Ted O'Neill - The Barbell Family's West Coast Philosopher

Ted O'Neill - The Barbell Family's West Coast Philosopher - Ted O’Neill is a strength and conditioning trainer and owner of Diablo Barbell, a private gym in Concord CA that is in the dominant Top 2 in the United States when it comes to training Elite-classified powerlifters. Ted is Jon Leon Guerrero’s strength and conditioning coach, and has guided his training to achieve meaningful and significant results over a relatively short time. Ted is also a serious student of philosophy, physiology, physics, nutrition science, and performance psychology, and he applies the practical points of his learning to the development of individual training plans for all of his athletes.
#barbell #ohio #strengthandconditioning #body #newlimits #powerlifting #philosophy #physiology #health #fitness

Haiku
​Strengthen the body,
The mind, and the attitude.
Ted seeks out the path.
Similar episodes:
​
Andrea Vitz
Rob Bell
Chad Michael Collins

Transcription

Jon Leon Guerrero  0:00  
Hey, this is john Leon Guerrero. Our guest today is Ted O'Neil. He's a strength and conditioning trainer and owner of Diablo barbell, a private gym in Concord, California, that is produced more elite classified power lifters than any other gym in the United States with the exception of Westside barbell in Columbus, Ohio, the proprietor of which is Ted's mentor Louie Simmons. Ted is my strength and conditioning coach and training in his care I've experienced meaningful and significant results. Now over the past eight weeks, I participated with many of my fellow Diablo barbell teammates. In a body composition challenge. I followed pretty strict diet guidelines that Ted established six times per day, two and a half hours apart, I consumed a meal comprised of 40 grams of protein, 40 grams of carbs, and 20 grams of fat. Now this plan was designed specifically for me so I implore you not to try it on your own

Jon Leon Guerrero  0:00  
Hey, this is john Leon Guerrero. Our guest today is Ted O'Neil. He's a strength and conditioning trainer and owner of Diablo barbell, a private gym in Concord, California, that is produced more elite classified power lifters than any other gym in the United States with the exception of Westside barbell in Columbus, Ohio, the proprietor of which is Ted's mentor Louie Simmons. Ted is my strength and conditioning coach and training in his care I've experienced meaningful and significant results. Now over the past eight weeks, I participated with many of my fellow Diablo barbell teammates. In a body composition challenge. I followed pretty strict diet guidelines that Ted established six times per day, two and a half hours apart, I consumed a meal comprised of 40 grams of protein, 40 grams of carbs, and 20 grams of fat. Now this plan was designed specifically for me so I implore you not to try it on your own. My Wife Kristi did it too and her diet macros were not the same as mine. She also got amazing results. We both drink a gallon of water over the course of a day. The point is I was almost always full. The bell would ring and I would go Jesus, I have to eat again. The strategy was to retrain my metabolism for a specific purpose. trim the fat without giving up too much lean mass, which is what happens with many of the typical weight loss programs. We also trained a Diablo barbell three times a week for about 90 minutes a session, mostly conditioning, a little bit of the traditional weightlifting exercises. Outside of that deliberately no other serious training, a little bit of yoga for flexibility and some walking for leisure. The eight week challenge concluded yesterday. Here's a brief recap of my results. I started out at 28.81 percent body fat. Cheese. What a fat Lauren, I feel like Tina. My ideal body fat percentage is 15% I lost 18 and a half pounds in total 16 pounds of which was fat, bringing my body fat percentage down to just under 24. So that's a third of the way toward my ideal goal of 15% which means I could conceivably be there by the end of the year. That is from being a pretty serious fat it has carrying around nearly 70 pounds of fat to being at my medically ideal body fat percentage in five months and getting strong in the process. Of course between now and the end of the year, there's Thanksgiving, my birthday, Christmas, New Year's Eve so it'll be a challenge. Anyway, Ted has led the charge for my results, usually with a gentle word sometimes with a more firm reminder of why I should showed up and always with the resounding chorus of the community of us, who follow his philosophies for conditioning, the body and the mind for the endeavor. And the approach has spilled over into other facets of my life. All of the other facets in my life, performance in my work, relationships and everything else. Speaking of everything else, my partner old Pedro Pete a Turner completed the core nado swim to benefit the seal veterans Foundation, seal veterans foundation.org over the weekend, and paraded around San Diego in his sexy Sanga from Sangha life Sunday life. com. We are on to the next fundraiser, which will benefit our favorite cause, save the brave save the brave.org and that event is the T seminar lucky Memorial golf tournament at the Temecula Creek in golf course that's on October 4, which is a Friday. Save the brave is a certified 501 c three nonprofit organization dedicated to helping veterans cope with post traumatic stress. You can register for the tournament at save the brave.org slash event and that link will be on our website. I'm also going to ask you to help us out by rating and reviewing the break it down show, especially if you like us. But even if you don't give us five stars anyway, on iTunes, Google Play Spotify or wherever you listen to find podcasts like ours. If you're on YouTube, please subscribe. Please like us, please hit the notification button so you'll know when we drop new shows. Anyway, back to Ted. He's helped me to change my robust relationship with food. increase the amount and quality of time I spend with my wife, improve my performance in all of the categories of my life, and even eliminate some categories that were just a time suck. And he did it by hiding philosophies for self improvement and overcoming obstacles somewhere behind a pile of weights. He's a profound dude. I think you're going to love him. I sure love him. He's our guest today. Here's Ted O'Neill.

Joel Manzer  5:12  
Lion rock productions.

Unknown Speaker  5:17  
This is Jay Mohr and

Unknown Speaker  5:18  
this is Jordan Hans's, director from the Navy

Unknown Speaker  5:21  
Sebastian youngsters, Rick Marotta, Stewart Copeland.

Unknown Speaker  5:25  
Baxter,

Jon Leon Guerrero  5:26  
Gabby Reese, Rob LE, this is Johnny Andre. And

Pete Turner  5:28  
this is Pete a Turner.

Ted O'Neill  5:32  
This is Ted O'Neill from Diablo barbell and you're listening to the break it down show.

Niko Leon Guerrero  5:38  
And now the breakdown show with john Leon Guerrero and Pete a Turner.

Jon Leon Guerrero  5:45  
All right. Ted O'Neill is a strength coach, a conditioning coach. He's somebody who works with athletes to attain levels of performance. And he has in the last couple of months become my strength and conditioning coach. I will say that I've waited to ask you to do this with me because I had always heard your reputation certainly precedes you. But I wanted to experience something that I thought was transformational before I asked you and I have I'm in the best shape that I've been in in probably the last five or six years. And it took you approximately eight weeks of guiding me through this process. Good to start me on this journey. So I wanted to talk with you today about your history in power lifting in not just power lifting, but in in human performance because I realize as I watch you that we're picking up heavy things and putting them back down again. And that is a disguise for some psychological concepts that help us to produce and perform better at other things that we do if we're paying attention.

Ted O'Neill  7:00  
You're paying attention. That sounds like so you're exactly right. What am I guys who's been here for a couple months the other day, at the end of his training looked at me and said, this isn't really a gym is it?And so he kind of caught on to this, because we were talking about something that was probably a little bit more on the esoteric side of performance. And he's also had a pretty massive transformation by doing things in a way that kind of fly in the face of convention from his experience.

Pete Turner  7:30  
Hey, this is Pete real quick, I just want to let you guys know, we are proud to announce our official support of save the brave, a certified nonprofit 501 c three with a charter of helping veterans with post traumatic stress. Here's how you can help go to save the brave calm, click on the link on the website. And my recommendation is this subscribe, give them 20 bucks a month, you've got subscriptions you can turn off right now that you're not using that are $20 a month, swap that out get involved, let's help these folks out

Ted O'Neill  7:57  
in a way that kind of fly in the face of convention from his experience. But he also recognized that, you know, there were using weights, essentially as the tools are the levers to create change. And that's that's really what that is. So there's there's a mechanics of transformation. And there was a way to achieve any goal. And a lot of times, just doing something like training or lifting weights, for some people is a means to an end. For other people, they can use it as part of this overall process of transformation.

Jon Leon Guerrero  8:33  
It's a gateway, it can be some people.

Ted O'Neill  8:35  
Yes,

Jon Leon Guerrero  8:36  
absolutely. So I breezed past, something that you said, which is that there is. And now I'm going to misquote you because it was 30 seconds ago. And that's how my memory is. But

Ted O'Neill  8:47  
what you said was seconds for me

Jon Leon Guerrero  8:51  
was that there's a path to anything, not just any physical endeavor, right, but anything. And that's really what we you've experienced here. And we've seen in each other in this community that you've created here. But I want to rewind a little bit and just let our audience know that you have created somewhere north of 40 elite level power lifters. Yes. And that is a classification. That's not just somebody saying, Well, you know, I sure can lift heavy things now. And I call myself elite, but there is a Can you explain the structure of how somebody attains that?

Ted O'Neill  9:25  
Absolutely. And I love that question because there's some really popular modalities. And fitness today that, for example, CrossFit, their their tagline is forging elite fitness. And I've always had a little bit of a problem with that, because I don't have a qualifier for it. So it's exactly what you said, it's, it now creates this perception, you know, this is someone who's pretty good at something. So now they can call themselves elite. Yeah, well, in the sport of power lifting. It's a very quantifiable measure. So much the same way that a martial arts you have a belt system, when someone starts to a white belt. And then on the all the way, the other side of the spectrum is a black belt. And if you're a black belt, you're considered a master. And you're kind of Excel to this thing. And you can now demonstrate the highest level the sport of power lifting has a ranking or a classification system from class 543212, Master of sport and then elite. So what is what is elite Elite to earn an elite total. And the sport of power lifting it's, it's a combination of your best squat, your best bench press and your best deadlift. Together, that's what you're told is called read the total of all three lifts. And then that would fall somewhere on that on that classification chart from class 54321 master to elite essentially being synonymous with a black belt if power lifting were to be looked at as a martial art. Sure. So to put that in some kind of a context. say if someone competes in the 275 pound division, they would have to total 2000 pounds. So maybe they squat 800 maybe they bench press 500 maybe they deadlift 700 pounds now would add up to 2000 2000 pounds. If they're competing in the what category is that? Again? That would be the 275 weight class.

Jon Leon Guerrero  11:18  
Okay, so that means an individual who weighs 275 pounds has to combine their total? Yeah, somewhere north of 2000 pounds, exactly an elite power lifter. And that's why they call it a leap.

Ted O'Neill  11:29  
Yeah, it's not, it's not a gimme, it's not something that if you show up regularly for a couple months, or a couple years, you're going to walk backwards into it. And you know, for some people, they spend many years training at the highest level and and still really have to reach for that. So it's called elite for a reason.

Jon Leon Guerrero  11:50  
Yeah. And there is now because it's quantifiable, it does, you know, puts a tag on it. But it doesn't diminish the efforts of somebody who's not necessarily elite if they're training to their capabilities. For instance, if you have somebody who has physical impairment, or you know, veteran who's lost his whatever limb, right, and he's doing things that are remarkable for the tools that he's got with him. And and one thing you mentioned is not unlike somebody who trains in martial arts and never achieved a black belt doesn't make them necessarily something less than a great martial artist, if they're working the tools, they've got the best their abilities. So let's talk about how you get somebody to the elite level, just as kind of a benchmark, knowing that what we're really talking about here is getting somebody to perform as best as they're capable. And, and to feel those, you know, the emotions of achievement and all of that stuff. Where did it start for you anyway?

Ted O'Neill  12:50  
You know, I've been training for over 30 years. When I was a little kid, you know, I always loved the idea of lifting weights, and I didn't get to start lifting weights until I was 10 years old. Okay. And then really took it up seriously as a later teenager. Yeah, right around around. Where'd you grow up? I grew up in the East Coast. Okay. Outside of DC outside of DC. Yeah. In Virginia. Okay, that's a now we're on the other coast. Yeah, right. Wow. And have been here for a pretty long time. We have been I've been trading for a long time. And I was not a natural by any by any stretch. So when I started lifting weights, as a teenager as a young adult, I remember my my first squat day was 75 pounds for two reps. So to put that into context, we've not had many grown ups here who are starting out that much of a deficit. Yeah. Although I never did it in a competitive setting. I spent the last couple years on my competitive career in power lifting, training for 1000 plus squat. So it was a it was a very, very long road. It was over 30 yours to climb.

Jon Leon Guerrero  14:01  
Wow. So that was the mountain you chose.

Unknown Speaker  14:05  
Yeah.

Ted O'Neill  14:07  
So for me and going from, you know, point A to this very distant point big. What was absolutely a mountain. I had to figure things out that for a lot of people, they would never even part of the consideration. Yeah, they might have started in a place that was that took me years to get to. So I learned a lot about process and a lot about what didn't work. Yeah. Because probably for 10 years I saw very, it took me over 10 years of squat 400 pounds, which might sound like a high amount for someone who maybe is looking at training as a recreational thing, but like in the context of power lifting. It's that's not a not a very big number. And I was trying, right, I just didn't really know, the best means and the best methodical. So really where this turned around for me was my mentor, a guy named Louis Simmons. Okay, who owns Westside barbell club in Columbus, Ohio. It's his little gym. That's probably about half the size of Diablo. And Louie has been around forever. He's in his 70s. He's the greatest strength coach of all time. That's not a disputable thing. Unless you sound maybe a little silly if you're trying to dispute that. Yeah. And I say that BC the guy is completely revolutionized training in almost every way. And a lot of people are using this method to don't even know their his methods.

Jon Leon Guerrero  15:30  
Yes, point. And Columbus is a capital of the sport.

Ted O'Neill  15:36  
Yeah, yeah. 

Jon Leon Guerrero  15:37  
Yeah. So back in the early 90s. That says a lot.

Ted O'Neill  15:42  
So Louie used to write this, he used to write an article for a magazine called power lifting USA. And he would write all this crazy training ideas, and it flew in the face of convention so much, that it was almost like reading the different language. And, you know, traditionally training is if you pick up a bodybuilding magazine, for example, like a Muscle and Fitness, they use the exact same formula now that if you picked up a copy of the 1960s, okay, it's literally the exact same formula, the exact same information every single month. So most training kind of follows these general guidelines that are that are accepted. This is the norm Louis stuff was so far out there. And so ahead of its time, he did it was just a real curiosity to me, because I wasn't going anywhere with what I was doing. And he would always leave his phone number at the bottom of the article. So you know, one day when I was 21, or 22, so this goes back now almost 30 years, I called him up. And sure enough, Louie Simmons answers the phone.

Jon Leon Guerrero  16:42  
That was Louie Simmons phone number. Yeah, Louie Simmons phone number there and you to call him

Ted O'Neill  16:46  
is it's, it's right there. So I would, you know, call and ask him all these dumb questions. He would take his time to answer them. And he would oftentimes call back on his dime. This is back when long distance calls. It wasn't long distance for those. Yeah, for people who haven't been before the cell phone era, you have a landline, your phone rings, you pick it up, right? So and it was a long distance Call, call back and talk to me for about training for an hour. And this went on, on an offer, you know, maybe over a year or something. And then he had given me a lot of resources on things that I could research and read. So at some point, I realized I needed to kind of just stop asking the stupid questions and arguing with this guy. argument. I wouldn't dare on the phone, argue with him. But by argument me and I would give him the counter to it and then go and still do it my way. Yeah. Which wasn't working out. Okay. So there was a moment of epiphany that maybe I should start listening to this guy, he's made all these champions, who's taking the time to talk to me on the phone and stop with my silly shit that wasn't doing anything. And, and that's when things really started to turn for me. So I kind of dabbled a little bit one foot in one foot out still thinking I knew better somehow. Okay, which is kind of a funny, a funny thing. Yeah, I'm sorry, now a little bit embarrassing. And then in the late 90s, really decided that I was going to give it 100%. And really, and really get after. And that's where my lifting completely changed. And that was kind of a precursor to starting Diablo barbell.

Jon Leon Guerrero  18:13  
Wow. So was there an intellectual pursuit that paralleled? what you were doing with your lifting? Because certainly, when you say things like, well, I've been training for 30 years, and you've been gathering influence for 30 years and training. But one of the things that I witness is that you've been gathering influence and a lot of things, not necessarily related to picking heavyweights up and putting them back down. Right. And that's not a process it started just just the other day, either.

Ted O'Neill  18:45  
Yes, you are correct. So probably around the same time, in my early 20s, I became really fascinated with people who were at the top of their craft, I people who were the most successful with, they did like what was different about that them? And I want to say it's man, it was either Carnegie or Napoleon Hill, a guy who many generations before done the exact same thing. In fact, his life's work was the study of people who were ultra successful.

Jon Leon Guerrero  19:14  
Right? And so Napoleon Hill was thinking grow rich.

Ted O'Neill  19:17  
Yes, he was. Ok. And Carnegie was the was the guy who kind of built his foundation around business practices and business principles, more specifically in the sales area. Was his big book,

Unknown Speaker  19:29  
when friends and

Ted O'Neill  19:31  
friends and influence people, so it was one of those two guys. Yeah, yeah. So I was I was into that stuff very early on. Okay. You know, when you're reading about people who are ultra highly accomplished, at some point, you're going to find where they deviate from the norm, or what I like to call now the veneer of reality. So that then starts edging over a little bit, and maybe in the quantum mechanics or metaphysics, and, you know, many of my pursuits then went in those directions, because that seemed to have a answers that were greater than what the 99.9% of people would both say, and then just generally accept, as wrote. So this is what this is, and we can't change this how it is. That's how it is right? That never worked for me. And you've been here long enough now in Diablo to know that I say all the time, every problem has a solution. Right? So that was something that was a concept probably back then that I was really testing, is this true that anything can be solved? Because he would kind of think it has to be true. Right? Because the problem, by definition should be solvable.

Jon Leon Guerrero  20:38  
Yeah, I mean, a problem, by definition is that there is something something gumming up the works. Yeah. So the solution often is on the other side of that on gum the works. Yes.

Ted O'Neill  20:50  
Indeed, yeah, that was the parallel to the lifting. So from Louise stuff, you know, he had his ideas on things. And he had researched stuff from all over the world. And given me this, this list of, you know, books and all this stuff. And a lot of it was this, these translated Russian manuals. And if you want to read some interesting stuff, that's really counterculture and training, get your hands on some 1950s 60s and 70s, translated Russian manuals, wow. And about how they were approaching stuff. And that's Those were some really interesting reads. But it still amazes me having gone through all that material, how Louie had created his system that would now commonly be called the conjugate method, or the concurrent method. By reading all that crazy stuff from the Soviet Union and different parts of the world, he kind of pulled different concepts out and put it into a cohesive template. Because that, that that stuff from from those areas in Russia was was a really, really interesting reading. Yeah, you know, their sports scientists, they didn't even say, you know, the participants for this test where Yuri and you know, whoever the guy's name is, where was the organism? Right? So everything they tested, it was the organism, you weren't even assigned a number. Yeah, it was just whatever organism was being subjected to that external stimulus. So, you know, a very different take on it than we had in the United States at the time where everything was really already more driven off a bodybuilding model, which was an aesthetic thing. Yeah, in terms of training. And we didn't really know how to train for sporting applications outside of doing general bodybuilding training, which isn't going to get it done.

Jon Leon Guerrero  22:31  
I'm going to take an aside for our listeners real quick, because they need to know that Diablo barbell is. Let's call it a gym. It's a large work area, with about a million pounds of stacked up. Wait about that. Yeah, here in there. No mirror.

Ted O'Neill  22:47  
Yeah, no mirrors, right.

Jon Leon Guerrero  22:49  
There's no mirror in the whole place. There's a lot of strong people walking around. And frankly, a lot of very attractively strong people walking around, not a mirror in sight.

Unknown Speaker  22:58  
Yeah. So this is one of the deviations from what a performance center would be versus a commercial gym. Right? in you know, really, the whole commercial gym model in the US was built off of the the bodybuilding model that came out of the 60s and 70s and Arnold's era and this kind of stuff. Sure. Everyone's looking at themselves. And that's fine for what it is. But, you know, Diablo started as a very grassroots underground power lifting or athletic training only facility. In other words, no one's looking in the mirror. Right, right. Everyone is focused on improving their performance.

Jon Leon Guerrero  23:36  
Yeah, there's some some greater pursuit.

Ted O'Neill  23:39  
Yeah.

Jon Leon Guerrero  23:40  
So and that's still true. Everybody, everybody who walks through that door has a greater pursuit. And then lo and behold, hey, you end up looking better, right? But in the process of, of striving for something else, a lot of times, you're rehabbing somebody they've gotten maybe back issues or whatever it is, they're fixing shoulders, hips, and in doing so, you end up burning off some of the excess that you don't need to be carrying around anyway.

Unknown Speaker  24:11  
That's exactly right. So even if someone's goals aren't initially to change their appearance with the the way we approach the world from our conditioning and, and just getting in there and learning the lifts, and the best way, mechanically possible, your body's going to undergo undergo some kind of metamorphosis.

Jon Leon Guerrero  24:32  
Yeah. So a couple other admissions for for audience. TED talks about his squat at the beginning being an abysmal What was it? 75

Ted O'Neill  24:43  
out of the hundreds that came later. Yeah.

Jon Leon Guerrero  24:46  
Well, when I walked in here, my skin you know, I'm a guy who's not afraid to lift up things and who was at a point in my life made made my bread moving couches around. So the notion that I would approach the squat rack with a bar that had no weight on it, and and be there for a little while. And then you asked me very, very recently, after weeks of training, hey, what's your squat was the last time you squatted? And I said, well, pardon me wait on it for everybody, I'm sure chuckled silently to themselves. We walked over to the squat rack, we put some weight on and we started going but to say that, that I make this admission not to embarrass myself from our audience. But they know I don't care about that. I make this admission because everybody has a starting point. And sometimes that starting point is someplace you don't even really think it is I wouldn't have thought that I would walk in here and approach the squat bar with no weight on it, and then pick it up and struggle with it, genuinely struggle with it. So you know, can I get the bar up in the air? Yes, turns out I was doing it completely wrong, and that my mechanics have been messed up so long that got things to fix before I can actually, quote unquote, perform a squat,

Unknown Speaker  26:05  
yes, properly. So this is a huge part of it, how you perform the movements ultimately paves the road for your future success on the movements. So if you're just getting into a bar, and and doing what everyone else does, and kind of trying to go down and up without having a lot of thought involved, because maybe not even aware of the things to be involved in. Right, right. When you're doing the movement. It's kind of the past to nowhere, in other words, you're going to get to a certain point, and then whatever your your greater weak points are going to be exposed constantly. And that's going to be your limitation. And there's really no way then to get better. In other words, in the context of not having any coaching or training or any form, your weakest link becomes your greatest defining factor, right. So the more than that you squat and then the more you practice the squat, the more you're dissing granting bad technique, and being limited by your weak point, you're going to run into that wall, you're going to keep chasing your tail, it's going to remain there. Yeah, because you're not fixing the wall. Right, you're not removing the obstacle, the muscles dictate the groove of the movement, or the exercise. In other words, if your hamstrings are weak or your hips are immobile, then those things are going to be present every single repetition until you go about fixing those particular problems. So and you've been here long enough to where you see that we have several different portals into Diablo, we have exercise therapy and rehab, that's a standalone thing. We have our conditioning groups, which is a standalone thing. We have our our power lifting groups, all these different things are weigh in. But then once we get here, and we're learning something like a squat, there's a commonality to it and that I would look out there is one best way to do anything. Okay, there might be other good ways. And then there's a whole bunch of things that are probably not good or not optimal, right? So really, I've made a career out of what is always the best way to do any one thing. Well, one thing like a squat might not be one thing at all. It might be 10, different little things all strung together to look like one thing. So you can really tell when you walk in and you see someone who's received high level training, and they're executing at an elite level. Even if they had no weight on the bar, you could you could watch someone squat and be like, wow, that person knows what they're doing. Right. I don't know how they know what they're doing. And right. I don't know what it is that they're doing. But I can tell that they're doing it through intention. Sure. And that's through the identification of all the little micro steps that lead up to performing something as complex and as coordinated as a barbell squat. It's very rare someone walks in here, with any semblance of what we would consider high level technique. You know, if they've been training for a long time, even if they've been pretty successful, there's usually something within the first one or two reps they perform that I can see exactly where we can create a transformation.

Jon Leon Guerrero  29:14  
Yeah. And you've done that a lot, too. I mean, yeah, we, you know, I had a next door neighbor named Garrett. Pearcy.

Ted O'Neill  29:19  
Okay.

Jon Leon Guerrero  29:21  
I don't know, Garrett. Well, okay. But we were next door neighbors, and we were friendly next door neighbors, and he clearly was a guy who could just you could look at him and tell him well, that guy can pick up heavy stuff.

Ted O'Neill  29:33  
Yeah. And he did.

Jon Leon Guerrero  29:34  
Yeah. But he came to you with a level of training that he had already had under his belt. And he came to you because he knew there was a next level.

Ted O'Neill  29:43  
Yeah. And he found it. So I Garrett lifted for our national team for a couple years and ultimately achieved 722 pound bench press in the to 20 class 800 plus pound squat and a near 700 pound deadlift. So grace he had gone from either being right under elite total. And I want to say the 242 way class to making a probably total in the 220 way class. So he made quite a bit of progress at a lighter body weight even

Jon Leon Guerrero  30:13  
Wow. How much of that do you see? Because I don't see that part of the gym yet. I'm not, you know, I'm not here for those sessions. I'm here for morning conditioning, doing a lot of that right now. And and I'm really enjoying it. But I'm not a place where any of that stuff's going to be useful to me. So how many people come to you with that same problem? I'm a lifter, I know what I'm doing to some degree, but I've hit a wall and I need to get past it.

Ted O'Neill  30:43  
Probably not enough. And that's that's changed over time. It's actually it's, it's a it's a great discussion point. Because there's this you would think that, you know, I've said for years if, if everyone who said they wanted to get strong, really Diablo Westside barbell, would have a line outside their door a mile long every single day. Yeah. So instead, it's a little bit easier maybe to do something like online training, where you ask someone who's, who's an expert. Right? Right. At online training? Yes. And they're going to write up a series of exercises. And you're going to do this in the comfort of your own home or your own gym and writing this and I believe you. Yeah, I believe you're going to do these things. And this is kind of what you get, right? So years ago, we would get more people, I think, who wanted to really go to the next level, we're now there's so many ways to circumvent the work. Another way to do that, is why would you take the time to squat 800, when you can put your 400 pound squat on Instagram, not labeled as a 400 pound squat? And everything's hashtag beast mode. Right. And and you get your Instagram trophy for the day. Yeah. And then so you don't have to go hit

Jon Leon Guerrero  32:00  
of dopamine. Yeah,

Ted O'Neill  32:01  
right. It's, it's, it's an interesting cultural phenomenon. Because it's, it's created something very, very different in terms of expectation, and understanding of what the process is, or maybe used to be,

Jon Leon Guerrero  32:16  
wow. So the social media phenomenon of hashtag beast mode, or that can be a capsule encapsulated, beast mode, which is really sort of hindered progress. For a lot of people, I

Ted O'Neill  32:28  
think, for a lot of people, because you we kind of have these things on the opposite end of the spectrum, just due to something like social media have a much greater awareness of what used to be underground sports. Yeah, like power lifting or strongman competition or Highlands games, or any of this stuff that he really before had to kind of seek out Yeah, a little bit. Now. It's now it's everywhere. So by virtue of greater exposure, you have some people who are just, you know, these genetic freaks that come out of nowhere and are now doing amazing things, with seemingly not a huge amount of training time. So this is new kind of created this redoubling effect of the of the genetic pool, I think. And so in all the strange sports, there's these huge numbers happening now, even it's a couple numbers a couple years ago, weren't really happening. But at the same time, all the average people are tending to be a little bit more stuck in that mediocre place where before they might have searched a little harder for something that would have given them the opportunity to go farther. Mm hmm. You know, die out. So

Jon Leon Guerrero  33:32  
over time, we're going to skew the mean, I think we already have

Ted O'Neill  33:35  
Yeah, you know, and this gym was really made on that average, to below average training. We've had almost no one walk in here who was a star on day one, right? Or had some level of relevant experience, to where they were already pretty good at it. We had people coming in have been training for four years, with little to no success. And, you know, couple of years later, have earned an elite total of all things where, you know, if you were to ask 1000, sports scientists, not one of them would have said, Oh, that person has what it takes to make an elite total in power lifting,

Jon Leon Guerrero  34:14  
not unlike your own story.

Ted O'Neill  34:16  
Right. Yeah. So I think I think, you know, sometimes like attract, like, in my story was one that I took a very long time to develop. And I think we've had a lot of people come in where I can kind of resonate with their story. And then take them down a similar path, where if they're physically underdeveloped at the starting point, if we just supply a series of solutions to their challenges, we're going to get somewhere in a completely different spot. I'll give you a brief example. What am I tell this story all the time, you know, but we have dozens of these, but Kim Kim, one of our lifters now retired from power lifting. He's a jujitsu player now, but he came in here years ago, and had been lifting weights for six years. And I've been lifting weights seriously for six years to something that he wanted to do. And he wanted to get stronger and bigger this whole thing. And he had achieved a 205 pound squat, 185 pound bench press. So the 315 pound deadlift, so kind of on the average to below average side for the regular average gym trainee, someone who's kind of doing it on their own, doesn't really know what to do. But he spent six years of this labor to get that level of results. And he really struggled here in the beginning, it wasn't an easy thing. It wasn't like I showed him a couple little secrets. And he flourished. He turned a corner. Yeah, yeah, he had a he physically had to totally transform. So the encapsulated version is seven years after his start date, which is almost the amount of time of experience he came in with. He took that tool five, squat, 859, holy cow, hundred 85 pound bench to 500. He never could bench anything, but at least he got 500 by Kenny, and then he took his deadlift, up to a 700 pound deadlift. And he became an elite lifter in two separate weight classes, the 242 division in the 275 division. So that was an unpredictable thing to happen. Like if you looked at that guy after training for six years, and you looked at what an elite power lifter would look like in the 242 or 275. class, you would just say No way. Yeah. And the more expertise that you have, the more you would say no. And I probably have 20 or 30, people like that we could talk about Wow, who just literally became someone different in relation to the question of who am I as a lifter? Or as an athlete? Yeah, you know, even some of our other sport champions are much that same mold to where they didn't have anything in them that demonstrated that they should have been able to become great at something other than Dr. So when I say every problem has a solution, you know, if you apply an amount of data desire, to the right map, hey, this is Pete a Turner from lions rock productions, we create podcasts around here. And if you your brand, or your company want to figure out how to do a podcast, just talk to me, I'll give you the advice on the right gear. The best plan is show you how to take a podcast that makes sense for you that's sustainable, that scalable and fun. Hit me up at Pete at breakdown show. com Let me help. I want to hear about it to the right map. I'll say then I firmly believe that can happen. I think we've proven that dozens and dozens of times here.

Jon Leon Guerrero  37:32  
Yeah. And I think that's a concept that is universal across endeavors, not just lifting weights. Absolutely. Again, back to our human performance topic, which really, there is it's not unlike if somebody had said, Hey, I'm going to start a company and it's eventually going to be worth $66 billion. And I'm going to do it because I'm going to compete with taxicab drivers. Anybody would have looked at that and said, well, you're bananas. Yeah. And now here we are. Because what, what that company did was happened to be in transportation. But what they really did was they gave people time back, and they created efficiencies that should have been visible to everybody else. And just hadn't been done yet. Yes. So there was a solution. And it ended up solving a large problem to a large degree. How many people come to you and say, you know what I've been? I've been here and I've achieved whatever I achieved here. And it has turned into achievement outside of here. Oh, I think even hear those stories. You

Ted O'Neill  38:35  
know, I think it goes hand in hand with the work that we do here. Yeah. And, and really, we hear it all the time. So one of my guys just posted something on the Diablo forum today about his successes and all this other areas in life just by undertaking this recent challenge that we put up. So we do these body composition challenge things where we assign a timeframe, and then we're going to teach you nutrition for you and customize that and get your training in order. But you know, none of that goes anywhere, unless you're changing your mind about something. Right? So it's not about necessarily doing the things. It's about first having the courage to become somebody different. Uh huh. So there's a formula to this, right, it turns out, as it turns out, there is a formula to this. And I learned this from this guy named Darrell Rutherford over 20 years ago in this little self published book called, so why aren't you rich, I bought it thinking it was a business book, because at the time I had my first I was CEO of my first company. So I had a chain of retail stores. And so I loved reading the stuff. So he had just completely different things

Jon Leon Guerrero  39:49  
to sell in this chain of retail. So

Ted O'Neill  39:50  
I had a chain of specialty fitness store. So we had high end exercise equipment, and all this kind of thing, right? Not sofas, or anything, imagine that. Right? So there was still kind of one foot in that side. So this guy, Dr. Rutherford, in this book, which really probably had its roots more firmly in metaphysics than in business, in a traditional sense, had this formula called be do have, and he called it the the process of the order of creation. In other words, to have an end result, prior to having that there's things that have to occur. And the first step is you have to choose to become somebody different. And once you've chosen to become somebody different than the things that you're naturally going to do as the embodiment of that person, or that personality are going to be in line with what that person would do. Yeah. And that's how you're going to have the end result. His contention was most people invert the order in any number of ways that they try to have something by doing something and they think they're going to become somebody different by virtue

Jon Leon Guerrero  40:55  
of this thing. That's absolutely true.

Ted O'Neill  40:57  
Yeah. And this is what most people do the and all the times.

You know, I learned many, many years ago, when people would want to talk to me about nutrition, and they said, Listen, if you just write me out a diet program, I swear 100% that I'll do it. And I'll tell them, that's exactly why I'm not going to do that. Because that's someone who wants something for nothing. They want something written out. So they think they're going to follow and they never do is not vested in it. Yeah, they haven't chosen to become someone different. They want to do something different for a short period time. It's just not sustainable. Yeah. And this is a universal concept. If you if you look at anything, or if we you know, anyone who's listening, it can be introspective on a moment of something they got excited about. It was an endeavor, and they didn't see it through, right, they were probably probably trying to do a whole bunch of stuff differently than they were currently doing. And yes, you that's, that's part of it. But the precursor to that is you have to kind of have this allowance, to let go of your own dogma and your own ideas on how you control stuff. Oh, boy, right. That's, that's the heart that's the Vegas that's actually becoming somebody different. Right?

Jon Leon Guerrero  42:01  
You know, and acknowledging that that guy you were before didn't know everything, right? That's not easy for people to do.

Ted O'Neill  42:08  
It's, it's, it's a very human thing. Yeah, we kind of stay stuck in ourselves in our dogma and in our story. And then we try to use willpower to kind of grind through something to exert some kind of a change, hoping that ultimately, something external is going to bump into us and our lives are going to be different, right? The process is actually very different entirely, you have to kind of go with him, right? And let go of all those things. Otherwise, the stuff you'd be doing would already be working. That seems logical. But we kind of approach this of Yeah, I've had zero success in this area. But this time is going to be different. It is

Jon Leon Guerrero  42:45  
going to be different than there we go with this definition of insanity. Yeah, in my own brief transformation here. And I call it the transformation because that's really what what has happened is, you know, when I came here, one of the things, things that I pushed back on, and I don't even I don't know, if you even ever paid attention to the notion that I put out there, because a lot of times when I got a couple of stories to tell to I'll be right back to this. But first I'm going to tell this story, tell the story. I was absolutely exhausted. One day we had done we were doing three rounds of the Medley that day, and I had done two of them. And I had had he fucking enough. And my I thought my lungs were going to come out of my nose. I thought I was dizzy. I walked into the gym, I found you in, you know, right over by the reverse heifers where I you're often moving about. And I said, Ted, I'm dizzy. And you looked at me and said, you know what dizzy rhymes with. And at that moment, I said, fuck, this isn't gonna work wherever it is. And I just turned around and walked out of the gym. And then I remember when I said that, after training, I somehow miraculously survived. Right, I did all of the, you know, I did the final medley. And afterwards, I said that to you know, to amuse whoever was around one of the people who were around with Jen. And Jen said, so what rhymes was busy? And I said, well, the point of that story is it didn't really fucking matter. Whatever it was, I knew that I was providing resistance, right? And the resistance was futile. Yes. And that the result was going to happen, if I recognize that resisting was exactly what it was, which was just a response that had everything to do with my current programming.

Ted O'Neill  44:43  
Yeah, so resistance is a really interesting thing, right? Because there's that saying, whatever you resist persists. Another way to look at that, that I often use is, you know, in nature, anything that you feed grows, right. So if you're feeding this concept of resistance, my lungs are burning, I'm exhausted. I can't do any of this. You know, you have to really ask, Is that really true? In that moment? Or is that just you know, we're, we feel like we're done. It's a very natural thing to feel like you're done. So basically, with

Jon Leon Guerrero  45:17  
all that apparatus, floating around here,

Ted O'Neill  45:20  
yeah. Right. So we do a lot of hard work. And it's really physically really, really hard stuff. And so when you're doing conditioning with a lot of weighted implements, and you're, you know, hustling between one and the next and not only you have to do it and do it properly, and do it correctly, but you're being watched the whole time. And you have kind of the sometimes your training partners provide a little bit of this. You know, pressure also, but you're also working with them and the whole thing, right? It's it's a, it's a challenging set of affairs. But yeah, the more you feed the idea in your mind, I'm done, you're going to get more of what the same? Yeah, you are done. You're just convincing yourself, you're convincing yourself. And this is really the entire crux of how I teach change. Yeah. So I would say in that moment, you had reached the wall or the threshold of your subconscious programming, right? So in other words, you arrive at this place where your brain says, I'm done. And there's not really a conversation that we have with your brain when it says I'm done. Because everything in your experience is telling you I'm done. And then it'll start making a ball. I know when I'm done. I'm done. I know my body. Yeah. Yeah, you know, how you got here. So what happens is, we start making all these excuse, my lungs are going to come out this and that. And then if someone really wants to dig deep, and when my shoulders hurting now my back, right? So we start trying to claim and own all these things that will support the notion of being done and not being able to go further. Because in that moment, the brains freaking out, the brains freaking out, because what's behind door number three is the unknown, right? So it's important to know, if one were to endeavor go down the path of change in anything, how the brain, the body are constructed? Uh huh. Right. So your brain essentially, could be said that it functions like an artifact, an artifact of past events, it's like your storage of everything that you know, okay, well, this point in time,

Jon Leon Guerrero  47:19  
and there's a use for that. Yeah, it's called experience its variances useful

Ted O'Neill  47:24  
experiences is almost always useful, depending on how you use it. Haha. Right. So your brain is designed to essentially to not allow change the first seven years of your life as a human being, you're essentially in delta and theta brainwave. And if you're not familiar with the different brainwave states, just know that's like hitting record. Okay, right. So in other words, your ears, yeah, your sponge ears, you're building your subconscious mind. Okay, so 95% of the time are there about if you talk to a neuroscientist or psychologists words, we spend running subconscious programs, only about 5% of the day, we're in our neocortex. So consciously in the moment, having present thoughts, we think we are all the time, it's just situationally different. In other words, we're always reacting to stimulus around us, based on what our brain tells us how to interpret this particular thing in our environment, right? Your subconscious programs better be really, really good. Otherwise, you're going to find that wall at some point really early on.

Jon Leon Guerrero  48:28  
This is why childhood development is so crucial,

Ted O'Neill  48:31  
and totally misunderstood. Right? So we're constantly picking stuff up. Now, that's not all the learning that we do. But the probably 90% of what's embedded in your subconscious is that first seven years, and then past that traumatic events, milestone events, habituation are all things that then create a subconscious program. In other words, if I choose to engage this experience my brands and tell me this is how it's going to come out. So now knowing that, you know, when you hit that I can, you might have had an experience before, maybe you're talking to someone in the conversation that you guys are on opposite ends of this thing. And you reach this point, we might even say, Man, you don't listen to at all. It's not that they're not listening, they're incapable in that moment of something different because they're telling you what they know from their subconscious, right. In other words, you're out your external stimulus has created a reactive phase in them a reaction, they're reacting, something they already learned, it's like watching a movie and expecting a different ending. Yeah, they're not in a place of conscious thought. In fact, when someone has reached the threshold of their subconscious programming, if you have to neuroscientist they would tell you, they're not physically capable in that moment of learning anything new, with the way that the brain is wired, unless their level of desire is greater than their, essentially their biochemical internal addiction to holding on to those past thoughts. Using conditioning you experience in that moment is a lever that we use here at the same way the lifting weights as a lever to bust you up against your limitations in your brain. Because the only way to get into the new is to actually go into the new, right, if we go back and to where we know and say my lungs are going to come out my nose, I gotta stop. Now. That just means you're stopping at a point where you can already predict the next thing. So if you go into that third round, which, you know, third round conditions, pretty heavy duty we already done to that's a 50% increase, it's going to feel like it's the deep dive. Yeah, you're now walking into the unknown. The moment you engage the experience of going into the unknown, now you're in the field of potential. Now new possibilities can actually happen to you. Yeah, they can't happen. If we stay in that place of stopping where our brain tells us to stop, then people will say that all the time. Yeah, I know my body. It's like, No, you don't. You know what, what got you here, right? No idea what your body is capable of. And this is what you're going to do. And here's how you're gonna do it. Ready, go.

Jon Leon Guerrero  51:08  
That's the device you came here because there's something about your body that you didn't like something. You wanted to improve something. Yeah, now you're here in in reverting the programming, you're reusing the improvement.

Ted O'Neill  51:22  
So now I'm going to drag you through the process, and kicking and screaming, I'm going to hold you to the things that that that's what our agreement is, if someone comes in, and they

Jon Leon Guerrero  51:34  
figured out that kicking and screaming is hard to do when you're carrying kettle bells.

Ted O'Neill  51:37  
Right? Well, you know, there's that old saying, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink. And I've always felt that wasn't true. But I figured out a long time ago how to make the horse drink. You just put the horse's head underwater at some point, it's got to take air therefore a drink? Yeah. So in other words, that probably wasn't the way the first one to drink the water, but it drank the water. By doing so was probably a better thing for the horse. I digress. So yeah, we're all limited, in a very real way, through our attachment to the past. Okay, but let's think about this for a second, when you hit that point in your conditioning, if you're the not lead, you know, we'll use that word, right, if you're not guided to the next thing.

Jon Leon Guerrero  52:23  
In other words, I've been a member of a gym that everybody knows the name of for years, and years and years. And if I was there, and didn't have the environment to coax me through that a lot of resistance.

Ted O'Neill  52:39  
Right? Then you're going to stay the same? Yeah. So then, if you always get to this place of your resistance, and you reach the limit of what I'd call your subconscious program, and you stop there, your future becomes very, very predictable.

Jon Leon Guerrero  52:54  
Right? And that's what your brain wants.

Ted O'Neill  52:56  
Yeah. Right. So your future is going to look like any day from the past. Yep, situationally different. And this is how people fool themselves, oh, this time, it's different. But it's not they're just, you know, it really a good way to know if it's different or not. So if you can predict the outcome, and how you're going to feel about that, then you're just replaying something that you already know. If you have like, for you, in that moment, when you had to do that third round, do you had no idea what that experience was going to bring? Other than discomfort? Yes. But you didn't know who you were going to be in relation to that process? Or what that was really going to feel like your brain just said, Nope. Yeah. And that's not our agreement.

Jon Leon Guerrero  53:34  
That's not our agreement.

Ted O'Neill  53:36  
I'm big unspoken agreements, right? So once we've decided on a course of action, that's what we get in the moment in time where we get to that place where it seems like that's not possible, I'm going to show you exactly how it's possible. And then by engaging that experience, and using that as a means of repetition. And this is why this is why weights and training, right? One that one of the common things about weights is always here, I did x many repetitions. So that's how you're going to be able to test those limits. And by understanding that as a mechanism, not just as a thing that happens, but as an internal mechanism to where you engage the new experience, your brain actually has to create a new neural network in that moment, to then be able to encounter the new. So that's a huge deal.

Jon Leon Guerrero  54:24  
And to some and to some degree, you put yourself you place yourself in sponge mode again.

Ted O'Neill  54:30  
Yeah, that's exactly what you're doing. You're so then you're forcing change. Yeah. And you're doing that by disallowing your past to become your future.

Jon Leon Guerrero  54:44  
So sometimes I'm pushing that cotton pickin Prowler and I got you know, 15 more feet to go. And I don't have Ted behind me barking to get the last 15 feet I have somebody else in front of me who's waiting for their turn, its brawler. How important is community? This theory that you've created around? Be do have? Yeah, and and the change that you you have to choose for yourself?

Ted O'Neill  55:08  
Well, you can feel it in that moment. Right? No one wants to be the one that that holds it up for someone else or takes away someone else's turn. So when everyone's supporting each other, you tend to work harder for your group and for your for your teammates, right. And so I think everyone understanding exactly what those last 15 feet feel like. Right also kind of creates this this energetic this group dynamic that everyone is kind of pulling for everyone else. It's the same Mike on the on the power lift inside of the gym to it just slightly different. So that's a great example of something being the same. Yet situationally different. Yeah, right. So really what we're doing on the power lift inside, we've created more leads than any gym in the world with the exception of Louie Simmons gym, Westside barbell, he's the only one who's done that more than I used to system. So there you go, yeah, we use the exact same levers and means and all the things that we do. Right, so it's always about getting to that place. And then whether it's a perceived social pressure, wanting to do better for your group, you know, one of our coaches, you know, right on your heels, kind of helping with incentive, like, do you want to do four rounds today? Or do you want to do three rounds today? Or if I catch it, I ride

Jon Leon Guerrero  56:28  
today, I catch it, I ride it

Ted O'Neill  56:30  
that that happens. That happens sometimes, too. So you know, all these things are just things in the moment, they kind of break you out of that place of I'm going to stop, I'm going to quit.

Jon Leon Guerrero  56:41  
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I tell you, the human machine is I'm learning more and more capable of a lot of things. And one thing that I've not seen watching over a lot of people as they train, and they're doing exercises that I have have to learn how to do and they're doing things with a lot more weight. And, and I'm proud to say women included. Yeah, there are plenty of women here who when we're doing an exercise, if they're grabbing a certain weight, I'm grabbing the one beneath that one. Yes. And what I haven't seen, and I'm going to knock on wood not to be superstitious about it, because I know it scientific is I haven't seen a lot of injury.

Ted O'Neill  57:24  
Yeah, so that actually creates a great talking point, because there's this fear culture in general, I would say in, in training and physical activity, this hurt. So I need to do this. And a lot of this has a misunderstanding with what processes in other words, you can be hurt, and you can be hurting. And those are two very different states of being. And they might have a similar path ology or symptom associated. But one might be totally fine to train through. And then one, maybe you need to work around and do something different. So on our power lifting side, we'll switch over here real quick to talk about injuries. We've had 26 men that have squatted over 800 pounds officially in competition, and 13 over 903 or four over 1000. Wow, zero back injuries. Wow. So if you go to most regular gyms, you know, whether it's a 24 Hour Fitness or place where people are, you know, think they're lifting weights a certain way and really trying their hardest, you might have a group of maybe 10 guys who have squatted 300 pounds, and probably all them at some point have had some kind of a back end, Randall because we get people from all the other gyms coming through our rehab side, right? Yeah, we're through our chiropractic side, I hurt my back squat, you know, I can't do squats, I can't do demos, how much do you deadlift? To 75? That's funny, we've never had an injury with you know, anywhere in that. So we do a ton of preparatory work, right? And then just also understanding the difference. So I've had people I've seen on the exercise therapy side who have been, quote, hurt for years. Yeah. And when I take them through a series of diagnostics, they're really not injured. So there's a difference between having the physical sensation of pain, and then having something that I would classify as an injury.

Jon Leon Guerrero  59:18  
Now, that's me doing a squat. Yeah. And that's why I have had to walk up to that bar with no weight on it, right? Because I have hurting when I do a squat in a place that by the way, everybody is not where you would think I'd be hurting doing a squat, right? So the mechanics are so wrong, that what hurts is that the that I have to fix the mechanics, yes. And the hurting and the being hurt are two different things to different things. So for example, being hurt is maybe like a muscle tear, or you have a full thickness rupture of attendance. So something is now affected, or mechanically, there's something wrong with the joint

Ted O'Neill  1:00:01  
where maybe like, you break up, break a cassette joint or something so that those are injury states, right, man, you know, tendon, ligament muscle having some kind of a tear, or some kind of a thing, or the structure itself being now mechanically altered, like maybe a space occupying lesion, which would be like a static effect in the in the back somewhere, her team can have all those same symptoms. But mechanically, you're still fundamentally sound. So the brain is very, very good at mapping pain. It's again, it's one of the mechanisms that's hardwired into us. If you're three years old, and you think the red stove looks kind of neat. So you touch it, and you put your hand on it, you burn your hand, and you learn really easy not to do that. Yeah, in fact, if you've had that experience, you can probably think about that and recall that experience in very, very vivid detail. Sure. Not unlike something like phantom limb syndrome. someone gets an arm or a leg blown off and battle and there armor leg still hurts. It's kind of a the worst deal possible. Yeah, it's like not even there anymore. Yeah, so our brand is exceptional, a mapping trauma and mapping pain. So if we've had something that's been a little bit gummed up, or tweaked, or has been uncomfortable for a period of time, now, we begin to have all kinds of changes in our movement pattern to facilitate this thing that's hurting. So I'm not going to pick that up this way. Because that hurts. I'm going to move this way now. Yeah. So once we start getting inhibition from the nervous system and firing the muscle correctly, now we start having all these secondary effects that lead to more pain. And then that kind of becomes someone's story for a little bit. Yeah, my bad back my bad need, you know, and now this is a big problem, because even if they're not heard, it's now part of their story where there's a reward they get for having their XYZ. And again, it's a very human thing to do.

Jon Leon Guerrero  1:01:57  
Right. And my reward you're talking about, you know, maybe not necessarily a reward in the sense of something where, well, I don't have to do that, because I have a bad back. Oh, you know, I would I would help you guys out. But money, right, or whatever that excuse is,

Ted O'Neill  1:02:12  
it's, it's something that we get by virtue of, of the problem. Yeah, maybe we get attention for it, right? Maybe we get out of having to move stuff for people. That could be convenient at times. Maybe it's something that allows us to perform a different function at work just by virtue of of that, so it becomes part of the story. And then if we lose that, like, sometimes, I'll get new people in on the therapy side, and they'll have this litany of things wrong with them. And I'll watch the move. And I'm thinking, I don't know if that's, if that's really true. Yeah. So you know, I want to start there, then with the state of being not the things we have to do. Because the things we have to do aren't going to mean anything to this person where they have this whole story about being hurt. I have to first challenge that as an ideology. So I'll ask them, who would you be? If you weren't hurt? If the all these things were problems? And I'd be superhero? Well, sometimes you really want to get better. That's my might be the thing you would say, right? If instantly you start doing what I would call arguing for your limitations, you start saying all the reasons as to why that's not possible. Wasn't the question I asked. Question is, who would you be? Yeah, right. So people will start going down this line about instantly arguing for the things that keeps them hurt. So it becomes an interesting psychology, ya know, they're already holding on to something. Their mind maybe wants to get them out of pain, part of it, maybe their conscious mind the subconscious mind to say, Nope, if we change this, we've now fundamentally changed who we are. And if we change who we are, then we don't get this, this, this and this as a byproduct of who we are. That's going to be a big change. brain doesn't like change the brain wants status quo. Yeah. And so they'll talk themselves into stain

Jon Leon Guerrero  1:03:57  
hurt. My way of talking myself into stay hurt was that that I've had a 50 year love affair with less than nutritious food. And it has become a part of my, you know, it had become a part of my story. Sure. I mean, you could ask me about a Birmingham, Alabama, ooh, you know what you should go have dinner at wherever. And I got to know a lot of places that were not the place to eat, if you were concerned about nutrition, although probably the most novel place to eat that involved, you know, their fatty whatever it was. And that is something that I embraced for a long time, because it's fun. Yeah. But it did become a part of my story, such that it limited my ability to understand my relationship with food. Yes. And the unhealthy Enos of my relationship with food right now, I won't say that I never going to go back to this place or that place. I certainly will. But I did find myself not long ago. And this is where I figured that my transformation had really meant something I ordered, I bypassed all the things on the menu at a place in we were in place in Petaluma. I can't remember the name of the place, everybody knows what it pub Republic is the name of the place. And they are known for great burgers and great a lot of things. But they also had a salad with seasonal greens in it that included heirloom carrots. And I found myself excited about I get heirloom carrots, which are going to be out of season next week, I better get the last of them. And I was just excited, just as excited about the freshness of the ingredients. And the the nutrition it was creating, as I would have been about boy that barbecue sauce here is tangy and they use a lot of molasses in there and who there is so Fatty, it's shiny. And

Ted O'Neill  1:05:55  
so then the question is what happened and you're now embodied a different state of being Yeah. So the things that that person does, or is very different than what the other person used

Jon Leon Guerrero  1:06:08  
to do. And somehow no less exciting,

Ted O'Neill  1:06:11  
right? So we're always going to do the things that are in direct alignment with our core beliefs. So that's a great way then to really measure that first step of transformation. Yeah, you're making different choices, not saying, Man, I really want to eat the fat burger with the molasses in it, you know, but I have to have this stupid salad because my asshole trainer told me that if I

Jon Leon Guerrero  1:06:36  
don't, I wrote it down on that piece of paper and write

Ted O'Neill  1:06:38  
I was gonna. And then you do that two or three times in that Show's over? It's one of these things where by becoming somebody different? Yeah, the things that you do now are fundamentally different. Right? So now you have a totally different result. That's be do have an action. Right? So you know, it's it's an axiom, it can't not work. The way things are. So a really good litmus test, always see if you're in alignment with the things that you are calling your goals, or what you're working toward, is how hard Are you having to work and other wisdom in the training we do here is very physically demanding. That's hard. But the whole time you're driving over you think, oh, man, I don't want to be here. And then you get here. I don't want to be here. This isn't a suck. Or is it like all right, so I'm going into things hard, but this is part of it. Right? Yeah. It exists in a different place. So when you begin to embody your transformation, you have it. Yeah. Right. So transformation is kind of the first big step is a step past that. I see. We would call that metamorphosis. Uh huh. Right. It's the if you look in the dictionary, it's like this, literally, that's the step past transformation. Okay. So that's just a continuing evolving, of getting to a place by choice. And this is a good talking point, yes, transformation happens via having an eye on something, you know, that's obvious, right? Maybe we want to change our relationship with food, we want to get in better shape. And you know, we all kind of intuitively have these things that we know like, for not doing those things, we think I really need to get in shape or this and that. So then maybe come to a place like this, then you start to get some real hands on experience about what that really means. And then you physically transform and you mentally transform as part of this process. So if you were then to look at that as a methodology, as opposed to something that you did, you now really hold the keys to the rest of your life. Because if you did that, in one place where you transform from a state of a to b, then you begin to come to realize that every problem does have a solution. And then anything that I want to do is already been mapped, right? Whether I want to make a million dollars or have this job or you know, have this kind of a partner or be able to perform this way. You already proved it to yourself then you have to get into the unknown and challenge those things and do that work and embody the feeling of being someone different and then all those things you know, over time naturally end up happening. So if you were to look at that as a series of things you could then replicate that then begins makeup metamorphosis.

Jon Leon Guerrero  1:09:20  
Our guest today has been Ted O'Neill. This is part one of hopefully many parts. I think there's a lot for us to explore. Thanks, man. That was

Ted O'Neill  1:09:29  
awesome. Appreciate it.