A Richard Master Class Healing Through Movement: A Holistic Approach to Fitness

In this conversation, Richard Aceves shares his journey from a life-altering rock climbing accident to becoming a coach and mentor in the fitness industry. He discusses the importance of understanding the body as a unit, integrating physical, mental, and emotional aspects of training, and addressing the fragmentation in traditional fitness approaches. Richard emphasizes the role of movement in healing and the need to rewire the body's response to stress and trauma through intentional training and emotional mapping. In this conversation, Richard Aceves delves into the intricate relationship between physical movement, emotional triggers, and the body's memory. He emphasizes the importance of understanding muscle engagement, the impact of trauma on physical performance, and the necessity of building safety and confidence in training. Through practical applications and personal anecdotes, Aceves illustrates how movement can serve as a powerful tool for healing and self-discovery, while also addressing the psychological aspects of physical discomfort and performance. In this conversation, Richard Aceves delves into the intricacies of coaching, emphasizing the importance of understanding individual needs and the role of feedback loops in personal development. He discusses the balance between physical and emotional stress, the significance of movement in healing, and the complexities of trauma recovery. Aceves highlights the necessity of addressing root causes of behavior and the energy required for meaningful change, ultimately advocating for a holistic approach to personal growth and resilience.

Takeaways

Richard's journey highlights the resilience of the human spirit.
Injuries often stem from a lack of understanding of body mechanics.
The body functions as a cohesive unit, not isolated parts.
Emotional and mental states significantly impact physical performance.
Stress can be a catalyst for growth when managed properly.
Cognitive acceptance does not equate to emotional healing.
Movement is essential for processing and expressing emotions.
Understanding the nervous system is crucial for effective training.
Finding mobility is more important than achieving flexibility.
Training should address both physical and emotional aspects of health. Identifying the right muscle engagement is crucial for effective training.
The body retains memories that can affect physical performance.
Emotional triggers can manifest as physical discomfort.
Trauma can be addressed through targeted physical movement.
Intensity in training is essential for real change.
The nervous system operates on a hierarchy that affects performance.
Pain and pleasure are perceived similarly by the body.
Active participation in one's healing process is vital.
Environmental factors can influence physical discomfort.
Accountability in training leads to better outcomes. Understanding individual needs is crucial in coaching.
Winning is about personal milestones, not just competition.
Feedback loops are essential for growth and learning.
Physical and emotional stress are interconnected.
Movement plays a vital role in healing and recovery.
Cognitive acceptance of trauma is faster than physical healing.
Crying can be a healthy emotional release but shouldn't be the only outlet.
Addressing root causes of behavior requires significant energy and effort.
The journey of change is complex and requires patience.
Holistic approaches to personal development yield the best results.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background
06:09 The Search for Solutions: Understanding Injuries
09:06 The Body as a Unit: Integrating Mind and Movement
11:48 The Missing Link: Addressing Fragmentation in Fitness
14:49 Emotional Mapping: The Connection Between Body and Mind
18:03 The Role of Stress and Movement in Healing
20:47 Understand

Transcript

Richard Aceves (00:02.286)
Do like to remiss and get going? sounds good. Any other expectations? Any other curiosities? Just here for a good time? Yeah, I like it. Me too.

Richard Aceves (00:18.12)
guiding principle. is essentially, it looks very simple, just a few words, but there's a lot of depth between each one of them. And it's been an obsession, I would say. So that's what we'll kind of dive into today.

I did this last month in San Diego and in my head two hours was a whole lot of time. It ended up being very short. So I'll try and I tried to keep myself structured, but I go off on rants.

I think that for you guys, just try and take it as much as possible. And if you guys have questions throughout, I work better with conversations. Sometimes I go into my own tangents that might seem way overwhelming. And so you just kind of sewn out. So rather than sewing actually like some very long strip, you bring it back to the real world. So yeah. We'll get rocking. When people come in, they can come in. So I'm Richard Assad.

I've been a coach, mentor, athlete, I would say almost my whole life. I'm always a student of a craft. So I started off in the culinary world then.

got into rock climbing and CrossFit and strength and conditioning powerlifting, got in a rock climbing accident and spent four months in bed. essentially at, we have to do feet here. So I had 20,000 feet of altitude. I got hit by a rock slide. It was about 14 hours on the side of the mountain. They got me down the mountain into the hospital. My hip was broken to about 30 plus pieces. I've had two owner replacements. I had my pubic bone

Richard Aceves (02:03.416)
pushed all the way up so they put an external fixator and spent about four and half ish months in bed and The doctor said, you know, luckily nothing happened in the spine. So there's no nerve damage going through the spine So we'll see how you recover but more than likely not gonna walk, you know walk minimally Not lift anything heavy. Don't think about going back to rock climbing Essentially just covering their butts I would say but gave me the diagnosis that I was gonna be sedentary

and more than likely riddled with pain the rest of my life. I'm a very stubborn person so I was like yeah I know don't think so so I spent those months in bed you can come in I spent those months in bed learning about the human body and learning about

more of strength and conditioning and diving deeper into cross-fit methodologies and just really starting to understand why is it that I won't be able to do these things and what can I do in order to be able to do these things of lifting heavy and x, and z. So for me, whatever I read, I also went on a more intuitive base. So a lot of my coaching and my mentoring is very intuitive as to how I feel. So the first thing that I thought is,

When I was out of shape and I trying to get in shape, what was it that I needed? To bring my heart rate up, to get blood flow going. So if I'm laying in bed, there's no blood flow, there's no heart rate elevating, there's no way for me to actually be fit. So I told my mom to buy bands and every morning I would wake up and I'd be doing bicep curls and doing some leg lifts if possible, just trying to get as much movement throughout the whole day even though I laying in bed. So blood flow allowed me to get better. And so I just started to do my own recovery after I taught myself to walk.

again about five six months after that I was dead lifting 400 pounds.

Richard Aceves (03:58.23)
I was like, it is doable. Now there are parts in the medical world where you should listen to your doctor. The bone hadn't fully healed or connected. So therefore I was deadlifting 400 pounds with an ulna that was connected by screws. So I had to, yeah, not the smartest thing to do. So I had to go down and redo another, I had another surgery where they put a bigger titanium rod and a new bone replacement, a new bone graft. And then that connected and then I had

I started training again and then the screws that I had on the pubic bone popped out. So then I had to go and get that hardware taken out and then I came back and then I started powerlifting and I tore my entire forearm. That's why it looks kind of funky. I tore all of the forearm muscle off of the bone doing a bench press competition. So I had to go.

back down, get that done. But after about five years, no more surgeries were needed. I was lifting heavy, I was doing CrossFit, I ran a successful CrossFit gym, and I reached a point where...

recurring injuries just kept coming back. So my shoulder kept coming back in pain. Like there was a point where I couldn't lift my arm up overhead. So, you know, I did the common sense athletic thing to do, which is pop ibuprofen like it's candy before you go train. And then I can go train, be without pain. Then I would go ice it. Then I would go to the chiropractor. I would go to the acupuncturist. I would go to the physiotherapist and you know, this would continue and continue and continue until I could just no longer move the arm. Then I would take like six

weeks completely off, go to the physiotherapist, not do any heavy lifting, the arm would feel great again and then because my body knew that it could handle the weights, I would go straight back to lifting heavy and then the arm would start to pop again, right? So I don't know if you guys have ever been there or know people that have been there. The same thing with my with my lower back.

Richard Aceves (05:49.484)
It would take me about 40 minutes to get out of bed. But once you get moving and once you are able to stretch and roll out and put on the lacrosse ball and kind of get the cue well to free up a little bit, I would go deadlift. But then here comes the PR weight at 600 pounds. And then what would happen, my back would blow out and I would.

this whole physiotherapy, chiropractor, like I just had on speed dial every six weeks to eight weeks, go through that same psych, I was like, something's missing. Because how is it that in the last year, I haven't progressed in my performance.

my recurring injuries are happening more frequently and at higher intensities. And the physiotherapist that I was going at at the time said, well, you know, maybe we just need to tone it down a little bit or your QL is tight and you you have tight hip flexors and we're going to massage this. We're going to do some dry needling. We're going to do X, Y, and Z. And then the chiropractor would tell me something else and then, you know, everybody would have an answer to my symptoms, but not a solution to my problem.

Can you say that again? Everybody had the answer to my symptoms, why my symptoms were happening, but nobody had a solution for it.

Richard Aceves (07:05.422)
So I was, I needed to find at that point, was like, I need to find somebody that can help me. I found my mentor at the time, Julian, and he, you know, the first thing that we did is we did an assessment and he said, well, your left lat isn't working and that's why your shoulder keeps getting messed up. And I was like, and you know, I had big lats, like I looked like a bodybuilder. I was very well.

Aesthetically looking shall we say right the muscle was there, but the quality wasn't there at the most The left lap does not yeah the left pterus major particularly So what that would do is if we look at what the pterus major does is it helps load on the eccentric face of the bench press Since I don't have to lap I lose and I stack right there. So now I come down I press I press up So what happens you can inflame your infraspinatus your mid trap or a very small muscle that helps pull the shoulder back so you don't round

we do that enough and with enough load it's gonna inflame and then it's gonna pop. So we built up the lats. I couldn't hinge even though I could deadlift 600 pounds and at that time it was like 650 getting closer to 700. I could deadlift but I wasn't actually hinging. So I was doing everything with mid back and low back.

So I'm actually learning to hinge and getting the hamstrings stronger and getting more importantly the left glute max defier. I was able to deadlift at, think after three months, I got a PR deadlift and there was absolutely no pain whatsoever. And I could do it the next day. And it was repeatable. So this led me down an entire path of...

wanting to understand what's been missing with the current fitness industry and what's been missing with the way that we approach training, recurring injuries and discomfort. And then that kind of radical led me to wanting to understand the nervous system and then having experiences where it goes a lot deeper into the psychological aspect or the emotional aspect. And so we've gotten to a point now where

Richard Aceves (09:06.594)
we cannot fragment the body as much as we want to try and fragment the body. So what do I mean by this? If you go to a PT, a physical therapist, they're fragmenting the body to the pure physiological standpoint. And then they're looking at it from a reference of a cadaver and fragmenting the muscles themselves to very specific muscle groups.

But in reality, when in life do you ever fragment to only need one muscle to be recruited? When we go out in the real world? Never. The body works as a unit, right? We go to strength and conditioning and we're only looking at how do we overload the system on a physiological aspect, not taking into consideration the mental side, the mindset, right? We've talked about mindset a little bit, not taking into consideration the emotional standpoint.

We go to a cognitive therapist to help us with our mental health with anxiety, depression, PTSD, whatever it may be. And they're only looking at the brain. They don't take into consideration how the body's holding on to stress. Right? So this is what kind of led me to understand that the body is an ecosystem. We look at breath work and we only stick to breathing. The breathing is partly a movement.

Right? So what I started to do is I started to do a lot of assessments. We did seminars around the world showing people that the body does work as a unit and the body doesn't function through points of position but through points of tension. Meaning, I can passively get my arm overhead. That's easy to do, right, for most of us. But can we do it with the right muscles? Especially under load, under tension, under stress.

So we started to look at what does the body actually need from a functional and evolutionary standpoint. And what we noticed is everybody seems to want to work on the smaller stabilizing muscles and everybody thinks that the larger muscles will be recruited if you get to your points of performance, to your positions. Meaning that if I do a shoulder press, my chest, my teres major, my lats are gonna be active.

Richard Aceves (11:26.008)
that if I do a push-up, it's gonna grow my chest. That if I do squats, my booty and my hamstrings and my quads are gonna get bigger. Well, what's wrong with that? There's nothing wrong with that. You know what's wrong with that is that it's not true. It's true if it's done correctly. How many times have you guys seen people that have gone to the gym for years and their aesthetics have not changed?

But if the aesthetics haven't changed, so let me rephrase this. Have you seen people that can do push-ups but their chest never gets bigger or stronger? No. Right? So if the aesthetics aren't changing, there is something missing. So it's even understanding people that eat healthy all the time, but they don't lose weight or their mechanisms aren't changing, their body isn't changing because there's something missing.

So the goal is to get stronger. What happens when you don't get stronger? What happens when you hit the plateau?

So the missing link is most of the objective science that is put out there is done with unconditioned people. So if you take anybody off the streets that is unconditioned and you give them new stressors for the next six weeks, there will be results, there will be changes. So then it's a matter of what do you want that paper to say and you make it objectively true. But subjectively, that's not true for 95 % of the people.

This is where we'll get into the principles because there are components that are missing. There are things that are being fragmented in each one of the disciplines. And that's what I want to do is I want to make sure that we can connect all of the disciplines, understanding that you are working with a human. We're not working with a cadaver, right? We're not just working with pure physiological standpoints. We're not working with pure cognitive, a pure cognitive problem.

Richard Aceves (13:23.405)
Like if you have mental health issues, it's not a pure cognitive problem. There's also a physical representation of that symptom. That's why if you have high stress or high anxiety, you'll have eczema breakouts. If you have gut intolerances, there's also a high chance that you're having either high stress or getting down or having a lack of hunger. You also have mental issues that are tied up to it. They're all feedback loops.

So what I want to do is I want to educate coaches that you need to find that root cause, whatever it is, and we start to change how the world is perceived by the person you're working with. Does that make sense to you guys? So we'll go through this and then we'll kind of tie it all together. Questions? Beautiful. All right, so.

We'll start with training. So training, right, movement is always going to be physical, mental, and emotional. Some can add spiritual depending on where you are.

you know, kind of semantics, but any time that you do any form of movement, it's going to be, it's going to have its physical application. There's going to be a mental component to it, meaning you need to strategize, you need to find out what's the best way to approach this movement, to build the skill X, Y, and Z. And then there is also the emotional component. The emotional component is a behavioral standpoint. So,

When we look at movement or a workout, we need to ask ourselves, are we looking for pure physical all out effort at any cost necessary? Do we need to strategize how we're gonna approach the workout? Or is there some form of very deep emotional intent behind the movement? Does that make sense? You cannot get to the emotional expression if you do not push physical intensity as mental stress.

Richard Aceves (15:17.631)
in order to allow yourself to be purely physical and change. So when I look at training, I've been able to map out the body and put behavioral perceptions into different parts of the body. So I call it emotional mapping. So based on how people hold on to stress, depending on where your point of discomfort, your pain is, or your lack of connection to a muscle, I can essentially see how your body is observing

the world and how it's talking to itself internally. Meaning that if you've had issues with your mentor, your father's side, if you have mom issues, if you have lack of safety in the environment, whether it's external or internal, if you lack the confidence, if you have insecurities, I can see quite a bit of that just by seeing how the body holds on to tension.

Right? So for me, anytime that I do movement, I'm doing physical, mental, and emotional work. Could you give an example of that? In like the emotional mapping stuff? Yeah. Yeah. So we can talk about...

If you're having discomfort coming through the left shoulder, depending where that discomfort is, so the left pec is part of self-love. On the bottom part, the upper part, is the acceptance of the motherly figure. When you start to falsify the self-love and, I say falsify, like you pretend that everything is good and happy, you usually start to see the shoulder do this, and then this starts to become over-socialization because the mid-trap will start to get heavy. And then you can also falsify confidence towards yourself by squeezing the shoulder back.

So I can see patterns on how people behave. And again, it's not a good thing or a bad thing. It's just how your body is observing the world. And we'll get into the reason for that in the neurological side in a little bit. But essentially...

Richard Aceves (17:15.851)
The way that I came to this was very subjective, meaning from my own experiences. There's some writings on it from the Maori, like Maori healers use a lot of this type of format, but more on the passive side. We'll get a little bit deeper into that. There's William Wright and Freud that talked about muscle armoring and how the body's holding on to stressors.

Now there's a, in the more modern days, you have the cell danger response theory, which means that when there's a sympathetic stress or a stimulus, there's, even though it's happening here, it communicates directly in a nanosecond, like very, very quickly neurologically to other cells in the body. So when we look at that, we have to understand that stress is just stimulus.

So stress could be a push-up, but a push-up is stress. It's stimulus. It's input coming in. This environment is stimulus always coming in. It's how our body creates or observes that stimulus, sends those signals up to the brain, and creates the prediction on how to behave in this environment. We're predictive, not reactive.

right? So when I look at training I go okay so we need physical intensity, we need some form of movement that is stressful.

that is stressful. We need stress in our lives. just, we think that stress is always just an overwhelming, stress is an overwhelming amount of information without any action afterwards. Right? So we all have like, we're in a point in our lives where we have the most amount of

Richard Aceves (18:59.699)
mental health issues, both anxiety and depression. We have the highest amount of cognitive therapists and psychologists. Same with like physical injuries. We have the highest amount of PTs and yet the cases keep going up. And so what is it that we have? We have information without action.

Right? We get an abundant amount of information coming in. How much of it do we actually take action on? Right? Where's the skin in the game? Right? We have thoughts about political parties, but yet we're not at rallies or doing something about it. We have all this information about everything that's going right, everything that's going wrong, but there's nothing that we do or take action on. Right? So this is where movement can help because it allows you to get rid of all of that information.

Yeah, so for me, the body has stimulus coming in and needs to have stimulus going out. Right? And so the problem is that we have all the stimulus coming in, but there is no expression about it. And the stimulus, the stress is like a, I always say it's a romantic comedy, right? Because we've all watched romantic comedies, right? The Notebook and...

right it's always the same plot isn't it like always like I don't like you I kind of hate you oh my gosh I'm falling for you and then oh you're gonna break my heart and you broke my heart but okay let's be in love forever and ever right it's almost always exact same plot line it's different characters different settings time periods it's the same thing stress is the same thing the stress that you're feeling out there will be the stress that you can express in here that's the beauty of

So that's why we always want to have training be physical, mental, and emotional. And it doesn't always need to lead to the emotional expression. And again, emotional, you guys are thinking of crying or having this huge rage fit or laughing uncontrollably. Those are all emotions. But emotional means that you've gained perspective on an event in life and you are able to create a new perception on it.

Richard Aceves (21:16.247)
that make sense, you're able to change your belief system from a not just pure cognitive standpoint but also from the physical standpoint. Okay we'll go a little bit deeper at that after we go through the stimulus and the objective. So once we get training done, the root of everything comes from stimulus and so it comes down to our nervous system.

within the nervous system.

There's the phylogenetic hierarchy. So essentially we have, you you've heard about the parasympathetic state and the sympathetic state, right? You're either at rest and digest or fight and flight, and now they're saying fight or flight. So in reality, we have four main states that we are in based on how our body observes the environment, predicts that it's going to have an experience in that environment, and then experiences that prediction is based on which state you're going to be in.

Okay, the flow state, this is part of the ventral vagus nerve. So it's gone the last five years, this has become a very high buzzword that we're gonna put you into the flow state and down regulate your nervous system and raise your vagal tone, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Right, so the flow state is our newest nervous system. It's the newest part of our nervous system. This is where socialization happens. This is where coordination lies. This is where the capacity for you to read facial expressions comes in. So the flow state is necessary.

Richard Aceves (22:49.985)
but it's not the be-all that people think about, right? After that, we go into fight or flight. So I want you guys to think this is your sympathetic nervous system. The fight is you winning, you hunting. The flight is you losing or running away.

Right, so we've all been there doing a hard workout and you're like, this feels awesome, this feels great. And then you start to feel maybe a little bit of anxiety or rise of discomfort or intensity in the chest or the shoulders. And then I know you're like, oh my God, how many more do I have left? Do I have to be here? Can I stop? What if I pretend that I need to go get water? What if I say I have to go pee? Then I can stop moving, right? That's the fight step. Right, is becoming hypervigilant and finding a way to get out of your situation.

And then after that, if all else fails, you go towards the freeze. This is the dorsal vagus nerve. They say it's part of your sympathetic nervous system, but I believe that is extremely wrong. It's part of your parasympathetic nervous system. The freeze state is part of a full collapse. It's playing dead. It's not feeling anything.

So I don't know if you guys have ever been pushing the sleds and you finished pushing the sleds and you're just kind of like in this position and maybe you still have like a length to go and Edgar's yelling at you and you can barely even hear what he's saying and you're just kind of like in a very zonked out moment, right? That's part of playing dead. The body is trying to figure out what's it worth getting the system back up to start to move again.

Right? I don't know if anybody's ever lost somebody close to them and the whole body just goes numb. Right? That's the dorsal vagus nerve in action. Your body goes into almost full autopilot. You have no sensation anywhere. You can't feel anything. Right? Like if you've pushed the sled enough, it's not that everything hurts. Everything is just completely numb and there's nothing you can do. And then afterwards, what happens?

Richard Aceves (24:45.899)
and then the legs start to burn, right? Mental anxiety, and you're like, my God, I need to move. Maybe if I move, I can start to get myself out of the pain. You start to move, you kind of come back up, and the heart rate goes up and it still burns, so come back down, right? You start to play. You're always gonna be in one state versus the other based on how you're experiencing the world.

So the fact that people always want you to be in a flow state, they're really trying to get you into a free state. You know how you said you don't mind going off topic? Mm-hmm, I don't mind. So in situations like not in the gym and in the real world, when there's a traumatic event, and I don't know if anyone's ever experienced this before, and police come or whatever, it's a traumatic event, you call 911.

telling you, meaning me, you just need to calm down. You just need to calm down. Yeah, absolutely not. No, no, that I can...

Right. Because it's a...

Richard Aceves (25:57.697)
they have a different perception of the world. The problem is that your perception is your reality. So meaning we could both have the same exact situation and will behave completely different.

And so they're saying that because they're seeing it from an outside perspective. And they're like, you can just calm down, then we can get rationalization, and then you can handle things in a much better way, where they're not in your situation where everything is going haywire. So it's a perception problem. So I mean, I learned very quickly not to tell my wife to relax. Right? just never, never, ever, ever do that. Right?

I'm trying to do that. So it's a matter of perception. Your system has learned to behave in a certain way because your body is a reinforcement learning machine. I mean, and truly, I want your opinion on this because you have all this research. So is there a better way to react? Because it seems like the people that are in the freeze mode in moments like

get taken more serious they tend to be respected more but it's not that I'm understanding what's going on I'm just more of like a fight person than a breeze person yeah okay I'm getting off topic. No no it's not off topic it's so the reason that you're more of a fight person or you're more of a you know we call them like an anxious driver than a sad like I'm more of a sadness driver so when shit goes haywire I'm that very I'm like okay very calm like what

the stuff that I need to do and I go inward, you go outward. And it's learned behavior. So from when you were very young to now, there's been events in your life that have caused you to behave, to react or predict moments in this manner. But I'm learning that the real world wants me to freeze. And so I don't fight as much anymore. I like do the freeze because then people start to take me to respect me more. And that's where you can start to talk about, well, we can talk about.

Richard Aceves (28:12.205)
I that then it starts to become more of an identity issue or crisis, Not crisis, but essentially you're always fighting between, so it's like playing like 40 chess. Between the states, you also have four identities that you're playing. So we're all schizophrenic of sorts, right? We have the inner child, right? Our innocent selves. We have the id, which is the primal self. You have the ego that is controlling how much of the primal self can come out to the superego.

the superego, how you think society views you and how you should behave in society. So based on the events that you're in, you start to behave a certain way because that's how you think society needs you to behave. Does that make sense? you're, it's, it's, everything is a constant condition.

way society wants them to behave, I just know that that's the best way to get respect or the best way to be taken seriously is that I just need to freeze and I go against what I really, what my true stimulus wants to do and I just need to be warned.

Right. No, but that's so what happens is that you're doing this, right? And so then there's it's what's called a somatic error. So that's essentially what anxiety is, is a somatic error, right? So stay within this topic, you guys, if you can stay with me. The brain and how neuroscience works, there's this wonderful genius of a man called Carl Friston, who's putting essentially quantum mathematics into neuroscience. And he has this principle called the free

energy principle. The body is constantly trying to conserve as much energy as possible, keeping you here, so that when it's needed you can fight as hard as possible. From an evolutionary standpoint, you know, we couldn't order uber eats if we were hungry, we couldn't turn on the heater if we were cold, we couldn't air conditioning our car if we were hot.

Richard Aceves (30:14.173)
We have to go do things. So the bodies learn how to best behave and conserve energy on this sort of autopilot look.

Okay, so the somatic error happens because your body is observing something, it's sending it to the brain. There's a prediction on how you're going to behave or what you're going to experience in this event and that there's a mismatch between what you observe and what you predict. That causes anxiety. So what that anxiety is is a miscommunication, right? So if I were to give you a glass of water and it's vodka and you chug it like water,

a shot. Oh I had a friend do that to me once. Right? I'm angry. It doesn't work.

Yeah, so then what do you then you start to smell the water to make sure that it's not right so that happened I was drinking my shot glass of tequila and my son came thinking it was water and took a chug and for like five days he was like he would like now he kind of doesn't really want to grab my glass of water and when he does he kind of smells it and make sure that's not tequila which I don't drink tequila every single day or like all the time but it was just that one instance created a new prediction to how this environment is going to be experienced.

make sense? That's what's happening when you're wanting to freak out or have this moment of expression of anger and they're like calm down like just chill like figure it out right so your body is being told that it needs to go here and they're telling you it needs to go here there's a somatic error between the action that you're taking because of what you're observing and what you're actually doing so what does that do it creates higher mental stress because now you're constantly wondering well is this a good time that I can do it?

Richard Aceves (32:01.163)
when can I actually let go of all this? And that's where movement comes in. Because you can use movement, which is not, again, it's a different lens, but it's the same expression. So I use movement and going, okay, all that anger that you have built up because people told you to calm down, that ball is those people. Slam the shit out of them and kill them.

Right? Which sounds like a very harsh thing to do. But the final self wants to express it. Right? So that's where the miscommunication happens. Does that make sense? So this is why movement is so powerful because yet in that moment, that moment is already passed. Right? There's nothing we can do to change that moment. Except we can use movement to regain perspective of that moment and change our perception.

You can never accept or go into a flow state without expressing the fight. Right? So another lesson I've learned, even though my wife forgave me six years ago for that one fight that we had about something stupid I did, those were words.

Cognitively, she's like, no, I forgive you. love, we hug, we da-da-da-da-da-da. Six years later, we get into some sort of alternating argument that triggered the same moment that happened six years ago. And guess what happens? All those details came back. She doesn't know where she put the phone five minutes ago, but she remembers exactly the date and time six years ago when that moment was so aggressive for her. So what does that show you? Cognitively speaking and accepting something is a justification for a lack of expression of fight of that moment.

you

Richard Aceves (33:41.261)
Does that make sense? No. No. So.

When you, let's say you write affirmations, I am a beautiful blah blah blah blah blah blah person, does that make it a reality?

They can to a certain extent. But you said cognitive... Say that again? Cognitive acceptance is a falsification of expression of fight towards an event. What do you mean by that? Cognitive? So, is there... Is there a moment in time...

where you've had an event or a trauma where you've mentally accepted it, but somehow we keep talking about this event or trauma. It still brings a rise of emotion towards it. But I think there's a lot of reasons why that's so though. Right, I agree. So one way to help...

resolve that trauma is by having some kind of physical expression. Is that your point? Okay. So how does this all fit into training and working out? Okay. The training allows you to change how your cells are moving.

Richard Aceves (35:07.521)
and how your cells are communicating. So the behavioral, so that event that happened, let's say the fight with my wife six years ago, caused a change in how her body holds on to stress. So have you guys ever been doing, nothing has changed except for there was something where it either over socialization or meeting and I don't know where like the shoulder just feels kind of heavy and tight, you're like, man, I could just do some massage right now. So that massage is a falsification that you've overcome that

event. So what training allows you to do, even though you don't realize it and why you get so outside of the, there's a delayed gratification in that reward system and that dopamine that comes in, but you're also rewiring how the body is seeing stress or events. How did you rewire the way your body sees stress through that your mentor and the work that you did that's made your working out more

So we do, I call them expression sessions or phylogenetic hierarchy workouts. So through movement, movement, the exercise is a by-product through creating enough physical stress, which means that I'm going to create enough blood flow. I'm going to raise the body temperature and I'm going to increase the amount of intensity or pain in a certain muscle. I'm able to rewire how the body observes the world.

So Carl Friston had this, it's a very simplistic version of it, but you guys can go read more about it. But essentially we observe.

Richard Aceves (36:47.115)
we predict.

Richard Aceves (36:53.357)
And then we experience.

Okay, and if you're going to get here, just tell me it's fine. so how did you like you were having some constriction and issues with your working out? Yes. And then somehow you and your mentor like how what were the emotional issues that were impacting your working out? And then how did you do? Yeah, so the fillet so

Let's do this. So let's go here really quick. So observation. How do we observe? Eye sight's one of them. Smell, taste, pressure, sensation, right? The body is taking in all of these inputs, right? These inputs are all sent through afferent signals up to the brain. The brain then goes, holy shit, like right now, holy shit, I'm being challenged. So think, Richard, think, think. I don't know you guys have seen my right cup going. And then I have an experience. So we've been,

told that we're a lot more that we were more reactive beings than predictive beings. We've always been I think therefore I am. You are therefore you think. The input is coming in first and then the brain needs to rationalize it and create an experience that fits your reality or your belief system. So for me my belief system was I can keep pushing through.

Right? So I can keep pushing through, I don't have...

Richard Aceves (38:25.729)
you know, and I still suffer with a little bit of imposter syndrome and you know, such as life, right? I don't have any, you know, PhDs and I don't have massive qualifications and certifications and accreditation. I do have thousands of people that I've helped get out of discomfort, physical, mental and emotional. Right? But for me, my like the direct correlation of the left lat was a lack of self-confidence and an insecurity in my own body to express outwardly.

environment. Whether it was right or not, doesn't matter the justification. This is how the body perceived the environment. So it was a lack of confidence that was causing your left lat to not fire Right. So in order for a muscle to fire, it needs to have neural output, especially when you look at bigger muscles. The brain needs to be able to send signals to the brain, the pep, to fire.

So it wasn't that you need confidence in the gym to execute a lift. You need confidence in life. In general. So then how did you, and if you're gonna get to this, that's cool, but how did you link those up and use the knowledge of the lack of confidence?

Yeah, so showing up in your left lat, not firing. Right. So the first thing that we talked about, so the first thing that led me down these steps was talking about mobility. So we talked about mobility and you have shoulder pain, right? So we have shoulder pain and you get diagnosed by a PT or a chiropractor or somebody that there is either a misalignment in your structure, right? In your posture, there's a misalignment or you need to squeeze your shoulders back or they say that you have upper trap dominance or

inflamed supraspinatus. Those are the symptoms. The diagnosis or usually what the problem tends to be is there is a lack of tension or capacity to create tension in the pec, the teres major, the lactorsea and the oblique. So we started to realize that the body works as a whole unit. I cannot fragment just the shoulder because it could be a core issue.

Richard Aceves (40:36.493)
So that was the first step, understanding that we need to find mobility, not give people flexibility. Meaning we can all put our arm overhead. Now, put your hand on your chest, a little bit lower, squeeze the chest, and pretend like you're doing a shoulder press. You can do it right now. And as you inhale, bring that arm overhead. You won't be able to go past the mobility of your chest.

So it starts to show that I can do an exercise 10,000 different ways. So it means that that exercise is a byproduct, not the product.

Does that make sense? Because if I don't have the mobility to get the barbell from here to here, I'm going to find any sort of way to get there. Okay, yeah. So we started to put that together. First and foremost, you understand the body works as a unit, an entire muscle chain, and we need to find mobility, not flexibility.

Okay, from there we started to find, we started to study a little bit more of the nervous system and we created a, it's an exercise called SWAMI. It's a methodology, a breath work methodology I've created. So it starts to connect the connection of breathing and contracting the muscles at the same time, which allows you to essentially up-regulate or down-regulate the nervous system. And we started to move on creating physical intensity to go from a free state. So for example, my left.

freeze meaning I can't get it to contract so what do I to do first I need to figure out how to get it to tense yeah right so if you can't tense the pack

Richard Aceves (42:14.305)
What does it matter if you're a pushup? Look at, like I'm doing the pushup movement, there's no peck engagement. Right. So how did you figure out how to move it if it's angry, if it's frozen? I did hours and hours of, I looked at all of the exercises that every bodybuilder has put up that says this is a lat exercise. And I did all of them for like three weeks until I realized which one was the one that was connecting to the lat. I said, this one works for me. For me, it was a one arm landmine row because it didn't let me displace

attention to my trap as I pulled up. So I started to get connection to the lat. And as I started to get connection to the lat, from a physical standpoint, I can now bench press with more confidence. From the mental standpoint, I'm like, I'm not feeling my shoulder pop. This is awesome. From the emotional standpoint, now I felt confident that I could go into the world and do the bench press. But it also started to change, not just in there, but it started to change being able to go and talk to other gym owners and going, hey, I know it's

crazy but I have this new method so it's to build my confidence not just in the gym but outside of the gym. Okay so once you identified like your lat isn't firing and it's causing these other issues because other muscles are compensating then you looked at a whole bunch of lat exercises, tried them all out, figure out which one helps you actually engage your lat and then you could then you have the mental and emotional come after because you felt successful and you were able to

get the gains that you want. Okay. then, you yeah, so, but again, the body's always holding on to information. So, you know, I always use this one because this is like one of my biggest epiphany moments. So was doing that, I call it a phylogenetic hierarchy type workout.

and I pushed so far that I was in this bodybuilding gym in Melbourne, Australia and it's like bodybuilding like I'm talking there's needles in the trashcan like a bunch of roided out dudes like it was like a basement dungeon-y type thing and I was doing this workout and I did a stretch and

Richard Aceves (44:21.665)
my mind, my body, my soul, like, let's say the spiritual side of things took me directly back to when I was three years old, learning to be potty trained in preschool. And it was like, you know, kind of like some curtains and then there was like a bathroom. And so I was peeing and there was people outside, little kids that were laughing at me.

Right? But you say that now as an adult, you're like, oh, well, know, kids, you're learning and you're making funny sounds. The perspective, OK. But for me, from that moment on, my timeline and how I perceived a public bathroom changed forever, which changed me forever.

So I can't go back and change that instance, but I can gain perspective of like, okay, so that was the reason. And now I can go give myself a hug, like, oh, it's all right, we all make sounds. After that moment, I can go pee in public. So the way the body learns is through enough physical stress to change the cellular communication.

Does that make sense? Yeah. No, I'm following you on the neuroscience. So yeah, so the body is holding on to these triggers because otherwise it'd be way too much work for the brain.

And so this is what happens when you become extremely hyper vigilant is the body stops moving and your brain's like there's 30,000 different issues that can happen. Social anxiety after COVID was a huge one, right? Because we were reclused so much that now stepping outside of the box is very frightening. So we need exposure therapy.

Richard Aceves (45:58.477)
Okay, so when you were saying earlier, like if the shoulders up and this and that means the mother issues or something like I didn't catch all of it, but where does that come from? Like I'm kind of interested in that part.

Yeah, a lot of working with people. once we started to do the phylogenetic hierarchy and understanding that, using the Swami breathing methodology, like I started to play, and I would have clients that would come in, they're like, hey, I have back pain, I have this and that. And so it's, as they were showing me their physical pain, I would bring in the, well, how's the relationship with your mom?

Oh, do you have any stored traumas? Or do you have this? Or do you have that? And I would just ask it and then just kind of step away from it because they're like, I'm here to just get my arm to move without pain. But most of the, not most, I would say like 100 % of the time was spot on. And I was like, okay, so from a physical standpoint, it makes sense. But what about from people that don't go to the gym? So then I started to go to bars because I like to go to bars.

and I'd order a beer and I'd sit down, I'd start talking to people, and we'd have a conversation. I was like, hey, so do you have discomfort in your shoulder or do you have discomfort in the right hip? I was like, yeah, holy shit. How do you know that? And I was like,

curious because I would get to get to know their life. So if you start asking questions about their lives and their pattern and how they're perceiving the world you get the exact same physical discomforts. So how do you use that information about their history to help you with what you do with their workouts? Yeah so last week I had an assessment with a guy from San Diego he was a special ops for 16 years. He did I think he said over

Richard Aceves (47:41.421)
hours in Iraq. So has a whole lot going on. We were doing the assessment, he's been having shoulder pain, again physios, everything else. Half PTSD, went to go do an Ibogaine treatment, has tried all the facets of getting help, still isn't doing anything. And so we did an assessment. So I started to look at how the body was holding on to tension.

and I started to see that there was an issue with the left shoulder, not so much the right shoulder, even though the right shoulder was the one that was in pain. And I started to see some issues with the hip.

And so, you know, as we were going, I was like, Hey, there's going to be some stuff that's going to come up. So just to let you know, like this isn't, this is, I was like, we can keep it at a pure, like for me it's like, can keep it at a pure physical level and get you out of discomfort, but the triggers will bring it back three months, six months later. So there'll be a point where you're going to get strong enough, but that pain is going to come back because you're not dealing with the behavioral observational piece.

He goes, oh, he's like, I'm willing to go wherever you want to go. And I was like, And so we did swami. We did some front rack carries. We started to get attention in the pecs. And so if I were to make the assumption that PTSD and the war was his biggest issue, I've already lost, which is what everybody's been doing. All you were at war, dude, and you have all these traumas. And so I just, I listened to the body.

I don't care what stories you're telling me. I want to know exactly what's happening and how your body observes the world. And so what I found is he had massive tension here. And so I went in and I was like, Hey, there's, you know, I was like, I don't, what I'm seeing is there's a massive lack of acceptance towards your motherly figure or your mom. And there's a lot of pent up aggression because you are like, we're talking about the superego versus the id. You're...

Richard Aceves (49:42.069)
you want to act in a very aggressive behavior because you have a different sense of what reality is and how you can behave as in a primal self versus how you're being forced to behave now. He goes, yeah, I holy shit. the problem, the symptom comes as physical discomfort, right? And then a little bit of mental issues because in our society, you shouldn't think about wanting to kill somebody with your bare hands because that's not the right thing to think about, but.

Oh, I do. Don't imitate. But you know what mean, but behaving on it is not right. So those were the issues that we started to clarify. And so what I did is we created a workout.

where the physical intensity allows his mind to go, I'm not doing a bench press, but allows the body to start to gain a new way to observe the reality that he is living in. So what's the new way you have him like when he's bench pressing, is he thinking that he's like, I pushed so much physical intensity into the body that you're not thinking you're allowing the body to rewrite itself and how it communicates.

So when you look at strength, right? So when you look at strength, in order for you to get stronger or for you to change whatever is going on in your body, you need neural output, you need muscle quality, muscle quantity, and then you can add a skill.

Everybody focuses on giving you the skill. Getting from point A to point B. I focus on massive amount of neural output. There is a hierarchy to your nervous system in order for you to be truly present. And when I say truly present, you're thinking about being present right now with the now like you would with meditation or breath work. I'm saying I need you to be present with the root cause of your issues. So this is where seeing the body and how it holds stress.

Richard Aceves (51:48.363)
with me with back pain, I'm going to take you to the root cause of why you're having the back pain. So the way that you do that is the nervous system. I'm running out of space here. Flip it brother, you can flip it.

Richard Aceves (52:03.757)
that works too. the nervous system has a hierarchy. It has eight steps. The first five steps are really all about automatic. So breathing, different functions that are very automatic. After that, it gets to a point where it goes, oh, I should be kind of alert. Right? So this is you who has the same drive to work every day.

Yeah, who has gone driving to work and gotten to work and gone, shit, I hope I didn't kill anybody. And autopilot, right? So you're autopilot. Then,

a car was by or a dog, you're holy shit, and you're present. And now you're, for the rest of ride, you're like super, super present and alert, right? So I'm pushing the nervous system enough to get to its utmost amount of alertness, which allows you to let go of the conscious mind and allows you to listen to the body. And so in order for us to make any sort of change, which is again, physical, mental, and emotional, we need three things.

We need raise in blood pressure.

Richard Aceves (53:11.595)
We need rays and body temperature.

Richard Aceves (53:16.915)
and we need pain, right? And pain, again, is a word for intensity.

Richard Aceves (53:24.877)
Pain and pleasure are the same thing. It's about perception. I always say squeezing your nipple hurts if it's random, but when you're in middle of the act, it feels kind of good. So pain and pleasure, same thing, it's just a perception. So if we can raise blood pressure, if we can get body temperature to go up, and if we can handle the pain and the intensity, we can change how we observe the world.

because we're raising ourselves to be present physically, mentally, and emotionally. And what I do is the body's holding onto the information. So I bring that blood pressure, that body temperature, and that pain to a very specific point in your body where you're oscillating heart rate, breath, and muscle contractions. So your present moment isn't right here right now. It could be when you're three years old and you're being made fun of that you're peeing. It could be because your mom's beating the shit out of you. It could be because your dad shaved your head

because you were complaining that you needed a haircut, I've had all these different stories. Okay, so like how did you do that with the seal? Well that's a trade secret. Is that the thing? you're doing some, okay so somehow, I'm not doing anything. With the weight you're having him lift and the way you're having him lift it and his breath work. You're oscillating heart rate, breath and muscle contractions. Okay. The body wants to displace tension because we're a lot more

cats. We love comfort. We love to have control. Losing control is scary. So we find ways to displace tension. So who does this when they're doing something hard? Edgar, I think I'm feeling my shoulder kind of tweak out. Is it the right position? I don't know what if I'm doing it right. Right? You talk. It's a displacement of tension. Physical intensity. You start to feel the physical intensity in the peck. You're I can't do anymore.

That was hard. What about when you're grunting? Yeah, that's way to get yourself to a sympathetic nervous system. So what's another way to do it?

Richard Aceves (55:26.081)
What's the first thing that they teach us in strength and conditioning? Brace. And you brace. When you inhale, you up-regulate and you disconnect. You stay hypervigilant. You keep coordination. You keep the sympathetic nervous system. You disconnect from the body. That's why power lifters never feel their body when they're squatting. Until something pops.

How long did it take like with your seal for this for the trade secret? So he had the the the his

His fond tetanus was released in 90 minutes. And it was done? There was no more? Well no, comes back. It's not that. Otherwise I'd be living in an island. So people can come see me. what mean? No, so we have to understand that it takes active work. You need to be present. You need to push the system. So it's...

The first session is, okay, we need to create awareness of what's happening. And then the second one is, do you want to change? So do you want to change your belief system? Some people do, some people don't. And some people think they do, but they're not capable of doing so. Because it takes energy and the body wants to be comfortable. Right? We all know how to eat healthy, correctly? Correct, correct, correct? But I see sidecar donuts, I'm like, damn, a donut sounds good right now. Right? Knowing is 5 % of the problem.

Taking the action on it is the hard part. And you have behavioral cycles. you go, you know, there's, it's the well-done control function. So you're always moving through this. This is perfection. You're never fully perfect. There's glimpses of perfection that you're chasing. And so all we're looking for, all I'm looking for is minimizing the displacement of tension, minimizing the amount of...

Richard Aceves (57:13.439)
up regulation or down regulation, right? So can think of the bottom part as like depressive moments and the up part as high anxiety. We want to minimize those because if we can minimize those, we can live in a more active present way. We can lower inflammation. If we lower inflammation, there's less pain. There's less mental stress. There's less physical stress. Yeah. So when you put the seal on, was it more like max effort until pretty much the failure to retrain his neuro-

Yeah, so we did Swami breathing, then we did front rack carries, then we did floor presses with a very specific, I don't know, we did a...

barracuda smashes and then floor presses with a med ball. And I was focusing just getting the pecs to fire. And I've pushed the intensity for him to start to connect. And then of course you could say like, okay, well you'll push intensity by doing a hundred repetitions. But if you're not using the chest for a hundred repetitions, for 60 reps, you're not doing what I'm asking of you. So again, I'm looking for blood pressure, body temperature, pain and intensity in the pec major. I'm focusing on the muscle that I want to fire, not the exercises points of performance.

So he would displace the tension by holding the breath. He would displace the tension by just going into a full collapse and just surviving. So the dude has the mindset of a killer. I was like, understand that if I told you to hold this weight here for 37 hours, you would not budge. He goes, yes. I was like, that's not what I want. The goal here is to get your pecs to fail. The goal here is to feel the pecs fire.

I need you to be present with the breath, the oscillation, the contraction. So it's about how you approach the movement that matters most. The movement is the byproduct. So I push enough intensity for him to...

Richard Aceves (59:06.771)
not care who's around, for him to not care that I'm counting reps or not counting reps, for him to just do what I'm asking of him, which is find the intensity in the pack. Doing so will get you to a point where you're physically, mentally, and emotionally present in whatever timeline you're in. So we can think of Einstein's relativity, right? If you were to take a movie reel and you put every single frame and you stack it on top of another, you're currently here. But if you look up, you can see your future in a

you look down you can see your past. That's essentially what I'm doing and what I'm doing is I'm allowing you to shift your timeline and go express anger that was never truly expressed because they told you to relax and be more calm about it because your dad said shut up I'm gonna give you a spank and because because because because that's the that's that's the moment of physical intensity that your body your nervous system chose to react differently in order to best survive.

We learn how to behave based on events. Okay, so I'm following everything you're saying. are interested in this. Here's my question. So, couldn't figure out how to make my lats work. Yes. Especially on one side. So, if...

If I'm having trouble doing that, then you have your trade secret if I come see you, is you would help me figure out how to make that happen. Based on doing breath work, asking me about my history. Based on what's happening with you. Yeah. And again, that's like the...

Well, we need to get to the objectives part, but based on how you perceive the world and what's happening in your world will be based on how much mobility or neural output you have on that day. So like I my parents when I was living in Amsterdam.

Richard Aceves (01:01:03.085)
My parents came to visit, my wife took off for three weeks, so I had my parents and my kids and myself living in a house. I was living in a couch and Amsterdam living is a lot smaller than California living, so it's a small apartment, maybe like 900 square feet. And I'm a very sociable person and it doesn't bother me all that much, right? But after a week and a half, I was like going to the gym and I was like, oh my god.

And you always justify your own issues and your own bullshit. And so I was like, what the hell? And so I was like, know, starting to get worried. So I'm like, I'm always saying bench press is not the enemy. And if you know how to move and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, everything was moving to range of motion. Everything was perfect. There was just pain right there. I was like, what the hell?

And then my parents took off, my wife showed up and she was like, oh, how was the trip? Like, how was the kids? How was your parents? I was like, oh, it was great. Like it was nice that we're watching the kids. I was able to go work. She's like, don't you think it was like too much? And that moment, like a click, it was like a black swan moment. And I was like, holy shit. Literally my parents left, my shoulder pain went away. It's environmental. So everything that you're feeling in physical discomfort is your body speaking to you. doesn't have words. It's not inside out. So the only way that the body can communicate is through

So the body is telling you how it's observing the environment based on how it truly sees the environment, not on how you're justifying it.

I justified it. I was like, well, they're here, they're helping. You can say whatever you want, but the body said, well, like, dude, you need some space. Like it's too much. And that could be based on back experiences from me having to go live with them when I was 18. Again, there's no good or bad. It's just shit happens and your body learns how to behave in environments. Yes.

Richard Aceves (01:02:53.357)
There was a time where, this was like five years ago or something, I first came to Richard, I mean, we kind of kept in touch, anyway, I had this shoulder issue and he...

I went to him just for like pain stuff and then it went down to you know confidence stuff and then it went down to what are you scared of all the stuff that I didn't even think was supposed to happen but it was the same thing it was like like his his homework for me was go find your lats and I've been in the industry for 15 years and I'm like I know I find my lats like I got nice lats bro same thing I spent hours trying to my lats

That was a point that I wanted to make before, but also every year, Christmas time, I have shoulder issues and it lasts two weeks. Christmas, that's it. That's it. Yeah, I know why, but it's just kind what you were talking about, you know? So yeah, I just wanted to shut it out.

I started coming to this gym because I knew I was going to see my ex-husband at my daughter's wedding. Oh my god. You want to get jaded? No, it was all about this. It was because I'm lucky to be alive. I'm lucky he didn't kill me. He tried to kill me in every other way. Financial abuse, physical abuse, mental abuse. And I was going to be a sit in a same room with him.

And that's when I started, that's when I found you. And thank you. And I survived it. Thank you. Yay!

Richard Aceves (01:04:42.187)
in a weird way, but I didn't know it like how you are so precise obviously and everything, but I knew that being physical was gonna help me get through all the memories and all, you know, just everything.

Yeah, just say something just one thing also I've been a strength and conditioning coach since 2012 I met Edgar a couple years ago at different without it from what I experienced is most of Just people general working out they don't take Accountability as far as like their own body. I just feel like you should get hundred percent like you know what you know your body more than the coaches You know, you know

Take full responsibility. I think that's the most important thing. That's the one right there. Yeah, so when we're looking at stimulus, right? So it's always a... We talk about the states. So we use movement to change how we feel about past events. We use breathing to change the states that we're currently in and wanting to change, right? So that's why like the breathwork stuff that's becoming very...

I am mighty right now. It's all about being in the now and being present. And then you use nutrition for what's to come. So nutrition, if you look at it, we should have carbs or sugars before we're go do something active. We should have more proteins and fats. We're wanting to down regulate them.

rest and digest, right? So this is a very simple overview, but it's the necessity to kind of understand that movement is what allows us to change how we feel about past events. So that's a perfect example, right? I mean, I started, like I might always say, you always join a gym where you start training hard when you have a big fuck you to somebody in the past, right? For me, it was like the doctors for the longest time.

Richard Aceves (01:06:40.269)
It was like, there's always something that you're trying to overcome about your past when you go join the gym. It just, is what it is. So finding the lats, right? So how do we get you to find the lats? So everybody that comes or joins the gym, there's always an objective behind it. There's a goal, right? So we can look at the goals as far as a immediate win. What do we want out of this session or what do we want out of this exercise right now? The means goals, which is usually why people come.

is in three months I want to have the confidence to be in the same room. I want to lose 10 pounds, I want to bench press, I want to deadlift, I want to bop 101, 101, 101. The means goals are always six months to a year tops, right? Maybe you get somebody that you're really lucky, it's like five years down the line. And then in reality you have the end vision. Like where is the value of movement for you? What happens when you lose the weight? What happens when we get you to find the lack? What happens when you go to the wedding?

And that was my biggest struggle as a coach and part of my imposter syndrome is anybody can go move. What's my value in this industry? And so it's being able to understand that your end vision needs to have one of these three things. There's always one of these. So there's safety, confidence, and performance. Those are always why people come into the gym or why you're here training.

Right? Performance being, I want to lose the 10 pounds, I want to go to the wedding, I want to deadlift a certain weight, whatever it may be. Yeah, but now that the wedding's over, I'm here for love. There we go. I like it. I love it. Beautiful. So what I started to realize is you cannot have performance if you don't build safety or confidence. Right? So getting you to find your lats requires safety in your body.

In order for you to have the confidence to move without feeling injured doing pull-ups or anything else which will give you the performance of being able to use the lats. Safety requires volume. The simplest way to teach it, how do kids learn to walk? They fall 10,000 times to learn the 10,000 ways not to walk. And then they start walking.

Richard Aceves (01:09:02.187)
and then running and then again, and then jumping and then again. I'm in that stage. Right? Learning how to jump? Right now it's declining. I'm still learning to jump. It's hard. Right? So the safety comes with volume. And this is where, as I see health professionals and I see people, they want to skip this part. They want to skip the volume part. They want to go straight to the performance.

Some people put in the time on safety, build the volume up, build it hours and hours and hours, and then they'll start to gain confidence. So they'll start going heavier, they'll start doing whatever it may be, and then they can get to their performance. Now what I tend to see happen, especially when we're looking at more performance-based athletes, is they start to pretend that they have confidence. Confidence is intensity. Physical intensity we talked about.

We start to replace confidence with volume, which is a falsified sense of intensity. So we start to do more because we think that that is more intense.

Richard Aceves (01:10:14.573)
sense? You're saying people do more volume, more amount of volume. More present. So this is you start to see people becoming more passive and less active. So this is why, you know, I understand people want to come here and just have a sweat and go home, but again, if you're here...

and you're thinking about taxes and the wedding and this and that and what I have to do over here, are you really training? Right? That's a passive approach. That's creating volume. That's not creating intensity. If you're here and you're doing, you know, let's say fetch press or shoulder presses or push-ups and you don't feel your pecs, are you really doing push-ups? Maybe in the lens of a point to position, but if the goal is to get your chest stronger, then you're not.

Right? So we need to make sure that we go through the stages of volume of exploration before we can start to exploit it in order to get to our reward, goal.

sense. So this is very important because if you don't have safety you can't expect to perform. At least maybe in the short term you can but in the long term there's the consequences.

sense? Questions? Right? So it all starts to play together, right? And so again, it's like, I'm not saying that movement is the only way I'm not saying cognitive therapy, I'm not saying don't go to the physiotherapist or don't go to the chiropractor, it's being able to understand that when we have discomfort, if the symptom keeps coming back, there is a miscommunication.

Richard Aceves (01:12:01.749)
And so this is where you're falsifying confidence by getting manual therapy and not having an action plan afterwards.

Good? Yeah.

Richard Aceves (01:12:22.369)
Right? Yeah, and so when you get rid of the physical pain, right? So let's say you have the shoulder pain, and you get a massage and it feels good and you can move it. You're sending signals to the body that it's safe and confident to go move in a skill that you already know.

Does that make sense? So if you overload the system, the body's gonna go, shit, the peck's still not working, and you just told me that I didn't need to fire my mid-trap. So what happens? It fires harder. And here comes the insanity of having the same loop for every six to eight weeks.

So if you're gonna get massage or physical therapy and get the inflammation to come down on the supraspinatus, we need to understand that we need to find a way to strengthen the pep so that it can maintain the load when you're moving. Okay, so when you said like you couldn't, your lats weren't working and you had to go through all these different exercises to figure out which one is the one that you needed to work that. Like is that like...

I feel like sometimes I do exercise and I'm not working the right muscle. Other things are getting way tighter before. Right. Yes. So like how do we, I don't know how to find these muscles. Yeah, that's it. It's like, oh, you should be using your pecs. I don't really feel that. I don't know how to do that. So there's...

couple things. The first one would be going towards real rolled objects, Edgar does a good job, sled work, sandbags. Then the second one is do you need neural output or do you need muscle quality? So for you, you need neural output. She's like, I don't feel my pecs. What do you mean? Right. So we need neural output. need isometric contractions at the strongest end range. So who can feel their pecs?

Richard Aceves (01:14:15.277)
So let's do something simple. can stand up, right? Let's put some practical application to this. Put some music on. We'll keep it simple. Oh dear. So we'll do this and then we'll do some other things. Essentially, when you bring your hands together, just kind of relax the shoulders and start to push. And again, it doesn't need to be a I'm going to kill you type squeeze, just a nice light push and see if you can slowly feel the contraction of the pecs. And just hold. And I want you guys to breathe in through the nose and smile.

Richard Aceves (01:14:47.021)
Pretend that you're whistling. Yeah, inhale.

Richard Aceves (01:14:52.845)
The goal is to feel the pack. If you're feeling the shoulders, it's because you're starting to squeeze too hard. So lighten up the shoulders, just slowly start to squeeze. The balls of the hand, I don't know what you would call them.

Right, just inhale, don't hold the breath. See most of you starting to hold your breath again. So that's a displacement of tension. So inhale. We don't hold the breath, we don't stop squeezing. There we go, we're gonna keep going.

Richard Aceves (01:15:24.845)
Who's feeling their neck or their shoulders? Don't do that. That's not what I'm asking of you. So what happens is you're expecting me to give to you in a silver platter your pec engagement. So if you're not feeling, if you're feeling your neck or your shoulders and you're not feeling the pecs, start to move the hands around a little bit. See where you can feel at least one peck. Start with one peck. So push together, maybe go out. You can start going out. There we go.

I always tell people, pretend that you're going to hold the tequila shot between your boobs. Right? You're not going to hold it with your shoulders, you're going to hold it with your boobs. Packs are your boobs, Packs are your boobs, exactly. Yeah. Come back in. You can go down. Right? So explore. That was better. Yeah, there we go. So nothing. Keep squeezing. You're not breathing. You're just placing tension. So breathe.

Richard Aceves (01:16:20.279)
Now bring your hands up to the eyeballs. There we go.

Richard Aceves (01:16:28.743)
Holding Breathing you guys aren't breathing most of you stop breathing see you already displaced the tension so you see how quickly it's been less than 30 seconds But because you're trying to survive the objective of squeezing your hands together you find some way to do it so I'm breathing pecs are on fire by the way, so if we could get this together Bring your hands down to your belly button and again squeeze The goal is to try and feel the chest secure it's like you really want to show off the chest

We're squeezing. Yeah, if it brings you to rest, can. Long exhale, so I want super long exhales, almost like a power wash, like a power washing machine.

Richard Aceves (01:17:23.437)
and relax and now I want you guys just nasal breathing walk around the building and don't talk to anybody so just breathe through the nose walk around

Richard Aceves (01:18:00.957)
We'll come back to the center.

Richard Aceves (01:18:14.637)
the neck or the shoulders.

Richard Aceves (01:18:20.684)
You're feeling the biceps perfect. That's a connection. It's getting there. You feel just only neck. And my traps. The traps, yeah. So what is this? Is this father and she's? That's a husband and wife. I'm not laughing, girlfriend. I'm not laughing.

There is a need for perfectionism. Yes, you're trying to find the position to get approval that you're doing the exercise that I'm asking of you But the problem is that the exercise that I'm asking of you requires exploration not exploitation So it's not based on positions. It's based on tension

So this is where you can... that again. It's not based on what? Precision. Precision. Position. Position. It's based on tension. So you are holding the position. So I can hold here, but I can be on my neck the whole time. Right? So even though right now, like it looks like I'm squeezing my tacks, really all the tension is in my neck. Well, I can feel it in my tacks when we were doing it, but then at the end I also have tension in my neck and shoulders. Yeah, that's the overload of the system. And it's, that's...

You're saying it's the perfection. It's a wanting to revert back to what's comfortable. So remember we talked about comfort. The body is very comfortable even in a very uncomfortable situation because it knows that it can survive with this observation. And so that's the problem is that we think that, again,

The pushups can help you change how you perceive the world, but if the triggers come back and you haven't changed, it's a lot easier to go back. Okay. So then you're saying I would have to figure out where did I start going to my traps and back to deal with stressors. Right. So you held it because I was holding it, not because you could keep the tension correctly. So that's what I do with a lot of the clients. I do with the Moringa. I was like, okay, go for a walk. And he started walking and just

Richard Aceves (01:20:34.798)
walking and walking he's like walking like this I was like dude looks like your shoulder is dude it's killing me I was like why didn't you stop well you just said go for a walk I was like right so I can't be like walk and stop because then he's just gonna be always looking for me to tell him when to stop which means that he doesn't need to be present but if I just have you keep going like I felt my neck why'd you keep going I said feel the pecs I don't know that's a good question isn't it

So you create independence and auto regulation, which for him was like a whole brand new thing, right? Cause he's been doing CrossFit and following strength training programs where it's like, Hey, do this amount, do this amount, do this amount. I thought I can check off and go do it. Does that make sense? Yeah. I'm just trying to figure out like, okay, so, and again, I don't want to make this about me so we can like, you know, whatever, but like they'll have me do the med ball thing like this at the gym. And I always end up afterward.

with mitraxin necrotin. And so I'm like, can't, this doesn't work for me. Like I gotta do, if I just do it this way, it works. I, so, so I'm trying to like put the pieces together of like, based on what you're saying, how do I take this and make it work for me? Like how do I use this information for? You are taking the measurements of success and making them the objectives.

taking the measurements of success and making them objectives. I don't really know what that means. You are taking the med ball carrier, which is supposed to help your shoulders become the solution to your shoulder health. You're exploiting the exercise without understanding the exercise. Well, I'm supposed to be like engaging my pets and they feel engaged when I'm doing it, but then somehow my traps and neck get involved.

and I don't know what's happening. Right. So right. But that's the... You answered your own question. I don't know what's happening. Which means that even if I were to tell you, you wouldn't be able to tell. So what we can do is we use breathing as a tool to allow you to be present. So what did I mention a few times here? Don't hold your breath. Yeah. Which everybody start to hold their breath. In through the nose, out through the lips. Right? So you being present would be...

Richard Aceves (01:22:56.844)
But what happened after 15 seconds?

Richard Aceves (01:23:02.188)
What happened guys? Hello? Right? So again, it's not you and it's not I'm not saying you're quitters. I'm not saying that you're miserable people. None of that. It's the body learns to survive. It sees stress and it goes, fuck. But then after this, there's volume. I have to go deal with the kids and I have this and I have that. So I just I'll just play the role right now. And so again, it's not it's not a mockery that

You're not paying attention. You're not putting effort in the gym because it's not about an attack on you personally. It's your system is so in an overwhelm and slight underwhelm that it goes, do I truly need to be present here? And it's impossible for people to be present all the time. It's you quit. Everybody quits. I'm a quitter. I quit all the time. It's how the body starts to learn lessons. So there needs to be, depending on if you're again on the more anxious side or

the more depressive side, depending on how you react to an overwhelming amount of stress, right? You freak out. So you, and hold the breath. So for you, I need to underwhelm you so that you can win every time. Well, so are you saying I need to go slower? You need stop before you feel the shoulders.

So again, breathing is a tool. So what did I mention earlier? If you hold your chest and you inhale, you can only go to your safe and range of motion. The same goes with movement. So when you're training...

Stop. You stop ten steps before him. Do you understand what he's saying? Are you having a revelation about my problems? I think you're hearing it in a different way. Okay. We can talk. So it's a needing to see when somebody needs to be pushed over the limit and when somebody still stays safe to have that comfort.

Richard Aceves (01:25:05.164)
Does that make sense? Again, it's just, it's a matter of...

You need to see what the person's win is. You know, the person wants, what are the expectations and the services you want? Like there's no, the problem with the highly anxious, very type A people, they want just give me the steps that I need to get to the point. That you're missing the whole point, that there are no right steps. There are your steps. And you need to figure them out. And the coaches can give you the guidelines. But you...

you know, like as a different light. As a different light, you're seeing, you're hearing, we're gonna warm up to squeeze, and every time you hear the word, you press up, as an example. In your head, winning that part, that immediate win, is surviving the whole song while holding on to the ball and pressing overhead every time you hear the word.

Winning for me is making the pecs fail. Meaning I'm so shaky because the pecs can no longer hold on to this tension because the intensity, oh it's on the other side, the pain, the blood flow, the blood pressure is so high because the pecs cannot take any more intensity. So I drop the ball halfway through the workout. See and I would say that I'm trying to do what Mark said and I'm trying to like own my body and say I'm not, this isn't working.

and give me something else. Right, but it's there's a... we'll play with the front rack carrying a little bit. Okay. And we can check it out. The problem is most of the times there's not enough stress, which is very counterintuitive. This isn't working for me. Let me go lighter to figure it out. Yeah. You're to a position. If I go heavier, the body's gonna be forced to work properly.

Richard Aceves (01:26:58.806)
See, and I freak out and think, well, if I go heavier, and I know I have this issue where I use the wrong muscles, then I'm gonna hurt myself. Right, and then I always respond, if I hurt you, I'll give you another free session. There we go, right? So it's a...

It's partly confidence of the coach to be able to push the intensity and convey the message enough. So let's take the med ball carry for an example. If it's too light, I can hold here for how long? Forever. If it's too heavy, I'm going to be forced, what does the weight do? It's going to push the load down. It's going to depress the shoulder. So when we think about neck pain, or shoulder pain, what's the usual symptom or diagnosis they give you? Upper trap dominance, elevation, or rolling forward of the shoulder. How do they try to

fix it. Retraction of the shoulder. How come the opposite of elevation is retraction and not Depression

We need to teach the body how to depress the shoulder. And then when you go towards the spiritual side or massage or the emotional part, what do they always say? when I get stressed out, just hold everything on my shoulders. Okay, so how can we overcome stress by taking action on stress? How do we take action on stress? We build confidence to take action, right? So it's all linked back together. They're just feedback loops. And again, it's...

I spent, like, I woke up at 2.30 in the morning yesterday because I have a whole new idea that I'm playing with and I spent six hours in the gym playing the new concepts. Like, I spent hours presently working on these ideas and these concepts. So when I see you...

Richard Aceves (01:28:37.79)
I'm not just saying the med ball is going to be what's going to help you change or this or that. I'm looking at a lot of different facets of more stress, less stress, slight positional changes. The whole goal here is for me to give you epiphany as a coach, is for me to give you epiphanies that make you think, not to give you the results. Because if can make you think, I can make you take action.

If you take action, you can change how you think. Yeah, yeah. So feedback, they're all feedback loops. So how do you reconcile the ideas of like targeting specific muscle like, you know.

versus the whole system as well.

together, everything is really isolated and like, it's a function of real life.

Right. So like... I do carries, right? So like when you guys are doing front rack carries, sandbag carries, everything is usually done on a more full body. So is it just like a combination of both working specific with some groups and then doing like... Then doing the full body. Yeah, I it depends on what we're going to be working, what you're working towards. But if there's shoulder pain, then I'm going to find out where the root causes this...

Richard Aceves (01:29:57.78)
Again, you could be having pain on the right shoulder. There's two things that could be the problem. It could be the problem that the right shoulder is doing all of the work and the left side is so weak that you never feel it. So whenever you're doing any sort of pressing, you're always shifting everything to the right side. And then the massage and everything else goes towards the right side. So the right side just keeps getting stronger until there's structural damage. There could be the issue where the right side is just stacking incorrectly. So we need to get it stronger and build mobility.

So do you need, it's a matter of do you need neural output or do you need muscle quality in that region? Sometimes there's a shoulder pain, but the shoulder pain is being caused by the opposite oblique. Because this oblique is weak, so therefore I need to stack everything on this shoulder. So even if I get this shoulder to be stronger, if I don't strengthen the oblique, as soon as there's an overwhelming amount of load, I'm still gonna shift to the right side, structurally.

So it's about, when I look at the body, I look at the body through tension, and I stress the body enough, I give it enough intensity for it to show me exactly where it's going to displace the tension to. Because how you displace tension in the gym is exactly how you're to displace the tension in the real world.

That's part of the selfish brain theory and the diva brain. You need to hire the stress, the higher the lesson learned. You'll start with boredom. You'll go to anxiety, which is mental and physical. It'll be mental first, then physical. It will depend on the person. Then you go towards frustration. You think that what you were going to do was a lot easier than it truly is, and you get frustrated and quit. Then you start to get angry at others. You can blame me, you can blame Madger, you can blame the object. And then you get angry at yourself and you realize that it was you all along. It's a very powerful statement.

Understand like you said it's you that needs to make the change It's you that has the problem. I don't know if any of you have ever been doing a workout where you're feeling like you're gonna die you're like Fuck right here. Just man up and start moving Right, that's you taking accountability that you're quitting

Richard Aceves (01:31:54.156)
Well, I think though, I would say for myself though, I need, like, I'm not an expert in everything. Right. So like I've been, I've been working on this, you know, can't figure out how to use my traps and lats and stuff for months. And then Chris had me do this rope pole thing and I was like, oh my gosh, that's what it feels like to have those scapula muscles come together. Like, like I couldn't make them come together.

You know, but I didn't know to try that how would I know to try this? We've been short we've been sold the six-week program to change them You know like it just it takes time

Yeah. I've gone as far as in one of our privates with a left peck. I've gone as far as having guys spend 45 minutes. I sat back. I said, you could use anything in the gym. I'm just going to sit back. You find your left peck. we have some, I've had people walk out of the gym and be like, this is what you're here for, Etta. This is why I hired you. And I'm like, no, no, that's not why I hired you. Because I did not tell them exactly how to do it. I wanted them to spend time figuring it out.

Just like Richard, you told me find your left flat. I've been training for 20 years, bro, I can do it. But I couldn't, spent hours and hours and hours trying to get it. And I know exercise very well. So for the general population, I've gone as far as telling them I'll stay in after 15 minutes. You just use the whole gym, you figure it out. I have a full recording of this guy jumping around.

equipment, equipment, equipment, trying things different ways to find it. And he paid $100 for that session. That's such an investment, long term. If I took five minutes to tell him how to contract, it's not gonna get him anywhere. He'll come back the next day and he'll say, he'll need me again. So it's a battle. Like I'll tell Mark, Chris, or Kaylin, I'll say, tell Emily to spend the next two weeks, whatever it is, during her sessions to find it.

Richard Aceves (01:34:12.524)
Just find it. Just go get it. Get after it. They'll give you $250,000 if you can get your last contract. But you'll probably get your last contract. You just gotta come up with the money.

It's a... Okay. So... Okay. The reason that you can't contract the pec could be physiological, psychological, or environmental. Well, it... There's different feedbacks, right? It's a neural... I think it's a neural pattern that has gotten so, like,

But why did it get like that? Exactly. And so again, it's, it's, it's feedback loops. What we can look at now is we are here and you're making the changes towards it. So now it's again, it's building, let's say it took 10 years to get that week, right? Or have that lack of neural connection. It's going to take time to build back up. Like it took me, you know, I have a very simple exercise called the psoas raise. And when I do seminar with coaches, I go through that exercise and you sit down and you contract the psoas.

You inhale up and you exhale down and I give this explanation I go when I first I mean I have structural damage right so my hip was broken in 35 pieces like I have a lack of connection from the

the pyramidalis and my lower ab stone are completely torn from the pubic bone. was like, took me, what was it, nine months where I did this for about 90 minutes a day for me to truly start to understand like the basis of a connection emotionally and environmentally to the psoas major, but B, how I displaced the tension, meaning how I disconnected from the psoas just to raise my leg up. I found every single little tweak as to how I could not connect to

Richard Aceves (01:35:58.766)
psoas and found my way to connect to the psoas. Right? So you're talking 90 minutes every day for nine months. mean, thousands of hours were spent on just trying and I'd be like standing here. Like you guys haven't even noticed, but I stand here and I start to connect and I start to rotate and I'm constantly playing with, I connecting? Am I not connecting? Just because that's how I work. I'm not saying that's how you have to work, but I do this at the seminar and then I have coaches that after three minutes go, I don't feel anything after my lower back. Yeah.

can't expect me to give you the 10,000 hours that I did in three minutes. I'll give you my philosophy and what I learned, but that's just a story. You have to go do it. And that's, and again, this goes again towards information versus knowledge. And the problem is that we're leading ourselves more and more and more towards abundance of information without skin in the game. And this is where we start to lose it. So you have great coaches that are trying to make you independent.

And you you stay for the community, but it takes work, know? And how much work it's going to take is really based on how much it's going to take for your system to go through those five stages of the Diva Brain to understand, holy shit, okay. So in reality, like there's a study done at Boston, I believe, with Steve Cotter was the guy that brought it up.

When you have a human, can only challenge 4 % of their current skillset. Of their current- Can say that again? You can only challenge a human 4 % of their current skillset. Current. That's sad. It's not sad, it's compounded. So if you, this is where, so we talked about physical, mental, and emotional.

Right? So let's start about how well connected are you right now? So I say right now we're going to grab a barbell. You're going to load up as much or as little weight as you want that you can physically, mentally, and emotionally walk up to and desert as close to your one rep max as possible. How many of you would get at 85 % on the first rep? How about 90 % of their one rep max? Meaning going heavy.

Richard Aceves (01:38:20.396)
For me right now, I'm kind of sore, but if you put 455 pounds on the bar, right now I haven't done anything, I'll walk up and I'll pull it up. Right now I feel safe, confident to perform. I'm physically, mentally, and emotionally not stressed about saying that weight or loading up the bar and pulling it up. That's, but if you were to say do 500 pounds, I'd go a little bit towards like the, I don't know about that, right? Just if I get myself out of it.

So if you can only challenge yourself 4%, that means that every time you walk in, you do a self-check and you go, okay, so I have a lot of stress with work, I have taxes are due, all these new fucking regulations.

Coach, today I'm just not in it. So today maybe the pets aren't in it because you just can't be connecting to yourself. Maybe today was the day that somebody cut you off and your kids pissed you off or something like, coach, I'm pissed today. Let's go fucking kill it. Go push the sled, go slam the balls. So this is auto regulation in order to get the emotional expression for what you need to perform with safety and confidence.

So finding the lats is the exercise can get you to the lats, but it can also get you to the traps. So just being able to understand where you can challenge yourself for that day. And it's gonna change.

If you had a shitty night's sleep, if you fought with your spouse, if you had amazing sex last night and had the best blind date of your life, you know what mean? It's all gonna be dependent. How many of us have had wine and come in slightly hungover, but it was the best session of their lives? right? what's his face? Peter Atiyah just made a post about it. I'm like, yeah, of course. The guy's neurotic, highly anxious, OCD. He's like, I just wanna tell you guys, my HRV said that I was horrible, but because I had a few glasses of

Richard Aceves (01:40:09.262)
wine last night but I came in and I felt great at the gym. I like yeah dude because the wine allowed you to down regulate your freaking hypervigilant nervous system and because you're using wine to actually be present with the people around you, you actually elevated your state of being present being in the flow so the next day you're ready to go kill it. Even though your HRV may say something physiologically, environmentally, and psychology you are much better.

So it's a matter about just being able to understand where you are today physically, mentally, and emotionally, and pushing that 4%. Maybe you start to do that over a long period of time, you're gonna start to find new lessons, and those compound. So right now it's like, just can't find my lats. But then once you can connect to the lats, it's like, oh, I can do pull-ups, oh, I can do this, oh, I can do that. It compounds. So it's not sad, it's just it's compounding interest. But it needs to be done presently. And that's the hardest part that people have in understanding that

As coaches, we're here to help guide you and we understand like when I see a client, I see two years down the road to five years. And so I can see exactly where their pitfalls are. Like with my clients, I'm just looking at that well-done control function. I look at their behavioral cycles.

And so I'll start with them and it's like we start talking like every three to five days. And then I'm like, oh, you're going down. What's going on? Let's try to do this, do this, do this. And then eventually it's like every six weeks and then it's every three months. Then one year to eight, one year to a year and a half, 18 months in, the cellular response has changed completely in the body. The hormone interactions. So at a cellular level, at a chemical level, at a mechanical level, everything changes to how it responds to life.

So like one of my clients, we did a, you guys can go listen to the podcast, but you know, when I first started working with her, was like, it's gonna take about 18 months. And she was like, all right. And it was in a span of 18 months, there was a lot of negative talk. She tested at a 48 on the depressive scale, on the cognitive depressive scale. Within seven months, she was down to a nine.

Richard Aceves (01:42:09.11)
So cognitively speaking, the changes happen a lot faster. But then of course there was a breakup, so that brought her back down. So we just start to look at behavioral cycles. So then a year and a half in, she had a breakup. She's like, this is the first breakup ever in my life. I'm like, I don't fucking need you in my life. Peace. How'd you get her not to quit? Not to quit what? Your sessions.

Richard Aceves (01:42:33.568)
It's the pecs! I knew it would start coming up so I'd be like, hey, what's going on?

I them. You don't have to. just saying it could help. You know and again I'm like I mold myself based on what my clients need. Some clients need you know. I'm not a therapist. There's no licensing. I just care about the human that I work with.

You know, just like you tell your barber and your hairstylist everything, you tell your personal trainer quite a bit. And so what I've learned to do is I've learned to listen to the body and not so much the stories. Right? So my medium, my form of working with clients is through movement and breath. So I don't need to know the details of everything. If you want to share, you can. But for me, that's still a, it's a, I got a client of mine that called me and told me the whole story and I'm like,

Why did you do this Swami? No. Then don't tell me the story. Go do this Swami and then we have a conversation. Or go do the expression session that I sent you. Because talking is a justification. It's a falsification that you're expressing a fight. Right? Meaning you can talk all you want. Right? Or like I always say, like the keyboard warriors behind Twitter. Right? Or Instagram where they're putting all these comments. But what are they actually doing?

So storytelling versus what you're doing are two very different things. The actions matter more than the words. Right? I've read a few inspirational philosophical quotes on Instagram lately.

Richard Aceves (01:44:37.792)
That's all I work with. look at people and you can tell me whatever story. The guy that I did the assentment with, he was talking about shoulder pain and all he ever talked about was his wartime. I was like there's something with the mother figure and then that's when he broke down because it was early age on that stuff. So I just look at what the body is telling me and then I approach it that way.

And so all I do is I just get people to move through tension and opposition, and I get them to go from the physical to the mental to the emotional. And then you can also talk about the spiritual part, right? Which would be like the change of belief system, right? So like if you look at Taoism, right? It's physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. So spiritual is about the higher chakras. And so right now there is a big shift where you're seeing the health and fitness space either go way back to pure physical

Just do the hard things because for a while there I went very spiritual where everybody got into you know You get into yoga and the breath work and the meditation and the down regulation because life is so stressful, but then You don't have the physical part. You need to be grounded in this world. Otherwise, nothing changes So there's a balance between those four that you're jumping back and forth

So there's a balance between it. And so sometimes people need more grounding. Sometimes people need to be more spiritual and more down-regulating. Though we say we have a very stressful life and never be suffering from anxiety, but like I said earlier, if you're hungry, there's Uber Eats. If you're cold, there's a heater. If you're hot, there's an air conditioner.

Right? Like, where are the real stressors coming from? Like, yeah, you have taxes and you have this and that, but in reality, like, your life isn't, for most of us, right, life isn't in danger. So it's all been falsified sense of lack of safety that has led us to have anxiety. And that's because there's no action being done in the body.

Richard Aceves (01:46:36.844)
When we move, when we get grounded, if the body feels strong and confident, the mind can be strong and confident to handle stress. Resiliency and stress adaptation help us both from the physical to the mental and the mental to the physical. But the mental to the physical, a little bit slower. And that's an improvement it takes. Cognitively, you can accept a trauma, I think it's like 10 or 11 times faster than physically. Say that again.

Cognitively, you can accept the trauma about 10 to 11 times faster and overcome it faster cognitively than you can physically. So I had a rock climbing accident. I cognitively accepted, I cried my eyes out, I got angry, frustrated, everything within one year.

It took me about 10 years to truly overcome the trauma of my rock climbing accident and actually face that part of PTSD. So I had PTSD because I had a rock slide that came down on me and smashed my hip. So I tried to get back to rock climbing a little bit too early on. I started to climb. I did my first pitch, two pitch, it two and a half pitches up where there was an overhanging wall and I froze completely. And that's when I stopped climbing because I was like, I put my partner in danger being completely frozen 300 feet above the ground.

I like, I'm not doing that again. So I stopped. And it took me 10 years, again, of moving and building confidence in my body to go back up. And I went up the same mountain, well, not the same one, but the brother mountain, the one that I went up where I my rock climbing accident. And there was a very similar trigger because it was a very similar environment. And I froze in the middle of a, it's called like the tongue, like the hillside where there was rocks. And it was just pure...

A pure frozen moment cognitively divides like Richard. It's not the same mountains, the winds aren't high, like you're fine, everybody's going through, like just move, and my feet would not move. Physically, it did not overcome.

Richard Aceves (01:48:33.644)
Heart rate spiked like crazy. Breathing was, when it was very mellow throughout the whole thing until we got to that point. Until again, the physical stress became high enough. The mental stress became high enough. Blood pressure went up, pain went up. All the muscles, all the injuries that I had came back up. And there was a point where said, Richard, get the fuck over this thing and you can do it. And then you start walking. And then heart rate dropped down. I went to a peer in the brain network, it's called peer executive mode network. And I walked the rest of the way.

for like five hours at a speed that was way faster than the first half. Because the first half I was enduring. I was pushing myself towards something that I knew was dangerous. Right. Yeah. I think...

I think you had an implicit memory of the original trauma that got triggered at that moment. Right, but that's the thing is that trauma can be triggered by a sense. you know, not to bring up your example, right? But let's say that the husband, the ex-husband wore a cologne and let's say that she's just walking down the street and some guy walks with that cologne, that's going to trigger.

You know what's interesting? For me, it's verbiage. It's verbiage. After my divorce, I a lot of the trauma, someone said to me, well, you have to lie. And I snapped. It's like, don't ask me to lie. It wasn't a scent. It was the words. That was a really bad reaction. I could have just said, you know, I don't feel comfortable.

But the reaction isn't a conscious reaction. That's the thing. People think, like when I work with people with PTSD or explosive behaviors or whatever, maybe, whatever you want to call it, it's a protective mechanism. Your body gets put into a moment where it notes it needs to spark in some way.

Richard Aceves (01:50:41.086)
And so it's, it's a, it's, this is where the cognitive, it's not, think, therefore I am. It's you, you, you're going to behave based on what's around you, the stimulus that comes around you.

And so, again, cognitively speaking, I've gone through a lot of the different, you know, I've brought back a lot of the memories with the Swami breathing. Like I brought back a lot of the memories that happened on the mountain. But until you're on the mountain, you're not going to be able to overcome it, right? But it's for veterans and for military people, they...

their protective mechanisms are so ingrained because they've seen parts of life that nobody else has. They've seen a new lens to reality that nobody else has. Somebody that's been through physical, verbal, emotional abuse has seen life in a way that nobody else has. And so that's why you can give everybody bench press, but everyone's gonna have a different reaction. And so this is where these, and I don't have anything against cold therapy or sauna or.

doing ayahuasca or ibogaine or any of this, but you have to understand that you're opening up floodgates of things that people may not be ready for. And this is where the emotional mapping comes in. There's a reason that your neck is coming up, and that's okay. Because I need to create the safety and the confidence in the body to be able to handle those triggers. But if I just open up those floodways and not tell you that you're enlightened and you're cured, but then the same trigger comes up and the body's not ready for it, you're gonna snap.

and the body is going to go back towards chronic pain anyways. So, you we have to understand what it is that we're doing when we do a lot of this, you know, there's going to be a big blend in the next three years. It's already happening with mental health and, you know, mental emotional health coming into the fitness space, but it's, a lot of people are doing it and they're just following the information and then they'll hit a wall.

Richard Aceves (01:52:42.132)
And then they go, don't know. And again, I don't have anything against physical therapists or acupuncture or chiropractors or cold therapy or sauna or anything. But there's a point where they're just following the protocol without truly understanding what's happening. And that's where my obsession goes, because I want to understand it. I want to be able to have the answers. For now, I'm...

The emotional mapping stuff hasn't been long. But more importantly, it's like when nobody has the answers, I do. For the most part. Or we're going to explore it and find it together. That's like being able to connect the psychological stuff, the neuroscience, the physiological, the environmental. Everything is playable.

Richard Aceves (01:53:32.876)
Well then, let's up a clock. Happen together. I didn't do any movement this time. know. I didn't get to the movement part. Last time he came, it was like a seven hour, seven hour with the coaches. Questions, guys? I have a question. Yeah. there's, you know, if anytime I feel like, like I need to cry, I could force myself to cry by doing heavy.

heavy rows, why, like just based on your perspective, why do heavy rows, and sometimes I don't even need to, and it'll come out. So why do you think heavy rows makes me like a frustration cry? Because you can't rationalize it to get it to work correctly. I recently started to play with this.

So I talk about having tension. So the best way to show tension is with an arch.

Richard Aceves (01:54:39.5)
That's a horrible looking match guys.

Richard Aceves (01:54:45.556)
It's not about perfection. That's true. Every cherry blossom is perfect.

Richard Aceves (01:55:13.676)
Yes. I'm also dyslexic, this gives me stress writing the words down on the mic. We need tension on both sides of the arches. You have physical, mental, emotional, then I've got the spiritual slash belief system. So belief system is your perception, how you see things through the blinders that you have. So.

Richard Aceves (01:55:35.99)
People will quit through emotional standpoints because they don't want to go do the hard work physically. So they're putting it on a pedestal. People will not have a change in belief system because they're not willing to do the work with physical and mental components, rationalization. Right? So, you know, again, like as a trigger, like your trigger in your belief system right now states that if X, Y, and C happen, you have an emotional outburst, which you're being told to be rational about.

Does that make sense? So the physical intensity will start to create rationale, which allows you to better buffer the mental versus emotional. The rational versus the pure emotional expression.

Does that make sense to you guys? So we need both because we need to have a sense of spirituality, belief system, a sense of values and principles that you live your life by, right? We're not gonna smash people's heads into the ground and wanna rampage, that's what I believe.

Right? So this is an arch within itself. You need to go from one to the other and you need to realize when you need to go on the more physical side, when you need to go on the more spiritual side and ground. So for you is you get the emotional outburst on the lats because there is still a lack of physical intensity to push through. So you're putting the, the, the rose on a pedestal. That doesn't really make sense. And he's a really super strong guy.

But he could be strong.

Richard Aceves (01:57:16.204)
But if it's causing an emotional outburst every single time, it's a quitting mechanism on the emotional side. So needs more physical intensity. Otherwise, he would be feeling good. be attacking the, he's on a fight state. So is he saying you have to go heavier? You're slapping Andrew. No, think, I think, are you saying, let me see if I'm understanding. I think, are you saying that Edgar's having some kind of like, he's. I feel like Dr. Phil right now.

Okay, all right. No, no, I like it. No, no. I've mentioned it a good way. So what I'm saying is, I'm not saying, maybe that he has the neural capacity to move heavy weights, but he could be lacking muscle quality.

on a physical side, right? So again, we're looking at this, each one of these is its own chess game. Or it has feelings that he's binding physically. And so when he does the heavy row, which means that he hasn't overcome it, which means that there's still not a rationale behind it. Yeah. So I've had people, again,

Crying is an interesting one, So crying is very empathetic, it's just releasing stress. And so what I mean by that is the body takes input and expresses, right? So if you were to think of, let's just draw like an orb, right? Okay, so.

This is a William Wright's version of why you have muscle armoring, which is essentially the start of emotional mapping. But essentially you have the superego, how you think that you should behave in this world and how society views you. You have the ego that's buffered. You have your primal self and you have your innocent child.

Richard Aceves (01:58:56.812)
Okay, all of these need to have basically input can always come in. So input being stressed. So lights coming in, yelling from your parents, from your partner, your dog walking, all these inputs are always coming in. From your inner child outwards, you need to have one channel in order to express. So if your ego is very much blocked because you don't want to let go or because you're trying to behave a certain way, energy gets stuck here.

You're being told to calm down. All the energy is being stuck here. Then you don't have an outlet. So what do you do? Blow up. You have a huge outburst. Does that make sense? Yeah, but I learned not to do the outburst anymore.

because then everyone says that I'm crazy. then I'll stay calm in this situation and then like you said, come in here and then, you know, you can. there should be, there's a sense of, again, crying can, it's empathetic, right? So it could be from sadness, like a sad thing happened, or it could be from joy. Like have you ever been so overjoyed? when my son was born, like I cried. Not because I'm sad. mean, sadness is happiness as well, right? It has two senses in spectrum.

When you're putting things on a pedestal, you find a way to keep it on the mental emotional side without going towards the physical, which means that you haven't changed your belief system about your confidence or your lapse. You can have the neural alpha, but not the muscle quality.

It's an observational piece that you're still being hunted by the exercise rather than hunting the exercise. So getting back to the cry now, so is it healthy to cry? Yeah, but if it's happening every time, it's a quitting mechanism. Like at some point we should be able to, you know what I mean?

Richard Aceves (02:00:55.948)
Yeah, and again, I use a quitting mechanism. It's a way for you to survive. It's not a good or bad thing. But you're going to go, yeah, so you go essentially from boredom, then you have anxiety, which would be mental or physical, then you have frustration. That's where he's at, it's frustration. You have it on a pedestal, it's an emotional quit.

Then you'll start to get really angry at others and then you'll get angry at yourself and realize that it was just you and now we can change our blinders from just only seeing here to seeing everything going, okay, I wanna see here. You change the perception. So crying is part of the way, it doesn't need to be the only way. If you're doing the same exercise and you're just always crying from it, you're putting it on a pedestal.

because it happened once and you want to try and recreate that experience over and over and over again, hoping for the same change that happened back then, but you're not the same person anymore.

Does that make sense?

Richard Aceves (02:01:58.348)
This is where the philosophical part comes in. It's neurological. Why are addicts addicts? They're always chasing the high from the first time they got really, really high. Obviously, there's root cause to the issues of them not being able to handle certain stressors in X, and Z. But the reality is that you're chasing that first high that felt amazing. Until it no longer feels amazing, and then you're doing things. And you're out in the streets or whatever it may be.

But an addict that gets sober is what? Still an addict. So you're still not changing. You're changing the lens of your addiction. You're changing your lens of addiction from methamphetamines to religion or to the gym for eight hours a day or to 35 meetings a week. You're not changing the root cause.

That's why you will always be an addict. But if we can get to the root cause, then you don't need to be an addict anymore. Because now you know how to regulate correctly. The addictive... The addictive mechanism comes from needing to have control. Even though feels like you're losing control, it allows you to have control. That's what you're searching for. Is control good? As a human, yes. We're a lot like cats. We want to have control of your environment.

So even when you lose control when you're an addict, you still have control of that loss of control. It's like if you look at like dominatrix and submissive people, right? Like you guys know what I mean? Like some stuff. Like who actually has control? The submissive or the dominant? The dominant, right? No, the submissive.

She's like, no, whoa, whoa, whoa. The submissive person always has the rules. This is how hard you can go. I know because I trained a few of them. The submissive person gets to decide what the guidelines of the type of abuse or intensity they get. And they have the safe word. They have everything. The submissive person is still under control.

Richard Aceves (02:04:07.626)
An addict is under control, but they're wanting to lose the control. They want to give the control away. that's, again, it's just, it's a different facet or different kind of It's the same stress.

So that's why I'm saying like, you need to get to the root cause. Getting to a root cause of something requires a fuck ton of energy because I'm telling you that we're going to change how you view the world with movement. And you're thinking again, like the system, like, okay, so how'd you get from here to here to here? It takes a lot of time because it's a lot of energy to rewrite something that your body as a system says, we've survived this long. Why do we need to change our thing again? Like, why do I need to change how I behave?

If I know how to survive? So an addict, not going to do math, but if I go to the gym eight hours a day, I still don't have to face that problem that I need to change. Because that requires a lot of work, but I could be at the gym walking on the treadmill not having to think about that one thing, that elephant in the room. Right? Cognitive therapy, great, okay, let's talk about the elephant in the room, but that elephant in the room is never going to change.

So that's where the symptoms start to go to the shoulder, the hip, the knee, the wrist, carpal tunnel syndrome, cancer, the symptom will still show itself. It's a cell danger response. So until you truly heal the root cause, which means it requires a lot of energy for you to change completely your religious belief system.

You won't, your symptoms will come back in different manners. Intolerances to food, skin problems, acne, inflammation in the shoulders, the joints, it's all the same thing. That's why it's like there's no simple way to explain it because you're trying to, you're taking a...

Richard Aceves (02:05:56.46)
a machine that has been surviving in the world, which is what it's programmed to do, and you're trying to say, need to go from Apple to Android. Come on, guys. That's a lot of energy. So that's the hard part of it. But with movement, present, active, physical, mental, emotional movement, you can change these belief systems over time.

Cool? Beautiful. Questions?

Well, if you guys need any help, I live now in Newport Beach. Edgar has my phone number. I'm always here to help out. If you guys are coaches, we have the Emerging Week and a seminar coming here. Or if you just want to learn more about this stuff, in March, mid-March. And I have online stuff as well. Cool. Beautiful, guys. Thank you so much for coming, guys. I really appreciate it.