Episode 4: Strength, Fortitude and Fitness - An Inspiring Journey with Brett Jones

This episode brings such an opportunity, introducing you to our special guest, Brett Jones - Strong First Director of Education. Brett's journey is both captivating and inspiring.

Brett’s unique wisdom on strength training offers a fresh perspective. He navigates us through the importance of building your practice and focus on strength as a skill. Our conversation unfolds as Brett recounts his personal journey of overcoming cancer. His pathway to recovery involved bodyweight training and the ‘Iron Cardio Protocol’ a strategy that can serve as a beacon of hope for many.

“Iron Cardio is a story of one man’s triumph over adversity—and a guide to your future strength and conditioning success. I would be hard pressed to find a reader who would not benefit from this book.”

– Pavel Tsatsouline, the author of Kettlebell Simple & Sinister

This episode goes beyond muscle building and strength conditioning. Brett and I deliberate on the often-underemphasized aspects of fitness - lifestyle and aesthetics. We advocate for a shift in narrative; from exercising for appearance to exercising for optimal performance and overall wellbeing. We highlight the importance of sleep, hydration, nutrition, and stress management, all crucial elements when striving for fitness goals.

If you seek a fresh outlook on strength training or simply looking for an inspiring journey, this episode promises to deliver both.

IG: @brettjonessfg

Website-
https://appliedstrength.com/

IRON CARDIO Products-
https://strongandfit.com/products/iron-cardio-by-brett-jones
https://appliedstrength.com/iron-cardio/

Chapters

• 0:02 Exploring Primal Foundations and Kettlebell Benefits
• 15:27 Strength Training
• 25:38 Cancer Survivor's Journey to Rebuilding Strength
• 39:04 Repeating Quality Reps in Training
• 46:39 Lifestyle and Aesthetics in Fitness

Transcript

Tony Pascolla: 0:02

Welcome to the Primal Foundations podcast. I'm your host, tony Pascola. We will dive into what I believe are the four central foundations you need for a healthy lifestyle Strength, nutrition, movement and recovery. Get ready to unlock your path to optimal health and enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Primal Foundation podcast. I'm your host, tony Pascola. Today we have a special guest, brett Jones. Based out of Pittsburgh, pennsylvania, he's a certified athletic trainer, strength and conditioning specialist, as well as the strong first director of education. He has the ability to insert a movie quote in any conversation or setting. Brett, welcome to the podcast.

Brett Jones: 0:48

Tony, thank you so much. It's great to have the opportunity and we'll see if we can fit any movie quotes in.

Tony Pascolla: 0:53

I'm sure we'll get a couple in To give some background on how I actually met you, not this past time at the Dome in Rosemount Chicago, but the year prior I got my SFG1. I think it was Sean, or somebody brought you over. You were doing maybe body weight or something else on the side, maybe SFG2. Yeah it was SFG2.

Brett Jones: 1:18

I was there kind of a day early sort of thing, just kind of milling about trying to cause as much trouble as possible.

Tony Pascolla: 1:25

They just brought you over. Somebody was like need to help with the swing. Within five minutes of watching you, I was like I'm using all of those things and those movie quotes. That was fantastic. Within five minutes I learned. There's the one thing you did where you place your hand your laser beam. I use that to this day and it works like a charm. Awesome, that was great. That was my first interaction with you, just taking a step back and just want to talk about. To start, the listeners have an idea of your background, whether it would be athletics or any type of strength training. Then how did you find your way to this family of strong first? Awesome.

Brett Jones: 2:07

Short story kept long, which is a movie quote, by the way, if you've seen nobody with Bob Odenkirk. Short story long. So wrestling in high school, junior high and high school actually my dad kind of set a great foundation for us from a training standpoint. He started working out to lose some weight. He had quit smoking and gained weight and then started training. I'd see him get up at 4.45, 5 in the morning, go to the gym, come back and get ready, go to work. Kind of set a foundation for me. Then I started wrestling, pretty much because my brother started wrestling and I was tired of being the victim of his practicing at home with his new wrestling moves.

Brett Jones: 2:58

I started wrestling in sixth grade and wrestled through high school. Wasn't that great of a wrestler? Worked hard, certainly, put the hours in, but there were more talented kids in the room than me. But I got injured a few times and ended up helping out taping, actually coaching a little bit. The one thing I could do in the wrestling room was snag a single. I could snag a single on anybody in the room. Even my wrestling coach couldn't stop me. But once I got the leg I didn't know what to do with it.

Brett Jones: 3:27

With that foundation and, having been injured, I started to pursue going to college for physical therapy. Well then I found out you had to do physics and some other things that I wasn't a fan of or didn't understand to go into PT school. I decided to go and stay with the athletic training route. At that time I was at an internship program at High Point University. You were supposed to put in 1600 hours. I put in way more than that and came out with an athletic training degree, did my master's in rehabilitative sciences, which actually drug and alcohol rehab, which we in just ballpark as behavior modification, behavior change. Then took my first job at a small military academy in Virginia and into my training room walks Gray Cook. Gray walks in hey, my name's Gray Cook, you need any help? I started working with Gray in my training room in his clinics. Then I left and ran a hospital fitness center for five years.

Brett Jones: 4:37

During that time somebody that had worked for me came back in and said, hey, you should really check out this Pobble guy. He's got some really interesting stuff. I'm like, okay, so I got power to the people and was like mind blown the antibody building mindset and prioritizing strength and minimalist sort of routine. I'm like, okay, there's something here. Then, of course, the marketing machine kicked in and I started hearing about Kettlebell, kettlebell, kettlebell. I got the book the original Russian Kettlebell Challenge book and, honest to goodness, read it and threw it in a drawer. I'm like I can do all that with a dumbbell. I don't need that. It was scratching at the back of my head so pulled it out, looked at it again, tried one of the snatch routines in the back with a dumbbell instead of a kettlebell. When EMS revived me I said I should probably. That's a joke. For career listeners that aren't familiar with my sense of humor, that's a joke. No EMS involved. No animals were injured in the filming of this podcast. But I very quickly found out that I should probably go get some training.

Brett Jones: 5:48

In this February of O2 went and got certified in the Povl's second ever certification and then was invited to start teaching with him in April of 03. So for 20 plus years I've been traveling and teaching, working with Povl. That, of course, became strong, first just over a decade ago, and in that time released my first DVD and Gray Cook ended up with it. And so Gray gets back in touch with me and I started doing things with FMS and the secrets of series and Kailas Denos kettlebells from the center put out a bunch of DVDs and products and development the FMS level two curriculum and corrective exercise and things of that nature. So that's kind of the.

Brett Jones: 6:31

I've been an NSCA CSCS for 25 plus years now. 25 years now. So yeah, that's kind of the like I warned you short story long, I could have just given you the acronyms and moved along with it, but yeah, I've been very fortunate, had no clue in taking my first job that Gray Cook was going to walk into my training room and had no clue who Gray Cook was when he walked into my training room, made the decision to go to the second ever kettlebell certification at Povl time. I just I'm very fortunate.

Brett Jones: 7:07

And then, really pivotal, there was a year later I decided to go to the Arnold Fitness Classic and I was living outside of Pittsburgh and New Bethlehem, pennsylvania, and Columbus wasn't that far so decided to and I was into grip, strength and bending. At that time I was the 11th person in the world to bend the red nail. Oh, wow, yeah, so that's awesome, used to have some pretty strong hands and I'm used to good and a few different things, and so that was really pivotal because that was my opportunity to work a little more directly with Povl and the crew at that time, and that's when I got invited to start teaching with Povl. So you just never know, those little decisions you make, the people you learn from or become friends and mentors. Yeah, then the Grateful Dead were correct. What a long, strange trip it's been.

Tony Pascolla: 8:03

And it's so funny. I'm a former wrestler, I've coached wrestling for years and it's just like, just based on you just joining the wrestling team, that just kind of took your path. How crazy, that's crazy. I know this is going to be a very loaded question in terms of, like, how long this can be, but in terms of and I have you quoted here. So swinging a kettlebell is one thing. You can't swing a barbell one time you could, but that's it. But what's the difference between just the impact of a kettlebell versus traditional equipment such as barbell and dumbbell, just what could be the differences for people to kind of get in their back of their mind of what are these effects from a kettlebell that I can't get from other tools or modalities?

Brett Jones: 8:56

Sure, 20 plus years ago when I started swinging a kettlebell, it was very rare. You had your own and you didn't find them any other place. Now you go to a hotel gym or most any place, they're gonna have kettlebells. So the deceptively simple design of a cannonball with a handle on it actually comes with a lot of benefits. So that thick handle offset center of mass really changes what you're going to do with that weight. So the thick handle is automatically gonna get us a little more grip training and stronger hand, stronger body. That offset center of mass means the weight is way more alive in my hand. And so when I'm doing something like a swing and that center of mass is projecting six to eight inches beyond my hand and I'm doing swings, cleans, snatches, things of that nature, there is a difference in how that feels and loads the body just because of that display center of mass. When I turn it into a clean or I'm doing a get up and I've got that bell on the back of my forearm, that bell up to a certain weight is actually going to help guide my arm into a better position. It's gonna load me differently than when the weight centers with your hand. Then you cross a point where it becomes a challenge to that shoulder position and so it continues to kind of develop. As you get stronger and you take on heavier weights, that display center of mass is going to change from assisting to challenging and that has other benefits. So yeah, the original. You can't swing a barbell between your legs more than one time and then you'll decide that was really bad idea. But with the kettle bell we get into this unique loaded eccentric position and because of that off display center of mass we can get into what we call over speed eccentrics. And I've been on a force plate with a 24 kilo bell two hand swing producing three to three and a half times my body weight eccentric load at the bottom of the swing. That is a really nice return on swinging a 53 pound weight to produce three to three and a half times my body weight eccentric load without having to take the impact of traditional plyometrics and shock method sort of training. Now, granted the percentage of the times body weight numbers you get into with some of that gets much larger than the three, three and a half times body weight with the swing. But that was just the 24 kilo bell. So put me on a force plate with a little bit heavier bell, numbers might change a little bit. So I think those are the main reasons why the kettle bell becomes a really unique tool and something that has benefits and I'm really minimalistic.

Brett Jones: 11:51

Well, it goes beyond that. If I'm driving someplace here in Pittsburgh, I have one way. Now there's we have a saying in Pittsburgh you can't get there from here because the road system and the way the geography breaks up the areas is just crazy. But I have one way to get from point A to point B, so I'm not like I don't spend time looking for the 10 other routes that could get me there. I'm happy with my one route. Might not be the most efficient, but it's the one I know. Kind of the same way with training.

Brett Jones: 12:27

I found kettle bells and it did so much for me and it was so impactful to the people that I got doing it. I really never got into Olympic lifting, just didn't need it. I could get somebody swing and clean and snatch in a kettle bell so quickly. I didn't feel the need to go on the journey of Olympic lifting. For those people that do, strong First has an O lifting course now and we have great information out there on it. I've just never pursued it because I kind of didn't need it.

Tony Pascolla: 13:02

Yeah, I mean Olympic lifting, like you were saying. That's a very long path. We see that in a lot of gyms that have group fitness classes They'll have Olympic lifting. But that's a very, very long path to be on and that takes a very long time to get those techniques nailed down. So just for general public, just doing overhead snatches, that's really tough.

Brett Jones: 13:29

Well, I can't even get in a proper rack position by the time I get my elbows high enough. You can see my hands are behind my head. We run into a problem because I can't put the bar through my face. So there's some things with Olympic lifting and stress on the hands and the wrists that are unique to that endeavor and it's an endeavor unto itself. It's awesome if you want to go on that journey. But I've just been pursuing the kettlebell and done some powerlifting and basic barbell training over the years. But yeah, the kettlebell, I found it. It was my route to get from point A to point B and kind of stuck with it.

Tony Pascolla: 14:10

Awesome. Now you're instructing and working with Strong First and I hear these quotes all the time from instructors. They speak upon strength as a skill and build your practice. Can you expand on those two points and kind of the Strong First philosophy?

Brett Jones: 14:28

100%. So the cornerstone is a quote from Matthew that strength is the foundational physical quality. I heard Eric Kressi refer to it years ago as the maximum strength is the glass. The bigger your glass, the more physical qualities you can fit in the glass. So it really does set the foundation and, coming out of bodybuilding eras and people not prioritizing strength as something to focus on and I've been every kind of trainer I've been the hit Jedi, I've been the functional training guy, I've been the bodyweight only, I've been the whatever Name, a type of trainer. I've been there, done that and when I started approaching my strength as a skill, I really started to unlock a lot of things because we tend to think of skill practice.

Brett Jones: 15:27

If we were talking to a musician, we'd have no trouble sitting here talking about how they're still working on their basic chords or scales. They're doing that fundamental thing and trying to do it a little bit better every time they do it. There's a famous cellist that I have quoted who was asked at the age of 92 why he was still practicing and he said because I think I'm starting to make progress at 92 and having spent a lifetime with this instrument, we tend not to bring that same sort of mindset. Call it a musician mindset, call it a skill mindset to our strength practice. But back to the Olympic lifting conversation. You have athletes that spend decades, careers trying to get better at two lifts the clean and jerk and the snatch. You have power lifters that spend 20, 30, 40 year careers trying to get better at three lifts squat, bench dead. You have athletes who spend careers trying to get better throwing a ball. But we tend not to bring that mindset to our strength practice. But when I look at something like the swing, I'm looking at what I think is a high skill activity that has tremendous carryover and a lot of benefit to other things that I want to do. So I want to treat my strength practice as a skill practice.

Brett Jones: 17:02

Nobody says, oh, he's not good at free throws, he just has good technique. You appreciate the fact that somebody that can step up to the line and hit 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10 free throws versus some other players 3 out of 10, they have a high skill at that and that's why they're good at it. But people will say he's just strong, she's just strong, she doesn't have good technique, she's just strong. I don't know that those two things can be separated. I think if you're going to display strength, you're going to have good technique In most cases. So I think that bringing that skill mindset, approaching it like a musician approaches their scales or their chords, really unlocks a lot of things.

Brett Jones: 17:48

Because when we look at something as simple as the bench press and you look at an EMG study of how a strength professional will bench press versus an amateur, if you've ever been in the car with somebody learning how to drive a stick, you've experienced what it's like to train as a strength amateur. You have these harsh transitions between muscle groups or gears. You get a little bit of chest, a little bit of shoulders, a little bit of tricep and there's not smoothness. Getting the car with a Formula 1 driver, you don't even feel the gears change, you just go faster. And that's the strength professional. That is that smooth transition from laps into chest and into shoulders and triceps and you have this really skilled application of force through the body. And that's what I'm shooting for as a strength professional, and treating your training as a practice.

Brett Jones: 18:43

We unfortunately ended up at a point where and I can go a couple of different directions on this ancient training systems were based on martial, restorative and pedagogical pillars. Martial was your ability to respond to threats appropriately. So a lot of our ancient training systems came from training soldiers. The pommel horse, which is now a gymnastics event, was originally in these gymnastics training systems as a way to help soldiers on horseback train to be better soldiers on horseback without having to be on the horse. So that's where the pommel horse originally came from. So, and then there's this restorative technique because the martial when you're learning how to defend yourself and taking blows yourself, you get knocked out of center. So you need ways to restore and be healthy. And then you had a theoretical body of knowledge that supported those other two.

Brett Jones: 19:42

Fitness has become our martial art. We go to fitness to. People perceive it to be to get beat up, to get tired. Now, dr Ed Thomas, one of my mentors, gave me a great quote. He said I never went to the gym to work out. I went to the gym to learn. Now, did I get tired, did I get sweaty? Did I get fit?

Brett Jones: 20:06

In the process of the learning? Yes, but that wasn't the goal. That was a byproduct. The goal was to learn, to learn the next progression, to enhance my skill in a particular movement or application of something like Indian Clubs or kettlebells or bodyweight training. What is my next step? What is the thing that's preventing me from getting a little bit better at this, and how am I going to work with that or around it to get better skill? I come back to the musician example a lot, because if you're going to talk about people that put hours in at practice, musicians are a pretty good group to talk about because they're going to practice a lot. Training your training as a practice means we're emphasizing skill. We're emphasizing this idea that the byproducts are awesome, but the goal is to have higher skill, to be stronger, to really enhance what I'm doing.

Tony Pascolla: 21:10

It's so funny you mentioned that because, as you were talking about the musician, I was thinking in my head and just to connect with the wrestling again, because in my wheelhouse I just know wrestling and I love John Smith. I think he's one of the best clinicians and coaches for Oklahoma State. I've bought all of his championship series watching and a couple of the videos that are just like literally his practice room. As you watch it, I'm thinking I'm going to get the special sauce. I'm going to get this something crazy. I don't even know what they do over there. They're like single legs, doubles, high crotch, go behinds. I'm like we do that too. We do that, but they spend it. When people walk into a college wrestling room, they think they're going to see this crazy, fancy, flashy. No, it is very basic. They get really good at the basics. They get really and then everything looks easy because they're so good at the basics.

Tony Pascolla: 22:15

And, honestly, when I started really thinking as a wrestling coach when I started just okay, we're going to my first year as a varsity coach. I'm like they're going to learn everything. I'm going to teach them everything. We got good at nothing. We got absolutely good at nothing and I had to just go back to the drawing board. I'm like, why are we just not good in these positions? And I'm like you know what? We're going to just teach three from the feet, three from the bottom, three moves from top and just get really good. And my team got really good. So there is some truth to that for sure. It's just like get really good at the basics and work on your skill. You don't have to do yeah, variety is great, we want variety, but we don't. Variety kind of gets you nowhere sometimes.

Brett Jones: 23:03

Well, two things quote from the SFG1 manual from a spec ops person. The elite are just better at the basics than everybody else. I'm pretty sure baseball players are still learning how to catch a ball, throw a ball, run a base and hit a ball. That's it Now. They do it in a bunch of different ways, but those are the four things they're trying to get better at. And that's funny. You mentioned that. Three moves from here. Three moves from here. When you talk to a martial artist or a fighter and they're in the ring or they're in a situation where things have gotten real, there's about three techniques they're going to draw upon. And they draw upon them because they can execute them on anybody at any moment and, successful or not, they get down to those three things that this is my wheelhouse, this is what I can execute, and it really is that. Focus on the basics. That's everything. And I forgot the other thing I was going to say. It'll come back to me.

Tony Pascolla: 24:02

You just bring it up whenever I kind of want to transition. We're talking about strength and it's your practice and building a strong body, but also the mental aspect of strength, and when there's hard times, how do you react to those things? So you've gone through a stint of cancer and you went through that whole journey, going through adversity and overcoming it. Can you tell us about that journey and that process 100%?

Brett Jones: 24:32

So February 20 of 2020, I was diagnosed with stage three primary tonsillar squamous cell carcinoma. So I had a throat cancer and that ended up with seven weeks of five days a week radiation and two chemo infusions. And, yeah, I went in 205. I was a little heavy, I wasn't at my leanest going into treatment, but I was about 205 and I came out of treatment 164, 163, 164. So I lost over 40 pounds in the course of treatment.

Brett Jones: 25:13

People will say I'm trying to find my limits. Those have been defined for me in the course of treatment and I was in there with going for a chemo infusion and there's grandmothers and people in receiving chemo are way tougher than I am and so I've had those things defined for me in the course of my treatment and it was. Yeah, treatment was a little bit of hell to get through and was in the hospital three different times in the course of treatment. One of those was L3, l4 discs. Decided to go in the first week of cancer treatment, like, let's just have a big party. So the first week of treatment is pretty rough. You get your first chemo infusion, you start your radiation. Radiation is interesting in that for the other than chemo and some of the other things that happened.

Brett Jones: 26:05

I was three, three and a half weeks into treatment and I'm like things are pretty good. And then the last three and a half weeks of treatment were really rough and the radiation stays active in your body for a good period of time. So I spent eight or so weeks really trying to recover from my treatment and so, yeah, that was a little bit of a rough patch, but my mantra was identify the next step and take the next step. My job was to get up, go get treatment and work as much as I could and get to the next treatment and take the next step.

Brett Jones: 26:52

And I looked at it like Matt Damon and the Martian were at the end. He's like it's just solving problems and if you solve enough problems you get to come home. You take enough steps, you get to make it through. And there's a survivor's guilt that comes with surviving cancer treatment being cancer survivor, because there's others that aren't that fortunate who don't make it through the treatment. So you learn a lot. But that mantra of I've always been a head down, put the work in sort of individual and so that you know, identify the next step, take the next step really just kind of coalesced during that time and I just my job was to take the next step.

Tony Pascolla: 27:40

Yeah. So at the end of this, at the end of this journey, you find out you know cancer-free, you know what are the next steps going from there? It's like now I've kind of out of the woodwork. You know, you're saying you lost a lot of weight, I'm assuming some muscle, lots of muscle mass, body fat, all those things. Now it's time where you want to get back. So what are the steps you take?

Brett Jones: 28:06

So you know, just real quick on that, like the background, you know I, three months after the end of treatment you get your PET scans and that's to allow enough time for the radiation to dissipate and so they're not getting false positives because of radiation being active versus cancer being active. So you get that first scan and then I was. It was scans every six months for the first couple of years and now it's a scan every year just to make sure no cancer is coming back. And my type of cancer was HPV-based. So when you see the advertisements for the HPV vaccines and stuff like that, maybe my cancer could have been prevented. But you know, 95 plus percent of the population has been exposed to HPV at some point. Most people clear it, some people don't. I was one of those that didn't, but the treatment outcomes are very good. When you're that HPV-based throat cancer non-HPV-based throat cancer is has a tendency to recur and is a rougher sort of a thing. But you know, once a year I get to have my little scan, ziety, and you know, get my scans and wait for the results and, you know, make sure everything's still clear and so that journey continues and so the at the end of, you know, treatment and recovery and wanting to get back to regaining my physical self, because being physical and being strong has been something that's been important to me for, you know, most of my life, from the start of wrestling and all the way through.

Brett Jones: 29:45

So initially I thought, oh, body weight training, we'll just go back and do some body weight training. And I'm like man, 164 pull-ups are going to be great, you know not, instead of having to pull 205 over the bar, I can pull 164 over the bar. This will be great. It wasn't. I had lost a lot of muscle, a lot of strength, and so I started into this body weight training. I'm like man, I'm kind of not strong enough to do well at my body weight training. And then I thought, well, I'll go back to swings and get-ups, we'll just go back, and you know, to the foundation. And I wasn't strong enough to be powerful. I needed to reset my strength and so I started working on what became the. It was originally Strengtherobix by Pavel and Alexei Sinart and it was a very simple program clean press squat, set it down, shake it off. Clean press squat on the other side. Now I had used versions of this and done my own versions of Strengtherobix for several years. This article came out in 2014. And so I had used it for several years and it just hit me that I needed something. I needed the basics executed well, pardon me and I needed something that I could really get into. And so I started with a 24 kilo bell, and what started happening was and I joke about this in the book and in a lot of different settings, but nobody sends me routines or programs to test, because they know I'm not going to follow them.

Brett Jones: 31:20

I'm a very intuitive trainer, trainee and trainer, and so I don't. I don't have spreadsheets. I don't have when I'm looking at my training for a day, I literally look at my training log and go, man, what do I feel like doing today? And make something up kind of on the fly. I've gone through routines and then gone back to see how I did it the last time I did it, and it's a year ago that I did that exact same session. So, while I'm consistent with the basics, there's a lot of variation and variety that gets in there, but it's variations within a theme. And so, yeah, the iron cardio protocol became how I rebuilt my strength and conditioning and took me from struggling for 20 sets with the 24 kilo to doing 60 sets with a 36 and 40 kilo and double 36 work and things of that nature. So it's been very effective.

Tony Pascolla: 32:17

Wow, there's a quote from Pavel. Iron cardio is the story of one man's triumph over adversity and a guide to the future of strength and conditioning success. Like what? What a quote from somebody you know? Yeah, I'm honored, Very honored, and so when the ebook came out and the the video, so I got it I'm like because you were just I mean, you post almost every day your iron cardio and I was like, let me, let me give this a try here.

Tony Pascolla: 32:52

And you know, and it's all things I like clean squat press, throwing in the pushups, the pull ups, throwing in the snatch double bell, sometimes single bell, so there's that variety, but there's that theme. And I've got, I've got to tell you like, just doing those things, I tell people all the time I do not work out as much as I used to, yet I am stronger than I've ever been. It's that what the heck effect? Right, Like what? What is going on?

Tony Pascolla: 33:23

And with clients that I have and even athletes that I train, it's it's really hard for me to tell them about, you know, taking ample recovery, because they kind of not that they don't want to hear it, they're just ingrained in the back of the head. I have to continue to push and go hard and my big thing is I have to bring them down and get, not let them burn out in a session and I think in they they like. Well, I should be sore tomorrow. I'm like, no, you shouldn't be sore tomorrow, you should be able to train. If you're sore, Like, and you can't train, I did something wrong. Can you talk about a little bit of kind of the flow of iron, cardio and the antihelicalytic work?

Brett Jones: 34:04

Absolutely. Yeah, I think the the challenging thing is the, the messaging that people receive on training is definitely slanted in that high intensity interval sort of mindset. And you know I was. I've used those over the years. I did a. I can remember a stair climber routine that came out of muscle media 2000, right around 99 2000. And I remember doing that and, you know, lost a bunch of weight. It felt, you know, wow, this is really great.

Brett Jones: 34:41

And the problem is a lot of the high intensity routines are kind of like the cabbage soup diet You'll, you'll, you'll do it for a little while, you'll get, you'll lose some weight, and then you're sick of cabbage and then you go back to the way you used to eat. High intensity training is kind of the same way. You're going to see great results for four to six weeks and then you're going to step off the edge of the cliff, you're going to have burned the engine too hot for too long and you, you end up suffering the, the impacts. So the question that I ask with everything that I do now is what is the cost? So when you, when you look at training like investing, I want to put a dollar in and get nine back. I don't want to put a dollar in and either lose $2 or only get a dollar back. I want to put one in and get three out, one in and get five out, like that's investing. That's that's where you you the compounding interest right, where you want to put a little in and get a lot out. If we approached our training like that, we'd be much better off. Instead, we approach our training as we just keep feeding money into the machine and initially we might get a little bit out, but the money keeps going back in the machine and we just keep having to pay that cost, pay that cost, and it does end up with, you know, tired, sore, achy, owie, you know all these things start to happen and we start blaming. You know a lot of other things. It's why we had this entire cottage industry of recovery strategies and tools and things that has grown up in the last few years, because people were like well, I can't recover from my training, so I must need supplement X, I must need this thing that blows up, or I need this cold tub, or I was asked this on a podcast of seven and quite a few years ago now.

Brett Jones: 36:38

What's your favorite recovery strategy? Proper programming, because if I've programmed myself appropriately, I should recover from my training. If you're not recovering from your training now, sleep, hydration, nutrition, stress those four things need to be dealt with with anybody, anytime. They are the big rocks that need to be really dealt with first. So we're going to separate those to the side and say you're hydrated, your nutrition is pretty good, your sleep is pretty good and you're not overly stressed. Now stresses, yeah, we'll set that to the side for the moment. It varies Beyond that. It's proper programming If I've programmed myself appropriately, taking into account maybe I am at its time in my life where I'm working two different jobs and putting in 10 hours a day and maybe I have some relationship stress going on or family stress going on. Now I know I need to do a little less of my training. I still need to train because that physical release is really important, but I might not be pushing quite as hard on my training. So if I program myself appropriately, I should recover, and too many people keep trying to figure out well, how can I recover from my training? Step one less kind of mind went to the doctor one time and asked the doc for some weight loss advice. Doc takes his prescription pad, writes a little bit, hands it to him. All it says on there is half Whatever you're eating right now. Half it's back to the basics, back to those essential things that are simple but not easy sort of strategies. And so when we look at training, I am focused on my output in the rep or in the set. That's where the magic happens, that's where the benefit happens. The rest is necessary so that my next set can be just as savagely well executed and beneficial. If I short my rest, I will see a decreasing performance. Within Stormfirst.

Brett Jones: 39:04

We talk about repeats instead of intervals. A repeat means well, I can repeat what I just did. So if I'm on the track and I'm running 200 meters, I'm making up numbers here. There's a track coach or a track athlete somewhere that's going. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. I'm admitting that right up front, right? So let's say we're doing 45 second 200. And that's slow, right, but I want to be able to rest long enough to come back and run another 45 second 200. And another 45 second 200. If I come back, and now it takes me 48 seconds, 50 seconds, 55 seconds a minute, which is typical when you start doing intervals, when you lock yourself into the specific work rest ratio and you start seeing this decreasing performance because you're not able to repeat what you just did.

Brett Jones: 40:02

My goal within any session is to repeat the quality, power, strength, effort that I was able to display in that first set, on my last set, and I'll draw that out for 60, some odd sets. Within an iron cardio session. I'll accumulate 150, 180, 240 reps of Gleens, presses, squats, snatches, swing, whatever, and the last rep is as high quality, as high power as the first rep. And so that's start thinking in terms of repeat, because you're output in that rep and I'm doing a protocol right now where I'm doing a rep every 20 seconds. So it's 56 kilo swing, two arm swing, one 20 seconds later, one.

Brett Jones: 40:56

There's also something called the energetic, so the first rep, research on some Olympic lifting, where the first rep of a set will be about 30% more energy demanding than the subsequent reps. So it's a whole bunch of first reps and it's just good, solid work. I could easily take it in the mindset of how many reps can I do in this set Instead. Really, quality rep 20 seconds later. Quality rep 20 seconds later. Quality rep 20 seconds later. So yeah, think repeats, think savagely well executed reps or sets. That's where the benefit is. You need to rest so you can repeat that effort and get more benefit.

Tony Pascolla: 41:41

And then this, and this is the one thing where one should people start to kind of or what are some cues for people to start realizing like hey, I'm actually, in terms of strength training, I'm actually not being very good at the rep, the rep went up. But as a trainer or as the client thinking inside like what are some of the cues? It's like, oh, like I need to either get more recovery or the weights got to change.

Brett Jones: 42:08

So within strong first, we have our stop signs and you know, if the world were to obey the stop signs, training would be would be much better. And a few of those are the speed of the repetition changes. So you know you're knocking out your reps. If I'm doing something like swings, I know I'm going to knock out Rod strokes here. I want to knock out a rep about every two seconds. If that starts to change, if my set of 10 swings, which should take me roughly 18 to 20 seconds, now takes me 21, 22 seconds, there's a problem. I have slowed down. If I feel that slow down in any way, it doesn't have to be the clock telling me. You know, and I think we've all gotten there in a set of swings or snatches where you're like man, I was a little slower standing up that time. You should have stopped a couple reps ago, like that's, you've actually crossed a stop sign. So, looking at rep speed, looking at rep quality or technique changes, if I'm pressing and I usually have, you know, just a little bit of lean, you know, appropriate to my body, body type, arm length, weight that I'm using, and all of a sudden I got to lean. You know, three, four inches more, should have stopped at the rep before that. Any change in technique, any change in tempo, any change in rep speed is a sign that you should stop that set and you're probably going to need to rest longer. And then come back to this idea of repeat If you can't, if my goal was set to five and I have to stop, sign tells me I need to stop at three, why I really didn't wrestle enough? Because my goal was to repeat that set of five. So if we kind of start bringing those mindsets into it now in, the hard thing is and you, you said it really well well, the weight went up. I've been there, I've had the weight go up, and then I look at a video and I'm like, oh yeah, the weight went up. That wasn't what I wanted to be doing.

Brett Jones: 44:15

I see it all the time Beast Tamer, iron Maiden challenges and things like that, and people have started to a little leg drive starts to click into the press, a little extra lean starts to kick in, the rep speed slows down, you know, and granted a max attempt, I mean you can look at some deadlift videos where people grind on a deadlift for you know, five, 10 seconds, trying to get this thing to finish. That's a max attempt. That's not training. If you're doing that in your training, training and testing are not the same thing. As much as I've seen the memes, I've been on social media enough to know that people are like, oh, every training is testing. I'm like, oh, no, no, no, training is not testing. So, yes, a max attempt will slow down and change. Because it's a max attempt in training. That shouldn't happen. So look out for those stop signs and that's the most effective way to start saying, okay, I need to need to scale back what I'm doing. So you got to maybe take a little bite of humble pie and back off a couple of things that you're doing, and you know that.

Brett Jones: 45:22

The other thing about you know my journey, cancer journey and everything else is you get humbled a little bit. You realize. You realize what's important and as much as I love training, I love being strong. I've been dealing with a little. I got a little right shoulder thing here going on, which is probably the radiation, the way it affects the neck and musculature and scar tissue and things like that. I got some things that I need to manage now.

Brett Jones: 45:49

So I'm impressing much, I really like pressing and I'm not doing it because that could I force myself through it. I can put up with some discomfort. I'm pretty good at that nowadays. I've always been pretty good at putting up with some discomfort. You don't bend nails without some discomfort and I've been through a variety of things in my life that were challenging and. But you know, I don't need to push myself through that, I need to do the right things. I've gotten some, some PT from a friend of mine and feeling good, hoping to get a session in this weekend and get tested out a little bit See where I am and yeah, I think that stepping back a little bit Probably a good thing for everybody.

Tony Pascolla: 46:37

Yeah, it's, we see again. Like you mentioned the social media, like you get like influencers, all these people like gotta grind, gotta go hard, Like what are you doing if you're not going hard? And like I told you too, it's I leave reps and reserve. I give myself a little bit of runway and I know I could do more. And I actually have a client and I just worked with her the other day and I literally all the time, before I say it, she goes. I like bring a weight over, she goes. Yeah, I know I could do more, because I say I know you could do more. It's like she's like this is your catchphrase. However, we're going to, we're going to really see how we do. We're going to do, you know, five reps with this and then we're going to stay here for a little bit and if it's looking good, we can go up and see where you're at. But I we never I see any of that.

Tony Pascolla: 47:24

It's done, it's over with, but it's you said a good quote keeping a or taking a bite of humble pie. Sometimes you got to do that and yeah, I work out less. I'm stronger than I ever been. Client comes to you, you know, and I you could speak on. You know, somebody comes to you aesthetics versus strength right, they come into you. I want to get fit aka jacked, right. Come to you. What is the difference in how do? How do you approach? You know, talking to people about aesthetics versus strength, yeah.

Brett Jones: 47:58

So first off, I think and this is a drum that I'm going to be beating for the next, next many years there's no, there's a Jim Gaffigan joke where you know he's like I go to the gym and I see all these fit people and I'm like you can go home. You did it, like you. You, yay you, you. You did it. You can go home. Now People think you exercised a little bit certain way. Well, run the numbers on how many people in the US actually exercise. It is a shockingly low number.

Brett Jones: 48:31

Rates of obesity and metabolic related disease are doing nothing but increasing. So the aesthetics message that the fitness industry has been pounding on and, I'll be very honest, aspirational marketing, you know, hanging somebody up there that looks a certain way makes me want to vomit in my mouth. I hate it with a white hot intensity, because I've been in. I've been in situations where I don't care how I looked. Had I not had some extra weight going into cancer treatment, I would have ended up with a peg tube. I would have had an even worse experience. Things would have been been worse. You want a little reserve. You're a six pack person. You're a. You're a single digit body fat person. Awesome, good for you. I hope you don't end up in a challenging situation where you're called upon to use your reserves to make it through because you don't have any reserves. So everybody can tell that's a little personal for me, because I've been there, done that, got the t-shirt cut sleeves off, mow grass in it, but the.

Brett Jones: 49:39

So we need to change the conversation from I exercise to look a certain way to I exercise to feel good, to perform well, to live my life to to my best. I want to. I want to exercise so I can go on a hike. I want to exercise so that I can be. We helped my stepdaughter move into her new apartment. I'm the guy that can pick up the couch and and move the thing right. I want to be that effective, useful, happy person that can hop into a variety of situations and be effective and feel good. Feeling good feels good. I have been in the position of not feeling good. Feeling good feels good. That is one of my major goals in in in training. So I that's just kind of a rant on this this whole idea of aesthetics. We have to change the conversation because, guess what, it's not being effective. If that was an effective conversation, 50, 60% of the US population would be exercising and we wouldn't have obesity and metabolic disease and all of these things going on. It is not an effective message. So if, if somebody can show me where it is cool, I have yet to see it.

Brett Jones: 50:59

So, first thing, when somebody comes to me for purely aesthetic goals that fitness competitor, that person that says they want to be a single digit body fat, I recommend they go work with someone else because that is not my focus. I will fail you in that situation 100%. I am not the right trainer for you. Now, once I screen you, I get a look at how you move. We talk about your injury history, medical history, we talk about some things that are challenging for you, and I create changes in your movement and I I help you with some of those things and all of a sudden you're like man, I feel better. I think we can work together pretty effectively.

Brett Jones: 51:43

So, and the other part of the aesthetics conversation is sleep, hydration, nutrition, stress. So what are you willing to do? You're sleeping five hours a night, you're eating Big Macs, you're in family and relationship, work, stress, like good luck exercising your way to an aesthetic goal when you got all that stuff going on. So we got a bunch of stuff outside of the exercise realm that we need to. We need to deal with the thing and to capitalize on the aesthetics versus strength question that you originally asked.

Brett Jones: 52:20

And then I went five different directions on Totally go wherever, because if you focus on the strength, you'll look the way you want to. If you try to look the way you want to and you don't focus on strength, you're probably just going to end up frustrated. So that that message of and I was doing this with a somebody that I was working with the other day and actually somebody that works with the team and and like I can break down my, my training philosophy for you in about three to five points movement, quality matters, strength should be prioritized, all those lifestyle things. We got to get dialed in on those two and what is the cost for everything that we're doing. So I can break down my kind of training philosophy for you in about four or five bullet points and give you some really effective things that we can, we can start this conversation on.

Brett Jones: 53:15

So if you work with somebody and you ask them, well, what's your, what's your training philosophy? And they're like I'm going to beat you up, yep, you're never going to be as sore as when you work with me. I. That's not not, not, not going to be an effective message with me. So you know, lay it out there. You know, the, the movement quality, the strength, the feeling good like. If we start taking care of those things and we get your sleep, hydration, nutrition dialed in, you're probably going to look the way you want to look. So it's a, it's a shift of focus and convincing somebody that the, the, I know, let's hang that goal out there. Cool, I get it, but let's identify the next step and take the next step and keep taking steps.

Tony Pascolla: 54:06

Yeah, that the aspect of lifestyle versus what you do in the gym. Right, it doesn't. If you go to the gym, I work out, but that lifestyle piece it's, it holds a lot of weight and you have to get those things dialed in because then I mean you won't. Just you could work really hard in the gym, but you're not going to see results if the other side of your lifestyle is mess. So, in terms of Brett Jones, what is next for you? You know, I know you have iron cardio out an app as well, correct?

Brett Jones: 54:41

So it's ACFfit app, which is a. What it does is creates kind of a 3D wire frame of you and tracks the kettlebell, and so it kind of tracks your, your sessions for you and we can look at things like you know, time between sets, so we, we know if you're starting to rush and sets are starting to take longer, and so there's some metrics that we we kind of have in there. So it's a, it's a neat app. You can do pretty much every, almost every variation of the iron cardio protocol within that app and and select your weights. And if you don't feel like thinking too much, you can just auto select and let the app tell you what you're going to do for that day.

Tony Pascolla: 55:20

Oh, that's cool. I love that because I don't want to think, I just want to go, you know.

Brett Jones: 55:24

Yeah, so ACFfit for that. I'll be filming another product for the Strong and Fit folks, which I'm I'm right now. The working title is Mind the Gap. That minimalist training checks all the boxes till it doesn't, and then you got to mind the gap. So we need to take care of some basic mobility needs. We need some single leg work involved. We need some, you know, things that are restorative in our training, but we only need a little bit of them. So mind the gap. I'll be filming that here in a few months and get that that out there. Continuing to work with Strong First FMS. You know we've we've got online videos and products that are in the pipeline and you know we're getting those ready, and so it's just busy, busy, busy.

Tony Pascolla: 56:17

Definitely sounds like it. Well, brett. Thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time to get on the podcast and share some knowledge with us. So, social media where can people find you?

Brett Jones: 56:31

Best place to really Instagram. At what is it? Brett Jones, sfg? I think I don't have it. I don't have it.

Tony Pascolla: 56:39

I'll put it in the show notes for sure. Yeah, we can put it in the show notes.

Brett Jones: 56:42

I don't even know my own Instagram handle. I'm on Facebook and you know social media is really weird to me in general. I think Instagram is where you go to be seen, facebook is where you go to advertise, and Twitter, or whatever the heck it's called now, or whatever it is, or threads is you know that's X, or Twitter, in particular, that's where you go to argue, which I have no patience for. I'm kind of at that point in my life where you don't agree with me Cool, we don't need to agree, it's all good. So, yeah, instagram is probably the best place. I got some workshops coming up September in Providence at the Perform Better gym, so kind of about 101, 201, strong First workshops coming up up there in Providence. Looking forward to getting up there and doing that and yeah. So that's the big stuff, awesome.

Tony Pascolla: 57:40

Awesome, well, great, well. Thank you, and to everybody else, all the listeners, thank you for listening to the Primal Foundations podcast and we hope to see you on the next episode. Thank you all for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe, like and share. See you all next time on the Primal Foundations podcast.