Transcript of Episode 169: Why You Need to Start Squatting
With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Mike Bledsoe
Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I'm your host Meredith Dykstra and this is Episode Number 169. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line of course, and today we welcome special guest, Mike Bledsoe.
Before we get into today’s topic, let me tell you guys a little bit more about Mike. Mike Bledsoe is a host of Barbell Shrugged, Barbell Business and The Bledsoe Show. Mike has been coaching and honing his own health and performance for over 20 years with a goal of creating the biggest impact possible. He uses video shows, podcasts, software, and entrepreneurship to reach as many people as possible.
As an athlete he has competed and coached many sports, primarily weightlifting and CrossFit in the last decade. As an entrepreneur he’s successfully cofounded Faction Strength & Conditioning, home of CrossFit Memphis, and Barbell Shrugged, and Barbell Business. He has a passion for helping others grow, define, and achieve success. Amazing bio, so excited to have you on Cellular Healing TV, Mike. Welcome to the show.
Mike:
Thanks for having me. I'm super excited.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, yeah, no doubt. Look, we were talking before we got on, and your philosophy with exercise just transcends into our philosophy with diet, diet variation, and we will no doubt move into that comparison. I always love to ask this. First of all, I thought you were in the mountains, right? To me, folks, doesn’t he look like a mountain guy? I'm in the mountains. He's at the beach. I look like a beach guy. He looks like a mountain guy over there in San Diego.
I tell you what, though, man, our viewers and listeners are going to love your podcast. I’ve heard nothing but amazing things. You have a really huge listening and viewing audience, so right up front, man, tell them how to jump onto that stuff. Then after you do that, I want you to tell us how you got into this.
Mike:
Excellent. Yeah, if you want to check out what we got going on, just go to barbellshrugged.com or hop on YouTube or iTunes and put in Barbell Shrugged, and we have a lot of fun. We make strength and conditioning, nutrition, all that, we make it as fun as possible. Most of the stuff we cover is functional fitness oriented, so we’re not really into the physique stuff, bodybuilding stuff. We’re more into how do you move and how do you exercise in order to enhance the life you want to live.
I got into doing video shows—well shit, I got into fitness when I was 15 because I was always drawn to movement and sport, and I always wanted to learn more. Then went to college, got exercise science, saw that there was no gym like I wanted, a nice functional gym. I was introduced to CrossFit which back in ’07 was and regard to functional fitness. Before that, most gyms were designed for bodybuilding. It was really cool to have something come along and really changed it up for us.
Opened up a gym in ’07 and then in 2012, we had done really well with our clients, we had done really well with our business so in 2012, I started podcasting and doing video shows, and we really just—a lot of people asked how we've had so much success with that and to be honest, it has to do with just being consistent, always showing up. I'm super fortunate that I started the show when I just went—I just kept going and plugging away, week after week, and that really exposed me to the best coaches and scientists all around the world because I travel around and do it in person. The majority of my education—I’ve been pursuing educations from the age of 15 to 30, but when I started doing the show, I started learning at an accelerated rate, because I was getting to spend time with some of the people, some of the best in the world so it's been a really fun journey.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It’s so true. I’ve interviewed experts on every topic that I can find that I feel knows the most and gosh, you just learn so much even preparing for the interviews, right? It’s like it’s fantastic. I was just traveling and I had time and we were down with Zach Bush who created a product called Restore. It helps fix leaky gut. I sat in a room with four scientists, myself and Jim [Recola] and I think we would both echo that we learned more in that hour and a half than we had in probably months. It was like condensed learning, so you're right. We’re blessed to be around some of the greatest minds, and we’re blessed to be able to share it with so many people, honestly. I just feel so fortunate.
Well, listen, we both agree movement is needed for the sick that want to be well. Without movement they become worse. However, we have a lot of people who can't—they don't have enough energy to do the exercises that this person would do but they still need to move. Then we have this group of our followers who wants to lose weight, struggles to lose weight, wants hormone optimization and anti-aging Both sides need movement. So how can we please both sides? Let's talk about some movements that you've discovered because you've got a lot of tricks and gadgets, man, but anyway, so let's try to talk about both of those groups and how—because movement is healing. Without movement you die, no movement, death; movement, life, so talk about it. You're the expert.
Mike:
Yeah. I think as Westerners, we’ve really—one of the reasons movement is so challenging is because our attention is on the outcome of movement, and so we’re always concerned with—we are looking at oh, what are my hormones doing, what are all these numbers look like, and if I do this what do I get out of it? For me, the very philosophical approach is I'm a human being. I was made with to two legs, two arms, and I'm supposed to be moving. I think that—was it Thomas Edison said that the purpose of the body is to carry the brain around, and he was dead wrong and that was—
Dr. Pompa:
He did say that.
Mike:
It’s that type of mentality that gets people completely jacked up. I think it was Dick Clark who said back I think it was 14 or 1500s and he was this scientist, and he started talking about the mind and the body as separate things. Now what we end up having is we walk around talking about the mind and we start—and we’re talking about the body as if these are two different things, and they’re not. These are nice little labels that we put on things so that we can divide ourselves against ourselves. The fact that we’re even dividing ourselves against ourselves makes movement challenging.
My first challenge to anybody who wants to live a better life—and the thing is I don't think of myself as a noun. I think of myself as a verb. I am a process. I am something that's happening all the time, and so that means that I'm in constant—I’m a kinetic being. I'm always in movement. Sitting still is not good. I know that I learn much more quickly when I'm in movement. I might have to go to conferences and sit still for a long time. Do you know how I process that information? I get out and move creatively. I dance. I do animal flow. I get out in the ocean.
Movement is part of the human experience, and I think that so many people are looking at I want this outcome. I want to be healthy. I want to lose this weight. I want to do all this stuff, and they're missing the boat because what they're doing is saying I want to be different and in order to get there, I have to do all this stuff that I don't want to do. They think about I got to do step one, and step two, and step three, and it’s like you are a human experience right now.
You are human being or we could say I like to think of myself as a spiritual being having a human experience. Is my human experience meant to be sitting at a desk all day? Is that what the human experience is supposed to be? Am I supposed to sit in a classroom from the age of 5 years old until the age of 22, 8 hours a day, and just sitting there and absorbing information so I can regurgitate it so I can hopefully get a job where I sit in a cubicle all day? This is from the very basis—if we’re thinking about movement as I got to go to the gym one hour day, we already have a problem.
For me, I really want people to think about themselves as having a human experience at all times in which case I think they start making different decisions. For the person who doesn't move hardly at all, I mean, add up the amount of physical activity that you do. If you are going to the gym 1 hour, that’s 1 out of every 23 hours. I may be resting eight hours in bed. We go from bed to the kitchen to sitting at a table to walking ten feet to their car to sitting to walking to their cubicle, sitting. They're basically sitting and laying down all day.
Then when they go to exercise, they get hurt. Oh, yeah, you're totally jacked up. You can't move. You can't go from—I don't take my car out. I don't take a Ferrari, start it, and then gun it down the road immediately and then wonder why I threw a rod. I think a lot of times, we'd be in a lot better metabolic condition if they just moved throughout the day and just it was something that happened.
For the person who does not move a lot, go for a ten-minute walk first thing in the morning. That's it, no expectations. I think for a lot of people, a lot of people who are out of shape, or overweight, or not happy with their bodies that don't go to the gym, I imagine that they're intimidated by the gym environment. There's a lot going on there. We may have had experiences with personal trainers who expected way too much of us too soon. This happened in CrossFit all the time. This was the world in which I've lived for a while, and we've had to really—a lot of what I've had to do is help those coaches dial it back for the average person. They want people to squat below parallel on day one. I'm like, somebody who's not walking for ten minutes a day, let's just go for a ten-minute walk and drink some water. Let's keep it simple.
For the person who doesn't move a lot, let's work up to 30 minutes of walking. I want you to walk ten minuets every other day this week. Then work up to 30 minutes. Then you might want to find somebody who is a personal trainer who is a really dialed in to looking to how you move and making assessments, not just throwing some general program at you.
Dr. Pompa:
Even the interest of what you want to do. We've interviewed a guy from here, Park City, and he helped my wife. Cycling was what she wanted to get better at. He said okay, this is your interest, and he developed movements around that, transformed her cycling without pains. Perfect point.
Mike:
It's got to be fun. It's got to be engaging. For the most advanced person, someone who does move a lot, I really encourage you to think about being present in your movement practice, connecting your movement to your breath. If you're thinking about what happened before after your movement practice, that session, then you're not present in what's happening right now. I think that for the longest time, I trained for the purpose of reaching a goal. Now when I move, it's about really enjoying the movement that I'm doing. Yeah, doing things that I enjoy is important.
Then another thing to consider for someone who's more advanced is most people do gravitate really far to one thing. I think in the beginning we should just do the things that we enjoy. Over time, I mean, you can get a taste for things and develop a taste for something A lot of what I did was very masculine in nature. What I mean by that is a lot of my movement practice and my training was accomplishment-based. I want to put so much weight on a barbell, or I want to run this thing in this amount of time. It's very accomplishment and measurement-based. I can measure my progress whereas there's more feminine-oriented movement practices where there's not a lot of measuring going on. There's not this big accomplishment thing. This would be something like yoga or certain types of yoga, especially yin yoga, and then dance. Hardly ever is anyone going to a dance class—we may be comparing ourselves to other people, but it would be subjective in nature.
I would really encourage people who do have movement practices, if they're really in a masculine movement practice like CrossFit, or weightlifting, or being a triathlete, or something like that, is play around with something more feminine, whether you're a man or a woman. Dance, yoga, and then vice-versa. If somebody's only done yoga and dance and things like that, they can really benefit from having a more masculine nature.
Dr. Pompa:
You're challenging me right now because I gravitate what I grew up with. I love weights. I just love lifting weights, just love it, can't get it out of me. I love cycling. I love hiking. I love being in the woods. However, put me in a room with people standing on one leg stretching, I would rather die. It's like stretching anything. It's not like getting on—why are we doing this? I'm looking around. Mike, don't take this the wrong way, man. You don't look like a dancer. You just don't look like a dancer. I'm going to make you back up.
Mike:
You didn't see this -inaudible-.
Dr. Pompa:
I want to see it. Dancing, I like myself. I do like it, but I'm not going to—I look at that as more fun. I get your point. You don't have to defend it. It's absolutely exercise, but point being is—this is what I'm trying to say. I'm not going to be like oh, you know what? I'm going to exercise. Oh, yeah, here, I got my iTunes, yeah. I'm not going to just start dancing. Maybe I should. That's me.
Mike:
There's a difference between creative movement. Creativity is a feminine trait, and it's having creative moment and play. If you watch a five year old at a playground, they are just playing. You throw a 25 year old, or a 35, or a 45 year old on the playground, they just stand there and look around. If they did start playing, they'd be so worried about someone judging them.
One of the things that I really been working on with myself and with other adults is teaching them how to play again. There's a difference between—you go in a gym, that's in a box. You are literally walking into a box and doing box things. I'm going to do this movement, up and down, up and down, left and right. When you get into creative movement, that's extremely important because that—if you want to talk about processing or thinking about creativity in your mind, you create creativity in your body first.
There's a theory which I subscribe to which is your memories are stored in your fascia If your fascia is not getting the type of movement it could be getting, then your creativity is being hindered tremendously. For somebody who's a professional, if they went and—what's that called? They polled the top 500 CEOs for Inc., 500 and look at all the top CEOs, and they polled them and asked them what was the most important trait for being a cutting-edge CEO in business right now, and they said creativity is number one. Because we have robots and people in third-world countries managing a lot of left-brain activities, if you're not practicing creativity physically, you're going to be hindered mentally, as well. I think a lot of times, going back to your body's not just here to carry your brain around. It's all one integrated system, and we need to be treating it as such.
Going back, I think it's really sad that we have put the mind—we separated the mind and the body, and then we say sit at a desk for eight hours a day. If your grades are bad, then we cut recess, we cut sports, and then what we do is we're saying the mind is more important than the body. Then the body is where our emotions and feelings come from. Now we're saying your feelings and emotions are not important. The mind is important. Now we've created an entire society of people who don't think that the body is—it's just not important. They may intellectually say that, but they don't really believe it. If someone can't believe that their body's important and they don't really love it, they're doomed for failure, really.
Dr. Pompa:
Exactly. Okay, so it's such an important part. I hear my echo. There's that echo again. Anyways, show us some of these unique movements. Show us something. Give us—I think you already handled some of these people who are very sick and challenged. I thought that was great advice, just walking ten minutes a day. I think we'd go aw, what's that going to do? No, that's transformative for moving lymph, all these things. You said something else, and I want to get into this. You're moving and trapped emotia in the fascia, in the tissue, without movement, that only accelerates. Movement can at least start that process. We need movement to move toxins out of the body.
Obviously, we can go on and on, but that even little bit, ten minutes, is a big deal. On this side of things, people that have enough energy to exercise, want to take their fitness to the next level, their functional movements, their health, their anti-aging, what are some movements here? You might have some other suggestions that were on this side too. I don’t know.
Mike:
It all comes down—it’s hard to say because everyone is fairly individualized when it comes to this. I think everybody should be able to sit in a bottom of a squat for ten minutes. If you can’t sit at a bottom of a squat for ten minutes, then—most athletes have a hard time doing this.
Dr. Pompa:
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.
Mike:
If you can’t sit in a bottom of a squat we’ll just say for two minutes, I would say that you’re dysfunctional.
Dr. Pompa:
I can do two minutes. I may even be able to do five, but I know when I’m there because I’ve done it, right? Just like in a stretching position, by five minutes I’m burning. I am burning.
Mike:
I know Olympic athletes that can’t do it, and they’re dysfunctional. What that means is they’re most likely going—that tells me they’re at risk of injury. Sitting at the bottom of a squat can really help you reset your body. It resets your breath, and so I get really big in the breath. If you sit at a bottom of a squat, try to chest breathe. You automatically start breathing from your diaphragm.
Most people walk around chest breathing, breathing into the ribs, but they’re not really breathing. They’re doing a lot of shoulder—people who have neck pain and things like that, they’re not really breathing into their belly. They’re not really expanding their diaphragm. They’re not expanding their ribs, and so if you’re in a bottom of a squat and you’re hanging out there for five or ten minutes total in a day, then what you’re going to do is you’re actually going to start repairing your breath at the same time. All movement -inaudible- breath. That’s your core. If your core is not strong—and it’s not even about strength. It’s about is it—are the motor patterns built in the order in which they are supposed to?
What ends up happening a lot of times is we get into a situation where we start chest breathing. What’s really happening is our breathing—the mechanics of our breathing is—the muscles are firing in the wrong order. That greases a groove over time, and now we forget how to breathe deeply. Any time we’re not breathing deep, we are throwing the sympathetic nervous system up, so that creates stress hormones like cortisol and things like that. If we try to fix people biochemically and we’re not addressing breath, we’re just doomed to go back. We’re just doomed to go back to higher cortisol levels. You know that throws everything off.
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, this is great advice for the person over here challenged and the person over here, this squat thing. I’m the person over here. I was over here going I can’t do that, and then the sick person is going I need to do that because they need to get their breath right. They need to get that firing, that parasympathetic and sympathetic working right. That was just unbelievable right there that this is a simple way to do it. You could start with ten seconds, right? I mean, work up every day.
Mike:
My first thing is accumulate. I like to use my iPhone. I just hit the Start/Stop button on my timer, and I accumulate ten minutes of squatting every day sitting in the bottom of a squat. I’ll do 30 seconds here, a minute there, and things like that. I know that if I accumulate ten minutes at the bottom of my squat every day, it’s going to keep my hips nice and flexible. My hamstring is going to be healthy. People think about all this stretching that needs to happen. If you just sit in the bottom of a squat for ten minutes total a day, everything will be just fine.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m doing it.
Mike:
I’m not saying you’re not going to need…
Dr. Pompa:
I’m going to do it.
Mike:
I’m not saying you’re not going to need additional work.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it, but people may not understand exactly what you’re talking about. Pull your camera back and just show them. I mean, I understand it. I mean, believe me when I tell you. Look at the legs on that guy.
Mike:
I’m just sitting in the bottom squat a little bit like here.
Dr. Pompa:
Are you going all the way down in the relaxed position, or are you holding yourself?
Mike:
I’m making sure that my back stays pretty straight. I don’t want to be like this with my back. I’m going to rock back a little bit. I’m going to make sure my toes are really engaging with the floor. I can sit right here. I like holding myself up. I like trying to keep my back pretty flat and straight. You’re not going to hurt your back if you don’t.
Dr. Pompa:
No. I mean, most people, though, aren’t going to be able to—they’re not strong enough in their quads to hold themselves up. They can just sit straight down, right?
Mike:
Yeah. I’ll show you again. You just sit. You can just get all the way to the bottom, and just hang out down here. I like to just put my elbows right here, and just hang out. I usually have my iPhone in my hand, and I’m texting. I’m working from there. I’m texting from there. I don’t sit at a desk at all. I stand at a desk, or if I’m on my laptop, a lot of times on my belly on the floor.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m standing. There are certain times where I’ll pop down. You know what I’m saying? Whatever, I’m doing something. Nine times out of ten I’m standing. Now, do you nose breath or mouth breath when you’re doing that?
Mike:
I try to nose breath most of the time, even when I’m exercising, a lot of nose breathing. I notice that I’m more likely to shoulder breath if I’m breathing through my mouth. If I’m breathing through my nose, it adds a little bit of resistance, and it forces me to take a deeper breath in. It also slows me down, so I can take fewer breaths per minute, which forces me to have to get a fuller breath each time. My general rule is I should be breathing out my mouth when I’m talking, and that’s about it. There are training sessions where I’m breathing out my mouth. It’s grueling. I’m just like, oh, I’m out of breath, but I wait to get there. Because the moment you start breathing real heavy in and out of your mouth, that means your sympathetic nervous system is kicked into gear, which is not necessarily a bad thing. You just want to time it well when you’re there.
I would say, whether someone’s advanced or not, test yourself. What’s it like to accumulate ten minutes of sitting in a bottom of a squat in a day? You don’t even have to go the gym. I would say step one is, if that’s a challenge for you, if two minutes straight is just impossible, then accumulate ten minutes a day in a bottom squat. That’s ten minutes. You don’t have to go a gym. You don’t have to do anything else. If you do that, you’re going to get massive health benefits from that by itself.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s great. Do you have another trick? That’s a great trick. I want another one.
Mike:
Yeah. This is actually similar is I like to accumulate seven minutes a day hanging from something. This challenge is good, and it also is good for the shoulders. Your shoulders should be strong enough just to hold you so just hanging up here from my rafter, and I accumulate. There’s workouts where what I do is I just switch between—the first thing in the morning, I’ll just switch between hanging from my rafters and sitting in the bottom of a squat.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s awesome. There’s no way you can…
Mike:
I’ll just sit in the bottom of the squat for a minute.
Dr. Pompa:
You can’t hang there for a full seven minutes can you?
Mike:
No. No.
Dr. Pompa:
I was going to say—yeah.
Mike:
I have some friends that can. I have some friends that can. They’ll just walk up to a tree, seven minutes. It’s incredible.
Dr. Pompa:
I was setting up my—I was setting my high school pull-up record, right? I realized my greatest challenge was my grip. It wasn’t my ability to pull myself up. I was failing in my grip, which was weakening my ability to pull up, so I had to start doing one-handed hangs, right? I was realizing that my grip is absolutely failing. I remember getting to myself doing a three minute one-arm hang. It took training, and I was younger, right? I mean, it took a lot of training to get to a three minute one-arm hang, man. Try one minute, folks. You think three’s short. It’s eternity.
Mike:
It’s a big deal. Oh, yeah, hanging from one arm, nuts.
Dr. Pompa:
Even now, one minute and I…
Mike:
It takes a lot of shoulder strength to.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It is. It is.
Mike:
A lot of shoulder strength. Yeah. There’s a lot of benefits, especially as people get older, doing the static holds. When we were younger, doing the explosive stuff where we’re jumping on top of things and running as fast as we can and just going nuts was okay. What I’ve noticed is I’ve got—as I’ve gotten older, the joints don’t feel so hot. There’s many reasons for that, and there’s many reasons why this would help that out. I won’t get into the nasty details of it, but static holds are really nice.
Ninety percent of my training I am either doing a static hold, sitting at the bottom. Static means just being still and having some resistance. I’m hanging from a rafter. I might be hanging with my chin over the bar is static holds or doing planks for your core. Things like that. A Superman hold on the floor.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I do those.
Mike:
Then when I’m at the gym, I’m doing a lot of eccentrics. That means I’m going really slow on the way down with pauses, and I’m still coming up—say I’m bench pressing. I’m still coming up with some speed. On the way down, I might be five or six seconds on the way down. That really saves the joints. It really helps with more muscular recruitment. It allows you to maintain muscle mass. As we get older, our muscle mass is decreasing every year. On average, the studies say, after the age of 35, you’re losing about a pound of muscle a year.
Dr. Pompa:
Crap.
Mike:
Muscle is really important.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I don’t like that statistic. I’m 52 this year, man. My goal is to be bigger this year. Come on. No. I don’t think I’ll be bigger, but I want to hold on to what I have.
Mike:
If you’re training, you don’t have to do that. Yeah. A lot of people lose muscle mass because they stop moving. Movement is the stimulus necessary for muscles to grow. We need muscles, and we need good motor pattern recruitment. I’m 35, and I’m already thinking about this. I don’t want someone having to wipe my butt when I’m 85. You know?
Dr. Pompa:
I do. I do. I want -inaudible-. I just don’t want to have to do that anymore. I’m just thinking about that. Matter of fact, I’m going to work on this now. I’m going to call my wife in, and see if we can arrange this. No. You’re right. You don’t want to have to do that.
Mike:
What that is is people can’t wipe their butt when they get older because they lack T-spine rotation. That means their upper back can’t rotate, right? I got something, a funny idea, which is I have a Squatty Potty. Are you familiar?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah.
Mike:
I use a Squatty Potty. This might be too much for some people, but I’m going to say anyway. When I wipe my butt, I actually—I stay down in a squatting position, and I alternate between hands. That’s how I do my T-spine rotation work is when I go to the bathroom.
Dr. Pompa:
You and Ben Greenfield must know each other.
Mike:
Oh, we’re buddies.
Dr. Pompa:
I know, exactly. Okay. I’m out to dinner with Ben, right? I’m with some of my good friends. I introduce him to Jeff [Hays] and some really close friends. He went to the bathroom twice during the dinner, and he came back huffing each time. Of course, the question was asked. Dude, what are you doing, right? You come back from the bathroom huffing. He says, oh, I do what he calls piss squats. Every time, before he would go to the bathroom, he would squat 40 times up and down, up and down.
Ben’s the guy who runs down to get the mail, sprints back, does push-ups. I’ve got to ask Ben if he’s doing the Potty Squatty what do you call it, rotations? The answer is probably going to…
Mike:
T-spine rotation.
Dr. Pompa:
If the answer is no, I’m going to start now. You know what I’m saying? That’s what Ben does.
Mike:
Absolutely. I will have started something before Ben. I’ll rub it in.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah, literally. Anyway, we were just on a call with Ben, ironically enough. Yeah, dude, you have a Ben Greenfield edge to you, for sure. No doubt.
Listen, though. I will tell you that we can laugh about that, but that is something more transformative. I mean, that really is. That’s a basic movement, and if you lose, your life is different. Your life is not good, literally. Not just wiping your butt, but turning around in a chair and picking something up and throwing your back out, for goodness sakes, I mean, there’s a lot of consequences to not being able to do that.
Mike:
Going back to movement and movement being a stimulus for the human body to regenerate and this is especially so for—light-weight, white women tend to have more osteoporosis. A lot of that has to do with the fact that they haven’t done as much weight-bearing exercise. What ends up happening is, when people get older and they break a hip, statistically, they don’t live beyond another year. You break a hip. It’s a sign of osteoporosis. It’s a sign that you’re not moving.
It’s not the broken hip that’s causing a problem. It’s just that, when you break the hip, it’s probably you weren’t moving already. Your bones are weak. The fact that you fell means that your muscles don’t move too well. Afterwards, it’s real easy—and I’ve got friends who’ve had parents that have gone through this. I’ve heard it’s like they throw in the towel. It’s already gotten to that point. It’s already gotten to a point where there’s—they just don’t have the will to break back through.
For me, that’s another thing. If I look at situations like that, I don’t think I’m ever going to be in danger of osteoporosis, but there’s always something that you might need to stave off. For me, it’s about, okay, I’m going to regularly introduce stimulus that’s going to cause my muscles, my skin, my bones, my eyesight, all this stuff to be challenged, so it’ll grow stronger and be stronger over time. I don’t want to ever have to be at the risk of breaking my hip, and end up being a burden on anybody else and on myself. Again, going back to what I was saying in the beginning, I’m a verb. I am not a noun. I am having a human experience, and I want to enjoy this human experience. That involves movement and getting really connected to my body.
Dr. Pompa:
Dude, I have to go back to the squatting thing here. I’m really excited about this. I got to lecture in Africa, right? I was talking about posture, etc., and I talked about the importance of the squat. The gentleman that ran this whole conference literally comes out, jumps up on stage, and says, okay, wait a minute. He’s been telling the people of Zimbabwe because he’s a big important leader the importance of getting back to squatting. He says, look, we used to squat. Everyone used to squat. He was talking about it preventing hip fractures and bones in the hip problems, arthritis, opens up the knees. He went off on this whole education about why us Africans have to get back to squatting. Chairs, they’re killing us, etc.
I mean, he had everyone doing the squat, right? Barely anyone could do it. Anyways, just preventing hip fractures, squatting, right? You talked about the breath. I didn’t know that. I mean, that’s another bad—the sympathetic [nervous system], I mean, come on. I didn’t know any of that. The knees, I mean, squatting and what it does for the knees, that’s another big huge problem. How many people are having knee surgery and meniscus problems when squatting is showing to improve the knees, the hips, and the low back?
Not to mention the neck. When you’re in a squatting position, it forces the head back. This is what America looks like, even kids. Here’s what they do. This is what they look like. When you’re squatting, you’re in the exact opposite position. It literally forces the spine and the head back over some.
Anyway, we have one more thing because we’re running out of time, and you and I could go off on that. By the way, I think you just gave amazing advice. I really do. It was funny. I started the show by saying how can you please these people and these people? Holy cow, we did it. I’m going I can’t squat, right? I’m like I can’t squat like that. I mean, it’s like—and these people are going, okay, I can do that, but I’m going to go up here with it. I’m going to do ten minutes.
All right, you mentioned trapped emotions, and I’m a big believer that trapped emotions are a massive, massive stressor that can keep people from getting well. Keep the person here that wants to be better from being better. Trapped emotions is no different than trapped toxins. We talk a lot about bioaccumulated toxins at the cellular level. You talked about emotions being trapped in your fascia, one of your theories. I absolutely see that because I believe trapped emotions can be in the DNA.
Now, you talked about—we talked about ayahuasca. I think this is just a really cool thing. It’s an herb from South America that actually releases trapped emotions, and just talk a little bit about that. I know we can’t get this in the United States, but I still think it’s a really cool thing when we’re talking about trapped emotions.
Mike:
Yeah. I think a lot of times, especially for a lot of men in America, they think about emotions. They’re like nah. I don’t need to worry about that. That’s a really big sign of suppression of emotion, and those are usually the people who could use it the most. Yeah. What usually happens, a lot of these emotional trauma that’s stored in the body impacts your posture. I’ve witnessed people releasing emotional trauma, and then walking differently afterwards. Squatting differently afterwards. It’s really incredible.
I’ve gone down to Peru. I’ve sat with ayahuasqueros and done ayahuasca and gotten the benefits of it myself. What’s interesting about the trapped emotional trauma, a lot of that was put in there—we could say it was installed or whatever pre-seven years old so when people were really young. When we’re that young, we think everything is true. Not only do we have emotional trauma that’s stored in the body; it created a belief around this or that. Having these subconscious beliefs that are running in the background keep us from achieving the things we want to achieve. I think a lot of times people who need to lose—they want to lose weight, right? They’re carrying around more weight. The physical weight is indicative of the emotional weight that they’re carrying. It being in the subconscious means that you’re not—you can’t really become aware of it.
What I’ll share is just a really quick summary of what I’ve experienced with ayahuasca and how it works. Now, ayahuasca is a tea. They brew this tea over a 24-hour period. The tea is made from two ingredients. It’s made from an ayahuasca vine and another leaf. I don’t quite recall the name of the leaf. They take this vine, and they take this leaf. They chop the vine up, and they put it in water with this leaf. They, basically, boil it over a fire for I think a day or two, constantly stirring it, and then they bottle it. If anyone starts thinking about what is this thing, it’s from the Amazon. It’s a vine and leaf.
Now, what you do is you sit down with an ayahuasquero. This is somebody who works with the medicine. You drink the tea. About between 10 and 45 minutes after drinking the tea, you—I’ll say I. I go into, basically, a different state of consciousness. I am pulled into drawing—closing my eyes. I go into somewhat of a dream state full of visions, and the world that we know that we’re touching right now completely seized to exist. Then I go into a dream state, and I’m being shown all these things in my life. I’ve gone to memories, and it starts basically giving me a—I start seeing scenes of my life as memories, and I’ve gone as far back as when I was nursing at my mother’s breast.
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, I want people to understand. This is not a hallucinogenic herb. It’s not. People, of course, get these trips on LSD. This is different. I know enough about it. Yeah.
Mike:
Technically, it is hallucinogenic. That’s not the primary—it’s not a recreational thing. Anyone who’s ever done this would not do this at a party. This is not something to be done recreationally. In fact, I would never do this without being under the care of someone who works with it.
Dr. Pompa:
I thought it doesn’t hit the same receptors as say LSD, right, or mushrooms. It works in a different way. Therefore, they weren’t classifying it as a hallucinogenic, but yet, it does the same, what you were saying, right? They would say, okay, it’s hallucinogenic.
Mike:
It’s more direct.
Dr. Pompa:
Explain it. Am I right on that?
Mike:
It’s more direct. With ayahuasca, what’s happening is you’re drinking—so all plants have this thing called dimethyltryptamine. Dimethyltryptamine is also produced by your pineal gland so that little gland in the middle of your brain. It drips dimethyltryptamine when you sleep and causes dreams. Dimethyltryptamine is also released in a massive dose when you die, and it creates an experience where you see the white light and all that kind of stuff. It does create this dream state.
What happened for me is I was actually able to go into memories that I was not able to recall without the tea, so I was able to go as far back as when I was nursing my mother’s breast. If you talk to any psychologist, they’ll tell that going preverbal, that means before language was adopted, is almost impossible, and the reason it’s impossible is because we use words to create memories, right, and thoughts. What we do is we package these memories as thoughts, and these thoughts are formed by words. Going preverbal can be really clearly for a society full of people who are not in touch with their bodies. If you’re not in touch with your body, that means that you cannot access memories that only are associated with feelings. Because we’re not in touch with our feelings, we’re not in touch with the sensations of our body.
Now, the people I know who are highly in touch with the sensations of their body actually can go preverbal much more easily. If you’re somebody who goes, oh, I don’t really remember anything before 5, 6, 7 years old, that might be a sign that you’re not in touch with the sensations of your body. You get back in touch with that, and all of a sudden, all these memories just start flowing. It’s really incredible. The medicine, for me, really allowed me to access things that were from my youth, and I got to see some things that I was told and things that happened when I was young that created beliefs that I operate now at, say, when I was 30 years old. I’m like, oh, wow. I behaved this way as a 30-year-old because of something that happened when I was 5.
What ended up happening is I—the ayahuasca works in a very physical manner. It’s not enjoyable at all. For me, it feels like it’s pumping my stomach. There’s something inside of me moving around, and then, what ends up happening is, oh, I will focus on one part of my body. I can feel it coming up, and I -inaudible- associating it with a moment in time. Then it comes out, and I’ll throw it up. When I throw it up, there’s this huge release. You still remember. You still have the memory, but it doesn’t hold the same meaning it once held. After having the experience, I feel much lighter, and most people who have the experience walk around the next day seeing the world differently again.
It’s a really beautiful thing that I have had the chance to enjoy. I hope more people get to learn about it. I’m not really sure what the laws are in the US. There’s two things that we know is true is it’s really hard to treat people with plants in the United States because they’re not patentable, and there’s the same reason—there’s many different reasons why the government’s been really opposed to marijuana over the last 50 years. There’s a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is is pharmaceutical companies aren’t pushing for it to be legal because there’s no way to patent it. It does solve some -inaudible-, right? The same thing with ayahuasca, it’s a plant. No one’s really paying for the research to see what the benefits. It should be told things like magic mushrooms…
Dr. Pompa:
Can they go to your site and learn more about it? Hey, people are spending all this money on this psychologist or therapist. I’m willing to fly to South America to get it, I mean, but where would they start? I mean, is there more information on your site?
Mike:
I don’t have more information on my site about that. Actually, if you go—I don’t have information on my site. On my podcast, The Bledsoe Show, on that show, I do address it quite a bit, and I have a few friends I’ve interviewed that have had experiences. The trouble is it’s hard to make a recommendation. Because just like any other practice, there’s a wide variety of how good somebody is, and you’re working in a Third World country. There’s a handful of people that I know down there that I could recommend, but it’s not something that I’m advertising heavily.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No, -inaudible-.
Mike:
For a lot of different reasons. I would recommend, if somebody’s interested in trying it out, do the research. There’s documentaries on it. Just make sure that you are—get referred to somebody. If you really want to do it and you ask around enough, you’ll get referred to somebody who’s really good. There are people who do it in the United States. It’s done in a—because it is something that was brought up by the indigenous tribes, it’s considered something like a—like Native Americans can still do things like peyote.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, I see that. Oh, I see that.
Mike:
It’s a religious thing. There’s the opportunity for that. I would just urge people, if it sounds interesting—by the way, it was—I’ve done some really challenging things in my life. This was top five most challenging things I’ve ever done, maybe top three. It’s not fun. If you think you’re going to have a good time doing it, then don’t do it.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It’s not the point here. The point is you’re releasing trapped emotions. I don’t think that’s ever fun. Anyways, hey, man, we’re out of time. We so appreciated you coming on. I know it was last minute, but it was a blessing for all of us and our viewers. Thank you, Mike. Appreciate it.
Mike:
Really enjoyed it. Thank you for having me.
Meredith:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Mike. Thank you, Dr. Pompa. I’ve been sitting here this whole time. I’m just like I’m going to run around and squat and hang. I’m pumped. Thank you for everything you did and all the awesome take-home advice too. I think all of us who are watching and listening are ready to go move around a lot. Thank you so much. Thanks for watching, everybody, and we’ll catch you next time. Bye-bye.
Dr. Pompa:
You got it. See you, guys. See you, Mike.
Mike:
All right then.
