people that have changed the way I move and have affected me positively — 

Tim Ferriss: Can I pause for one second?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Don't lose your train of thought. Because you do a lot outside of the gym, or I should say outside of the weight training gym, a very, very serious dedicated jiu-jitsu practitioner, which is not purely in the sagittal plane, right?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: There's a lot more going on.

Nsima Inyang: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Nsima Inyang: Jiu-jitsu for me was really fun to start. We could talk about that later. But that's the sport I started doing because I realized that all the lifting I was doing had me feeling very stiff and unathletic. So I got into jiu-jitsu about nine or 10, almost 10 years back to try to see if I could combat the way my body was feeling, which had its own issues. But rope flow, when David told me about it initially, I was apprehensive. I got a rope, I started doing it, got frustrated, dropped it, kind of like the girl in the park that we met today. You get a rope, you do it for a little bit, you don't know what to do, you drop it.

Tim Ferriss: How did he sell it to you? Do you remember what the pitch was?

Nsima Inyang: He talked about all the benefits and he showed it. He even showed me some in the gym, him and his head coach, Chris Chamberlin. But it didn't necessarily stick because I didn't have a structure to it. So what I ended up doing was I ended up just looking at a bunch of people that I could see on YouTube, I went through some of the videos that David sent me, and I just tried to practice it a little bit each day. Frustration would set in though because the flow wasn't happening. It's called rope flow because I think people ask, “Are there sets, reps, et cetera?” No, you just go, you rotate, you move, you put the rope away, you go do what you do, right? It's not like a workout. It's play.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it's closer to, like, slacklining.

Nsima Inyang: Exactly. It's play. It's a flow practice. But once things started clicking and I started seeing how it was affecting my jiu-jitsu, and in my jiu-jitsu, it's inherently an asymmetrical practice, the martial art. You have a dominant side and a non-dominant side, so you'll tend to do things, whether it's sweeps, whether it's takedowns, et cetera — 

Tim Ferriss: Guard pass.

Nsima Inyang: Guard passing. You go that one direction, you grease that dominant groove, and your non-dominant side ends up being just this goofy mess, right? But I started realizing that — 

Tim Ferriss: Oh, that's just your non-dominant side? No, I'm kidding. I was saying that about myself. I'm not going to spar you, no, no.

Nsima Inyang: No, but seriously, but what slowly started happening was I started noticing like a scissor sweep I would really do to my right side, I'm now, “Ooh, that left side rotation felt pretty powerful. I don't usually drill that. What happened there?” Passes to my left side started feeling better. And the reason that was happening was because when doing rope flow, it's a symmetrical practice. 

You learn to rotate using your spine on your dominant side, but you get that rotation on your other side, and what happens is, as you do this back and forth, naturally you want to make your non-dominant side feel as good as your dominant. So now your rotation with your spine to the left side of your body or your non-dominant side starts to feel just as good as you're dominant and you're moving with more symmetry through everything that you do.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And let me add something just with kind of beginner's eyes, now that I have a PhD in rope flow after our workout this morning.

Nsima Inyang: Let's go.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I would just say that one of the benefits of something like rope flow from a development of symmetrical abilities perspective is that you get a lot of reps, right? Because you could do something in the gym that's aimed at symmetry, but how many reps and how many steps are you actually going to do if you're programming properly, right? And at what point is your technique going to degrade, where you might be doing more harm than good? Whereas with the rope flow, it's like it doesn't feel good, you're going to know because it's going to be janky. You might whack yourself in the ankle, whack yourself in the back of the head like I did, whereas if it feels fluid, you're going to know it feels fluid and you get a lot of reps.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So you have the benefit of volume on your side in developing that water fuel.

Nsima Inyang: Mm-hmm. So there's that benefit of volume, but at its most basic level, you learn to navigate that rope, move it through space while using your spine as the main mover. You learn to do that. Initially, it's a very handsy thing, you're using your hands a lot, but then you learn to follow the weight of the rope and use your spine both sides, right? You notice if you walk after, you now have this natural swagger that starts to happen when you're walking. You're moving through space with that spinal engine.

Tim Ferriss: And I'm going to try to just paint a visual for people when they're imagining rope flow, because some people, I imagine, are not going to really have a video in their mind as we're talking. This is going to age me, but I'll try it anyway. So if you imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger, Conan the Barbarian, iconic scene with the sword, with the sword, swinging it on either side, okay, you've got it, you've got a sword in front, now he's swinging it to either side. Okay, now imagine instead of the sword, you have a rope that is whatever this is, an, I don't know, inch and a half, two inches thick, something like that, like a heavy-ish rope. And so now imagine you're swinging this rope around, but instead of just using your hands, let's just say you bring your hands in closer to your chest, and now you're creating that figure eight with your shoulders, and that is then swinging the blade aka the rope, right? So just imagine that kind of movement. Is that fair enough?

Nsima Inyang: Yes, that's fair, that's fair. And along with that, it's not just the spine, it's the weight shift of the feet, because now you're shifting from one side to the other, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, right? And one of the reasons why I believe it's helped so much with my jiu-jitsu, because jiu-jitsu, it's a very rotational practice when you're trying to leverage an opponent from one side or the other, is because my weight shift on both sides of my body has improved from my feet.

So this is one of the reason why when you start to do more rope flow and you start to get more of the underhand side, the underhand practice — you've hit a boxing bag before, right? You've done that type of work. Go do that type of work again and do some uppercuts, do some hooks, but remember the things that you've learned. You're learning how to generate power and rotation from the ground through your fists. There's so many people that I've seen now that have literally said, “It's improved my punching,” or, “I actually know how to throw a punch because I've learned how to swing this rope through space.”

Tim Ferriss: But also like you were explaining and the underhand — oh, boy. Okay, so guys, we're talking about the Conan and the Barbarian thing. We won't belabor this. We'll obviously have some video linked if you're listening to audio. But imagine that you have the sword kind of — forget the sword. You have the rope. It is behind you, right? You're dragging a rope, let's just say, with two hands on one side. It's a thick rope. And then you pull it up and the rope is taking this sort of upward trajectory, like a diagonal. That would be, I know it's not the best description, but that would be like the underhand, whereas if you're bringing it over your shoulder like a whip or something, that would be the overhand.

Nsima Inyang: You went to the whip again, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: What was that?

Nsima Inyang: You went to the whip again, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: You know? You know? Yeah, it's — yeah, you know. This is why you don't go to your BDSM dungeon the night before your podcast. It just bleeds over, guys. I'm sorry. All right, guilty as charged.

So what appeals to me, and I mean, this is my enthusiasm, is outstripping my experience, that's probably the story of my life, but what the little that I've seen of say rope flow as one tool in the toolkit, part of what appeals to me about it is that like my experience early on with Pavel and kettlebells, there is this weird like what-the-fuck transfer where people who, let's say, do a bunch of kettlebell work suddenly have better running times, and they're like, “What? What do you mean? What the hell is going on?” Right? Or because of the thicker diameter, over time they don't even realize it, but suddenly the limiting factor, which was their grip on the deadlift, has been not entirely removed, but improved dramatically, right?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And when I looked at the rope flow and I'm like, “Okay.” Forget about the rope, right? It's a tool for engaging these other planes of movement. And if done in, we were talking about this earlier today as well, not necessarily as an hour-long workout where you're just like dying inside, but rather like flossing your teeth or getting up and taking a shower, it's like, okay, you take a shower once a day, like rope flow once a day, and over time the adaptations that would take place. And one thing I didn't tell you, because I did confess that this is very self-serving as a meeting because I was like, “I really want to dial in my programming,” recognizing there are things I want to do in the future, which are not breaking powerlifting records, ain't going to happen, it's definitely not beating you in jiu-jitsu, because I'll get all of my appendages snapped off, don't need that, but — 

Nsima Inyang: I would never do that to you.

Tim Ferriss: Unless — I appreciate that. It wouldn't take very much. But there are things I would really like to do. I would like to compete in more sports, even if it's just in a club capacity. I would love to get back on the tennis courts and get back to playing tennis. And this might require some elbow surgery, but get back to rock climbing. And also, one thing I didn't mention, but probably is the thing that I would tie most directly to the rope flow, I love working on pads in Muay Thai. And it is such a good workout. I'm not going to get yet another goddamn concussion, I don't need any more of those, and I would really like to get to the point again where I can train on pads hard for lots of rounds with a really, really skilled trainer. I just love that experience. And I'm so bored of stationary biking for my endurance work. So bored. I mean, God bless these tools, but still, it's pretty boring.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So where should we go? There are lots of tools in the toolkit. Let me ask you this for people who might be wondering, and guys, I'm not getting an affiliate commission on rope sales here, like I have no dog in this fight, but it seems to be a very versatile tool, and there are lots of versatile tools, but it is also a tool that is very hard to injure yourself with. And for me, it's like weightlifting, and a lot of training, number one, unless it's a sport, is about injury minimization first and foremost.

Nsima Inyang: It should be.

Tim Ferriss: So if I add in strength training that increases the likelihood or endurance training, that increases the likelihood of me getting injured, scratch it, it's out. And then I'll take my risks where I need and want to take my risks, like skiing, but I don't want to take it in the weight room. How long does it take for people to see some benefits from something like rope flow? And what have you seen in students and people who try this and stick with it for a couple of weeks?

Nsima Inyang: Mm-hmm. Literally, I've had people that are in the Stronger Human community that literally after day one they're finding that they have better balance walking up the steps, right? And these were people in their fifties and sixties. They're like, “I'm walking upstairs and I feel more balanced.” Why? Because you're shifting your weight from one side to the other in a more efficient manner, because the rope has taught you how to do that. You'll feel better rather immediately. Now, the question is like how deep do you want to take it, how many of these movements do you want to learn, because I think that as a — Kelly, I've seen Kelly Starrett start posting more about rope flow, and he's been talking about it in the form is just being a warm-up before you do any of your lifting movements, as a good rotational warm up, and that's great. So it can just be used for that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: But I think there is a power that comes with the practice. When today we linked around four movements together, the overhand, the propeller, the dragon, and the underhand — 

Tim Ferriss: What was it called when I donkey punched myself in the back of the head with the rope? We should give that one a name. That's the Ferriss.

Nsima Inyang: That should be called Ferriss. But the one thing I want to mention about this too is this. Honestly, I look at rope flow as kind of like its own internal martial art. Do you know internal martial arts?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nsima Inyang: So when it comes to internal martial arts, like I think tai chi would be considered one, bagua would be considered an internal martial art, when it comes to these martial arts, they're not necessarily external martial arts like jiu-jitsu, boxing, kickboxing, Muay Thai that's based on the output, based on the damage you're going to give to an opponent. The focus is more so on breathing, mastering the movement, linking the movements together. You're more focused on what's going on internally and what your body is doing through space. Now, there are forms, like aspects of tai chi that can be applied to combat, but when you see a lot of older people doing tai chi, it's this flowing movement practice that gets the body feeling better afterwards than when it began.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: And the reason why I see rope — 

Tim Ferriss: In a lot of ways, just having spent a good amount of time, like in early mornings in China and so on, it's kind of like, people are going to crucify me for this, but it's kind of like Chinese yoga in a sense, like they are moving through all of these different planes of movement, they're doing it every day, and even the kind of rotational like kidney slapping stuff, there are some similarities — 

Nsima Inyang: Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: — when you look at rope flow and then you look at what these 80, 90-year-olds are doing in China in the park every morning.

Nsima Inyang: And they're 80 and 90, dude. That's the thing that's so amazing to me, like you're still moving like that at 80 and 90. You're independent. I would even assume that a lot of these people probably feel minimal amounts of pain. They feel a level of freedom in their bodies at that age, right? And that's kind of how I look at rope flow when you learn to link things together. So we learned a few movements today, but there are so many more movements that you learn.

And the cool thing is that you do some of this stuff this week, Tim, you're going to wake up and it's just going to be there. You don't have to think about the movement now. You just go outside, you do it, it's no thought, right? It turns into a flow. It turns into a flow state practice, right? That's where I think the strength is. Because that feels like play. It no longer feels like a frustrating rope flow practice, although when you start learning new moves, there's a level of frustration. I still hit myself. That eye hit you did today where you knocked your eye, I do that all the time when I'm learning new shit. The rope will still do that to me. Because the rope teaches you how to rotate. You'll learn how to follow its weight and it'll teach you how to rotate better by hitting you by not rotating cleanly. When you clean that up, then it rotates cleanly to the left and cleanly to the right. And then again, when you link all this stuff together, it's play. It's a flow state play that always feels better afterwards.

Tim Ferriss: Now, for people listening, and for me, oftentimes when I say for people listening, it's just because I want to ask the question for myself, I am the type of person, I know myself well enough at this point, I am almost certainly not going to become the Muhammad Ali of rope flow or the Fred Astaire of rope flow. It's just not going to happen, right? What are the bread-and-butter minimum effective dose, maybe people can find this, you can point them to where they can find these things, but are there two or three movements where you're like, okay, if you were just going to do five minutes a day or 10 minutes a day, maybe it's two times five, to start your day and to end your day, what are the bread-and-butter moves where it's like, if you only did this, there would be a lot of upside?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: What are those?

Nsima Inyang: That would be, first off, I have a full foundations rope flow course that is free. It's like 50-plus videos of it. It's at skool.com/thestrongerhuman. It is free, okay? Now, overhand race and chase, underhand race and chase, propeller or dragon, which is what we did today.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Did I do race and chase or no?

Nsima Inyang: You did, yeah. The overhand race and chase, you did the underhand race and chase.

Tim Ferriss: Race and chase is walking while you're doing?

Nsima Inyang: It's not walking. You can just stand there. But you added walking into it, you added a gait pattern into it, right? So overhand race and chase, underhand race and chase, propeller, link those three together, you have a flow from side to side, right? And that's the basics, right? You learn to link those together, you'll feel better.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, okay.

Nsima Inyang: But again, I think that — you mentioned you're not going to become the Muhammad Ali of rope floor or whatever. But one thing that I think is good to understand is we've got decades for this, bro. What is three to five or 10 minutes a day for a few years? How good are you going to be at this a year from now, just for five minutes? You're going to look pretty fucking good. My mom's probably listening, she didn't want me to curse.

Tim Ferriss: Sorry, Mom. I'm going to forget and I'm going to curse myself. You can blame it on my bad influence.

Nsima Inyang: But five years from now doing it, five minutes, you'll probably do it longer because you're going to naturally just get better at it, you're going to just be moving really well with this from this minimal input. Again, it can be a practice that beats you up, especially because you can get a workout from it. It doesn't have to be that. It doesn't have to be something that beats you up, but if you want to go intense with it, use a heavier rope. You can.

Tim Ferriss: How much do ropes cost, for people listening, because I haven't even asked that? I should have asked that. To get something you can use for this, because I do find a little bit of heft to be helpful. We started with a very lightweight, light rope, which was almost like a lariat, like a lasso. It was very small in diameter. How much does it cost to get the Magna XL?

Nsima Inyang: Magnum. The Magnum XL, it's not [inaudible 00:32:16].

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. How much does one of those cost?

Nsima Inyang: I think the Magma XL is — 

Tim Ferriss: Oh, it's Magma.

Nsima Inyang: Magma, not Magnum. No, it's Magma. Your mind wants a Magnum.

Tim Ferriss: I know, I know, I know. It's like [inaudible 00:32:27].

Nsima Inyang: It's Magma. It's red, Magma.

Tim Ferriss: Some people can't be saved. I got it, Magma. Okay, God, I screwed that up twice. Okay, Magma XL, and this probably, we were bouncing around. So probably the rope itself probably weighs like two pounds, two, three pounds.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Maybe less, all right. And how much does that cost?

Nsima Inyang: That one's like $80, I think.

Tim Ferriss: $80.

Nsima Inyang: This is the thing though. If you want to just get yourself a rope from Home Depot and cut it and make a rope, that's fine. You can work that. You can even work with an exercise band you might have at home. You can mess with some of this using a belt if you don't want to get anything, if you just want to do the bare bones stuff. But certain ropes, like the Magma XL, the RMT rope, which I think is like 40 or $45, there's a feedback that you get from the rope because it's very smooth when you're rotating it. That feels better than a Home Depot rope. Doesn't mean you can't use a Home Depot rope, or a rope from a boating store. Boating store ropes are actually pretty good quality.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I bet.

Nsima Inyang: Boating stores are really good quality rope, so you could get something from there, cut it up, make your rope, you're good. So that's the thing. It's a practice that if you don't want to spend anything on it, you don't have to. Or if you want to spend nothing or very minimal amounts of money, you can do that. But then all you need is your rope, some sunlight, or you can do it indoors if you want to, and you're going to feel better. 

And one thing I want to stress is this. I got this from, do you know who Bill Maeda is, out of Hawaii? Have you seen his — 

Tim Ferriss: I have seen his videos.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah, Bill's the man, man. I love Bill. And we had him on a show a few years back, and people have probably been saying this forever, but when he told me and when he started speaking this way, it really resonated with me, where he calls his workout each day, he calls it a practice. It's his practice.

Tim Ferriss: For people who don't know who this is, how would you describe Bill?

Nsima Inyang: He's a lifting samurai. That's how I would personally describe Bill.

Tim Ferriss: How old is Bill at this point?

Nsima Inyang: 55 or 56.

Tim Ferriss: And that guy is unbelievably shredded and strong.

Nsima Inyang: I think he will be 56 this year. Strong, shredded, Bill has a level of also curiosity that I admire. Because Bill has had so much fitness experience through the years, he's done so much. He's had a lot of positive and negative experiences, but he's also someone that as much as he knows, he's continuously open to learning more and refining his knowledge and what he teaches his clients and the people he works with. And that's one thing I really admire about him because he's 50-something years old. He looks amazing. He does well, but he's also a sponge.

And that's something that I want to, ideally, I hope when I'm 55 or 56, I want to remain a sponge. I don't want to lose that. But he calls his movement, his workouts a practice, because he changes it up each day. He does like 5, 10, 15 minutes of movement, and that's his daily practice. And that's the way I look at my movement practice. When I go into a gym, I have in my Notes app, I have just certain things that I might be doing during that day. Or I'll know what I did last week, so I'll be, okay, let's maybe add this in or do something else. But I keep things around so that I get a general daily minimum amount of movement in no matter what.

So I have certain flow movement that I'll get in. I have a club by my desk. I have a sandbag by my workstation. I have a sandbag in my garage. I have rings in my kitchen. I have things spent throughout the house and throughout my space, so that when I go by them, I'm encouraged to lift them. I'm encouraged to lift the bag. I'm encouraged to swing the rope. I'm encouraged to swing the club. I do all these things on a daily basis, that has my body feeling better and better as I continue to progress at the meat and potatoes of what I'm really trying to push forward.

So I have these daily minimums, which is just my practice, these are just things I do. And then I'll have certain things that might be the workout, whether it's the jiu-jitsu or the thing I do in the gym or my garage, or maybe I go out to the field and I do some stuff, some extra work. But I have those daily minimums that are just part of my practice that just make sure that I'm always making progress, so that the only time that I do something isn't just in my workout, I want my body to be able to do these things at any time.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. And I mean that underscores also some of the stuff that I saw and you explained in the video, and you have a lot of videos, this just happens to be the one that initially caught my attention. But if someone let's just say is training the big three lifts or whatever they happen to do, and they're hitting them once a week, or who knows? And then they're not getting really any movement practice between those. It's like of course they're going to be very constrained to a certain plane of movement, certain types of movements.

Well, let me bring this back to me. I've been watching Conan O'Brien Must Go. If people haven't seen that travel show, you should watch it, because that's basically Conan's move. So I'll copy Conan here. We were talking about this back issue that's been plaguing me, and how I am actually back to a point now as of just a few days ago where I'm loading more in terms of, let's just say back squat, which is a very open question as to whether to include it or not, and other things, making a lot of progress ever since really surgically trying to focus on glute exercises, which seems self-evident.

But I could give people a long list of stories about why that's been a challenge over the last three years, but have made progress and want to get back to, let's just say, doing five rounds of heavy work on Thai pads. And who knows, maybe even doing some jiu-jitsu, although I have a lot of PTSD from my joint injuries. So what are some of the things you would potentially suggest if you were getting me started with programming, and I'm sure you'd have to do an assessment and so on, but there are some of the things we talked about over lunch. We don't have to talk about these, but sandbag, box squat, recognizing that I'm very apprehensive about the low back, because if I have to sit for instance on a hardwood bench for 30 minutes and I don't have any padding, my back could be seized up for a week, which means basically no sleep.

So I'm scared of having that experience, and I recognize that if I don't load and work on my body, not just the low back in isolation, it's never going to be fixed or improve. So how would you think about training with respect to this?

Nsima Inyang: Okay, so I'd have to rewind it, and we talked a little bit about this earlier, but I'd have to rewind things back to first off, the way someone breathes through the way that they move daily, every single day. Because when you injure something initially, you injure your lower back, which has happened to me many a time in the past. When something happens that aggravates the area, you tend to hold your breath. So when you bend to grab something, you'll [breathe in and hold your breath]. And then when you feel safe enough, you'll exhale and start breathing again. Some people do this without even realizing. They'll go down to tie their shoes and they have breath holds without realizing they have breath holds. It's just an ingrained movement pattern, that they bend, hold their breath, come up, boom. They get out of their car, they're holding their breath.

Many people have instances through their day that the breath is being held. And the problem with that, the reason why that's a really big issue is because when you hold your breath, your tissues will seize up to keep everything in place. The Valsalva maneuver, when lifters lift heavy loads and sometimes not heavy loads, is meant to increase that intra-abdominal pressure so that there is no movement of the spine when you're dealing with the load. That's what it's meant to do. But also there's limited movement when you're holding your breath. So the thing that I would want to get you doing is first to make sure that you learn how to breathe while doing everything.

That doesn't mean just breathe when you're doing everything through the house, et cetera. Even when you're going to go pick something up and you find, “Okay, I'm going to hold my breath when I do this.” Can you slow that movement down in a way that you can try to breathe while doing it so that you're not ingraining that pathway of hold breath and do the thing? How can we do the thing and breathe? Because when we're breathing, the body feels safe. If you're breathing and doing stretching, or you're breathing or doing anything when it comes to movement, you move more freely. Once you hold your breath, your body goes into this time to try to stay safe. Same thing in jiu-jitsu. When a new person starts jiu-jitsu, the first thing that you have to tell them to do is breathe. You remember.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nsima Inyang: You're on bottom side control or you're in some type of position, and immediately you're like, [sounds of strain], you're trying to produce force and you're holding your breath while doing so because you don't feel safe enough to produce that force while breathing. What this is going to do is it's going to help us to get those tissues moving in the way that they should. The body's going to feel safe so those tissues are going to start moving well, and we won't have excess tension throughout the whole system. And this is why I would tell somebody with whatever lifting that they're doing right now.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, tell me.

Nsima Inyang: Let's lower the loads that we're working with and learn how to use the breath while lifting, pushing, pulling, hinging. Let's learn to use the breath while doing all of this. What this means is when we are in our concentric phase of the lift, whether it's a push when lifting, whether it's a pull when pulling, whether it's hinging or coming up from a squat, we're exhaling. Let's just use the squat as an example rather than a bunch of things. The squat, inhale when you're going down to the hole, exhale when you're coming out of the hole. Let's learn how to do that. Because in life, if we're going to squat down to the ground, we shouldn't hold our breath when going down to the ground, but many people do.

We should just, whether it's inhale when getting down there and then breathe normally, we should be able to do that. And what I want to try to help you do is I want you to make this a global phenomenon. So you're having very minimal or no, unless they're purposeful breath holds, you're not holding your breath during the day. There's other benefits outside of this where you're not going to feel as stressed, because a lot of people, when they are looking at their phone or they start thinking of something that brings a level of anxiety, inherently they start to hold their breath and they don't realize it.

This is something that's going to help you get rid of global tension outside of what you're doing in the gym, which is going to help you just feel better overall. And this isn't something you deal with in just a day, this is a habit change. If you want to change the way you do this when you're lifting, you must lower your loads. You don't do this with maximal loads. You don't do this with heavy squats, heavy deadlifts. You don't do this when lifting heavy sandbags, or even kettlebells, if you're not used to this. You work on doing this with light load, and just like you progressed before with heavier loads, you progressively overload your ability to lift while breathing over time, you can progressively work with heavier and heavier load.

Tim Ferriss: So assuming I'm working on this.

Nsima Inyang: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: I'm working on the breathing. Tim, breathe. All right. My garage is a gym. I may not have all the requisite tools at the moment, it's got all the basics. What are, whether it is me or others, but what are some of the non-negotiable exercises that you might prescribe for someone in my position, where it's like, “Okay, I remember back in the day, I like to consider myself pretty athletic.” My enthusiasm outstrips my structural integrity on some regular occasions, and I would like to train for the long game, but also I would like to be very strong. I would like to be, for me. For me, I would like to be very strong. I still know I can develop that capacity. It's just a matter of strengthening or catering to the low back so that I'm not terrified every time I set foot in the gym of having some spasm that cost me two weeks of sleep. So we were talking about, well, let me ask you a question. So back squat or no back squat?

Nsima Inyang: For you?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: Depends on the type of back squat we're talking.

Tim Ferriss: All right, because we had box squats come up, and I had some questions and concerns around that. We talked about sandbags. How would you think about lower body, I guess it could be full body, but lower body loading for someone like me?

Nsima Inyang: I would want you to focus a little bit more on unilateral before we do more bilateral axial spine back squat loading. So something like different forms of lunges. The ATG split squat is a really good money movement. Do you know what the ATG split squat is?

Tim Ferriss: I do not know what that is.

Nsima Inyang: ATG split squat is something popularized by Ben Patrick. Deep knee flexion of the front knee, the back foot has a large amount of hip extension. So you're getting hip extension of the back leg, deep knee flexion of the front leg. So you're building a level of strength through long ranges in motion with that movement. So those ATG split squats, different types of lunges. I would have you focus on that instead of the traditional actual loaded back squat for a while. I'd also say that not that bilateral squatting is bad, but if you do, maybe you start learning how to do that with a sandbag. So use a kettlebell or a sandbag with that. First you need to learn how to lift a sandbag, because when you lift a sandbag, the load is in front of you. Your spine is going to be in a fairly neutral position, but you're going to have a little bit more of slight maybe flexion in that spine. And you're going to learn how to breathe against that load while squatting down with it in front of you.

So that could be a 50, 100-pound sandbag. You'll probably start there and you'll probably move forward with that over time. But the thing is is you're not directly loading that spine right now as you're doing, you're not causing all of that compression. Not that compression is bad, but it seems as if you are a bit compression sensitive when it comes to squatting patterns because of what's going on with your back.

Now, if you did want to work on some bilateral squatting, which I don't think is a horrible idea, I would probably say if you wanted to work with a barbell, don't squat to full deep knee flexion depth. Let's stay away from that for a while. So let's do barbell back squats to a box, making sure you're maintaining tension as you go down to the box and coming up. So you're not just plopping down to the box, sitting back, losing that tension, then coming out. You're maintaining that tension while breathing, and you're working maybe 40, 50%, 50, maybe 60% of your one rep max, where it's like you can actually master the movement without stressing about the load, but over time you can inch that load up in a safe manner.

Tim Ferriss: And is the reason for that, just because this might help other people. So I injured myself three years ago doing a workout that did not feel like an injury at the time. It was back squatting, but I was basically going ass to heels, and I suspect in retrospect that I was doing like a little butt wink where I was starting to, to make it simple, just like round the lower back in the bottom ranges. And I think it was that kind of bending of the paperclip that caused that initial acute problem.

Nsima Inyang: That was a real squat, bro. That's how you're supposed to, that's a real squat, bro. You don't squat ass to grass in a squat.

Tim Ferriss: So the box would, let's just say, would it be just above parallel, something like that?

Nsima Inyang: It would be above parallel right at 90 degrees.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, basically helps to mitigate the risk of that.

Nsima Inyang: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Would you do something similar with the sandbag or would you do that from the floor? What does the range of motion look like?

Nsima Inyang: You can squat down to to it. You could squat down to a box or you could squat all the way down with a light load if you feel comfortable. I would suggest that in your situation, you inch that down over time. Because what you could do is if you have multiple sandbags you could squat down to the other sandbag, or you could squat down to a box. And then over time lower that height where you feel comfortable. Just make sure as you're squatting down, when you hit depth, you're maintaining tension.

When I say maintaining tension, by the way, I mean you're not totally just sitting on the box, limping out and then coming back up. You're exhaling or inhaling as you go down to the box, you're still maintaining that position, and then you drive up. You're not losing that tension that you've created in your legs, your feet especially as you go down. You're maintaining it. So you don't lose — because the reason why people do the Valsalva maneuver is so when they hold their breath, they can maintain structural integrity of the spine, rib cage over hips, et cetera. When you're braced and you can't move, what's keeping that integrity is the air that you've stored in your abdomen when you're squatting down.

When you're breathing while doing this, whether you're inhaling while you're going down and exhaling when coming up, the structural integrity is you are maintaining it. You're maintaining it while you're breathing. So when you're breathing, you do have more room for that to happen, but you should be able to maintain that structure without the breath. When I deadlifted 755, I didn't use a belt. Main reason I didn't use a belt is I wanted to make sure that my structure could deadlift this weight without the need of outside assistance. The weight belt, when you're using it, is supposed to, when you push against it, increase the amount of intra-abdominal pressure you're able to create and help you maintain that. But when I did that, the reason why I didn't use the belt is because it didn't make sense to me to develop all this strength if I couldn't do it on my own. So when now we're breathing while doing this.

Tim Ferriss: Very Constantine, Constantinos. Remember that guy back in the day?

Nsima Inyang: A lot of Russians did that, though, a lot of Russians would do that. But I think that there's a knowledge there, because you want to be able to do all of this stuff on your own. Yes, it can add some, but having to need to use a belt to do everything to maintain your structure I don't think is the best idea. Now, when we're using the breath, we're not getting that extra pressure that it helps create, but we're training ourselves to always be able to maintain the right structure and maintain the right amount of tension while breathing when lifting weights. And the reason why we're doing that is because life wants us to do that.

When we're going through life, when we're fighting, we're not holding our breath. And I know that some people will say, “Well, this isn't the gym. The gym is supposed to help you do this stuff better.” The reason why I started doing this is because I wanted to make sure that the strength I was building in the gym would be something that would — 

Tim Ferriss: Transferable.

Nsima Inyang: Transfer really well to the fighting that I was doing and the stuff that I was trying to do. And in all of that, breath holding is never part of it. Unless swimming, there's breath holding. I think for me now when lifting something really heavy, it's an exhale. When people see me using sandbags, this is an aside, but I was always somebody who when I lifted, I purposefully wanted to stay quiet. I don't like emoting. I don't like it. It's not in my nature to be the person who goes, “Ah” when doing stuff. But when you learn to breathe while lifting, what ends up happening is when you're creating that force, when you're lifting that sandbag off the ground, when you're pushing, that happens. You're lifting, that happens. It's not because I'm trying to sound hard or tough or whatever, it's because it's like — 

Tim Ferriss: Like the Thai fighters kicking, same thing.

Nsima Inyang: It's what my body needs to do to produce the force efficiently and I can stay safe through it. So as that started to happen, I started to feel stronger, and it transfers. You know what I mean? So that's something that actually I think would help people understand this, especially the exhaling to create tension, is let's do this right now. I think you already understand, but I think it'd serve. Growl.

Tim Ferriss: Growl.

Nsima Inyang: Growl. I'll do it first. Huhhhhn! Growl. 

Tim Ferriss: Huhhhhn!

Nsima Inyang: What do you feel? Do it, just breathe. And then Huhhhrrrrrnnn!

Tim Ferriss: Huhhhrrrrrnnn! I feel, there's a sort of shielding. I feel there's an abdominal contraction.

Nsima Inyang: There's a level of tension that's created.

Tim Ferriss: That's the most noticeable thing, yeah.

Nsima Inyang: But now when you exhale, when you see a fighter, that tension is created to keep this structure in place so it's safe when producing force. So this is why when I'm lifting a heavy sandbag or when I'm coming out of the hole of a squat or when I'm dead lifting, sometimes this will come out. Because it's my breath helping me create a strong enough structure to not buckle under the load I'm lifting, rather than me holding the breath. And not that again, not that this is bad. If you're a lifter and you're doing this for your maximal lifts, I'm not telling you to just desert the Valsalva maneuver, but I do believe that if you learn to breathe while lifting, this is one of the fundamental things that will keep you safe while lifting, that will help you progress well, and will help you decrease the amount of stress that it has on your body over time.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay, cool.

Nsima Inyang: And lastly, the biggest thing I think is it'll help you get rid of excess tension that you're holding in your body when you don't need to have that tension. A lot of people deal with that.

Tim Ferriss: All right, so let's say I'm working on that. Let's say I decide box squat, going to give that a go. Maybe I have a safety squat yoke or something. Sandbag, all right. Probably do some isolateral stuff. So ATG, split squat. For somebody who's listening, let's say maybe they're in a similar boat. Or maybe their back is fine, but they want to get stronger using these movements. What type of set rep programming do you give to someone who's not an elite powerlifter?

Nsima Inyang: There's no need to do anything under five or six reps if that's the case, you don't have to do that. Because over time, as you work with sets of five, six, eights, 10's, over time, you'll naturally be able to get stronger in those rep schemes with those loads. And I'm not saying that heavy lifting isn't good, I do things that are three, four, five reps when I'm working with heavy loads, I still do that. But the problem that happens with a lot of people when they get into a program that's focused on the load and the heaviness of the load, they start doing things they shouldn't do to lift that load.

So if we're trying to focus on maintaining our breath, there's going to come a point where you're working with the load that you're going to find you won't be able to breathe well, you won't be able to inhale and exhale at the phases of the lift that you should be. But also, you manage to lift it and you're like, “Okay, I'm strong enough for this,” so you'll add on more. And then you'll get to a place where you're holding your breath, and then you'll get to the place where all the times that anything's really happened for me has been when I was creating a little bit too much tension. I was holding my breath and something happens, not when I was breathing with it. So that's why I don't necessarily, if you're not someone who's powerlifting, and if you're in the gym, you're just wanting to lift and get stronger, so I don't want you to focus on the weight on the bar. I want you to focus on the quality of the movement.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I'm by myself in my garage, so I definitely have no one to impress. So what would you suggest then? Would it be two, three sets of blank with X number of minutes in between? Because we were chatting a little bit, and this is nothing obviously compared to what you do, but when I was my strongest back in the day, which was probably '96 when I was in China of all places, I was doing sets of, let's just call it six to 10, but closer to six in pretty much all movements with five to 10 minute rests. I was taking really long rest intervals. And generally hitting, it was split push, pull legs, and I was hitting each of those workouts once a week roughly. What would you prescribe as a starting point for me with sets and reps, and rest intervals and things like that? Any thoughts on how to approach it?

Nsima Inyang: Two to three sets per movement. I like people doing things for sets of… Not sets, reps—six, 10, 12. I would say doing that kind of rep scheme. So what I would do is on certain days, if you're doing two times a week in the gym, one of those days, have your movements doing maybe sets of six or so, and I would also split it up like this too. When I lift, I do upper and lower body. I don't just break it up into a push, pull, whatever, I do full body stuff. So if you're doing upper and lower on a certain day, for one day for your upper body movements, if you're doing sets of six or so, do sets of 10. Yeah, sets of 10 on your lower body, eight to 10 higher up.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So this day, let's just say it's Monday.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Upper body would be six rep sets.

Nsima Inyang: Six rep sets.

Tim Ferriss: Lower body would be 10.

Nsima Inyang: Higher up 10, 12 sets. Yeah. 12 reps per set. On another day, if you're doing a full body day again, I would say for the upper body, that would now be higher repetitions and your lower body would be lower repetitions. Right? If you're doing two full-body days. Now, I think you said you're doing push-pull — 

Tim Ferriss: Legs.

Nsima Inyang: Legs. Right?

Tim Ferriss: And I'm not married to that. It's just easy for me to remember.

Nsima Inyang: This is the thing. There's so many ways to set things up, but for minimum effective dose, if you can do each body part twice per week, which you can probably do in two to three training days, it doesn't have to be a five-day week split. Literally, you can do all this two or three days in the gym. For two days, that's how I would split it up. For three days, you get a little bit more leeway with volume, and three days is nice because if you, for example, on your first day, if you find that you do better having slightly lower amounts of movements, then you can split that volume into three separate days rather than having that volume in two days instead. Does that make sense?

Tim Ferriss: Can you give me an example?

Nsima Inyang: So, if you did five upper body movements and five lower body movements on one day, and then day two you did five lower and five upper, right? If you're finding that that's too much for you to do in a two-day period, you could take some of that — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that would be too much for me. I, for whatever reason, handle volume very poorly.

Nsima Inyang: Split some of that volume. Instead of just totally taking down that workload, split that workload into three days. So then you're doing, what is it? We just mentioned 20 total sets. Do six sets, six sets, and then on another day, it's going to be eight sets of that movement. You split that volumes three days, you're good, right? But you can still do that rep scheme where you hit each body part twice a week. You manage to do some slightly lower repetition, some slightly higher repetition. You're good.

Tim Ferriss: Yep. Got it. Okay. And then what about rest between sets?

Nsima Inyang: That's variable because some people like to have actual rest between sets, but then you can also, if you're doing on a certain day, let's say for your upper body movements that you do some push and some pull, you could superset those because they're antagonistic. So when I say antagonistic, instead of resting, you would do a pushing movement. Then you could literally just, let's say you do a push, then you do a row. You could do that back to back because the recovery of each movement doesn't necessarily get too much in the way of each other.

There will be some stress from the weight you did in that specific first set, but the muscles being worked when you're doing that push movement do not get as much in the way as the muscles you're doing work in the pull movement. So you could rest if you wanted to, but you could also superset it. And one thing that I think, a concept that I want people to take from this because I know how people love to have that specific program that they do, which is good, but learn to add an element of play into this. Learn to have an element of freedom into this.

So if you feel like you want to rest or a minute or two in between a set, rest, if you feel like you want to superset, superset, because again, I think that when you start, you can get very specific with it, but when you start making too many stringent rules within it, it becomes too — it can for some people become quite daunting and monotonous. So something that I do is when I'm doing a squat, I'll sometimes do some rope flow in between just to get some rotation — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let me ask you this. Just to stand in for the audience here.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Do you think you could have gotten away with that earlier in your training? Have you laid such an incredible foundation of strict, maybe monotonous training, that now, I mean, you're like, okay, this body's not really going anywhere. So if I want to do some Sudoku in between my overhead presses and do some rope flow over here, maybe a little pantomiming in between this set and that set, that you can get away with it in a way that might not serve a beginner or intermediate. Or am I off base there?

Nsima Inyang: So the reason, let me mention the reason why I do rope flow in between, it's not because it's part of a workout. It's because it helps me feel better. When I put so much compression on myself, there's a level of — for me, there's a level of stiffness that I feel from that set. The reason why I do the rope flow is to help me kind of undo that stiffness before my next set. That's the reason why I do it. I don't do it because it's a super efficient part of the workout, but I do it because it helps me feel better for the next set I'm about to do. When I do a lot, and other people notice this too, but when you do a lot of compressive things back to back, you start to kind of feel this lower back tension and stiffness and this overall stiffness that you're creating for the workout.

The stiffness isn't necessarily a bad thing if you have something, especially, you don't have to do rope flow in between sets too. You do that post-workout or later, that will be something that really will help you feel better. But the thing is, when you only do that, you then walk around with that stiffness that you've created and you have nothing to undo it. This is one of the reasons why a lot of people will work out, then after their workout, they'll do dead hangs because they feel like, oh, I'm getting this decompression in my spine from everything, and that can feel better.

But the thing is you can get that same decompression from the rope. You could get the same type of decompression from swimming. Swimming does the same thing. But the reason why I was saying all of this is have a structure to what you do, but allow yourself to kind of add things to it or subtract things to it when you want. Because the only thing that's going to help you get bigger and stronger is progressive overload over a long period of time. It's not going to be the magic set and rep scheme that you're doing right now. It's going to be what you're doing being progressed over years.

And for people listening, because I think one criticism that I get a lot is like, you didn't get this big from rope flow. Nah, I didn't get this big from rope flow. But at the same time, I could have gotten this big while feeling better for years if I had the other practices that I do, like the rope, the clubs, the kettlebells, if I had those practices included, it's not about getting big, it's about gaining strength and muscle, but moving well throughout the whole process, not focusing on the way you look, but moving like a fridge and feeling like you're old, that's not the goal. I mean, I don't think anyone sets out to gain muscle and strength with also the goal of feeling like they're 80 years old. No one wants that, but that's where a lot of people are, and a lot of people will kind of just, they'll assume that that's part of the process — 

Tim Ferriss: And doesn't need to be.

Nsima Inyang: — and doesn't need to be at all.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you definitely need to hang out with Jerzy. You'll enjoy hanging out with Jerzy and Anjala.

Nsima Inyang: I'm excited. No, from what you told me about him, I'm going to like him.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you guys will get a kick out of each other and because, for instance, Jerzy, he also does decompression but usually hanging upside down and like —

Nsima Inyang: In boots?

Tim Ferriss: Boots. But he does some really heavy weights. He'll hold onto a hundred pounds in addition to hanging upside down. Anyway, he's got his own approach to things for very, very short duration, five to 10 seconds. But I think you'll find a lot of his stuff thought-provoking. But he is all about movement, and he gauges, he tracks everything meticulously with his trainees, but he'll also look at their gait, and he's like, I want to get you to the point where you walk like a dancer.

He's like, that's definitely one of his explicit goals is watch gait and movement in that way. And when I told him that I was doing, and I think there's a place for this, I'm going to continue to do it, but I was doing biking for exercise, and what his thoughts were, and he was like, “Terrible.” He's like, “That's stupid. So stupid.” And Jerzy, I know I'm paraphrasing here, but he was like, “If you want to ride a bike because it's fun to ride from point A to point B,” he's like, “Great.” He's like, “If you want to ride for 50 miles because you enjoy it, great.” He's like, “If you're doing it though as this monotonous punishment and training,” he's like, “Terrible.” He's like, “Don't do that.”

Nsima Inyang: I want to mention, don't lose your train of thought, but I think that's what he's mentioning there in terms of relation to gait, it's a very smart way to try to think about some of your training. Because when a lot of people think about the squat, when a lot of people get their feet set, they usually have their feet out at an angle. Most people — 

Tim Ferriss: Slightly pointed out toes.

Nsima Inyang: Slightly pointed out, slightly pointed out toes. You're creating this force upward with that barbell. So you're learning how to have force coming from the ground through, but you're just going straight up and down. Now, the thing to think about, and the reason why I mentioned this is when you do watch a lot of people that develop those capacities and a lot of them walk through space, it's almost like they're walking in a squat position with their feet. They're walking with their feet out like this.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, they got a Charlie Chaplin-esque.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. The thing is, you'll see some pro NBA players walking like this. You see a lot of that, right? I'm not going to necessarily say that that's bad, but what I'm going to say is over time I used to kind of walk like that, but as I started thinking about what my feet were doing during everything I was doing and I started thinking about doing certain exercises that would potentially improve my gait over time, now my feet face forward when I walk. And I'm not intentionally doing this. It's just my directionality through space is now forward. I'm not fighting myself trying to navigate forward with feet that are outwards. That's not efficient.

I'm not saying everybody needs to walk with their toes forward, but I'm saying when you start thinking about ways to adjust your gait with your movement, so this could be the bilateral movements like the ATG split squat, that could be using a sled. I think sleds are super powerful, and the unfortunate thing is not everyone has access to a sled, but that is literal forward and backward force production. When you're pushing a sled, there's this force that you're learning how to push forward, but you need to have your feet moving you forward too. So you're learning over time how to push a weight forward through space. I think they're super powerful, not just for developing structural strength, but also improving one's gait over time.

The way you walk will change, and the rope will help with that too, but that's something to think about. I don't think most people should be walking with their feet ducked out. And I used to walk like that because sumo deadlifting, the feet are here. I'm producing force from a foot position like this. Squatting, I'm producing force from a foot position like this. Now when I go and do other things, that's the way I move through space, and that's not efficient.

Tim Ferriss: So, just because I'm curious and at least long ago found a lot of dividends from doing sumo deadlifts — 

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. They're not bad, by the way.

Tim Ferriss: Recommendations for sumo deadlifts. Any thoughts on common mistakes, tips, principles that you've refined over time where you're like, okay, here's some of my pre-flight checklist that might be helpful to people. And could you just describe, it's called sumo deadlift, right? Because it's a deadlift. You're pulling a barbell loaded with plates off the ground, but your legs are wide, right? Your hands are in between your legs going down to grab the barbell. So you look like a Yokozuna squatting down and getting ready to do the whole sumo thing, hence the name. What recommendations might you have for people who are hoping to improve their sumo deadlift?

Nsima Inyang: There's this funny thing within the powerlifting community where there are powerlifters who are like, they look at the sumo deadlift and they say, “That's not a real deadlift. That's not a conventional deadlift.”

Tim Ferriss: Conventional deadlift would be like knees inside the arms, right?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. And it's just so funny to me. We had Colton Engelbrecht, an aside, Colton Engelbrecht.

He has the highest total ever in powerlifting of around, I think I'm going to butcher this, but I think it's like 2650, right? At two — I think he was 275 when he did this. So he wasn't even at the heaviest weight class. He was 275 at 22 years old. He's been powerlifting for three years. Highest total ever.

So he squatted 470 kilograms, 260 kilogram bench, 470 kilogram deadlift on an eight or nine day. So he squatted and deadlifted 1,036 pounds in the same meet.

Tim Ferriss: At 22.

Nsima Inyang: At the ripe old age of 22 years old.

Tim Ferriss: Good lord.

Nsima Inyang: The reason why I mentioned this — 

Tim Ferriss: Is this yet another reason you never stretched your street fights people? I mean, I doubt you'd pick on this guy, but — 

Nsima Inyang: People are getting — 

Tim Ferriss: You just never know.

Nsima Inyang: — so much stronger, so much younger. It's insane. But the reason why I'm mentioning Colton is because Colton does the sumo deadlift, and some people roast him for that, and they're like, it's not conventional. It's like, whatever. But when we had him on the show, I was like, “Colton, why do you sumo deadlift?” And he was like, “It feels more natural.” And I was like, “Yeah, it does.” It feels weird to bend down and pick up a barbell implement in the conventional way, at least for my body type. Some people with very long arms, certain length of their femur, some people feel better with conventional, but the sumo, for me, has just made more sense because you're getting down in this hip position, you're driving with your legs. It just makes more sense in my opinion.

So, nothing against conventional, nothing against any other deadlift, but the sumo. Now, when doing the sumo deadlift, I think one thing that people really need to focus on is what their feet are doing. And I think this should be how it should be with every single lift. But when doing the sumo especially, there's a cue that people get, and people get this cue in squatting too, where you'll hear knees, push your knees outward, right? For the squat, you push your knees out so you can have space to get in between your hips when you're squatting. Sometimes your knees are too far forward. Some people with their limb lengths don't have the ability to get down to depth. So when you push your knees out, you provide room.

The sumo deadlift, when people say push your knees out, when you push your knees out, you provide room for the barbell to ride up your body. But the other cue of rooting the feet into the ground, and I learned this cue from Kelly Starrett's book, Becoming a Supple Leopard, back in 2013.

Tim Ferriss: Have you met Kelly?

Nsima Inyang: Met Kelly. Yeah. We've had him on the show a few times.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, cool.

Nsima Inyang: I always mention where I've learned these things. Kelly's awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Kelly's great.

Nsima Inyang: I learned that from his book. I also learned, and the reason why I keep my face relaxed when lifting and stuff. I also learned that from his book, Supple Leopard, because when he talks about my fast release, you shouldn't have a pain face. If you relax, it's going to allow yourself to relax through these movements. But anyway, that's an aside. Rooting your feet into the ground will allow you to have external rotation of the hips.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, we did a little bit of this earlier today, but just describe for people what that actually means. So you're in a gym doing a sumo deadlift, you have shoes on, presumably. What are you doing with your feet and legs?

Nsima Inyang: I think something that can help somebody understand this is using the hands, putting your hand on a table, and trying — you could actually do this with both hands. Keep your fingers planted in the table and try to see if you can rip the table apart while keeping your fingers where they are. Rip the table apart. Now, what do you feel when you do that?

Tim Ferriss: So in this case, you're sort of externally rotating your hands, even though they're not moving.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Right?

Nsima Inyang: Ripping that table apart, but what do you feel when you do that with your hands? That's actually, what do you feel?

Tim Ferriss: What do I feel? I mean, I feel a lot of tension in my arms.

Nsima Inyang: You feel a lot of tension in your arms. What do you feel in your shoulder?

Tim Ferriss: Shoulders have gone down and my lats are engaged. So, I mean, there's a lot going on.

Nsima Inyang: So, the shoulder can be compared to the hip, where the hip externally rotates as you're grabbing the ground, the shoulders will have this downward rotation when you grab.

Tim Ferriss: As I do this, I guess it depends on if we were doing a push-up, it might even be better. Right now, our arms are extended in front of us. If we were doing a push-up, what I would expect is that this eye of the elbow, the inside of the elbow, let's just call it the eye kind of when you bend your arm, it would be in that crook, would almost certainly rotate. I would imagine there would be some rotation in a push-up position.

Nsima Inyang: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Which would then mimic the, I guess, femur or — 

Nsima Inyang: Exactly. So the reason why I wanted you to do that with your hands is I think that can help some people understand what they should be doing with their feet because — 

Tim Ferriss: You've got some meaty hands, my friend. I do not want to get slapped with those things. Jesus.

Nsima Inyang: Tim. Tim.

Tim Ferriss: I'm just saying.

Nsima Inyang: Let me say this, you don't know how happy that makes me feel. Do you know why?

Tim Ferriss: Because you've wanted to slap me and now it's not allowed?

Nsima Inyang: No, no, no, no. Over the past, jiu-jitsu, and we're going to come back to the foot thing, but the jiu-jitsu is a martial art that has a lot to do with the hands, the grip. And I've noticed that my hands have gotten bigger because I've purposely started doing more hand type of work this past year.

Tim Ferriss: Like the rice bucket.

Nsima Inyang: Like the rice bucket. I've been doing a lot of hand work because I started, because of all the gripping in the martial arts, I started to feel pain in my fingers. And one thing you notice with a lot of high-level black belt grapplers is their fingers are kind of mangled because of everything that happens over the years. So I started doing rice bucket work and a bunch of other things, but my hands, I'm happy you say that because my hands didn't used to be this meaty.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: So thank you.

Tim Ferriss: You're welcome.

Nsima Inyang: It's working.

Tim Ferriss: You're welcome.

Nsima Inyang: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, if this jiu-jitsu or YouTube thing doesn't work out, you could go into one of those Russian slapping competitions.

Nsima Inyang: I would never.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I know.

Nsima Inyang: I would never. No.

Tim Ferriss: Not worth the TBI.

Nsima Inyang: No. They would mess me up for sure. I'm not strong enough for that. But the reason why I wanted people to do that on the table and feel that is because when a lot of people try to do this with the feet, they just grab the ground like this, and what you were doing in the park initially, they kind of just curl their toes.

Tim Ferriss: Like pinch.

Nsima Inyang: Like pinch instead of pinching slightly and then ripping apart to create — 

Tim Ferriss: And ripping apart, just to be clear, is not straight out to the sides. It's really like a rotation.

Nsima Inyang: It's rotational.

Tim Ferriss: Yes. Right.

Nsima Inyang: And that rotation is going to allow the knees to come out for the sumo deadlift. The knees will pull out because you're getting external rotation of the hips, which will allow you room to drive the hips forward.

Tim Ferriss: Let me ask you this, with the sumo deadlift, when you place your feet, let's just say straight ahead is 12 o'clock, and then your toes are getting pointed out, how externally rotated are your feet to begin with? Are they as far out as you can get them and really close to the plates? Are they at 10 o'clock and two o'clock, and then you get that type of tearing apart external rotation? Because I'm thinking — 

Nsima Inyang: So nowadays my feet would probably be at 11 and one.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right.

Nsima Inyang: The reason why they're at 11 and one is because I have better mobility than I had in the past. So when I do create that torsion I have more hip mobility to create when I'm moving outwards. Some people who don't have that hip mobility have to have their feet in a wider position so that they can create enough width to have their knees not be in the way of the bar. So that's totally dependent on one's hip mobility.

Tim Ferriss: Hip mobility.

Nsima Inyang: But when you get more hip mobility when you're creating that torsion, your feet angle will change slightly for how comfortable you are in the position. So whatever position you have right now, there's a golden position for the level of mobility you currently have, and as that mobility improves and as your ability to create more force improves, that position will adjust.

Tim Ferriss: How close to the plates are your toes?

Nsima Inyang: My toes? Oh, no. Yeah, my toes aren't — 

Tim Ferriss: How wide is your stance is another way to put it.

Nsima Inyang: It's like 90 degrees. So when I say 90 degrees, I mean my legs are out and my feet are, or my knees are right below my femurs, so I don't have this. You see a lot of people where they almost have this triangle angle with their feet. I have a box. That's the structure I'm creating.

Tim Ferriss: In the bottom position, you're saying?

Nsima Inyang: In the bottom position. Yeah, in the bottom position, it's like boom, boom. It's like a — 

Tim Ferriss: From knee to ankle is perpendicular to the ground.

Nsima Inyang: From knee to ankle is perpendicular. Interestingly enough, you notice like an Ed Coan, he had this outward, you'll notice he kind of was — his feet were closer together in his sumo deadlift, and he was a crazy sumo deadlifter, but that's where he found he was able to create the most force.

Tim Ferriss: What was his crazy, record-setting deadlift? Some insane number. What was it? 970 at 220 or something?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah, let's put it on screen. Ed Coan's had a lot of records.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, he's had a lot of records. I remember getting this book, I'm blanking on the author's name, but it was like Ed Coan the Man, the Myth, the Method, which was a great book, and there was a photo. You want to talk about people who were well-built for their sport. You look at Michael Phelps, you're like, okay, I could swim my whole life. My body doesn't look like that guy. His ankles are funny and he is just perfectly built for the sport. And there was a photo, I don't know if it was Wilt Chamberlain or some NBA player who's like 10 foot 10, and he's next to Ed Coan, who's not 10 foot 10. He's like five foot five. And they put their hands together and they were the same size. And I was like, man, oh, man. You could not design from scratch a better body for this exact lift.

Nsima Inyang: Have you ever met Ed Coan?

Tim Ferriss: I don't think I have met Ed. We've had conversations before, but no, I don't think I've met him in person, actually.

Nsima Inyang: Okay. Ed is a literal mutant to this day. The last time I saw him in person was a few years ago.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, is it fair to say, I mean, one of the greatest powerlifters, if not the greatest of all time?

Nsima Inyang: Still the greatest powerlifter of all time. I would say he's still the greatest powerlifter of all time. I think he popularized his sport so much. He got so many people into powerlifting. He inspired so many of the greatest powerlifters and minds, or minds in powerlifting to this day that I don't think no matter what anybody else does in powerlifting, I think Ed Coan is probably still the greatest.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Nsima Inyang: And then from there it's like, well, who has the highest total in that? You know what I mean? And going back to Ed's structure, first off, his hands are huge. I shook his hand and his hand engulfed my hand, me being so much taller, it's like he ate my hand with his and made me feel so small. The second thing is the length of his arms. Ed has these — 

Tim Ferriss: His ape index must be off the charts.

Nsima Inyang: He has these orangutan arms, bro, where it's like, when you look at his sumo deadlift form, it kind of makes some sense with how easy — 

Tim Ferriss: He doesn't have to have the legs super wide.

Nsima Inyang: He doesn't. He doesn't, right? So one of the things about the sumo, and one of the things about lifting in general, is finding the best position for your anatomical leverages. So not everyone's going to squat with their — some people, for example, a Kelly Starrett, a lot of the time he was squatting with his feet pointed straight forward creating that torsion. But you look at his limb lengths, he could be really good for that.

Some people, if they have a longer torso, sometimes that position doesn't do well for them because as they head down into the hole, their body folds. So some of them need to have a much wider stance so that when they head down into the hole, they don't have this massive folding of their torso. So what's one of the cool things with lifting where you'll see someone like an Olympic lifter with beautiful mechanics, but then you also really have to pay attention to the way this person is built, and you have to find the best way to move that way through space with your leverages.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally. Makes me think of one of my buddies, amazing striker. Used to compete at very high level, and I mean, he is gangly as fuck, right? And that was part of the problem because he would be a foot taller or he would have eight inches of additional reach on people, so he would just pummel the hell out of people in the same weight class. But there's certain movements. You want that guy to do bench press? You're going to come away with the misperception that he is weak, right? It's like, no, maybe with that particular movement, sure, it's not very well-built for his dimensions, but let him throw a power jab at your face. Yeah, he is well-built for that. Just different body types.

Nsima Inyang: Let me add this in because I think this is something that can maybe give some people something to explore when it comes to their deadlift movement. When it comes to deadlifting, the things that we think about is the conventional deadlift, the sumo deadlift. Well, you could also attempt doing a staggered stance deadlift. So a staggered stance deadlift would mean there's one foot ahead, one foot behind, the foot behind has the heel elevated slightly.

Tim Ferriss: Like a kickstand.

Nsima Inyang: Like a kickstand. Exactly. Kickstand. It could be called kickstand, staggered stance, deadlift. Deadlifting that way. You could use either a straight bar, you could use a trap bar. The concept still holds true, but the reason why I have enjoyed progressing that staggered stance deadlift, and I use a trap bar when I do that, is just because, for me, it feels as if it relates to gait a little bit better than the standard deadlifts do. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do the standard sumo or conventional, but when I'm thinking about creating upward force, how would I jump off of the ground?

When I think about that and then I think about, okay, transferring that to a barbell, I wouldn't necessarily jump off of the ground in the stance that I'm using in sumo or conventional. I would do it in this kind of staggered kickstand stance and then pop off. If I were trying to actually create force upwards, that's how I would do it. And I think that that would be worth one's time to progress. You're not going to lift as much weight initially, but over time, you can build up some, I don't even like saying this because I don't want people to think of it in terms of numbers. I want people to think about the movement, but you can get very strong doing that. And then, you're also strong in the stance that can relate to how you'll actually move yourself through space, but now you're creating force with it.

Tim Ferriss: What are some exercises that you think, I know this is such a maybe trite question, but just really incredible bang-for-the-buck exercises, and for instance, for me, and I'm not saying I'm any paragon of exercise expertise, but like the two-handed kettlebell swing, it seems like you get so much from that exercise performed consistently with progressive resistance, whether that's in terms of loading through higher volume or increasing the weight. I mean, it is just remarkable how much I get out of that exercise even once or twice a week. It's just astonishing to me. Continually. Anything else that you would throw into that type of category that come to mind with the condition that you can get somebody to the point where they can perform them safely, reasonably quickly?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. I think everyone should own a sandbag because picking up a sandbag off of the ground, starting light. So you get yourself, let's say you get a 75-pound bag, you fill it up to 50 pounds, you get yourself to lifting that without any type of discomfort. And one of the reasons why I think that is so beneficial and so useful is the way that one will bend down to pick up a sandbag. Because when you bend down to pick up a barbell, it's this implement that's perfectly symmetrical. The only way that the hands are involved or when they're gripping like this, right? You have to get yourself in this neutral position, you hinge forward. It teaches you how to be a perfect hinge, a perfect lever.

But whenever you lift a sandbag, every sandbag lift has its own — it's never the same because of the nature of the implement. It's this shapely thing that you have to, first off, you have this open palm grip, you have to grip around it, and then you have to organize your body to lift it safely. Anybody can lift a sandbag safely while breathing. Over time, you increase the weight. But I think that if people learn to lift sandbags well, that will be something that will actually prepare you to lift well for life because your spine isn't in this perfect neutral position as you're doing it. There's slight curvature, and you learn that it is safe to lift something with some slight rounding of the spine.

Of course, with a barbell, you don't do that often unless you're doing something like a Jefferson curl, which I think they're pretty solid, especially if you don't load them to a crazy extent as you're progressing it, because some people get focused on the load. By the way, what a Jefferson curl is it's a purposeful rounding of the spine to lift a barbell off the ground. It's actually the antithesis of, I think I'm using the word antithesis correct, but it's the opposite of what you're taught to do when you deadlift to create a neutral spine. You're literally rounding your back to lift the barbell off the ground. It sounds like a joke, but it's to ingrain in your body that my spine is okay getting to this position, lifting something. But I think a sandbag would be money for people.

Tim Ferriss: And just for clarity, are you picking it up and then dropping it, and then picking it up and dropping it?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. A base thing that you could do is literally pick it up to around your stomach, bring it back down to the ground. You can either drop it or you can lower it back down to the ground. Then there are progressions where now you pick it up, launch it up to your shoulder, bring it down back to the ground. So you could drop it or you can bring it slowly back down to the ground. And then you could pick it up, throw it over your shoulder, pick it up, throw it over the opposite shoulder. It's inherently a rotational throw when you become adept with it, right? So there are progressions, but the base progression would be literally just — the first thing you would do is you would just do a sandbag deadlift, then you would do a lift to the stomach, then you would do a lift to the shoulder, then you could do a throw. 

And then there's a bunch of things, you could do squats, you could do split squats, you could do Cossack squats, you could do lunges.

Tim Ferriss: Cossack squats is another one. Typically, I've just done that with kind of a goblet squat type of hold on a kettlebell, but just remarkable how much you get out of that exercise as you slowly — and what was wild about it to me, what a funny name, number one, but is I was using it as a warm-up for some acrobatic stuff that I was doing way back in the day. And I was just using it as a warm-up. But I noticed I was getting stronger.

And so I started adding a little bit of weight, a little bit of weight, and I got to the point where I was doing Cossack squats, and it's not like this isn't a ton of weight, but it's like with a, I don't know, 70 or 80-pound kettlebell. And again, the transfer, I was just like, “Wow,” I wasn't even treating this as part of my workout. But just over time, because I was doing the acrobatic stuff very regularly, so I was like never doing it to exhaustion, just that “greasing the groove.” And I was like, “What the hell is going on here?” It's just remarkable how much it had transferred.

Nsima Inyang: It's a money movement. So I mentioned all those movements because these are all things that you could do throughout the day with a sandbag that you keep by your desk. You could do squats, you could do some quick lunges, you could bring it up to your shoulder. You could do some quick Cossack squats. You could do a reverse lift. You could literally do all these movements with a sandbag — 

Tim Ferriss: Are you just bear-hugging the Cossack when you're doing the Cossack?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah, you — 

Tim Ferriss: Bear-hugging the sandbag, rather.

Nsima Inyang: — you can keep it right there.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: And then you go into a Cossack squat position. Yes, absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Nsima Inyang: And with the Cossack squat specifically, it's particularly powerful because most people, when it comes to training the adductors, they mainly do that with the machine in the gym.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so adductors, guys, are inside of your thighs. I mean, that's very super — like Suzanne Somers, thigh master, that's adductors, right? So if you were trying to pop a ball between your knees using your adductors.

Nsima Inyang: There's a very shady side of the internet of women popping watermelons with their adductors.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. That's — 

Tim Ferriss: I thought I'd seen it all.

Nsima Inyang: You haven't until you see that.

Tim Ferriss: This is going to be the headline for your episode.

Nsima Inyang: But if you want the strength to do that, right, Cossack squats are going to be great. There are more specific adductor movements like the Copenhagen plank.

Tim Ferriss: You're saying most people who train their adductors are using — 

Nsima Inyang: Only using — 

Tim Ferriss: — one of those machines.

Nsima Inyang: If they ever use that machine, sparsely, they use that sparsely typically. And that ends up being a very weak link. So one thing that I've noticed in — 

Tim Ferriss: Now, just for people who might wonder, because those machines are very popular. They're usually monopolized by any — not to paint them with a broad brush, but a few women are just sitting on there for hours it seems, working this stuff, right?

Nsima Inyang: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Why is that a weak link compared to doing something like a Cossack squad or something else?

Nsima Inyang: Because you never — you do get some tension on those tissues when you're doing a typical squat, but not an insane amount. When you're doing a sumo deadlift you also get some tension on that area, but not as much as when you're isolating it at a bilateral fashion with the Cossack squad. Along with that, in the Cossack squad you get more length of those tissues when you get to depth of the Cossack squat than you would — 

Tim Ferriss: I'll give another — 

Nsima Inyang: Go ahead.

Tim Ferriss: — bad visual for people. So people are like, “What the hell are they talking about Cossack squad?” So imagine the most stereotypical, Russian dancer, arms folded, kicking out from side to side, and then freeze-frame, on the ground, where one leg is fully extended to one side and he or she's basically squatting ass to the other heel on the other side. Okay, Cossack squad, right?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. Yeah. And one thing I find interesting about that is for a long time I was really trying to get good at Cossack squats, and it wasn't until I was allowing myself to breathe when I got down to that position that I actually got there safely and came out. So — 

Tim Ferriss: What have you found most effective for improving ankle mobility, right? Because for a lot of people, if they try to do a Cossack squad — well, do you have heel up or heel down, I guess?

Nsima Inyang: Heel down.

Tim Ferriss: Heel down. Okay.

Nsima Inyang: I have heel down. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So for a lot of folks, if they try to do that, they're going to fall backwards if they don't have the ankle mobility, right, if the knee can't travel kind of over the toes.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Any thoughts on developing that?

Nsima Inyang: I think that a great conversation for you would be Ben Patrick too.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right.

Nsima Inyang: Because what I'm going to tell you — 

Tim Ferriss: Literally knees over toes.

Nsima Inyang: What I'm going to tell you is this is why I find that I've been so lucky to learn from so many people, because the only reason why I'm able to first have the level of mobility I do is because of a lot of things that I've learned from these different people. So, for example, the ankle mobility you're talking about right there, some things that helped with that were the ATG split squat that I was telling you about, which is a movement that, again, he popularized. But that front leg — I hope that when this podcast comes out, maybe there's an image of an ATG split squat that can be pulled up so people can see — 

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. Yeah. For sure.

Nsima Inyang: — that the front leg that's doing the split squat, over time there are regressions to that movement, by the way. So everything we've talked about, if you find that you're not getting there, regress the movement, regress the range of motion.

Tim Ferriss: Tell me if I'm getting it roughly right. And also, I have his ATG device that is plate loading for wrist work, extensor work, grip work, which is fantastic. What does ATG stand for?

Nsima Inyang: ATG, his company, stands for Athletic Truth Group. You think it stands for Ass to Grass.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I didn't see it coming. Okay, got it. Athletic Truth Group.

Nsima Inyang: Athletic Truth Group.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Got it.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. And Ben is a guy — one of the reasons why I appreciate Ben so much is because he's a very open-minded individual. You'll run across so many people in these different fitness spaces, and they're so — 

Tim Ferriss: Dogmatic.

Nsima Inyang: — dogmatic, gung-ho about their system and, “If you do this system, this is what's going to happen when you do this. It's not good. And this is what's going to happen when you do this.” It's like everything is their system. But the people that I tend to really appreciate are the people that, they may have some things that they do, but they can also see the strength in many other things, right? And Ben is that type of person where — he's also someone who continues to learn. He has these — this what he's done, but Ben is continuously learning and applying new things to the people that he works with and himself and finds benefit. And it's one of those things where he's in the constant growth rather than finding the negatives of everything that everyone's doing, right?

Tim Ferriss: To protect his predefined fiefdom. Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. So, anyway.

Tim Ferriss: So let me throw out something. Tell me how close this is. So there is an exercise, of all places it was actually given to me by a physio in Sweden who I chanced upon. Because my back has been bothering me for so long and everybody you meet is like, “Oh, you got to try my friend's blah,” right? Or, “This person can do this,” or, “You have to try my friend, the acupuncturist.” Everybody's got a suggestion, God bless them. But it ends up, after a while, you become a little tone-deaf to it, because I'm like, “All right, look, I can talk to your tarot card reader and I can talk to your Qigong person. I'm just not sure it's going to do anything.”

But this physio ended up working with a lot of professional fighters, that's not me, and professional soccer players, and he really knew his stuff. I just lucked out. Because this drunk guy at a party was like, “You should meet my physio.” I'm like, “Yeah, I'm sure I should meet your physio.” And then I just had a wide-open day the next day, and I was like, “Fuck it. All right, sure, I'll meet your physio.”

And Sebastian's his name, ended up being excellent, in Stockholm. And he gave me some very basic exercises, again with the intention of remediating some of the back pain and strengthening. And one of them was elevated front foot split squats, very lightly loaded, going fully down to the bottom position where the front knee is way over the front foot toes — 

Nsima Inyang: That's regression for the ATG split squat.

Tim Ferriss: — and basically ass is on the heel. Three second pause at the bottom, back up, and doing sets of six to eight basically.

Nsima Inyang: That's a regression for the ATG split squat. That's a regression for the flat-ground ATG split squat. And to go back to what you're asking about the ankles, why is that really good for the ankles? Do you know that the position that the ankle gets into is this deep position, right, that you can, when you own that position, you lower it to the ground. And now, when you own that position of the ankles, right, you apply that to a Cossack squat, you're able to get to full depth of Cossack because of where the knee — the knee is over the toe and you're in deep ankle dorsiflexion, right? That's how these things work, where — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, dorsiflexion, just pull your toes towards your nose.

Nsima Inyang: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: That's dorsiflexion. And toes towards your knees. That's dorsiflexion.

Nsima Inyang: The thing is when you find that you don't have the mobility for a specific movement, there are so many ways to regress it. With a Cossack squat, you could do a Cossack squat with a wall behind you. So the wall can help guide you down, unloaded, wall behind, Cossack squat. You can even angle the foot outwards a little bit, to allow yourself a little bit more give with that — 

Tim Ferriss: You can also add some heel, right?

Nsima Inyang: You could also add some heel. You can also put it on a box if you need to, and then slowly regress it down. And I want to mention, the concept of regression is what got me out of knee pain, is what got me out of pretty much all pain, right? But specifically I want to mention knees because when I was in my early twenties, I had a meniscectomy, partial meniscus removal. I can't remember which knee now, I think it was my left, because of something that happened in jiu-jitsu. I also, when I was younger, I had Osgood-Schlatter and I was a soccer player. So when I got into my early twenties, I couldn't sprint. I felt like I was probably going to have trash knees for the rest of my life. I couldn't run, couldn't run without pain at all.

So, let alone run, absolutely couldn't sprint, couldn't jump, right? But I was doing squats and stuff and there was some pain I was having, so I was using knee sleeves. So I was pretty certain that, at this point I just need to make sure to keep them pretty strong. But these things like sprinting, et cetera, it's not going to be part of the system for me.

That's when I came across some of Ben's stuff back in 2019 or 2018, I think, right? I came across some of his stuff on Instagram, started regressing it, doing like the simplest regression. So I had ATG splits going on a box. There's this pulse movement that you do where you just have this very small range of motion with the knee where you're just putting yourself into slight knee flexion, coming out, pulsing it, driving a lot of blood to the knee area, right? And I would progress these things over time.

After four or so months, I was able to get into full, deep knee positions that I was never able to get into without pain before. And then, when I started doing things like running, I was able to run without pain. And then I started sprinting without pain. But it started with regression, right?

Tim Ferriss: Bless you.

Nsima Inyang: So the reason why I'm saying that is — 

Tim Ferriss: That was a very princess-like sneeze for such a large man.

Nsima Inyang: I didn't want to let it out.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Nsima Inyang: If I let it out, it would be disgusting. So when you hold it in, it turns into this mousy squeal. Let's keep that in there. Let's keep that in there. If I had to sneeze again, I'll show you what the big one looks like just so I can save myself, my gosh.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Nsima Inyang: But I say this because regressions are the name of the game for all this. If you have pain doing something, there is a way to regress it, and you need to own the regression before you progress.

Tim Ferriss: I just want to underline this because when I started to get out of some — I mean, this back has been — this chronic back pain has been one of the biggest challenges of my life, because I've always seen myself as athletic. I've always been able to sort of take a kicking and then get back on the horse and get back to athleticism. And this experience where this pain at such a pivotal, cornerstone piece of your body is tied into every movement. When you sleep — there's no escaping it. Psychologically, physically, emotionally, it has been such a difficult experience and given me so much sympathy for people in chronic pain. It's like if you have not been in serious chronic pain it is impossible to understand what it's like until you're there.

And I would say the one mantra of sorts that has allowed me to start digging out of that hole — and I used a different term for myself, I don't remember where I got it, but it was just like, “Scale it down.”

Nsima Inyang: Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: Right? And it's the same idea, right? It's just like, okay — let's just say hypothetically, okay, I might need this surgery in the elbow. Okay, great. I can't do X number of push-ups. Okay, fine. Do one 10th of X number of push-ups, right? Okay. You can't do whatever it might be. Well, barbell puts too much torque in the elbow? Okay, fine, let's use dumbbells, right?

But the rule is you can't do nothing. You have to scale it down. And maybe you omit exercises, sure. But it's like, “Train around it, train around it, train around it.” And it's like, for instance, the box squat. Great example. Jerzy is like the — Jerzy Gregorek, who I keep mentioning, is the ultimate master of regressions.

To use your word because he'll have someone, they'll do a squat and they'll go down eight inches and he's like, “That's it.” And they're like, “No, but I do below parallel in the gym.” And he's like, “You shouldn't.”

Nsima Inyang: Yeah, you shouldn't. Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: And he's just like, “Okay, your max depth is,” whatever, I'm making this number up, but it's like, “36 inches off the ground.” And they're like, “That's a joke.” And he's like, “That's your assignment.” He's really funny too because I remember at one point I was like, “So you're suggesting?” And he's like, “No, I'm not suggesting, I am telling you.” And it feels like a waste of time to start off in where he would start people, but as they develop the right mechanics and then, pain free, progress. And it takes weeks, maybe even months, to get back to where they think they should be, and then lo and behold, they're so much stronger, they own the position, all these aches and pains go away. So you can't do nothing, but you can scale it down or regress it, right?

Nsima Inyang: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And the other thing I'll mention just for people who may be in a similar position to myself where they have a lot of low back stuff, the other reason that Sebastian prescribed the front foot elevated split squat was to avoid hyperlordosis, overarching of the low back. I have a lot of thoracic mobility issues, so I tend to flare out and arch. And he was like, “Okay, let's mitigate that by elevating the front foot.”

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: All right, cool. Dig it.

Nsima Inyang: I want to mention I — Ben, he has an app, and on that app he puts all his stuff there for monthly payment for people, so if you guys are — and Ben mentions that people can do this, so I'm going to mention this too. You could go on there, you could screenshot the movements, and you could cancel, literally. And I have a program there too in his martial arts section, right? And you can literally go there and you can just take it all if you want to.

But the reason why I mentioned that is because all the regressions are right there. If you're looking for a way to regress all these movements, that's all there, right? There's also in — and that school community. But just take the regressions and be patient with those regressions, because one of the reasons that I was held back for so long was because I thought I was better than I was. I've been playing soccer for like 16 years. I've always seen myself as an athlete. So going to do some of these things and these simple regressions, I was just like, “No, I can move on to the last chapter. No, I should be able to.”

And then I'd always find myself in pain. I'd always find myself moving backwards. And it wasn't until I just realized, “Hey, be a beginner with this. Start with the regressions, own those, and then slowly progress upward.” But then I was able to make all the progress to where I am now, right? So it's a big shift.

And this is the last thing I'll mention. I think one of the reasons why this is hard for some people that lift or that have already been training for a bit is because traditional lifting is kind of easy in the sense that, if you get strong with the shoulder press, you just increase that weight, week by week. Bicep curl, increase that weight a little bit. You get this big payoff very, very quickly, then you see that weight going up. But when it comes to holistic movement in some of these ranges, you'll realize that you have some weak links that you have to work on with potentially no weight. And that's not as fun as just doing the heavy shoulder press. You know what I mean?

Tim Ferriss: Getting the payoff.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I would also say it's like you can get away — at least, I'll personalize it. I think this is true for a lot of people, but just because you can lift more weight than your friends does not mean your form is good, right? I don't think my form was the worst in the world, but we were talking about 96 when I was probably my biggest and strongest and arguably fattest, but — I wasn't that fat. But where I was doing 400 pound-ish back squats for a set of 10.

Now, in retrospect, should I have been doing that? Probably not. And when I mentioned earlier, I was like, “Oh, yeah, probably three, four years ago,” whenever it was in that back squat workout, when I hurt myself, I was probably going too low and having that change in the spinal position with like butt wink, and I think that probably contributed to it. And I'm sure there are people out there who are like, “Pssh, Tim Ferriss can't even do a goddamn squat. I knew it. That guy's an idiot.” What I would say is, you could be right, number one. Number two is get video of your technique and have somebody who actually knows what they're doing, like a very high-level competitor, look at that technique. And chances are it's not as good as you think it is. Do you know what I mean?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And then there comes a point where it's like, all right, I've bent the paper clip so many times, boom, I have an injury. And now it's just a wake-up call. It's like, “All right, let's start from scaling it back, from the fundamentals. Swallow my pride, take my ego down a notch, and work it back up.” Which is very hard to do psychologically. Really tough.

Nsima Inyang: It is.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, there's so many parallels that I see here. It's like with Jerzy, it's like, man, you have to check your ego at the door, because you might walk in and — he doesn't care. He really doesn't. He's so salty. You could be world champion in X, Y, and Z, and he'll be like, “Okay, you're going to start with 20 pound on dumbbells.” And you're like, “What?” He's like, “Yeah,” he's like, “20 pound dumbbells because you shouldn't be doing this with more than 20 pound dumbbells.” And people are just like, “What?” He doesn't even compute.

But then with these micro progressions, as he would call them, it is incredible. Like I was saying to you, he had this Vietnam vet with a number of fused vertebrae who had been walking around in body brace, could not bend in any direction, got him to the point where he is doing stiff-legged deadlifts with 315 off an elevated platform.

Nsima Inyang: That's so crazy.

Tim Ferriss: And continued doing that for decades. I mean, it's unreal. And similarly — and I haven't seen this because I haven't really been doing this term in the notes that I had for this conversation, it's not my term, but I like the term, which is microdosing movement?

Nsima Inyang: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: I've only played with that with a few things like slacklining. And it is incredible what your body can end up doing with three to five minutes a day of slackline. You do not need — in fact, one could argue you shouldn't do really long sessions. So what are some other examples of microdosing movement? Because as I get older, more and more, yes, you want to be strong. Yes, I agree with Pavel, strength is kind of the mother attribute in a lot of ways, right? Yes, you want to have muscle mass because of Sarcopenia and all this stuff as you get older. That's all true.

And fundamentally, we are evolved as bodies to move in space. Our brains are evolved to manage that interface, right? And I find myself hungering for more and more athletic movement, right? So what are some other ways to microdose movement that might kind of produce benefits, and you can take that however you want to take it, that are surprising to folks?

Nsima Inyang: Mm-hmm. So I think one of the simplest things one can do is start introducing different shapes of your spine. Primarily a shape that I think many of us are scared about, which is like spinal flexion.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Spinal flexion, reaching over, touching your toes with a rounded back.

Nsima Inyang: Exactly. But let me actually just rewind real quick because I want to mention, Pavel talks about “greasing the groove.” I got introduced to microdosing by a friend of mine, Cory Schlesinger, I think he's like — 

Tim Ferriss: Just to be clear, microdosing movement.

Nsima Inyang: Microdosing movement. Not microdosing psilocybin, although that's fun. But microdosing movement. Cory is — I don't know if he's working with the Phoenix Suns now, but he was like the director of performance, I think, for the Suns recently, so I know he's working with an NBA team. But when he talked to us about it, he was having a lot of his NBA athletes, he would have them do a little bit of movement before games, a little bit of movement after games, and he'd figure out ways for them to have movement sprinkled into their days so that they always felt good.

Because what happens with some athletes is they have to have this extensive warmup routine to get their bodies ready. And these are athletes, by the way. So if an athlete needs this extensive warmup routine to get ready for game day, somebody who's sitting at a desk or just working or whatever, the amount of prep you might need to get ready to move is far too much. The goal of microdosing movement or “greasing the groove,” as Pavel puts it, is to make it so these different movements just become a part of who you are and what you do.

You don't need to prepare to bend your spine down into a flex pattern and pick something off the ground because you're just healthy and safe — you feel healthy and safe doing it. Now, the thing I'll also mention here is that there are many really smart people who are against some of the things like Jefferson curls. Like Stu McGill doesn't like it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, doesn't like it.

Nsima Inyang: Stu doesn't like it.

Tim Ferriss: No.

Nsima Inyang: And I would agree to the sense of people who haven't regressed the movement enough. If you just rush into something like a Jefferson curl that we were just talking about, where you have deep spinal flexion, you pick up a barbell or something off the ground, that's going to cause you some issue. Especially if you don't feel safe doing it. You're going to hold your breath, you're going to force yourself into that position, and then you'll tweak something and then you'll say, “This is a bad position or a bad movement.” But when you learn to breathe through movement with no weight, right?

So like I was talking about, let's say you decide that I'm going to pick that ball off the ground a little bit a few times a day, flexing my back and going back to the ground. I'm going to inhale when I go down and exhale when I go up. I'm going to make myself own this movement. Doing that with no weight initially for most people is going to feel fine. And then as you improve that, you're like, “Okay, can I do that with a six pound kettlebell? Can I do that with a 20 pound kettlebell? Can I do that with a 30 pound kettlebell? Can I organize my body to lift this safely in this position?”

And then you own that position because it's no longer foreign to you. Now you're no longer flexion intolerant. But when you're someone who has avoided these different ranges of motion with the spine, whether it's deflection, extension, et cetera, and then you go into this — into a workout, or you try doing some weighted rotational movement and then you tweak something, you think that these are bad movements or bad ranges of motion. But the thing is that you didn't regress it enough and you didn't spend time with the most basic forms of those movements.

So when it comes to microdosing, one of the ways to make microdosing easy for you is to make your environment serve you. This is why — and some people might just think I'm some fitness nut for this, but I keep equipment around my area. Around my desk, I have a kettlebell sitting there, I have a club sitting there. I have a 100 pound sandbag by my desk, by my work desk.

I also have a gripper on the table so that if I'm doing something on my — my laptop is one side, I can hit that gripper up a little bit. I have these things just sitting around to encourage me to touch them, because if they're not in front of me, I am not going to do them. All this hand stuff, you give me that compliment on my hands, bro. It's because I have grip equipment everywhere.

Tim Ferriss: I cannot — 

Nsima Inyang: I have it in my car. I have it at my podcast desk. I have it at my work desk. I have it in the kitchen. I have it everywhere.

Tim Ferriss: I can't wait for you to — I think you already saw the video, but to take another look at the Abrahangs — 

Nsima Inyang: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: — with Emil Abrahamson, because then you could just have — I mean, you could do it off the back of a set of stairs. That's what I do at home. But if you get like a hangboard — and don't overdo the hangboard people, that is the perfect way to blow apart your tendons and ligaments. Take it easy. But that's something you can sprinkle in so easily. I sprinkled that in.

Nsima Inyang: My rice bucket sits in front of my TV, right? So that's the thing.

Tim Ferriss: And just for people who are wondering what the hell we're talking about, the rice bucket, imagine old badly dubbed Chinese Kung Fu movies where they shoot — they make their hands into spears, shoot it into a bucket of rice, and turn their hands and do different movements to toughen up their hands and their grip and so on. It would be a version of that. A lot of baseball players do that too, right?

Nsima Inyang: They knew what they were talking about.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly.

Nsima Inyang: They knew what they were doing. A lot of this stuff isn't new. I'm not making this stuff up. People who do this stuff for centuries because it works. But would I do the rice bucket if I had to pull out the bucket of rice from my garage every single time?

Tim Ferriss: No, of course not.

Nsima Inyang: I'd have to keep it in the vicinity of something that I already do stuff, so that when I go by it, I'm like, “I can do this for a quick minute as we're watching something,” and then go back, right? I have, for example, there's this stool called a Hunkerin Stool — by the way, you don't need a Hunkerin Stool, you could just have a low seat — 

Tim Ferriss: Hunkering stool?

Nsima Inyang: Hunkerin, H-U-N-K-E-R-I-N, Stool. It was made — this guy's name is Kasey. He owns this company, Hunkerin Stool. It's a low springy seat.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Nsima Inyang: Right? People will see, if they ever watch any of my videos, you'll see me sitting on a Hunkerin Stool.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I saw one of those in one of your videos.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah, it's a low springy seat. So now you sit down — 

Tim Ferriss: What do you use that for?

Nsima Inyang: You just sit down in a squat position.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, okay.

Nsima Inyang: You sit down in a low squat position.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it.

Nsima Inyang: So I noticed you have these low mats here that maybe people might sit on for meditation, but you have these things that will encourage you to get lower to the ground, right? So the sandbag, I also sit down on the sandbag as it's low to the ground, and that helps — that encourages me to get down in this low position, this low squat position, to become comfortable there. So now I'm not uncomfortable getting down to the ground, which is an essential thing that we need. A lot of us, some of us only get down to the ground when we're doing martial arts. Some of us probably can't remember the last time we purposefully went down to the ground on our own volition. Maybe you fell, right?

But can you become comfortable going down and coming up? Because now if maybe you do fall, it's not as much of a struggle for you to figure out the puzzle of getting off the ground. It's actually not even a puzzle. You just can't.

Tim Ferriss: Well, Kelly, you mentioned Kelly Starrett, who — he and I go way, way back. And we actually were in Japan together at the same time and went on this amazing trip with a group of guys. But on that trip, Kelly and I — I mean, both of us, it's kind of obvious when it's pointed out, but in Japan, if you're going to traditional inns and spending time in those types of environments, you are getting up and down all the time. And you are sitting cross-legged and you are getting up, and you're basically doing Turkish get-up light all the time, right? You are constantly getting from that sitting on the floor position to fully standing.

And every once in a while, these are harder and harder to find, you've got a squat toilet, and it's like, “That's it.” And I remember asking one of my friends when I was 15, because I'd never seen a squat toilet, it was my first time out of the US, I'm like, “What the hell is this?” And I went to a baseball game and all they had was squat toilets. And I remember asking my buddy, he was 15 also, I'm like, “What do your old people do?” And he just started laughing, he's like, “They've been doing it forever. They have no problem.” And I was like, “Wow.”

Can you imagine what would happen, how many ER visits and ambulances you would need if suddenly that were put in a US stadium? Forget about it. But the fact of that “greasing the groove,” right? It's not like these 80-year-old Japanese people are doing tons of Jefferson curls and Turkish get-ups, but they are sitting down, getting up, sitting down, getting up, many, many times a day in a lot of cases.

Nsima Inyang: And even just that aspect of sitting on the ground. Think about the position that the back gets in, the deep knee-flexion that you're getting. And many of these people can just comfortably sit in the Seiza position without a problem. The position of the ankles, the position of the knees, all these areas, when getting up and down off the ground, how healthy that is for your joints and your movement? That's why it's like, instead of thinking about all of this as exercise, how can we build our environment?

The places where we go, even if you're at a cubicle at work, can you put certain things in there that can help you — encourage you to move a little bit more, right? If you do that, that will make a lot of this stuff so much easier because it's less about, “How do we program this?” And more about, “Let's just touch this a few times a day.” After you become more comfortable sitting down in that low position a little bit more, picking up with that, with the rounded back, just casually picking up that sandbag. You're not doing these things while warming up. You're just doing them. They're what you do.

Then, when you want to go progress it, it's even easier because this is just how you move. For me, it wasn't until I truly set my environment up to serve my movement ability that I started making bigger and just bigger leaps in my progress because it became less of, again, the structured workout that I have to go to the gym and do all the time to just, this is just what I do.

I can just pick stuff up. I purposefully hung up gymnastics rings so I can develop my skill of hanging once again, right? So I have those just hanging and the TVs right there, so I'll just do some quick pull-ups and hang on it.

I set up this environment and so it's almost like an environment of play. I have fun here, and I think if more of us did that, it would aid in our movement progression much faster than always having to go to a gym with four walls, fluorescent lights and get this workout in.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Also, I'll bring up another person you would have a blast with if you haven't met him. I remember I got so much shit, it was funny. I got so much shit when — a lot of people were interested off the bat, but I also got a lot of shit when I did an episode on gymnastics strength training with a guy named Chris Sommer. Coach Chris Sommer, former coach of the national men's team in the US.

Nsima Inyang: I think I bought his program years back.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, GST.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I remember there were a bunch of folks in various communities, I'm not going to name them, but they'd be pretty obvious, pretty belligerent online weightlifting communities. There's a fair number and there's like, “Bah ha, ha, ha. Now Tim Ferriss is into Pilates. Good luck with that. Good luck developing strength.”

And I'm like, let me see you do an iron cross, right? Let me see you do a planche with your feet off the ground, and then tell me that those guys or gals aren't strong. Let me see you do that. But the point that I was just going to make is it doesn't have to be with a bunch of ferns and chrome inside four walls.

You can get so unbelievably strong, and this is going to be old news to a lot of people, but with calisthenics and doing, if you want to try it here, I'll give people something, they'll be like, “Oh, this is so stupid.” I'm like, “Okay, try it.” Do something called pike pulses.

So, there are a lot of ways you can strengthen your core and abdominals and so on. This one, so put your feet, sit down on the floor, legs out in front of you. If you're sitting up, that is a pike, and so your feet are straight.

Now what you're going to do is put some strength into the toes, point them. And now what you're going to do is reach forward on either side of your legs, not as far as you can go, but pretty far. You're probably going to be on your fingertips on either side of your legs.

Now it's very simple. All you need to do is lift your legs off the ground and just pulse up, keeping your legs completely straight, quads locked, and just bring your legs off the ground, bringing your knees to your chest. Good luck with that.

Do a couple of sets of 10 or 15 of those, and if it's too easy on the first one, bring your hands forward four or five inches. If you can do it then do it again, most people will just be murdered by that. And that is, you do not need a lot of space. You could do that in the smallest apartment right next to your bed.

Oh, there's so many good exercises. This is really inspiring me also, to get back. I really feel like my new chapter, I have to be careful not to be too enthusiastic and hurt myself, but it's going to be a couple of fundamentals.

I'll probably continue to do sumo deadlift in the way that I described it a la Barry Scott who trained Alison Felix way back in the day. That was in The 4-Hour Body stuff. But the sumo deadlift with no eccentric, I just find it just transfers to so much.

Kettlebell swings for sure. And I was very interested, people can probably find video of you doing this, but the pendulum.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah, the pendulum swing with some kettlebell juggling.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Haven't gotten to the juggling yet, but different types of swinging. Rope flow to get into some new planes of movement. And then I think I'm going to re-explore some of the GST stuff. Because I recall doing some basic basic ring stuff. It's like, look, I'm not going to win any awards here.

And then doing this is all body weight stuff. And I got so big. People thought, they're like, “Oh, my God, how much heavy lifting you've been doing?” And I was like, “Zero.” Most of this is from also because my upper arms, my biceps were the biggest they'd been in probably a decade.

And people were just like, “Bro, what you on gear? What's going on?” I was like, “No, I'm just literally doing straight arm tension. I'm not even doing any flexion. I'm not bending my arms. This is all ring work with fully locked arms. That's it.”

Nsima Inyang: Dude, it's great that you mentioned this because over the years, one thing that I try to do is I try to find stuff I'm interested in that I really suck at to improve at. I'm 250 pounds, so for me — 

Tim Ferriss: You are a lot bigger in person than you're, I mean, you're big on camera. And then I was just like, “How am I going to find this guy?” And I was like, “Oh, he's not hard to find.” Those quads are the size of my office. Jesus.

Nsima Inyang: But yo, man, calisthenics was something that for me, I think is a place that I'm not the strong, I'm not very, very strong at. Some of that can be attributed to my body weight, and I've been so excited at just really nailing down all of these calisthenic basics to continue to improve so that I can do more complex movements.

Because one of the things that I think that frustrated me with calisthenics years ago was like, gosh, these muscle ups, oh, I was always making excuses of my weight, but I was not strong enough with my body weight to do these things.

So, one of the things with calisthenics is also owning those basics, push-ups, dips, pull-ups, regressing the pull-ups if pull-ups were tough.

Tim Ferriss: Also like regressing, like ring turnout push-ups, incredible.

Nsima Inyang: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: I've had shoulder surgeries and stuff. The degree to which that has helped my shoulders just ring turnout push-ups.

Nsima Inyang: Scapular pull-ups. The strength of the scapula I think is something that a lot of people, as they're doing calisthenics, they don't realize is so important, and there are ways to isolate the scap and strengthen that with these movements. Right?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, God, yeah.

Nsima Inyang: I realized how weak my scapula was compared to a lot of other things. Like when I would be doing pull-ups, yes, the scapula is involved, but I wasn't focusing on it, which is why a lot of progressions were elusive to me because my scapula wasn't as strong.

So, I'm very excited progressing calisthenics, and I'm more so excited for the next five years. I think that in five years, six years from now, I can be pretty elite at calisthenics and it's going to take me that long, and I'm okay with that.

That's a ways away. But I know that chipping away at that skill is going to be one of those things that for me, when I'm 60, 70, 80 has those big maybe 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 has those big dividends. Because one thing is when you see people who are very adept with their body weight, they just have control of everything.

They're very adept with their body weight strength, and these aren't, you can lift weights. But just because you're strong with a barbell or strong with weights does not mean you're strong with body weight. I know many heavy people that can deadlift hundreds of pounds that struggle doing 10 pull-ups because they don't have good control of their body weight.

Tim Ferriss: Or just because you can lift a lot of weight in a few movements does not mean that you've bulletproofed yourself against injury — 

Nsima Inyang: Nope.

Tim Ferriss: — either.

Nsima Inyang: Exactly. Exactly. And calisthenics is something that will show you those weak links with your control of your body and will help you improve with that over time. And your practice of wanting to — rock climbing inherently adds the skill of calisthenics into it, so it's a two for one.

I would love to do rock climbing, and the thing is, I do so much jiu-jitsu right now that it's like I've got to pick between rock climbing and calisthenics. I'll focus on the calisthenics bit and maybe do rock climbing here and there, but that's a very good practice to develop that level of strength.

Because rock climbers, man, elite ones, and even non-elite rock climbers, just the way they can contort their bodies and have the strength through their grip, through their whole body, my gosh. It's another amazing practice that's awesome for longevity. That if you're struggling to find something — 

Tim Ferriss: Well, that was part of, side, a knee injury this past ski season. I was super bummed and I was in a great location, but I'm up in the mountains and the climbers are world class.

Nsima Inyang: Oh.

Tim Ferriss: So I started going to a climbing gym with my ski instructor who was also a very good climber. He sets routes and he's very good, super technical. And in that gym, because we would go when I would typically want to go skiing, so let's just say in the morning. These are work days so the gym was not empty because this was a popular competitive gym.

So, national team was there, silver medalist from the Olympics was there when we would go train, so it's amazing to watch those people, number one. But secondly, what really motivated me was, yes, sure, I just love rock climbing because it is along with jiu-jitsu, it's human chess. Those two are actually very similar in a lot of ways.

But what I noticed in this gym in particular was these groups of mostly women, but not always, mostly women who are in their 60s and 70s who were doing stuff that I could not conceive of doing. And they do this week in, week out.

I saw a guy and my buddy was complaining that he couldn't go climbing because of a hip issue. And I saw the 70-year-old guy with a leg brace on climbing, and I took a photo — 

Nsima Inyang: 70?.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. With a full leg brace. He'd twisted his knee, and he's like, “I'll just use one leg and two arms and flag with one leg.” And I sent a photo to my buddy who's younger than I am. And I was like, “Bro, I've got some bad news for you.”

And I was so inspired to see these people who are decades older than I am who are doing things that I could not even approach doing right now. And I was like, “Okay, this is a good sport.” This is a really good sport.

Jiu-jitsu too, if you play it smart, just like gymnastics. I can't recall if Coach Sommer had a quote. It was something like, “There are aggressive gymnasts and there are old gymnasts. There are no aggressive old gymnasts.” It's something like that. And it was just like, let's not get too ahead of ourselves because the candle that burns twice as bright burns twice as fast situation.

What are the non-negotiable lifts? If we're talking about just for lack of a better modifier, traditional lifts. The stuff that you could do that people could do if they walked down to a good neighborhood gym.

Are there any things for you that you're, all right, these are some of the ingredients in my multivitamin? It's just like I take the multivitamin every week. That's how it works. A couple of movements.

Nsima Inyang: The first one would be a sled. The reason why I sled is because it is something that Grandma can do, and it's something that the NFL linebacker can do. And it can be progressed or regressed to either level while causing probably most likely no issue to either.

The reason why I mentioned the sled before I mentioned something like a barbell back squat or a barbell deadlift, is because some people, when it comes to direct actual spinal compression, where the barbells are right here, they just can't handle forms of that compression when moving through space yet.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, I probably shouldn't handle it frankly, right? I've been doing back squats, but there's definitely part of me that's like, “Homie, this is not a good idea.”

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. This is the thing though, I think there are many forms of squatting one can do. We talked about sandbag squats. That's not actually loaded. That actually feels really good because the weights in front of you, you are holding it. They feel safe, they feel good, they can be progressed.

But the sled is something that you can load that thing up, and if it doesn't move, you just don't have the ability to produce the force to push or pull it through space. I wish everyone would be able to work with a sled because it's so safe and it has such a huge ability to be progressed or regressed to any level safely for literally everyone.

That's why I'm starting there. Louie Simmons was someone who, and he was the owner of Westside Barbell, who passed.

Tim Ferriss: Legendary.

Nsima Inyang: Louie is the one who got Mark, and Mark introduced the sled to me, and it's just, the sled is powerful. So, unfortunately it's hard for some people to have that at home. I have a Torque sled at my house. It's this TANK sled that you can wheel around.

Tim Ferriss: So, the Torque sled is not, it's not on skids, it's on wheels with — 

Nsima Inyang: Wheels.

Tim Ferriss: — mechanical resistance?

Nsima Inyang: Yes. And that one's, again, they came out with a new one that I have, I forgot its model, but it's one that you can literally swivel around. So, you've seen the TANKS where you have to push it, then you have to get to the other side and push?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: This one. You can push, swivel and turn and push. It looks like a little Batmobile. It's pretty — 

Tim Ferriss: Oh, that's cool.

Nsima Inyang: — cool.

Tim Ferriss: Does that allow you to pull as well, or you'll only push?

Nsima Inyang: It allows you to pull as well. You can hook a cable to it, and then you could also push and pull it. It has magnetic resistance, so you can increase the resistance so that the harder you push, the more resistance it gives you, so it can build to any level of resistance.

I have my mom, who's 67, I have her come to my place so that she can do the sled multiple times a week. That's why I have her come, because it's something she can do and progress without pain. So, if people can just get themselves to a place that has a sled, it's a full body movement from the feet to the hands.

Tim Ferriss: What does a sled workout look like? Or where does it integrate into a workout?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. A sled can be a very meaty part of your workout if you learn to like it. The reason why I say learn to like — 

Tim Ferriss: That exhale says so much.

Nsima Inyang: The reason I say — 

Tim Ferriss: If you like swallowing broken glass, I have a piece of equipment for you.

Nsima Inyang: This is the thing, the slide could be a good first two, three minutes to get the knees warm when you're moving forward and backwards. Or it could be a very metabolically taxing strength building workout that you can do for 20 minutes to get your heart rate up while also increasing your ability to produce force.

So that's why I say when you're pushing a sled, your heart rate will spike, your whole body will go on fire because you're starting from your feet to produce force forward and pulling backwards. So it'll spike the heart rate, but everything will start to get sore.

Your feet, your glutes especially, when you're learning how to stack your body against that weight, you'll see it. And people who are new on the sled, some of them aren't familiar with getting their body in the right position to produce force forwards.

Tim Ferriss: They're too upright.

Nsima Inyang: They're too, the system's very open. So upright, you mentioned, right? So, some people, they'll start pushing a sled, their ribs will be in this flared forward position. Their pelvis won't be in a neutral position, it'll be tilted back, and they'll try pushing, they can't produce much force. You then, they learn how to — 

Tim Ferriss: And just to, sorry. Just to paint a picture for folks. If you imagine a sled, all right, so it's a sled, like a toboggan with weights on top of it, but what you're holding onto, imagine you have two subway poles in front of you that are, I don't know, 18 inches apart, 24 inches apart. Those are vertical.

You're holding onto those, one with your left hand, one with your right hand, and then you're pushing that. Right? And so we're talking about the body position because this is going to be one of my follow-up questions is, what is the correct, what is your preferred position for pushing a sled?

Are you bent 90 degrees at the hips, staring at the ground with your head in line with your arms as if you were doing an overhead press? Is it, I don't know, 20 degrees off of parallel to the ground with the upper body? What does it look like?

Nsima Inyang: So, this is where I think the power — 

Tim Ferriss: I've wondered about this because I got a sled based on, actually, I think it's Mark Bell, who I owe thanks for this. A very early, early, early stone age version of something like the Torque sled.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. Was it from Torque or was it another company?

Tim Ferriss: I think it was another company. It was — 

Nsima Inyang: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: — like Xpro, X-P-R-O or something like that. I can't recall. Sorry guys that I'm butchering it. But the challenge with that for me always was it was like, “God, I love this hip extension and glute engagement, and if I'm not careful, I feel my lower back.” So that's what I need to account for. I would love to get back into sled, but — 

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — I would love to hear your thoughts on just avoiding probably too much flaring and pointing my titties at the ceiling. It's an exaggeration, but you get the idea, guys, if you're arching your back unnecessarily. It's a simplification. So, what would your prescription be?

Nsima Inyang: Level one for the sled would be learning how to create a neutral system when pushing the sled through space. So you're inherently going to come forward a little bit. You're not going to be vertical and pushing.

You're going to be leaning forward a little bit, but you need to make sure that your rib cage is over your hips. So it's like two bowls pouring into each other. When we were mentioning this open system flared, I know some people aren't watching the podcast. Your rib cage would be — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, flared. Imagine — sorry. Imagine if you had a foam roller. You put a foam roller right below your shoulder blades, and then you basically bent your upper back to bring your head closer to the ground.

Nsima Inyang: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: That would be flaring, right?

Nsima Inyang: So you cannot produce a lot of force when you have this flared system. You also, it's more difficult for — 

Tim Ferriss: It's super common, by the way. People who think they don't do this, take videos of yourself doing varied exercises. It is so common.

Nsima Inyang: Yes, it's extremely common. Another issue is maybe having, this is a little bit less common, but too much flexion, right? So too much bending when trying to push. You want to be in a neutral position, a strong neutral position where your rib cage is right above your hips.

Tim Ferriss: So, can you explain that to me? Because rib cage over my hips makes me think that I need to be upright.

Nsima Inyang: All you want to think about is, for example, the neutral position that we think about when we're squatting down, that rib position, let's now angle the body forward while maintaining that rib position and pushing the sled.

Tim Ferriss: Got it.

Nsima Inyang: That's all it is.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Nsima Inyang: That's going to be the position that allows us to be able to produce the most force while moving forward. Now, for some people, when it comes to the upper part of the spine, let me also mention this. This is the level one pushing and pulling position that we want our ribcage in.

Because for me, when I want people to progress what they do with the sled, it's a very powerful tool to allow you to push and pull in different spinal positions. So you start off by pushing and pulling the sled with a neutral spine. Then you can start to push and pull the sled laterally.

So the sled is here, you're here, you're pushing the sled laterally. You're pulling the sled laterally while maintaining a fairly neutral spine. But then over time, the strength that you can get the sled is that when you push the sled, you can push with more spinal flexion when you become more comfortable.

So you can learn to produce force with spinal flexion. And then you can learn so when you're pulling the sled, you can learn to almost Jefferson curl pull the sled in deep spinal flexion.

You don't start here, but when you become comfortable, and you've been doing this with very lightweight initially, you can be comfortable pulling this load with deep spinal flexion. That's later on. And that's, for me, where the sled has become super powerful.

Because what my goal is for myself and what I've done is I became very strong pushing and pulling stuff with a neutral spine. Then I pushed and pulled with spinal extension, purposefully putting myself in this position while pulling and pushing. I pushed and pulled in deep spinal flexion so that I could become very strong in this spinal position.

I push and pull in deep lateral flexion. So I'll literally push the sled here with lateral flexion of the spine.

Tim Ferriss: That's so scary for me to watch.

Nsima Inyang: I'll pull the sled here with deep lateral flexion on the other side so that I can strengthen all of the positions of my spine with this implement.

This isn't something you're able to do with the barbell. You could do spinal flexion Jefferson curl stuff, you can do some lateral stuff, but the sled allows you to produce force on an object forward, backward, and to the side with that intent of movement.

Tim Ferriss: When you are pulling, how are you pulling? I know this sounds dumb, but do you have ropes attached to the sled like with the Torque sled?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: How are you pulling it?

Nsima Inyang: So the Torque sled, there's two ways that I'm pulling. When I want to get into deep flexion, I have this thing, it's something that Mark made; it's called a shake strap. It's this strap that you're able to, it's like a cable attachment that you can put on a machine, but you can also put the sled.

And I loop my hands through it, right, so my hands are here, and then I'll let my back bend, and then I'll start walking backwards in deep spinal flexion with that pulling me. So it's like, if you can imagine my — there's a video of this.

Tim Ferriss: I can imagine that.

Nsima Inyang: Imagine you reach through a hole and then grab it and it's — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it's right there.

Nsima Inyang: — wrapped around the wrist.

Tim Ferriss: And literally — 

Nsima Inyang: When I'm going backwards, I'm in this position while moving backwards. I'm in this deep spinal flexion.

Tim Ferriss: What about off the rack white belt version?

Nsima Inyang: Neutral spine.

Tim Ferriss: Neutral — 

Nsima Inyang: That' what I said.

Tim Ferriss: Right, but are you using the — what's it called?

Nsima Inyang: You can use either the sled attachment that, whatever sled you're using, or you can most sleds have something that you can hook onto and then you can place that attachment, and then you can still push and pull with a neutral spine.

Tim Ferriss: I got it. What is that? What does Mark call that?

Nsima Inyang: It's called a shake strap.

Tim Ferriss: Shake strap.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. It's called a shake strap.

Tim Ferriss: And he sells that somewhere presumably.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. Everything that I've talked about, I put it all in a place called thestrongerhuman.store. It's a website so all this equipment is there, but you can also find this at his website, which I believe is markbellslingshot.com. So, for the sandbags and everything, I mentioned ropes, it's at thestrongerhuman.store.

Tim Ferriss: I was in the middle of nowhere, Italy, and I went to this gym, this tiny gym, and there was a slingshot there. And I took a photo and I sent it to Mark.

Nsima Inyang: Those things are everywhere. They're everywhere. That's one of the cool things about that. You'll see them in the most random gyms, but when it comes to that, the basic version of the sled that Mom and Dad can do, older people, younger, everyone can do, push and pull with a neutral spine and learn how to produce force.

Slowly increase the load. When you feel comfortable, start introducing a little bit of play in your spine. But when you introduce this play in your spine, don't move the spine out of that position when pushing and pulling.

Tim Ferriss: And probably drop the load.

Nsima Inyang: Drop the load. Absolutely, drop the load. It needs to be light. But let's say for example, you start exploring with a little bit of spinal flexion when pulling the sled. You get into that spinal flexion, the sled is really light. You start pulling backwards. You're breathing, you're not holding your breath.

Your body learns, hey, this is actually a good position for us to produce a little bit of force in. We're strong here. Versus when most people get in that position, there's a breath hold. It feels unsafe. Something gets pulled.

So for me, now, the only reason I was able to progress this was because I worked on those regressions. And when a lot of trainers maybe see some of this, they're like, “That's unsafe. Just wait a few years. You're going to blow your back out.”

Like, “No, I'm not going to hurt myself because my body knows that this is a good resilient position to be in. I'm not afraid of this position.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. There's also, I mean, so that is definitely key to keep in mind if you've slowly conditioned yourself to be safe in those positions. There's also just a lot of dogmatic, “Never do this” nonsense that has no backing.

The number of classes I've been in where they're like, “Don't lock your knees. Don't lock your arms.” There are these posters that Coach Chris Sommer pointed me to. It's a photo of this Chinese gymnast beast in a Maltese cross. If you want to know what that is, go check that out. And it just says underneath, “Lock your elbows.”

And it's yeah, if you're not dumb about it, our body, we have this full range of movement for a reason. Look, if you're hyper mobile and this and that, you got to take it into account.

Nsima Inyang: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: But also, you're allowed to ask questions about the rules. Make sure you understand why the rules exist and if the person can't explain it. Interesting. Well, at least I cross examined it.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, so one topic that you wanted to make sure we touched upon is soft tissue work.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: This is a topic near and dear to my heart, so take it away. Where should we start?

Nsima Inyang: So, again, so many things. I've met Kelly Starrett maybe three times, you know what I mean? I think he's been on the show twice, and he's come to the gym.

Tim Ferriss: Can I set the stage for people who have no idea who this is?

Nsima Inyang: Set the stage for Mr. Starrett.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So Kelly Starrett, famous for Becoming the Supple Leopard, which by the way, I'm not sure if he's ever shown this photo. There's a photograph of him in the gym that he started with his wife, which is him in a leopard print bathrobe, pulling a Zoolander. I'm not sure if that relates to the title of the book, but the point is, high-level PT performance coach, works with the highest levels of military, highest levels of athletics.

And also, this is important to me at least, is a practitioner, right? He walks the walk. I think for his, I think I'm getting this right, for his 40th birthday, and this is a large man. He's a big boy.

Nsima Inyang: He is.

Tim Ferriss: He's got to be 230, 240, 250, who knows. In that range. Thighs as big around as this table.

Nsima Inyang: He's going crazy if he's listening to you say this right now, by the way.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I'm just going to keep laying thick.

His legs are ridiculously large. He is a very strong man. And for his 40th though, because you would look at him, you'd be like, okay, that's a meat cube. I'm sure he is very strong in a couple of lifts. However, for his 40th, I think it was he wanted to power clean some ungodly number, and he can't really use one of his wrists. So he catches the barbell in this half salute with one arm when he catches it on the shoulders. So there's that.

So on his birthday he wanted to do that. He wanted to, I believe it was run an ultra marathon. And not just any ultra, but the Quad Dipsea, which is a killer, like a widow maker. You guys can look it up. It's in Northern California. And do a standing backflip. So it's like you would look at him, you wouldn't assume all of these things are possible, and yet there you have Kelly Starrett. So that is, and — 

Nsima Inyang: He did a backflip?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: Yo.

Tim Ferriss: And also, formerly incredibly high-level world-class kayaker. So this is an athlete who now helps other athletes and many more non-athletes in addition to that.

So I took us on a bit of a sidebar. But you were saying, Kelly.

Nsima Inyang: I think everyone should own his book on Becoming a Supple Leopard because there's so many concepts. I bought that book in 2013, and so many concepts or things that I've continued to build my knowledge pace on that have helped so much. One thing from that book that was just a small mention but went a very long way for me was keeping a relaxed face when doing myofascial release or soft tissue work. And when you're doing soft tissue work, and we can just use an example, if you're on top of a foam roller or you're using a hard med ball, Kelly has his harder products like his Supernova product. It's very hard and you roll on top of it. It can hurt because you're now rolling your tissues on top of this hard piece of equipment. The instinctual thing to do was grimace and make faces.

Tim Ferriss: Give me this.

Nsima Inyang: And what happens, even when I did that instinctively I tightened up right here. And those tissues, they bind up to try to keep you safe. You hold your breath, you tighten your face. You're not able to get as deep into the tissues that you're trying to work and help become more supple. So Kelly's advice is like, “Get rid of your pain face.” Stop, right? Because inherently, if you just try to get this loose, get this relaxed, you'll start to probably breathe. You'll start to get deeper into those tissues. The soft tissue work will work better. That's the goal of that.

Tim Ferriss: Why is the soft tissue work important?

Nsima Inyang: The soft tissue work is important because what I've found is that when you have certain tissues that are too tense, earlier in our conversation we're talking about not holding the breath so that you're not holding onto too much tension, but what tends to happen for many of us is we have different areas of our body that hold more tension than others. And what soft tissue or self-myofascial release does is it helps you search for areas. You're tacking down certain tissues, that feels good, that feels good, ooh, that feels gummy.

You're doing work on that, whether it's with a med ball or a Body Lever, which is the leverage tool I showed you. And when you're able to breathe and work through those areas, what you'll find is when you again work through that and it's not as painful, you go and you move again, you might have extra range of motion. You might have less joint pain in a joint that's lower or high of the area that you were just working. And a goal of this is to have that tissue state that you create after doing soft tissue work, have that be your default.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: That's the goal.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let me mention just a few things here too. One is going to sound super bougie, but I'll say it anyway. Even when I was driving around in my POS, hand me down minivan, and making next to nothing out of college, body work again, like scale it down. If I had to go drive into the most dangerous part of San Jose to the most sketchiest massage place just to pay for a 30-minute massage because I couldn't afford anything, I would do that.

So bodywork and soft tissue work is something that has just been a non-negotiable for me forever. And it doesn't fix everything. It's not a panacea, but just to get into the microdosing movement, you can also microdose massage in terms of self soft tissue treatments. 

So before bed, pretty much whenever I'm at home, certainly before bed, I always roll. And that is not just to work on the tissues, it's also to down regulate. And I'm not sure if there's any science to back this, but it feels like it helps me shift into more parasympathetic state, helps with sleep.

Nsima Inyang: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And I do literally it's five minutes, I would say. Probably no more. Typically lower body, not a lot of upper body stuff. But as a result of that tiny, tiny continual dosing, it's like when I do get body work, it's very common they're like, “Wow, your muscles are very easy to work with. What is the story here?” And it's like, “Yeah, it's just flossing.” It's the daily practice of doing that soft tissue work.

And I haven't used it yet, but I'm excited to use — maybe you should just put — maybe the person who owns this product, so they should maybe in quotation marks, just call it the “Nutcracker.” I think of a Nutcracker, what is it called? The Body Lever.

Nsima Inyang: The Body Lever.

Tim Ferriss: The Body Lever. It looks like a giant nutcracker that you can, with your arms, use to compress your leg, or your abdomen, or you could brace it against a leg and use it to benevolently crush your arm to do forearm stuff. I mean, it looks very, very flexible. Rock climbers have used something, I think they probably have rebranded it now, called the Armaid, just specifically for the forearm stuff.

Nsima Inyang: I think there's a company, maybe Rogue, they had this thing that you could open up and clamp down on your legs and arms.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, very, very similar idea. So I'm looking forward to using that. I remember I saw you, maybe it was in the same video, I feel. But you were in a sauna with a proper banya hat on, with the nutcracker on your leg. And I was like, ooh, I want one of those. And I actually took a screenshot and sent it, small world, to Kelly Starrett. I was like, “Starrett, where do I get one of these nutcrackers?” And lo and behold, full circle, and now I shall have my nutcracker.

What — 

Nsima Inyang: It's here today.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. Oh, amazing. All right. Look at this. Christmas comes early.

What other types of, because when people think soft tissue, there are right and wrong ways to do this. Not everything delivers the kind of benefits one might hope, right? So for me, I mean, this is very 101, but it's like if I find an area as I'm rolling out my IT band on my vastus lateralis, and the outside of the quad tends to get very, very tight. And if I find that gummy painful spot, it's like, okay, you don't just gloss over that. Let's sit on that for a while.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Also, using vibration even. Now they have Theraguns and stuff. I used to use a Hitachi Magic Wand for this, funny enough, if people — 

Nsima Inyang: Wait, what?

Tim Ferriss: Popular with lesbians.

Nsima Inyang: You really — bro. Okay, I could see that working. Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. So multipurpose, but using percussion devices for sure. Also, when I've located through foam rolling that painful spot, going to it with a theragun or something like it. A million different devices you can choose from.

Any other particular types of soft tissue work that you like to do?

Nsima Inyang: So let's just start with probably some of the easiest that you can manage. People like Gua Sha. You can get yourself a Gua Sha tool. You could pull out a butter knife.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right.

Nsima Inyang: You could pull out a butter knife, lotion up an area that you want to work. Let's say that you do a lot of gripping and your forearms are tight. Pull that out, get the area lotioned up, and then start to work those areas. Concepts when doing soft tissue work with any implement is number one, you have to breathe. The thing that people, I think makes it hard for people, makes them not want to do it, is they do it, they feel tension in a certain area. They hold their breath. They tense up. It doesn't loosen up because they're too tense. And it's a bad experience, so they don't come back and do it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: So just like we were talking about how when you're doing exercise, you need to regress it to your pain-free level stress.

Tim Ferriss: That's true, yes. I was just going to say the same thing.

Nsima Inyang: It's not that you regress your soft tissue work to a pain-free level, but you regress it to a level that you can breathe, and try to relax while dealing with the pressure you're putting on yourself. So if you're putting so much pressure that you just have to go like that, you decrease the pressure. You're not ready, dog.

Tim Ferriss: Which is also true with manual therapy. If you have somebody working on you. If you're bracing, or holding your breath, or making a pain face, it's too much pressure.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah, absolutely. Way too much pressure.

So that's something that can help you actually make progress with the practice, because if you can keep that as your North Star, try to relax my face, make sure I'm breathing, and putting as much pressure I can manage if I'm keeping these two things in line, you can progressively overload the amount of pressure you place on your tissues, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, just to pull something out. This is, I can't remember who told me this, but it's from Thai massage. I mean, who knows if this is originally from classic Thai massage. But a very, very, very good Thai massage therapist, which is an incredible art form, incredible, said to me, “There's no such thing as too deep, only too fast.” So it's like you can get really deep with a lot of pressure. You just can't get there too quickly. And you can apply that to self massage.

Also, there's a guy, Jason Nemer, co-creator of something called AcroYoga, amazing Thai massage therapist also. And he'll just use his forearm and his elbow on his own arms, on his own legs.

Nsima Inyang: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: You don't necessarily need a whole magician's kit full of tools. You can also just use your forearms.

Nsima Inyang: Exactly. Tennis ball at home. I think some tissues that people really leave out of the mix are their feet, especially the bottoms of his feet.

Tim Ferriss: I was just going to say this little looks like a tennis ball called Rubz, R-U-B-Z, but it's got little nubs on it.

Nsima Inyang: Super hard, or is it softish?

Tim Ferriss: It's pretty hard.

Nsima Inyang: Super hard? Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it's pretty hard. But just I will travel with it, and it's like the amount of relief you get systemically from rolling out your feet. And I think who I picked that up from is Ed Corney, actually.

Nsima Inyang: Okay. Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. He talked about decompression, a certain type of hanging. He has a very particular device. And then I'm pretty sure he talked about rubbing out the feet because he said it helped with his knee pain. I was like, huh, I think I'm going to try that.

Nsima Inyang: I'm really happy you mentioned that about Ed, because when it comes to soft tissue there are many people within the sphere of fitness, especially on the evidence-based side of fitness, that when people talk about soft tissue work, the only thing, the only rebuttal they have is like, “Well, there's really no research to back that up, and it's probably placebo. If it feels good, go ahead and do it, but there's nothing really to prove it works.” And the frustrating thing about not just that, but many aspects of evidence-based fitness is that there's a waiting game to wait for a paper to tell you something works that's probably been done for centuries in many different cultures for a long time. Massage and soft tissue work has been a panacea for so many different groups of people around the globe. But we have people in exercise science that want to discount it because they don't have a paper that proves this efficacy.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: So that's why, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying evidence-based work isn't helpful, but don't allow evidence-based studies to block you off from trying something that might just be really beneficial for you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: That's all.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let me add something to that because this is definitely a nerve for me as well. It's like, all right, look, science is amazing. Okay. The scientific method as a structured way of not fooling ourselves, incredible tool for humankind. I mean, indispensable. And Western medicine, I'm going to say, and this is going to be controversial, the most effective healing system ever devised on the planet, period, full stop.

If you look at infant mortality, reductions in infant mortality, the advent of antibiotics, I mean, this is an incredible system of healing, as are many others. All of that said, as someone who has been involved with supporting early stage science now for more than a decade, science is fucken expensive, and it's really slow.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And what that means is also within the realm of exercise science, it's like you don't want to fool yourself so you should be scientifically literate. Yes, you should pay attention to the literature if you can. Yes, by the way, that takes some training to get to the point where you can actually read something like that properly.

However, there are so many incentives that will prevent most studies from ever getting done that you could be waiting forever. And especially in the realm of exercise science, where it's like you're not experimenting with a speculative type of invasive brain surgery in some far-flung third-world country. It's like, no, try some soft tissue work. Who cares? The downside risk is so minimal. See how you feel. Learn to trust your body again. Which is another reason why I, more and more so, and it's not valuing it more so, but increasingly value movement, because it teaches you to get reacquainted with the subtleties of feeling your body, which autopilot linear movements in the gym do not automatically do. Do you know what I mean?

Nsima Inyang: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And then you can become a better gauge. And look, this isn't to pat myself on the back, but as you do more of that, it's like when we were doing the rope stuff this morning and I was like, oh, I feel like I'm flaring. I feel like I got a little too high on that right foot. And it's like you develop these sensitivities, and then when you have, and look, again, I'm not Baryshnikov, or I'm not a surgeon with the most delicate hands in the world, can't read Braille. But as you develop that, you can then trust your body, right? It's like, all right, you'll begin to pick up patterns.

And also, I think I had too many exogenous ketones, but lots of personality, I'll keep going for a second. The other thing, and this came up through my archery in the last six months, because I was training with amazing guy, Jake Kaminski, two times silver medalist. One of the most successful archers the US has produced in the last 30, maybe 50 years. And he, like me, takes meticulous training notes, including soft tissue. So that if he had a problem, he's like, “Hmm, this rib is slightly out,” which is a really common issue with archery. He could be like, “No, it's not the last workout.” He identified through patterning because he shot a million plus arrows easily. He would look back and he's like, “It's usually five or six workouts back.”

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I could identify either what helped me, or what the problem was. And similarly, it's like, just experiment. Take good notes. Try not to fool yourself, and keep what works, ditch what doesn't.

Nsima Inyang: Ditch what doesn't.

Tim Ferriss: But man, the soft tissue stuff, it's so incredibly helpful. And I wanted to add also, just because I mentioned the pre-bed, not to totally hijack this, but so it goes.

Nsima Inyang: You can. Okay.

Tim Ferriss: You mentioned rope flow prior to bed, if I'm not misremembering. That was not on mic, but do you do rope before bed?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. I'll do some nights it's maybe three or five minutes. Some nights it'll be just flowing for 20 minutes outside my house, just relaxing.

Tim Ferriss: And you were saying that also it helps to alleviate the morning stiffness the next day.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. Okay. I'll come back to the soft tissue thing in a second. But Mark and I were having a conversation early last year, and we were like, man, you just wake up. What can help us just get rid of waking up in the morning, just feeling that morning stiffness? Not morning wood, just body stiffness.

Tim Ferriss: Don't want to fix that.

Nsima Inyang: Right, don't want to fix that. You want that. That's a good sign of hormonal health. But the general morning stiffness where you got to wring out your body a little bit. So I thought about that for a while, and then I just started doing rope flow before bed. And the first night I did rope flow before bed, which wasn't something I usually did. I usually just like, I'd come home, work, maybe take a walk, go to bed, wake up, do rope flow, feel amazing. Did rope flow before bed, woke up the next morning. It was just like, ah. Really, I just felt like I didn't need to — my body was already lubricated. That's what I felt like.

And I was like, okay, maybe this is just a one night thing. But I then noticed that the nights that I didn't do some rope, and all it is is rotating before bed. Let's just call it that. If you have something that you can get some natural rotation in before bed, cool. If you have the rope practice, cool. But getting that natural spinal rotation in before bed will help you feel better when you wake up in the morning, and your back will not feel as stiff. You know what I mean?

It's huge. So the reason why I know it works is because I have nights where I don't do it. And I've also told many people in the stronger human community to try that and let me know what they feel. And everyone that does it wakes up feeling better in the morning. So I know that it's one of those practices that if you have a practice where you do some soft tissue work, don't stop the practices you do, just add in three minutes. Do two to five minutes before you go to bed. Two to five minutes.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, scale it down. If you're like, “I don't have 10 minutes.” It's like, “Okay, you do one minute.”

Nsima Inyang: Every case.

Tim Ferriss: It's like, oh, I can't do one minute. It's fine. Do three passes on the IT bed on each leg on a foam roller. Come on.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: It's like there will be a point at which you have no excuse. And I'll add one more thing, which I guess I accidentally omitted from my mind as soft tissue work, but it's definitely soft tissue work. And this is something that has stuck for me big time and I've passed on to a lot of friends. Also, to give credit where credit is due.

So my mid-back was bothering me. I had this really old injury and my mid-back was really spasmed. And I was doing hand balancing practices 100 years ago with a guy named Andrii Bondarenko. And I didn't train with him much. I mean, the guy is a phenom. He is a, or at least at the time, was a top Cirque du Soleil performer, famous for one armed hand balancing, like one arm handstands. He's not a big guy. Who knows? He probably weighs 130 pounds, maybe 140. Maybe of people I've met personally, the most incredible combination of strength and mobility that I've ever seen.

Nsima Inyang: What's his — I'll get his name after. I need to write that down.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Andrii, A-N-D-R-I-I, Bondarenko. And I think his Instagram is just Andrii Bondarenko, excellent teacher. And we did some hand balancing stuff, and I was explaining my back issues and he's like, “Oh, you need to get one of these mats.” And the mat was, I ended up getting the Nayoya Acupressure Mat.

Nsima Inyang: Is this like a Shakti?

Tim Ferriss: It might be the same thing. There are a bunch of imitators too.

Nsima Inyang: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: There's one called Bed of Nails. The basic idea is it's like a thick towel with plastic golf cleats covering it.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And then there's one for the neck, and it fucken hurts. And even to this day, I've done it hundreds of times, if you're a little sensitive, especially if the tissue's inflamed, it hurts. If you stick with it past three or four minutes then your body chills out. And I typically stay on 10 minutes.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: The reason Andrii introduced it to me is his coach, when he used to do team acrobatic competitions, which is a big thing in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world, where you have guys — it's almost like if you could imagine cheerleading plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, where you'd also have male only teams, female only teams, where you'd have a flyer, someone who's doing crazy acrobatics. That would be Andrii who would get shot into the air, with guys who would make a, they call it, a basket with their hands. People can look this up.

All those guys would just be beaten to hell. And the coach would make all of them lay on one of these for 45 minutes after every practice. And I started using it and I was like, okay, I have no idea how this works. All I know is man does this work. And before bed, especially with a lot of my back issues, that is non-negotiable. And I'll give one trick for folks also. If you have low back issues specifically, traveling with the whole kit and caboodle is a pain in the ass. Just take the neck attachment, travel with that. That'll fit easily into most suitcases. And then you can lay on that for your low back on the carpet in the hotel or whatever for 10 minutes before you go to bed. Resolves 50% of my low back issues for sleep. It's incredible.

Nsima Inyang: So the cool thing about this is it's really simple as to why this all works, blood flow.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: You bring pressure to an area, you drive blood and nutrients to that area after pressure is relieved. So when you have that on your back, or you have that on your whole back, because I actually have the same thing at home. I have it in a box. I need to bring it back out. Because I did it for a while and I was like, oh, it's cool. I like it. It helps me relax, but I didn't keep it. So I'm going to bring that back now that you mentioned it.

But all these things, they're driving a bunch of blood to that area, which now when you get up you feel relief in those areas that you brought a level of pressure to. And that's why it's so good for healing of specific areas. And that's why when it comes to soft tissue, I don't just do the hot areas that most people would think about, like maybe the quads or the forearms, et cetera. I hit my whole body throughout the week. So I'll do tissue work on my head. I have a tool that I'll use. And while I'm in the sauna I'll get on my temple, I'll get on my head, I'll get on the back of my neck. I'll get here.

Tim Ferriss: Must make people comfortable. This is not like you're in a public sauna.

Nsima Inyang: I have a sauna at home.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Nsima Inyang: But when I do go out to the public sauna, I do take a Gua Sha tool and a Body Lever with me, and I will hit that stuff in there. And usually people are like, “What are you doing? That looks like, it feels so good.” So I'll give them the Gua.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. You know what? That's not so bad. That's not so bad. I mean, I've been to some of the OG, Russian, Turkish baths in New York City, and there are these old guys from the old country who are shaving their chests in the sauna. And I'm just like, “Bro. That's not okay.”

Nsima Inyang: You shouldn't be able to do that.

Tim Ferriss: It's not okay. I've seen it on multiple occasions. So the point I'm making, Nutcracker, fine. I'm okay with it.

Nsima Inyang: Absolutely. But that's the thing. You're bringing blood flow to all these areas. And if you can — going back to what you were mentioning about learning how to heal yourself, that's what this is.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: Body workers are essential. They're great. I have no issue with them. But I think that if you're someone who you go to a body worker and it's usually maybe a two-time-a-month thing, because that's what most people can afford, usually it's like once or twice a month. Now you can go to a body worker multiple times a week because you are your own body worker. You learn to find the areas that — 

First off, you learn that when you put pressure in a certain area you get release somewhere else, so you take a mental note. And at this point, for me, I know that when I'm feeling a little something in this upper part of my glute, I know what to hit. If I'm feeling something in my wrist, I know what to hit, my forearm. I have these reference points of how to heal myself because I've become familiar with pressurizing my body.

And you learn these things. You know what I mean? And anyone can learn this. You don't have to have a degree with a bunch of schooling on this. You just have to touch yourself.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That's it. You just have to experiment.

Another one, and I actually owe Dustin Moskovitz the thank you for this, co-founder of Facebook, now Asana. It is the worst branding, which is why I always forget the product name. It's like the Back Buddy. It basically looks like a very tricked out Pimp my Thera Cane. So a Thera Cane would be like a plastic candy cane that allows you to get to points on your back that at least I am completely unable to touch.

And then there's one that looks more like an S.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. Okay.

Tim Ferriss: I'm pretty sure it's called Back Buddy. People can look this up. If you just search Dustin Moskovitz Back Buddy I'm sure the right name will come up. And I have one of these everywhere I go as well because there's no way, in terms of soft tissue work, me doing good work on my back is going to be a little tough for getting very focused attention.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Anything else to add on the soft tissue side of things?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. In terms of equipment, Amazon has med balls. So you can get yourself a med ball on Amazon.

Tim Ferriss: That's a ball name, medicine ball?

Nsima Inyang: Medicine ball, yeah. Because that can allow you to — and they're inexpensive. So you can roll on top of it, on top of your hamstrings, your quads. You can do some torso work. But it's a good inexpensive tool for you to get yourself some soft tissue work.

Tim Ferriss: And just for clarity. You are rolling on top of it, or you are rolling the medicine ball on top of your leg, as an example?

Nsima Inyang: You're on top of it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Nsima Inyang: You are on top of it, using the pressure from your body to put into that ball.

Tim Ferriss: Ah, yeah. I got it.

Nsima Inyang: So I would look at these are different types of pressure. The med ball allows you to put your own pressure into that implement. So there's that. I think there's this woman called Jill Miller. She has on Amazon Tune Up Fitness Balls is what they're called.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Nsima Inyang: I like those specifically because they're not extremely hard. They have a tad bit of give. They're hard, but they have a bit of give so you can really sink yourself into it with that pressure. So I would suggest instead of, because most people they want to get the hardest balls, but the thing is hard, hard instruments, especially when you're pushing or pressurizing into them, they can almost make most people back away from that resistance. Most people need to use a slightly softer implement to ease themselves into this soft tissue work before moving towards the Kelly Starrett Supernova, or his Peanut, or any of these harder implements.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: So that would be at some type of pressure. The Body Lever allows for a leverage type of pressure, where now you are pressing two things into each other and you're finding that type of pressure. And then it also allows you to kneed, like you would at a massage with a masseuse. You now can use that pressure to knead.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: And then, as far as other implements, there are Gua Sha tools that you can get from different companies, Amazon or whatever, where again, it's this rubbing pressure. You want to have these implements that provide you different types of pressure so you can do whatever it calls for on any given day. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Let me ask, just because I have to ask, or my OCD will not allow me to proceed, or at least not land the plane on this conversation. Nordic curls. What are Nordic curls and what does your resume look like with respect to Nordic curls?

Nsima Inyang: The Nordic hamstring curl is something that I started doing again after I met my buddy, Ben Patrick. I wasn't able to do a Nordic curl when I first met him.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, so explain what a Nordic curl is.

Nsima Inyang: A Nordic hamstring curl — 

Tim Ferriss: Is this also something you should not just run out and try without supervision?

Nsima Inyang: Don't do it. Don't do it. Regress it. If you try a Nordic curl, most people will pull their hamstring.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Nsima Inyang: A way that you could do a Nordic curl would be, let's say there's a flat bench. Let's imagine that you have your knees on the bench. You could strap your ankles into the bench, and the goal is to lean your torso down, almost just like you're leaning your torso down, all the way down, and then come up with the strength of your hamstrings. So you're not slamming down, you're not just falling, you're going down slowly. And the hamstring strength is going to be the limiting factor if you are able to control yourself down or bring yourself up.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, exactly. It's so much hard. I mean, it is hard the way you describe it, and it is even harder. I have a Sorinex machine for the Nordic hamstring curl.

Nsima Inyang: I have a machine at home too.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I haven't touched it in a long time. It's a little dusty at this point, but imagine I'll give another visual for folks. So imagine that you had a nice thick memory foam at the edge of a pool, so you could put your knees down without your knees hurting, and then a really fat friend came behind you and just sat on your ankles. So now you can get to your max height on your knees. So your hips are kind of in, your knees are in line with your hips, which are in line with your shoulders, and your fat friend is sitting on your ankles, but you're comfortable in the memory foam. And then without breaking at the hip, right? Keeping the knees, hips, and shoulders in line, you put your hands behind your back and then go all the way down so your nose touches the water and then come all the way back up. It is so fucking hard. And then how does this fit? Why the hell am I asking you about Nordic curls? There must be some historical reasons.

Nsima Inyang: So I saw that a few years ago. I saw that Tyreek Hill did a certain amount of Nordic curls.

Tim Ferriss: Who is this person?

Nsima Inyang: Tyreek Hill is an NFL player. I don't watch much football, so I forget the team he plays for, but he's like, people see him as he's one of the fastest, if not the fastest player in NFL. And one thing, and a trend you notice amongst a lot of guys who are very fast is that they also have the ability to do a few, if not many Nordic curls. One thing about the Nordic hamstring curl, there has been some research to back this up, but it doesn't mean you have to do Nordic curls if you want to build resiliency in sprinting, but they progress Nordic curls on athletes that sprinted. And these athletes all had less occurrence of pulling their hamstrings because of the amount of strength that you build in your hamstring at length. Because you notice at the end range of a Nordic curl, your hamstring is at this length and position with stress on the hamstring, which is why if you're new to the movement, you need to regress it because you could pull your hamstring in that position. It feels — 

Tim Ferriss: Pull a hamstring, by the way, is not like, “Ouch, that hurt. Let me sleep on it. Now I'm okay the next day.” Typically, it's not one of those.

Nsima Inyang: It's not nice. So when Ben talked to us and told me about the Nordic curls, I tried one, couldn't get it, and I was like — 

Tim Ferriss: What did this NFL guy do?

Nsima Inyang: Oh, I forgot how many, I think Tyreek did maybe 12 or 13? 12 or 13. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to progress Nordic curls, and when I saw Tyreek's video, I was like, “I want to do more than Tyreek.”

For me to progress Nordic curls, I started at the basic regressions. I started first off having a bench higher and going with limited range of motion, so not going all the way down, finding where my body would not be able to handle the pressure and going to that range, repping that out. Slowly lowering down, took me a few months to lower down to a flat bench. Then I was able to finally do one Nordic curl. Then I would do a curl where I would go down and push myself up and give myself assistance. And over time that built, and then I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think in the video I managed to do 18 Nordic curls. I'm not sure if I did 17 or 18 Nordic curls.

Tim Ferriss: Something like that. I mean, look, I'm relying on, I'm relying on some deep research here. So let me take a look here. I mean, I think we should pull up the tape.

Nsima Inyang: We'll have the video here. We'll have some footage here.

Tim Ferriss: Deep research says that the previous record Tyreek was 10 and you did 15.

Nsima Inyang: There we go. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: But the point is, the differential was substantial from a percentage standpoint. You did not just eke out, barely beating the record. You beat the record substantially.

Nsima Inyang: And this isn't like a world record. I think there's a guy who, he's much lighter, but I think he managed to do 25 Nordic curls or something like that. So it's like I'm not the guy in the world who's done the most Nordic curls, but I wanted to be Tyreek. If I'm to be Tyreek in one thing, because I'm not faster than Tyreek, it's going to be doing more Nordic curls.

But it's one thing, a strength coach who I respect so much and he's taught me a lot through the show and through what I'm able to see him do with athletes, Ian Danney. He's someone who I love his work because he's someone who takes everything that we've managed to talk about here, and he applies it to different athletes he works with. So he'll have certain athletes that he progresses a lot of Nordic curls with, he'll have athletes that he does different soft tissue work with. He has athletes that he purposefully has them do certain types of static stretching, which certain people are like, static stretching isn't good for you, but Ian knows when and where to apply these different modalities, rather than saying, “That's just bad, we shouldn't do it.” Ian is someone who understands how to use all of these things holistically to make progress and that's something that I really think most of us should try to do when it comes to our personal physical practice. 

Tim Ferriss: All right. So bone density. I have lifted most of my life and in certain segments of my body, I was shocked to find, I think partially due to the back injury and reducing certain types of loading. But I have below average bone density in a few segments of my body. Not all, it's like the average is fine, but averages can be super misleading. You've got to be careful with the averages. So the average on DXA, great, but in certain segments way below average. So I was like, “Hmm, I've been thinking about bone density a lot.” For longevity and health span, you want sufficient bone density.

There are different ways to catalyze the adaptation of increased bone density: compression (lifting), tension (isometrics), impact (jumping), and then rotation, which is certainly for me, and I think for a lot of people, whether they consider themselves athletes or not, that is an obvious omission a lot of the time. And that could be mace, kettlebell, juggling, rope.

Nsima Inyang: And that's more so pulling at the bones. So that rotation, it is rotation, but it's also pulling these segments.

Tim Ferriss: I Got it. I got it. Okay. So you need more tension. So rope may not be actually a great example, but the kettlebell would be since it's at the end of a kinetic chain that's getting elongated or at least, and stretch in that sense.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it. All right. Aging insurance, certainly. This is something I think about a lot with aging parents as well and really trying to, I was talking to a doctor I know really well and he is like, “Yeah.” I call my parents' trainer and I just say, when I see he's like, I just say “Make them cry. You have to make my parents cry,” because they need the bonus. You have to load it, it can't be comfortable or at least overly comfortable. Anything else that you'd like to just add on? Bone density?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah, I think that, okay.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, also another one. Just because the one place I'm happy to spend a lot of money is on very, very, very good doctors. And I'm fortunate to have really good doctors. You have to ensure you have adequate calcium absorption and that you are not taking things that could over time interfere with calcium absorption. So in addition to the stressors, you've got to pay attention to what you're able to absorb.

Nsima Inyang: On my YouTube channel, I have a video that I made. It's like 40 something minutes on bone density that goes into everything.

Tim Ferriss: All right, great.

Nsima Inyang: It goes into all of this. So if you guys want to spend some time and go and watch that video, it's going to be worth it for you. 

But one thing I want to mention, I'm happy you mentioned the jumping thing because jumping is something that we just literally stopped doing. Some people, it's something that I stopped, I was a soccer player for years, and when I got into a certain form of practice, there was a point where I didn't jump for years unless maybe I was just doing a random box jump here and there, which I ended up being really crap at because jumping is something I stopped doing. And what happens to many people is because they slowly stop getting off the ground, there comes a point where they never jump again and then they're 40, 50, 60, they jump, they pull something and then they're like, “I can't do this.” Because they can't, first off, they don't have the strengths to propel themselves off the ground, but they also don't have the elasticity to be able to land and handle the force from the ground.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. It's not the jumping, necessarily, that the problem, it's the landing.

Nsima Inyang: It's the landing. So I think something that can be a great investment for many people, including those that are older is a rebounder. A rebounder is a mini trampoline that you can have.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, little trampoline.

Nsima Inyang: There's many brands. Bellicon is like the Rolls Royce of rebounders, but there's also

Tim Ferriss: Bellicon. Sounds like the Rolls Royce.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. There's also less expensive brands. But I love the rebounder. I have a rebounder, and the reason why I like it is because it's something that I can just keep in the backyard and when I go outside, I can just hop on it real quick. It feels pretty meditative. But there's been quite a few studies to show, especially in older adults that rebounding helped them build bone density because of the low intensity jumping that it causes for them.

Tim Ferriss: I can guess at the answer here, but why is that better than say, jumping rope or just jumping in place?

Nsima Inyang: It's a regression.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Nsima Inyang: It's the regression. You know what I mean? Because many people, they try jumping rope. Many people, their feet will get beat up a lot. It's something that you absolutely can and should build the capacity to do. I look at jumping rope as rebounder, light hopping, 30 seconds to a minute to two minutes of jumping rope each day or every other day. Then over time, you're going to get to a point where you can jump rope for 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes. But the thing is, the ability to jump rope without certain muscles and areas getting taxed more than others is a full body build of elasticity from the feet to all the way up to the neck. Because everything needs to have the right amount of tension, but not too much tension. So what a lot of people notice when they start jumping rope is that they're like, “Oh, my calves got super sore.” Right?

Experienced people who jump rope, it's not their calves that get super sore. It's like everything just kind of starts getting tired out because their whole system is just popping them off the ground very lightly. Whereas when you're new to it, that impact and even your feet are too weak to handle that impact on the ground and don't pop off. So that's why a rebounder is going to be super good then regress, so you can have your hands on something and start jumping. Then just literally, when I say — 

Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by hands on something?

Nsima Inyang: Put your hands on a table, hop. Use that to help you have a softer landing. Initially, you might have a lot of weight in your hands so that, because maybe you can't handle that landing, but over time you're going to be able to put less weight in the hands. And then this is where I got my mom.

Tim Ferriss: So hopping aka, basically, emulating what you would do, kind of jump roping?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah, you could do that lightly. You can also kind of transfer from leg to leg light hops, but the goal is to, again, do not be embarrassed with how low you have to regress to feel comfortable with this. Don't just try starting to jump with a jump rope immediately, because if you do that too soon and your body's telling you signals that you're not ready for it, whether you're getting a lot of impact in your lower back, your knees, your feet are feeling really beat up. You need to listen to those signals and regress the hopping. I'm telling you, if you can regress hopping, do it a little bit, it doesn't have to be every day, it could be every other day just a little bit. You'll get to a point where you can start jumping rope. You'll get to a point where — 

Tim Ferriss: If you want to see an example of what not to do, people can search for the Tim Ferriss experiment parkour episode where I went from no jumping to let me try to learn parkour in a week. Don't do that. Yeah, do not do that. Basically just blew apart my entire body like Forrest Gump's braces. Not a good idea, so yeah, regress.

Nsima Inyang: But the reason why I think that that's so important, it's great for bone density what we were saying here, but I think it allows you to bring back that skill and never lose it. Because once you're able to start hopping and it's now an effortless thing, just a little bit will allow you to hold onto it for the rest of your life. And if you have it right now, do the low-intensity jump rope. You don't even need a jump rope. Just do some hopping each day so that you maintain that ability to just propel and land that goes very far, and a majority of the population can't do it anymore just because one day they stopped and they never did it again.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I can't remember who told me this. I'm inclined to say Kelly Starrett because I get a lot of these from Kelly. So Kelly, I'll give you credit for this even if it's not you, but I think it is Kelly who is quoting a famous Russian sports scientist, as I recall it, who said, “Once you stop jumping, you start dying.” That was the quote.

Nsima Inyang: I love that. Yes, dude, that's true. There was this video, maybe I'll be able to find it by the time this comes out, but it literally showed this young man and it showed all of his relatives that were over 40. He had something up there and he was trying to have everyone jump. No one even actually, there was a few people in their 30s, everyone tried jumping and they could barely get off the ground. It's such an awkward thing, and he's someone who trains jumping so he was able to go super high. But it just shows that once you stop, it can go very quickly. But I want people to understand this doesn't mean you can't get it back. It just means that you've got to treat yourself like a kid that's learning to walk again, you got to start with the basics. Be okay with that taking a while. Your feet have to adapt to the stress your body has to adapt to handle that force, and could be a year, could be two, could be like whatever.

Tim Ferriss: So what does a rebounder session look like? How long would you bounce on it?

Nsima Inyang: Literally, you could bounce on it again, just kind of like you could do a minute, you could do 10. A rebounder takes away a lot of the impact that you're going to have from the ground because it allows you to go in and then you're able to use that energy to pop back up. So when you become, there are rebounders, like the Bellicon, I think other rebounders also, they have these handles that you can use if you find it difficult.

Tim Ferriss: I've seen this. Yeah, they're all tricked out. They're like the Batmobile sled.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah, there's a whole fitness, a whole fitness trend of people on YouTube that do rebound or exercise is like it's a workout for them. And The cool thing, and this is actually, I think this is a great thing, some of them are heavier, that's powerful. Somebody who is, let's say they're a hundred pounds overweight, 150 pounds overweight, but they can actually start jumping again and they can start bouncing again. But then over time they can transfer that to flat ground. So that's why I think it's super powerful for everyone, and if you find that jumping, you can't do jumping, rebounding is great.

Now, I also like rebounding too, because it's something that I feel kind of decompresses my system a little bit. I like it because when I get into the air, there's just this, I can't replicate this floaty thing that happens in the air where it's just like you're weightless, and then when you become experienced, you can really go down into the rebounder and just get super high and you're just literally going down and floating. When I come off of the rebounder, my body feels similar to when I finish a swim. I feel this global decompression everywhere. So it's one of those practices that I look at that makes the body feel better afterwards than before. It's not meant it can be a workout if you want to be. I don't look at my rebounding as a workout. I look at the rebounding as a recovery practice that feeds my body and allows me to do more hard work later. I look at the rope as that too. It feeds my body and allows me to do more later. It's healthy for me. And it's just fun.

I think a big thing here, all this stuff for me is fun, man. It feels like play, right? So that's very important for me.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, playing the long game, if it's too boring or too punishing, ultimately it's got to be sustainable. And we're excited to try a lot of what we've talked about. So where can people find all things Nsima?

Nsima Inyang: Yeah, make me and my producer Owen Carr, we make videos on the YouTube channel, which is just my name Nsima Inyang. So if you want to find the bone density video, the traditional strength training video that's at my YouTube channel, which is just my name, Nsima Inyang. For any of the — 

Tim Ferriss: Just to note for people, there's a silent N in there. N-S-I-M-A I-N-Y-A-N-G.

Nsima Inyang: Yeah. If you say my name wrong, trust me, I ain't going to get mad at you. Don't worry, okay? So don't be scared. Over at my website, thestrongerhuman.store, there's ropes, sandbags, kettlebells, the Body Lever, pretty much everything that I use, it's over there at the Stronger Human Store.

And then if you want to learn rope flow for free, I have a rope flow Foundations course that has 55 modules and over 50 videos that go in depth, taking you from being someone who can be basic with rope flow, to someone who can now flow with many different movements. That's in the stronger human community, which is on skool.com/thestrongerhuman. And I also have stuff there where you can learn kettlebell flow, how to do soft tissue work. Pretty much — 

Tim Ferriss: Skool.com is spelled like normal school?

Nsima Inyang: S-K-O-O-L, S-K-O-O-L.com/thestrongerhuman. Thanks for that correction. My goal for that place is, first off, there's a great community there of over 12,000 people right now. They're all doing, I love how these people bring in their different expertise with what they're doing. Not everyone is doing all the exact same things that I do. So it's cool that I get to learn from them too. But it's just a great community of people that are all just trying to become stronger and build their own personal physical practices. My goal for myself there is just to put everything that I've learned there. 

I think I want to mention this, Tim, your podcast is a podcast that me and my best friend, his name's Brian Bulaya. We were listening to your show back when I was 18 years old. We were listening to your stuff back. Actually, no, I think I was 20. The 19 and 20s when we were listening to your show, we would literally go on calls and be like, “Okay, dude, what'd you learn from this?” We'd get the books that were referenced in the show. I think we read The Way of the Superior Man because of something you mentioned on one of your, somehow came up. So that's what got me on the path of self-development and learning, constant learning and Brian would say the same thing. Me and him are going to go crazy because like, “Oh, we just went on Tim Ferriss.” It's cool. So I want to say thank you.

Because honestly, dude, I've listened to so much of your show, so much of your show, and it's taught me so much through the years that for me being here right now, it's literally insane to me. I'm just happy that I was able to stay kind of chilled during this show. This has been really cool. So I want to say thank you because you literally, man, your stuff has changed my life, seriously.

Tim Ferriss: Amazing. Thank you.

Nsima Inyang: Thank you.

Tim Ferriss: And so glad we got to spend time together, and I'm very excited to see what you do in the coming years. How old are you?

Nsima Inyang: 32, turning 33 this year.

Tim Ferriss: You've got some runaway. I cannot wait to see. The fact that you're doing Masters. I've got to talk some shit.

Nsima Inyang: I also compete in Adult! I also compete in Adult. I don't only compete in Masters.

Tim Ferriss: Because Masters starts at 30, right. And I remember this past winter, someone's like, “Yeah, you should do some Masters competitions in skiing.” And I was like, “What's the lowest age that one can be Masters?” They're like, “30.” And I was like, “Oh, I see.” So people who just stopped competing at the highest levels. No, I'm not going to be a mop for those guys. Thanks very much.

Nsima Inyang: But there's ranges of Masters. There's Masters One, which is what I did. So I compete in Adult and Masters, but there's also Masters Two and Three. So they do it from 30 to 33, then 34. 

Tim Ferriss: All right, all right…

Nsima Inyang: So it's not like I'm competing against some 60-year-old.

Tim Ferriss: Just sandbagging. Just like, “Take this guillotine… bitch!”

Nsima Inyang: No, they're all around my same age.

Tim Ferriss: “How's that arthritis? I'm going to [inaudible] your arm off. Don't look at me that way.”

Nsima Inyang: But I also compete in adult. 

Tim Ferriss: “Take your walker and get out of here.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. Well, the very, very, very fun and super, super informative to spend time together and very inspiring because as you're talking about these things, and I'm sure I'm not the only person, I'm sure people listening, you do a very good job of making it seem, which it is, not just tangible but achievable. Scale it down, right? You're not going to walk in and do 600, 700-pound, 800-pound deadlifts tomorrow if you haven't been deadlifting. You don't need to do that. You shouldn't even attempt to do that. You shouldn't even attempt your one rep max and the payoff that you can get from layering these things in. Learning to feel your body, learning to then trust your body, becoming familiar with the map that is your body and how it changes over time. The payoff with this type of micro-dosing of movement, the micro-dosing of soft tissue treatment, it does not need to be. And turn your life upside down, change everything transformation overnight. And it shouldn't be because that's going to fail.

And from experience, I can tell you whether it was with training with Jerzy back in the day, or training with Coach Sommer back in the day, it's like these little things done consistently. If you are consistent and you add some progressive overload. Doesn't mean a lot, doesn't mean slapping on 20 pounds every time you go to the gym with extra weight. Micro-progressions that are sustainable, so you're not getting injured, ideally, those things will happen—little nicks and bruises along the way. What that can add up to when I look back at some of those experiences, it's just unbelievably impressive and more important, fulfilling. And you can actually fully inhabit this body that, by the way, mind, body, there's no separation. It's just one integrated unit. And we are evolved to move our bodies through space. That's why the idea of a brain and a jar doesn't really work. Uploading consciousness, no. It's all integrated into the movement of the body. And I think you are an incredible ambassador for it. So thank you for that. And you're a very, very, very good educator.

Nsima Inyang: Thank you.Tim Ferriss: That is hard to do. That is hard to do in a very crowded media landscape. And I saw that video and I was like, “Huh, interesting.” And then Mark's name popped up and I was like, “I think I recognize that mutant.” Hold on a second and I texted Mark, and here we are. I'm glad it happened and we'll link to everything in the show notes, folks. We're going to go get some food, which I'm very excited about, and show notes, as per usual, tim.blog/podcast, we'll link to everything. And I can guarantee you, if you search for this episode, Nsima, N-S-I-M-A, there will be one and only. It's hard for me to imagine getting a collection of those. And as always, folks, until next time, be it just a bit kinder than as necessary to others and also to yourself, very important. Compassion that doesn't include you is incomplete, as Jack Kornfield would say. And thanks for tuning in. Until next time.