The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Ben Patrick (KneesOverToesGuy) — 20-Minute Workouts That Produce Wild Results, From Chronic Knee Pain to Dunking Basketballs, Lessons from Charles Poliquin, Bulletproofing the Lower Body, and More (#835)

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Ben Patrick—better known as “Kneesovertoesguy” (@kneesovertoesguy)—the founder of Athletic Truth Group (ATG), an online and brick-and-mortar training system rooted in rehabilitative strength and joint health. After years of debilitating knee and shin pain (including multiple surgeries), he rebuilt his body and performance, going from a sub-20″ vertical to a documented 42″ leap. Over the past 15 years, Ben has coached thousands of clients (from weekend warriors to pro athletes) across 50+ countries, sharing his stepwise method via social media and ATG’s coaching system. He is the author of Knee Ability Zero and other books on fitness and recovery. His mission now: democratize pain-free movement by making tools, systems, and education accessible to everyone, especially high-school students.

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

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Tim Ferriss: Ben, nice to see you.

Ben Patrick: Hey, brother. Thank you.

Tim Ferriss: Nice to finally spend time together. We did a bit of a workout overview, recorded some video so people will be able to find that and we’ll put links in the show notes. We’ll talk more also about things you might pin for people who want a visual reference here. But let’s go back in time. Nicknames. We were chatting a bit before recording. What was the nickname that we were discussing and who gave it to you?

Ben Patrick: Yeah. I had a high school basketball coach who started calling me Old Man. I was so stiff it would take me so long to warm up compared to other players. I knew I wasn’t built well for basketball. I thought I could work my way, so I was just doing crazy workouts from the time I was maybe nine years old, so by 12, chronic knee pain. So even by high school I couldn’t get low in my legs. So I think during all that puberty time, things weren’t forming right, because I was so stiff I wasn’t getting into my legs the way I should started calling me Old Man. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So we’ve got Old Man Patrick in high school. Flash forward now you’re known as Knees Over Toes Guy. So something happened in between those two. What were the, and we can approach this any number of ways, you could explain why the name or you could talk about maybe catalyzing moments or findings that set you on the path that led you to become Knees Over Toes Guy.

Ben Patrick: Absolutely. And as you alluded to on my Instagram, YouTube, it’s pinned where this kind of stuff we’re talking about, someone just can just go look at it and see it visually, almost in order. So the chronic pains and stiffness, doctors did think around 14 probably something happened I should have had surgery on, didn’t have surgery, different things started stacking up. By 18, I then did have surgery, partial kneecap replacement. Part of my kneecap was just floating there. Quad tendon reattached and then had a meniscus transplant. And then it took about a year and a half because I was so extreme, so stiff, I was immobilized and really couldn’t even run for a year and a half. That set off a chain of things. By then, my right knee was hurting worse than my left knee ever had.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that happened when I had my left shoulder surgically reconstructed after the year, year and a half it took to finally rehab the left, the right was screaming.

Ben Patrick: Yeah. So I was in a pretty dark place because considering my right knee hurt worse than my left knee ever had, I’m like, I probably need surgery on the right knee now. And I had gotten from the surgeries and I had stayed on painkillers and my parents didn’t know. My girlfriend didn’t know, who’s my wife now.

Tim Ferriss: You staying on the painkillers.

Ben Patrick: Yeah, right. I was just popping them. And then I stumbled on some stuff from Charles Poliquin, who you had on your podcast.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Spent a lot of time with Charles back in the day.

Ben Patrick: Yeah. And he had various information that was very clear that it was like, no, no, no. What we’ve, in the fitness world had all been taught of don’t let your knee over your toes. He had stuff saying “No, this is actually the athletes.” He helps them prevent injury and rehab with training that position.

Tim Ferriss: And just for people who are trying to imagine what this means. So if you were to say be in a squat position, keeping your shins vertical where your knees are aligned over your ankles, that would be the, let’s just call it pre-exposure to Poliquin, sacred cow. At least in a lot of the exercise science worlds. Do not let your knees travel over your toes. Right?

Ben Patrick: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Keep your shins vertical. So Charles is saying quite the opposite.

Ben Patrick: Yeah, and good point there. It was totally understandable why that occurred. 1970s exercise science is becoming a thing in school and they found that when the knee goes over the toe, then there’s more pressure on the knee. So what went into textbooks was showing when you exercise, don’t let your knee over your toes. Now, for someone to compare, think about stepping down the stairs and stop. You take a step downstairs, stop. You’re loading your knee over your toes, every single step you take downstairs.

So when I started studying Charles Poliquin because of what I had been through, for me instantly, I knew there was something here because I had tried all the mainstream methods of no knees over toes. So the first thing then that I could tell that allowed me to get off the painkillers was dragging a sled backwards. So every step I take, my knee is over my toes, but I’m not — it’s almost like if someone walked backward up a hill to rehab rather than going down the hill. And that’s actually the progression of the rehab, is walking backwards trying to add resistance to walking backwards, which is gentler to then I use a slant board, but someone could really, you could roll up a towel to elevate your heel. You could start with your heel flat, you don’t have to even elevate the heel to start where you actually work on stepping down. So you’re actually controlling the motion at your pain-free level of stepping down.

Even if you can’t, I couldn’t do a six-inch step. I could maybe control a couple inches and you’re using high repetitions as if you were a gymnast. 

Tim Ferriss: When you say you can only do a couple of inches, could you just paint a picture for what that means?

Ben Patrick: Let’s say you’re walking down the stairs, each stair is probably six inches. I couldn’t control that motion without pain. I had to clunk my way down the stairs. Ease up pressure with the upper body. I couldn’t control step-by-step without my knee hurting, but someone could do less than a six-inch stair. So the walking backward as a warm-up, you’re getting circulation, we’re talking maybe stacking up 100, 200 yards backward, which didn’t hurt. And then was getting circulation, getting some strength. So that was what I felt like, okay, I can get off the painkillers now because I have this way of naturally reducing the pain and getting some strength going in a knee pressure position.

Tim Ferriss: And let me just sidebar quickly for folks. I have only, in the last handful of years, I’d used sleds a lot, but I was always pushing, and it’s only in the last handful of years and you have met these guys as well, but Nsima Inyang and Mark Bell, and of course, Mark Bell used to train with who? He was at Westside Barbell, Louie Simmons, and you mentioned his name when we were recording earlier. I have come to appreciate just how incredibly therapeutic this pulling of the sled is, which you could do with a harness around the waist. You could do it with a vest, you could simply hold on to, I guess that’s typically how I’ve seen Mark do it, for instance, where you’re effectively just holding onto handles with a strap that attaches you to the sled for rehabilitation, for prehab, for building in some insurance policy for the knees. It is just incredibly effective but also, so elegant and so simple and hard to hurt yourself.

Now, of course, talk to your doctor. I don’t pretend to be one on the internet, but that’s all I wanted to say, was personally, I can also vouch for this. Did you come across that through Poliquin?

Ben Patrick: Yeah. So Charles Poliquin was interviewed for this article where he helped an Olympic athlete who wasn’t going to be able to compete in the Olympics and they started going backward with the sled often because he could recover fast and he was able to get back and actually win a medal at the Olympics. So I’m not advising someone to rush, but that was a unique case where this might be the guy’s only chance — 

Tim Ferriss: You have a constraint.

Ben Patrick: Ever. Yeah. So that sold me on it. And then once I was experiencing it, I was like, okay, I can see there’s something here. It’s not like that solved all my problems. That was enough for me in my state to be willing to get off the painkillers and then start exploring further stuff. And then — 

Tim Ferriss: How long did it take you to get off of the painkillers after you started doing the sled work?

Ben Patrick: Well, I remember after the first week of doing this, I then intentionally got off. That didn’t mean all my pain was gone, but it was like I wanted to experience this route and not try to shield the pain anymore. So within a week I knew, okay, there’s something different here of progressing the knee over the toes rather than avoiding the knee over the toes. And the sled at least, gave me something. It was hard. I didn’t really want to think about any further progressions, but that gave me something I could do, didn’t hurt.

And to give someone an idea on the safety, we can’t say anything is 100 percent safe, but real numbers at the gym, I eventually made, coached thousands of group training sessions. So it wound up being, I counted like over a hundred thousand times that I coached people on the sled. No one was ever hurt doing the sled. It could happen. To give you a visual that we actually did, which was I feel like the best visual to explain to people. My mom is 71. We put 1,000 pounds on the sled, and had her try to drag it backwards. She couldn’t budge it but she was fine.

Tim Ferriss: People are going to be wondering why you would do that to your mom. Why did you do it?

Ben Patrick: I feel like that actually — more people are like, “Oh, now I get why it’s safe,” because the thousand pounds that she’s trying to drag is not bearing down on her. So when you’re trying to drag a weight, it probably has less potential to body build and create that breakdown that turns into new muscle tissue and stuff. But it has more potential for getting into something with safety and without pain. So that was my stepping stone. Charles Poliquin, this was before social media, so I didn’t actually see any videos of any of the stuff. I had to really decipher articles. I had to self-teach based on information he had put out. And through my just self-experimenting, I was able to get to where I could play basketball really hard without my knees hurting.

Tim Ferriss: What other ingredients were added to the cocktail outside of the backwards sled pulls?

Ben Patrick: Yeah, yeah. You’ve got the backwards sled pulls. Then it was really clear that he was getting people into a full range of motion squat. And that was also something that growing up my whole life in basketball was like, don’t do any deep squats. Your knee goes over your toes. So it was sort of, don’t go below 90 degrees and don’t let your knee over your toes, were the two prevailing things. And I went to six, eight, 10 trainers. So this is not just like a, look, maybe that was bad luck that none of those trainers knew differently. It does seem like it was the prevailing way and having been on basketball teams now, having coached, I could safely estimate that 99 percent of basketball teams don’t squat with a full range of motion.

Tim Ferriss: And I’ll throw out a Poliquinism. He had quite a few of these, at some point, I’ll tell you the origin story, how I connected with Charles, which is pretty funny, but this is one of his lines. And this is, I’ll give credit where credit’s due. This is from Outside online, but “Strength is gained in the range it is trained,” right? Very Seussian, as they put it. And you just see this over and over again.

And I’ve interviewed, for instance, Coach Christopher Sommer, who used to be the men’s national gymnastics coach. And you look at a lot of, say, cases of what people might consider inflexibility. And it’s just the body being very smart to guard itself against injury where it is weak at the extent of your range of motion. And when you start to develop strength at the end range, all of a sudden — your “flexibility” improves because the body is very, very intelligent and it’s guarding you against injury.

So sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to mention the Poliquinism, because I think it puts a fine point on some of what you’re saying. It’s like if you’re never getting into a full squat position, if you ever engage in anything that puts you into those positions, your foot slips while you’re playing intramural soccer, who knows, right? You’re going to be potentially in a world of hurt.

Ben Patrick: No, I appreciate that. And I think to make it an effective podcast for people, please keep chiming in. Even for our body, this is the mindset, the efficiency, the 80 percent of the results from 20 percent. This is the stuff that helps me make my system. So it’s hugely inspired by that. And outside of my videos, I don’t have a ton to say here, so please keep it coming. Make it interesting for people.

Tim Ferriss: I think you’ve got plenty to say. I’ll keep prompting, but please go ahead.

Ben Patrick: On the deep squat. What I have to offer is lots of experience trying to help people who can’t figure out how to apply this stuff. Deep squats hurting is super common. People feeling like they don’t have the mobility to get into a deep squat. Elevating your heels a bit can help people get lower on a squat and holding a weight out in front of you reduces the pressure on the knee.

Tim Ferriss: Do you recommend people do what people would envision as a normal squat? So both feet on the ground, same plane? Or one exercise that you’re very well known for, right, the ATG split squat or front foot elevated split squat. Would you have them start with that in place of the prototypical squat? How do you think about that?

Ben Patrick: I see it in relation to age, almost like a Perverse system, meaning my kids are three and five, their squats are incredible. I’m not like wait until you — so it’s almost like in youth, my whole system for the knees is, if I can have you comfortable and able to be getting stronger, controlling a full range of motion squat where you feel like you don’t have to stop before you get all the way down, but also where you feel like you don’t have to bounce to get out of it where you’re able to own it. You can control it all the way down, pause and then explode up without pain, able to get stronger. Kids naturally have that.

And so when I’m coaching, I volunteer at a school. I’ve had to coach 50 kids at a time. I set up 10 slam boards. Some kids need to elevate the heel, some don’t. They’re able to back their heels up, whatever they want. Everyone can get down into a deep squat without pain. Some need to hold some weight out in front of them to get down there, but the younger they are, 100 percent can do it. All little toddlers can deep squat.

Tim Ferriss: Why does the weight in front of you help someone can get into a squatted position — whether the heels are elevated or not?

Ben Patrick: It’s simply a counterbalance. So when you go to squat down and you think about that for someone with knee pain, you think about that pressure, holding the weight down in front, you can actually lean back a bit, your knee doesn’t have to go as far over your toes. So I’m trying to help people get better at knees over toes, not work through pain in the process, gradually coax that ability or if they’ve already got it, we can fortify it super easily.

So a progression using common weights is, let’s say you hold because it’s mostly going to be adults listening to this. Let’s say you roll up a towel on the floor and you lift your heels up onto it to simulate some more of that mobility to get low and you hold a 25 pound plate out in front of you, you get where you can lower down pain-free in a squat, let’s say five reps controlling down. Okay, now let’s say you hold a 45 pound plate, not all the way out in front of you, just in front of your knees. Get to where that’s pain-free, five reps let’s say. Okay, now you hold a 45 or more pound kettlebell not far out in front of you, but above your thighs now.

Tim Ferriss: Closer to your center of gravity.

Ben Patrick: Yeah. And then depending on a person’s goals, what would be even closer than that would be a bar on front. So depending on sports goals, I find with all students, I want them to be able to hold a kettlebell and get down in a deep squat without pain. That’s a pretty good, I have to get down and pick up one kid, two kids, I got a third kid on the way. I have to squat down because if you’ve got to pick up two toddlers, you can’t just bend your back over. You can for one, think about trying to pick up two little bodies. You got to deep squat. So I got a deep squat with some load. Saying everyone has to barbell squat, that’s just not true, but I do think it would be a common sense goal for everyone to be able to hold a kettlebell and squat all the way down without pain.

Tim Ferriss: So, I want you to fact check me if I’m off base here, but I would like to come back to the split squat for a second. Particularly with that front foot elevated. So imagine that you had some place in your house, I’m making this up, where there’s one step up, maybe it’s from living room to the kitchen or vice versa. Could just as easily, as we did earlier, be two thick 45-pound plates. If they’re like the bumper plate style, so whatever that might be, six to eight inches, whatever the height happens to be.

So you’ve got one foot on that. Then you have your other leg as far back as is pain-free and you go down into a squat to the extent that you can be pain-free in that range of motion and your knee, if you build up to it, maybe you’ll get there naturally quickly, your front knee is going to project way over your toes. And the reason that I wanted to come back to this is A, because I’ve derived so much value from this and so much pain reduction in the back. And the third is from a form perspective, I wouldn’t want people who have never explored really deep squatting to jump into doing squatting where they’re rounding the low back at the bottom most portion of the squat.

So just to paint a picture for folks, maybe they’ve heard these terms, but if you imagine your hips, your pelvis, like a glass of wine, if you’re pouring wine out the front, that’s anterior pelvic tilt. If you’re pouring wine out the back, that’s posterior pelvic tilt. If you go into the bottom of a squat, especially if you’re loading yourself up with a barbell or something and you have a lot of posterior pelvic tilt, some people call that the butt wink at the bottom, you can really hurt yourself. And I was guilty of that at one point. And I like the safety profile and I don’t want to make anything sound risk-free, of course. But of all the exercises that I’ve seen, especially under control, slow cadence, the front foot elevated split squat, it seems harder to commit cardinal sins where you’re going to injure yourself. Is that a fair statement?

Ben Patrick: I think so. And that was, for someone listening who is confused on what we’re talking about, now you understand where I was when I was 19 trying to figure this out without seeing visuals. So I have, by far, made the most step-by-step free videos on how to do that and how to use — a stairwell is a near-perfect device. You have balance to hold on to reduce the load. You have scalable steps to use — 

Tim Ferriss: Which is what I did in the beginning, right? I had my front foot two steps up, holding onto a railing with one hand and then just worked the way down.

Ben Patrick: That’s how my mom has mostly done them. She’s 71. If you see her sprint, it’s like “I’m going to need to see a birth certificate.”

Tim Ferriss: That’s wild. 71, your mom can sprint.

Ben Patrick: My mom is more impressive than — I try, I can’t get — my mom can get more views than I can when I talk about it.

Tim Ferriss: All right, so just to give voice, certainly this pops into my mind. I’m like, wait a second. All right, so do you just come from thoroughbred genetic stock? This sounds outrageous. Has your mom been sprinting her whole life? Did she have a period where she couldn’t do it?

Ben Patrick: Exactly. So I started training her because her hips were deteriorating. She’d then had a fall, chronic hip issue began. And so I’ve been training my mom for going on eight years. And I wound up at my gym. I had a whole women’s class, people of all ages, grandmas, young mom, everything in between. And then my dad is more like me, Mr. Fragile, the broken bones, the knees, the knee tears.

Tim Ferriss: I think that’ll be my new podcast name. The Mr. Fragile Show.

Ben Patrick: Yeah. When I was a kid, I went to a speed class to try to get faster and he signed up with me. And this is a youth speed class, so there was no warmup structure. It was just, okay, here’s the first run.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

Ben Patrick: And he didn’t get to his second step and pulled his hamstring. So I come more from his fragile side. My mom’s been working from a desk for 50 years, so we don’t really know what — she ran when she was a young girl.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right.

Ben Patrick: Probably pretty athletic, but didn’t keep doing sports or anything and just generally ate well, stuff like that. But now the hip is deteriorating and I’m like — I remember going to visit her after she had a fall and I’m like, I was getting worried, had her start coming to the gym. So she fell in love with the sled. Eight years, she’s been sledding regularly. She’s very gentle with her program. She spends maybe 10, 15 minutes a day. And similarly, I work out only twice a week. It’s a bit different for me because I’m raising toddlers, running a business. So it’s like I know I can carve out my time to exercise twice a week. Me and my mom, we do all the same exercises, basically, just at different levels. But that split squat, she credits with fixing her hip problems. She’s got great mobility with the grandkids. 

She’s slowly coaxed my dad along, so my dad does different pieces of the programming to fix up old pains and stuff. So there’s some mixture of good genetics. Definitely not — my dad never was able to grab the rim or anything like that.

And I was the same in basketball. I went through my high school career unable to grab the rim. And now, it’s not that much proof, but okay, I’m 34, I’ve been dunking for over a decade without having any problem. Your video guy filmed me dunking out on that concrete court. And for me, it’s the fact that I can go play. And that’s what I trained for. We don’t really know, genetically, do I have good genetics, bad genetics, somewhere.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m not trying to— It was more “My 71-year-old mom is sprinting.” I’m like, “Wait a minute. Hold the press.” I just wanted to unpack that, so thank you for that. If I were to ask your mom, all right, you can only pick three or four exercises, that’s it, that you get to continue with. You’ve had eight years to trial and error and try a bunch of stuff, what do you think she would respond with, of the three or four?

Ben Patrick: I know she would do the sled, forward and backward. That became a way of life at our gym and she’s kept it up ever since. I know she would do that full range of motion, which varies based on the person what that means, but where you’re not stopping short, you’re embracing your flexibility. Full range of motion split squat. I know those would be her top two, and then I know she would throw something in for the posterior. I’ll have to ask her what is her favorite today.

Tim Ferriss: If you just had to hazard a guess, what do you think she might choose?

Ben Patrick: I think she would choose the way that we use that back extension machine because she works from a desk. And so, particularly when you put that full split squat, which stretches the front of the hip, with then where you’re getting to squeeze those glutes, that sets that pelvis, that it’s almost like whether someone has posterior or anterior, it seems to benefit everyone because you’re getting both sides of that equation. I think she would do that one.

Tim Ferriss: All right. And again, just a reminder for folks, we’re going to link to everything, and you’re going to have videos pinned, and just search Kneesovertoesguy for all the platforms and you’ll find those. 

What else did you pick up from Poliquin, if anything comes to mind? Let’s start there, and then I’ll trade with you.

Ben Patrick: So many gems. That’s a tough question.

Tim Ferriss: It is. Sadly, Charles is no longer with us.

Ben Patrick: I know.

Tim Ferriss: I actually got the phone call about it pretty much immediately after he died, which was very sad, very tragic, way too early. But anything else come to mind? I could buy you some time if you want.

Ben Patrick: No. So I mean, he was trying to master everything from, he was helping bodybuilders, athletes. The thing he told me, so only one time when I finally had the money and freedom to go see, he came to America, did a seminar, and he said — this was towards the end. And he said his only regret was not getting into flexibility sooner. And you know he was a wealth of strength, knowledge, a lot of that strength relating to range of motion. That definitely left an impact on me, that he wished he had gotten into that sooner.

And the conclusions that I’ve come to is you can see my style of training. The way I stretch wouldn’t be how someone would normally think of stretching, but just the idea of your strength and your flexibility, really getting those into harmony, to where the positions that you’re flexible in, you feel strong in those positions.

And so I’ve really explored that deeply now, compared to, let’s say, look, people are going to have way more experience in bodybuilding, powerlifting, strongman, these kinds of things. And Charles had way more experience there than me. So I think that was — if someone goes to my pages and sees the style that I train, I feel like that was the gem that was just what I needed that gave me now the systems that I love.

Tim Ferriss: And also getting strength and flexibility or mobility in harmony can sometimes mean that you’re training both at the same time. Right? Often can mean that. And we were recording earlier, and not that I’m going to win any gold medals in the split squat, but my range of motion is pretty good, all things considered. And I credit that to doing the movement.

And also I gave him a shout-out when we were recording, Jerzy Gregorek, some credit where credit is due, who holds multiple world records or did in Masters Olympic weightlifting. He’s got to be close to 70, if not 70 now. He can still do — he can stand on a balance board, like an endo board, with a fully loaded barbell, and do an ass to heels Olympic snatch at his age. It is unbelievable. His wife also holds a few world records. She can do the same thing. Their sustained athleticism is just beyond incredible.

And for ankle mobility, he had me doing basically one or two reps on the minute overhead squats. So I’m holding a barbell overhead, but we’re talking bar, maybe plus five pounds on either side. Very light weights. Just doing one rep on the minute for 10 to 20 minutes. That’s it. And by greasing the groove in that way, I went from basically zero ankle mobility, lots of injuries, still a lot of lateral instability, to being able to do what we did earlier, which is frankly years after I did that training. It’s been really durable, which is wild.

So one of the points that I hear you making that I see reflected in a lot of what you do is that you don’t necessarily have to do, you absolutely don’t have to do for most things, an hour of strength training every other day, plus an hour of stretching every day or every other day. You just do not. That is not necessary for most people at all. The surface area for injury goes up also when you’re throwing everything and the kitchen sink with lots and lots of hours.

And certainly, I mean, I had conversations with Charles back in the day where we would talk about some of these professional athletes, let’s just say NFL players, who have five, six percent body fat. They destroyed the combine. They’re these absolute phenoms. And I would ask him, “What do they eat for their diet?” And he’d be like, “Oh, Wendy’s for breakfast, Burger King for lunch, McDonald’s for dinner.” I mean, you have to be very careful that you’re not modeling your training on mutants.

So I’ll just pull out a couple of things from Charles. So I first met Charles because he reached out to me after reading The 4-Hour Workweek, my first book, and he had applied a lot of it to his business and his productivity. And I think at the time, he didn’t realize this, but I had been exposed to tons of his stuff, just as you had, through magazines way back in the day.

And he reached out, and he’s like, “You don’t know who I am.” And I was like, “Well, actually, that’s funny. Because I do know who you are.” And then we connected, and Charles ended up in The 4-Hour Body. He introduced me to myofascial release and active release technique. And there’s some before and after photos with internal rotation on the shoulder in The 4-Hour Body that are unbelievable. They look like they were staged because the gains in range of motion are so significant.

He was right about so many things. Wasn’t right about everything. But there are so many things that Charles did that ended up being proven out through studies, and data collection later, and exercise science in other fields. It’s pretty remarkable. I mean, he got a lot of things right.

Ben Patrick: He was so dedicated. I forget the exact number, but he learned a bunch of different languages so that he could read — 

Tim Ferriss: He spoke a lot. Yeah.

Ben Patrick: — essentially everything that had been written about exercise.

Tim Ferriss: In the source language.

Ben Patrick: Right.

Tim Ferriss: What a maniac. Also cantankerous as fuck. Oh my God, he was so salty. And part of his charm. One of a kind. 

Who else has influenced your thinking on exercise and movement, just broadly speaking, your way of training?

Ben Patrick: Charles was really cool about crediting where he learned different things, and so that’s something I’ve kept in. And it also gave me the idea that, okay, there might be real gems in quite a few areas. So I know you’ve talked about gymnastic rings. Okay. Doing rows and pull-ups with gymnastics rings, I do one set to burn out of each per week. That saves me so much time and gives me a pretty balanced upper back for my goals. So there’s a gem that Poliquin didn’t teach me, but his general mindset of learning.

Tim Ferriss: I’m just going to pause to ask you to repeat something you told me earlier. Where did Charles figure out the backwards sled pulling?

Ben Patrick: Oh. Oh, man. That’s such a cool story.

Tim Ferriss: Do you want to talk about pulling from unusual places?

Ben Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. So Charles went to the source, Westside Barbell in Ohio led by Louie Simmons, who was creating the strongest powerlifters in the world. And Louie was jealous of these Finland powerlifters of their squats. And they said that their secret weapon was their day job was dragging trees. So Louie invented the idea of dragging weight as a form of exercise. And then, that became a way of life at Westside Barbell. One of Louie Simmons’ disciples, Dave Tate, who made the, if you’ve heard of EliteFTS, they made the prowler style slide, all kinds of amazing stuff. I’m going to see Dave in two weeks, actually, for the first time.

Dave has a quote that’s like, “We didn’t have warm-ups.” It was Louie Simmons just telling him, “Hey, before you train, go out to the parking lot and drag the sled.” He’s like, “We didn’t have shit called warm-ups. It was called the stuff you do before you train.” And people were like, “How many sets and reps is that?” “I don’t know. It was X amount of times down the parking lot.” “Oh, how long was the parking lot?” “Don’t know.” So it was cool, the history there.

But it’s cool how Charles Poliquin would just go to the source. He’d go to the source in Europe, or Ohio, or wherever it was. He would go to the source. And then it was, like I told you, it was this article of where he used the backward sled for knee rehab for this Olympic athlete that kind of, I don’t know, that kind of gave me a stepping stone to all this stuff.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If people also want to look up Louie Simmons and his writing online, a lot of amazing tidbits to be found to this day in a lot of his writing. And Westside Barbell, for a period of time, it was just one of those factories for mutants that — and of course, there’s some selection bias if people are traveling to the Mecca to station themselves there to train. There’s a little bit of selection bias. But the results were just so incredible. And the number of world records broken and the number of innovations, whether that’s, say, chains to provide more resistance as you get into stronger ranges of motion with, whether it’s deadlift or anything else. I mean, bands and so on. I mean, a lot of what you see that is propagated throughout the gym universe started there, or at least was codified and formalized in some way there.

Ben Patrick: Yep. So that was a great one. One that I think would be inaccurate if we missed, there was a bodybuilder named Bob Gajda. G-A-J-D-A.

Tim Ferriss: Bob. Don’t know that name.

Ben Patrick: Gajda. Okay. He was Mr. Universe right before bodybuilding really blew up. And now, these are his words. He worked at the Chicago YMCA. His passion was helping get kids off the streets, off drugs, doing bodybuilding. He’s Mr. Universe. He goes into the lockers one day and sees people shooting up drugs, steroids. This was the beginning of steroids. And when I say this, people are like, “Oh, no. Bob was on steroids too.” Look, this is Bob’s story.

Bob’s story is he stopped — what you can look up is he was Mr. Olympia when he quit. Not a lot of people are going to quit right when, guess what he was getting offered? The first protein shake deals. So there wasn’t money in what he was doing. All of a sudden, there was money in bodybuilding. And guys were doing steroids, and he quit. So when someone turns down money, I feel like there’s a — I believe what he’s saying. And he wound up then getting into, sort of like my passion, of helping people enjoy life without breaking down. And he invented this device that he called a DARD. D-A-R-D. I think it was Dynamic Axial Resistance Device.

Tim Ferriss: It rolls off the tongue.

Ben Patrick: It didn’t catch on. By the time I was studying this, you couldn’t even buy it anywhere. It didn’t turn into a business that worked out. But it allowed you to do the opposite of a calf raise and strengthen the front shin muscles.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, got it. Right. Tibialis anterior. 

Ben Patrick: Yeah. So one of the things I do that’s really unusual, and Charles Poliquin did calf training, did tibialis training, lots of coaches have done this. Bob was the creator and really had a big impact on me. And in my workout style, which I hadn’t seen anyone doing, I go from the resistance forward and backward, like with the sled, to then working my lower leg muscles. So with the sledding, you’re pushing through your feet in various ways. I mean, you’re working all kinds of stuff.

But my mindset was like, “Okay. Move the body forward and backward, then start addressing the body from the ground up.” Let’s get some extra — before we even get into the knees. I found extra de-sensitization before getting into the knee work by doing the lower leg work after the sled work. Maybe it was just because the sled burns your legs and you get a little break. But we can’t say it’s a bad thing to have some extra ability in the front and back of our shins.

And so, an equipment company reached out, said, “Is there anything…” This is when The Kneesovertoesguy was starting to catch on on social media. “Is there anything that doesn’t exist, that you think should exist?” I’m like, “Yeah, there should be these DARD bars.” But I told him, “Call it a tib bar,” to make it simple for people because it’s the anterior front tibialis. Tibia is your shins.

Tim Ferriss: Calling something a DARD also. I’m going to Hell. But it’s a hard one to sell.

Ben Patrick: Yeah. So with the Kneesovertoesguy stuff, I could see, okay, I’ve got a pretty good skill here at helping people understand this stuff. And so, I’m like, “I think tib bar.” And now, it’s a pretty common device. You can even go on Amazon and buy tib bars. I mean, there’s like 10 sellers now. I have by far the lowest price for an American made tib bar. I don’t sell the most tib bars.

Pretty much anything that I make in America, someone’s going to make more money copying in China. And that’s actually, at first, it seemed annoying, but now I’m like, it’s actually pretty cool. Everyone wins. I can make a nice living pursuing American-made on everything I do. And people are going to copy it, because the price is going to be higher American-made. All right, everyone wins. You can get it cheaper from someone making it in China.

And that doesn’t mean all my stuff is made in America. I’m pursuing all my stuff made in America. And anything on my website, I don’t play games with people, it says ATG USA. Then you know, if it says that, it’s made in America. So this was a really cool device, particularly for rehab. 

But even for me, what I showed you in my video, you can put your butt against the wall with no equipment whatsoever, raise your toes, and do that for a while, and burn out, and get a reverse calf raise, a tibialis raise.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll just paint a picture for folks. So if you have your — you’re standing facing away from a wall, maybe your heels are a foot away from the wall, your heels?

Ben Patrick: One to two feet.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, one to two feet. Then you lean back against the wall. Now take your upper back off of the wall. So it’s just your hips and low back against the wall so you’re not cheating. Your legs are locked, right? Your knees are locked.

Ben Patrick: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And then you’re lifting your toes to the greatest extent that you can. And the nest point that you added to that, where I was like, oh, that’s actually very smart, and it’s particularly, I would say, helpful for someone like me, who has basically torn everything in both ankles, to me, he’ll hook some nonsense way back in the day, that basically lifting the foot as much as possible, then going down on the pinky side, then coming up and going down on the big toe side, and alternating back and forth like that, I could see helping also with some of the lateral stability issues that I have.

So we were chatting a bit before recording about some of your different pieces of equipment, and I told you that I really liked your wrist bar. So the wrist bar is, imagine a baton you would hand off to someone in a relay race, but at one end, half of it is thick enough. I don’t know what the exact diameter is. Let’s call it two, two and a half inches. So that you can plate load, you can put an Olympic plate on that and then secure it, which makes it very interesting because you can work with progressive resistance.

And for me, that was important and will be important. I’m six weeks after elbow surgery, so I’m not quite there yet. But for sort of supination and pronation, whether I’m doing isometrics or otherwise. And it’s very small, very portable. And one of the advantages, we were chatting a bit — well, why don’t you just tell the story, and then I can add some color if need be.

Ben Patrick: Well — 

Tim Ferriss: I put this bar in 5-Bullet Friday, which is my newsletter that goes out to two million-plus subscribers.

Ben Patrick: There’s a few moments I look back at just sheer luck, like when you won something at the fair that you thought you wouldn’t have done it. And one of those highlight just lucky moments is we’re just seeing the wrist bar sales just going nuts. So my staff are like, “What the heck is going on? Why are we selling so many wrist bars?” And we quickly traced down that it was because of you. So that’s like an all-time business moment. And that’s made in America, so we were able to basically just make them to order and just quickly service everyone.

Tim Ferriss: Right. So that last part is important, right? Because I think you mentioned it was more units than the history of the bar up to the point or something.

Ben Patrick: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I try to give people a heads-up if something is going to land in the newsletter, because what can end up happening, as one of my fans termed it, the hug of death. So the hug of death can take a number of different forms. It could be a website crashing. But it could also be where someone has a long lead time on ordering inventory. Let’s just say they’re getting it from China. And not that that’s intrinsically bad, I’m not saying that that is.

But let’s just say for them to get an order, they have certain minimums and so on. And they believe that these sales from the newsletter are going to continue at that velocity. And they only had 100 in stock, now they order 2,000 because they expect to be able to move those and they don’t. The hug of death is, “Uh-oh. I’m not going to make this money back.” And companies, small companies in particular, can go under if they misgauge stuff like that. So you had the advantage where you’re making them, I mean, from a global perspective, right around the corner, so you could do just-in-time inventory.

Ben Patrick: Yeah, we didn’t even have to order a batch. We were just able to fulfill the orders. Awesome. Awesome family in Minnesota who does stuff for a variety of people in fitness, but reached out to me a few years back and has really helped me to make some cool stuff American-made.

Tim Ferriss: What other principles, topics, exercises, would you like to talk about? Maybe one way to edge into a starting point for that is before coming here to do this recording, and we did some movement earlier, I did what I’ve done a number of different times. Because your name has come up over the years and I’ve looked at your videos and watched a lot of them. Sorted your videos by most popular. I’m sure a lot of people do that as a way to produce a manageable shopping list of videos.

So my question for you is, which videos were not anointed by the YouTube gods or, for whatever reason, have not had the views that you would like, where you’re like, “If I could point out one video that I wish people paid more attention to.” Could be any video. But your greatest hits don’t need the help, in a sense. Maybe you’d like to mention one of them. But if there’s a lesser known video where you’re like, “Man, this one’s really, I think, quite important, and it hasn’t had the visibility.”

Ben Patrick: Well, so I just made a video really recapping all my knowledge because of going on this podcast. I didn’t say it in the video, you don’t want to jinx it. Like, “Hey guys, I’m going on Tim Ferriss,” and then you get canceled. But I made it for this podcast. And it happens to be doing really well. I’ve found that the videos I put out that really hit home and help people then, long-term, wind up doing well. So for me, it’s almost like my experience has been the better videos do have more views.

Tim Ferriss: Got it.

Ben Patrick: Because I try to be really careful to never lie in a YouTube title. What I have to look out for, which I’ll still have to check it on your video, because who knows on your staff who’s going to title it, is people have me on or whatever. And then it’s like, I found one, and they’ve since corrected it, but it said knee pain. It said “Fix knee pain guaranteed in 60 seconds.” The only — 

Tim Ferriss: I won’t have a video with that title.

Ben Patrick: Caps. “The only exercise you’ll ever,” caps, “NEED.” And sure enough, the guy, great channel, great guy, very busy, naturally hired a professional company. And then, it actually alerted him and he found a bunch of lies like that in the titles. So because of that, yeah, you can get a lot of views if you lie in the title. And even for me, I’m not saying this from a point of perfection, there was one that was so hard. I think I’ve kept it up, and sometimes I go back and forth, but I had titled it—this was four or five years ago—”How to Make Yourself a World-Class Athlete.” And I use all these stories of people who weren’t world-class athletes and made themselves world-class athletes. But still, that was the closest one I can remember that I feel like was potentially a lie.

Tim Ferriss: Now, you’ll pin the video that you referred to, which is the recap of a lot of what we’re talking about visually. Do you recall the title of that?

Ben Patrick: Yeah, a Minimalistic Workout Program with Sets and Reps. That’s how I title things now. There’s no — 

Tim Ferriss: No fluff.

Ben Patrick: Yeah. So what’s funny is that, so now to get views, it really is about the content itself, not the title. So it doesn’t say, “Knees over toes,” it doesn’t say, “fix knee pain,” because there’s these keywords used to get views. So it just says, “Minimalistic Workout Program with Sets and Reps,” and it’s doing great.

But that’s the most recent one I made for this podcast for someone to not beat around the bush, get all the key information. It even gives you sets and reps. It gives you my actual program. It’s not a theoretical program. These are the two workouts I do a week. All the people I train are on very similar versions of this.

Tim Ferriss: And I want to give people a taste of some of what we recorded earlier in case they don’t see it. And in effect, I’ll summarize, but feel free to jump in because I’m a stickler for detail and I like exact recipes, it could be my OCD screaming at the back of my head, which is pretty often, but the point you made, or at least that I heard, was you’re not really a magic sets and reps guy in terms of some Goldilocks perfect protocol.

And the reason I bring that up is that just like you can regress range of motion in a movement, you can regress the volume. And what I would say is that in pain-free range of motion, a little bit can go a long way. So if you look at something and you’re like, “Ah, I don’t have time for three sets of this or five sets of that,” or whatever it might be, okay, fine. Well, maybe you start with one set. And I know people who have gotten into tremendous shape coming from a baseline of zero, right?

Ben Patrick: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: No athleticism, nothing, and they’re like, “Ah, I don’t have time to go to the gym. I don’t have to do that.” I’m like, “What about one push-up before bed? What about one push-up? Is there a reason you can’t do one push-up?” And they’re like, “Yeah, of course I can do one push-up.” I’m like, “Okay, great. Do one push-up,” and then turns into two and then it turns into whatever.

And I know one guy, within a few months, he was doing 50 push-ups before bed and he was seeing real results and then that was the unlock. So that’s a long-winded way of just saying don’t get fixated on your limitations. You can always scale down.

Ben Patrick: Yeah, yeah. My starting system is one to two sets, and then I found for myself, one to two sets I can maintain great. Only on exercises that I’m planning to put more weights on. I’ll go a couple more sets just to actually — you’re probably still only talking one or two sets, really, because they’re — 

Tim Ferriss: Like work sets?

Ben Patrick: Yeah. Just to make sure people safely take their time. Now, I simply wouldn’t have believed 15 years ago that now I’d be doing only two workouts a week, 45 minutes dunking and stuff. So I wouldn’t have believed it. So if someone thinks we’re full of shit, I would’ve thought we were full of shit. That also doesn’t mean that higher-volume programs can’t work.

Number one, I see all the different exercises as a beautiful freedom with different inputs and adaptations, and I see all of fitness as positive and then I see even all people’s viewpoints of then how to program that up as positive. I don’t do the comparing teardown, what’s — the program you stick with that works for you and your goals is awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the program you stick with is the best program.

And I want to reiterate what you’re saying because I write books to be references for myself basically. If I can find a book that does the job already, writing is way too hard. The research is way too arduous. It takes way too long. I don’t want to write a book. It also turns out to generally be a terrible way to make any money, even if your books do very well. So there’s just way too much of pushing boulders up the hill for me to write a book unless I feel like I’m gathering things that I need and can’t find somewhere else. That was the case with The 4-Hour Body.

And this minimum effective dose, the concept, the MED of finding the minimum effective dose, and you can look at many comparables. It’s like there’s a certain temperature at which you boil water. You don’t need to get it 30 degrees hotter. If you go outside, there’s a point at which you start to adapt in the sun and develop a tan. You don’t need or want to stay out another hour and you progress and you start to extend the duration, et cetera.

It turns out that you can apply this almost everywhere. You can apply it to language learning with the highest frequency words, you can apply it to, for instance, I was asking on X, back when it was Twitter, people for favorite chapters in The 4-Hour Body because I was curious about possibly updating things, although there’s not a lot that needs much updating it turns out, and people gave various examples. There was a — I think it was an NFL player who was benched and got back to playing professionally using the pre-hab chapter and Occam’s Protocol — Occam’s Protocol is like 20 minutes twice a week resistance training — and a handful of other things.

There’s another guy who chimed in, and I understand you can’t believe everything you read on the internet, but I’ve seen multiple examples of this. He got to, I think, a 475-pound deadlift using the Barry Ross protocol in the book. And Barry Ross coached Allyson Felix and many other sprinters. It is the most minimal thing you could possibly imagine, and a crux piece of it is doing deadlifts to the knee and then effectively dropping the bar so that you’re not risking any type of hamstring strain, and doing two to three sets of two to three reps. That’s it. And you’re taking big, fat powerlifter rests in between those sets. The amount of strength that you can build doing that is head-spinning.

Ben Patrick: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: So I just want to emphasize that “I don’t have enough time” doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny if you’re willing to scale back, and in fact, you can do a lot more with very little than you might suspect.

To your point, there are also volume-based approaches. And I mean, Poliquin, we talked about Poliquin. He did a lot of high-volume stuff with his athletes. Not everyone is going to tolerate that very well, nor is it going to be compatible with their schedules necessarily. So you find what works for you and ultimately the program you stick with is the best program.

Ben Patrick: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, The 4-Hour Body had a massive, massive effect on me. And this phase of life, it’s like 2-Hour Body for me, and because it’s the strength, the flexibility, the circulation, the cardio, all this stuff wrapped in one. Yeah, I mean, I don’t do any other therapies. I don’t have to take any supplements. Those couple hours go a long way for me.

And then what are my goals? For me, being a dad and then really focusing on my business, treating people well, and doing good, it takes a lot of time and energy because if you turn a blind eye to your business, that’s rarely going to happen on its own.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, very rarely. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

Ben Patrick: Yeah. So it’s like those are my goals. I also don’t want to spend any time having to rehab stuff, and knock on wood, it’s 12 years now, no knee or back problems. It was like 15 years ago that I got into this, and I would say my biggest mistake was treating it as short-term rehab and being like, “Oh, great,” and then trying to go back to the methods I used to do.

Whereas now for me — because you had the question in the video of like, “So is this a warmup for the work?” And they’re like, “That’s the workout.” And then you get better at those things, and some of these things we’ve mentioned, whether it be then finishing with a set of ring rows to a good burnout. That’s going to take what, a minute, and goes a long way.

So the efficiency of sledding and what I use at home is a resisted treadmill forward and backward. I look at the clock. Three, four minutes have gone by that I’ve done three sets forward and backward, catching my breath between each set. I’m pumped and my lungs have had a great workout, my legs are warmed up, springy, fast, all this stuff.

So 4-Hour Body, you can see in my passion, this is more along my passions in life is almost helping people that don’t want so much stress on the body to then be able to focus on other things.

Tim Ferriss: Or stress on the schedule, right?

Ben Patrick: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Stress on the family.

Ben Patrick: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I would say that if I were to, and it’s just these things are too long and most of it, the vast majority of what’s in The 4-Hour Body, I feel, is very defensible. It’s become more defensible over time — 

Ben Patrick: That’s awesome.

Tim Ferriss: — which has been cool to see since it came out in 2010. But if I were to add a few things to it, I would add sled work or analogs, like the resisted incline treadmill. I would add a chapter on intermittent fasting.

Ben Patrick: Cool.

Tim Ferriss: I would add a chapter on, it might not be a chapter, but maybe a sidebar on various hip activities, exercises, things like glute medius work, just things that you can do to stabilize everything else in effect that I did put some of in Tools of Titans with, say, some of Peter Attia’s exercises and so on.

Ben Patrick: Cool.

Tim Ferriss: I would probably add a chapter or a sidebar on Zone 2 training, which I still, to this day, find to be the most boring thing in the world, but if I have to drag myself or whip myself to do anything, that would be on the high-whipping scale.

And I think that’s about it. And there are probably chapters that I would pull out to simplify, to further simplify things. And that’s about it.

Ben Patrick: That’s awesome.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, these things are so reliable and I would say to someone, for instance, again, this is going to sound like nothing, but if you have access to a sled — and people can look at the resisted treadmill that you have also through ATG. How much does that cost?

Ben Patrick: 600.

Tim Ferriss: 600, right. So I mean, it’s, on the grand scale of things, not just affordable as an investment, but also space-efficient because the biggest knock against the sled is that you need space and the sleds are not cheap, particularly the sleds I really, like the Torque sleds, which I own. I love them. But here in Austin, I don’t have the space for one. But let’s just pretend you have access to one of these. Let’s call it a sled for simplicity, just so people can visualize it.

Over this past summer, I did sled work where effectively, as prescribed by Peter Attia, if I’m doing VO2 max training, I would want to do four minutes on, four minutes off. You could make it five or six or whatever. It depends on how hard you’re pushing. And let’s just say it’s four minutes on, four minutes off for four rounds or five rounds or six rounds. And I would do that with the sled and I would push. This was on a gravel driveway with mechanical resistance. You don’t need to add much weight.

And so what we’re talking about, just to do the math, let’s just say it’s 15 minutes, which often it would end up being 15 minutes because I would run out of gas, but 10 to 20 minutes, let’s call it. I was doing that every other day, fasted after a little bit of caffeine. And my God, can you get in good shape just from doing that.

Ben Patrick: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, it sounds — and I’m sure there are some very high-level athletes or people who are doing 600-pound squats or 900-pound deadlifts who are going to laugh hearing me say this, but you might be surprised how much your legs will grow and how much stability you will develop doing this, and how much body fat you can lose just by making that the first thing you do, and in my case, I’m getting sun exposure at the same time, for 10 to 20 minutes in the morning. And then let that afterburn work for a bit.

I would typically do that in the mornings and I would take some, a very — I’m talking like 300 milligrams of essential amino acids instead of branch-chain amino acids, but that’s a longer story. And I would do the workout and then I would hold off on eating for a few hours and then break my intermittent fast at 2:00 or 3:00 p.m. But feeding that way and then doing weight training typically before my second and last meal of the for dinner, gaining muscle mass, not losing muscle mass.

And the total, I mean, we’re talking about weekly time, if I’m doing it every other day, it’s three or four, let’s call it, days a week, so that’s an hour. And then the weight training’s probably, since I’m doing some rehab as well because of some current back issues, we’re talking about two to three hours a week. That’s it. That’s it. And it’s split up also into very manageable doses. It’s not like I’m asking you to do a three-hour or two-hour workout at once.

But it is really, to this day, there’s still things I come across, like the, in my case, I’m still elevated, but the front foot elevated split squat, or the ATG split squat, or, for instance, the exercise that you showed me earlier which is basically a seated, let’s call it, more constrained version of a Romanian deadlift standing, people can find this on your pinned video, I imagine, so I won’t belabor the description, or sled work where I still find these things that are like — I think to myself, “My God, if I just did these and that was it, the sort of return on invested time is so much better than the long tail of 30 exercises that I could try to do.”

It still makes me smile and blows my mind to this day how some of these things are just so inherently, given their risk-to-benefit ratio, so high-yield and it’s really wild.

Ben Patrick: Yep. That’s exactly how I feel. It’s still, to this day, it’s like I do my two workouts a week. I’m just totally stoked. And sometimes I still have that “wow” feeling every time because I’m like, “It’s unbelievable.” And now I’ve been doing this for so long that it’s not like, “Wow, I could just train like this.” I have been for a while and the results are insane.

Tim Ferriss: And you’re playing sports, right? In terms of — 

Ben Patrick: I try once a week to play some basketball. Right now, that means playing with the best kids at the school that I’m volunteering at. So it’s two workouts a week, try to play basketball once a week, and raise toddlers.

Tim Ferriss: Before you play basketball, any type of warmup that you do for that or has your training provided the warmup?

Ben Patrick: Yeah. So first and foremost, the training provides a warmup. I don’t have any special warmup. From what I’ve learned training-wise, I try to at least have systems. And to recap incredibly fast, my systems, because you’d actually ask me what are my total principles, and it’s just three total principles as far as I can see, which is the forward and backward resisted movement; and then the training from the ground up, just reminding myself even if it’s one set, “Okay, I’m going to hit the lower legs before I go to the upper legs”; and then the third one being the strength through my mobility, and then I just flow that to the upper body and I’m done.

That’s the training principles. If you add all of that up, forward and backward, ground up, because most of us has probably not done as much work for the lower body and lower legs as for the upper body, so we’re restoring some natural balance there.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I need to do a lot of work on the lower legs.

Ben Patrick: Right. We could say that your body’s inputs would think that you didn’t want to get as strong in the lower legs as the upper. So by doing that, you’re what? You’re restoring some balance to the body.

Tim Ferriss: A quick piece of trivia for people who might find it funny. Go look at really early photographs of Arnold Schwarzenegger posing, and some of them have him standing in water where water’s up to his knees because he was so embarrassed about his lower leg development.

Ben Patrick: Whoa.

Tim Ferriss: Alas, I haven’t figured out how to wade through swamps up to my knees to cover my lack of development in the lower legs.

Ben Patrick: Yeah, most of us haven’t. It’s almost like we’re telling the body, “Hey, I don’t want to be as strong proportionally in the lower legs as everything above it.”

And then the amount of foot pains and different chronic pains that I’ve had people who had for years that are gone now just from restoring that balance, it’s really cool. And then the third one being training the strength through the mobility, as I said. So those three.

But what’s the strength through mobility again? We’re restoring that natural balance because when we go into weight training, our body starts to shift towards strength in certain ranges but not others. So all of it together just means my whole philosophy is just to have balanced ability in the body, forward, backward, high positions, low positions, lower legs, upper legs.

So that’s how I train. That makes me healthy that I can just go play basketball. But because of all that, I try to be sensible about it and do a sort of segmented warmup of like, okay, dribbling in place, then dribbling in motion. Now what’s a little more pressure than that? It might be shooting. So it’s just super basic. Someone could do that for any sport. It’s like you take the forces and you just segment them into an obvious warmup, so there’s no special — 

Tim Ferriss: Magic.

Ben Patrick: — basketball warmup.

Tim Ferriss: No magic sauce.

Ben Patrick: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Well, we’ve covered quite a bit. Ben, is there anything else that you’d like to cover? Any other topics you’d like to jam on? Anything that comes to mind?

Ben Patrick: I think more for you, which is, for me, as or more important than any of this exercise stuff is you’ve managed to become this giant without bashing other people, without playing games that you know are lower integrity. So you must have some sort of — because I’ve had to set up for myself, “Okay, I need to make sure that my posts don’t have any lies to try to start arguments or that there’s nothing intentionally trying to start arguments.” And there’s these things like this that I’ve had to piece together.

But I think of you, and sometimes I’m blank after that, apologies for being blank, but it’s like there’s not a lot that I can look to and go, “Here’s a guy who’s succeeding in ways that I want to succeed,” helping people, but with your integrity. And to me, that’s more important than the rest because I feel like that’s the trickle-down that makes life shitty for a lot of people is the more and more leaders who then lose their integrity, I think that’s more important than all of the rest because that affects everything.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Thanks, man.

Ben Patrick: So what’s your — do you have a — 

Tim Ferriss: What’s my process?

Ben Patrick: I mean, yeah, what’s your thoughts on that? I mean, even if you just think about it, you’ll share some unusual information compared to what normally is going to be on a podcast.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m happy to riff on it. I would say that there are a few things that come to mind, and I’ll maybe get there by way of example.

So there was an episode I recorded a long time ago with a fellow named Balaji, who’s very smart and he’s known for a great many things. He’s actually been very accurate in predicting a lot of geopolitical events and so on. Also happens to be incredibly technical and familiar with cryptography and crypto and so on. And I did an episode with him and it just exploded. And there were many reasons for that, but it ended up being, I think at the time, the most popular episode of the year.

Ben Patrick: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: And there were a number of trend lines at the time. People were at home, this was during COVID, crypto was on everyone’s radar. All of a sudden people are using various means of finding something to do, including trading or, quote, unquote, “investing.” And I used “quote, unquote” because it wasn’t always investing. So there were many things that contributed to this episode doing well.

And I remember having a chat with my team internally and they were like, “Here are four or five other guests who are also involved with crypto who we think would be very, very strong.” And I paused in that moment. And there’s this quote, it may be incorrectly attributed, but there’s a quote that I have started almost every presentation I’ve ever given. So it’d be kind of hilarious if it were not attributed properly. I think it’s attributed to Mark Twain, but, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” It’s roughly along those lines.

And so I looked at what was happening around me and I saw a lot of podcasts focusing on crypto, I saw a lot of media focusing on crypto, and I looked at, in my mind, telescoping forward, what would be the implications of me having these four or five people on? There would be a definite short or intermediate-term reward. Lots of downloads, very happy sponsors. I could probably increase my rates. I mean, there would be real financial rewards.

Okay. What are the trade-offs? Because there are always trade-offs. Always. And you make any decision, just like literally from the perspective of decision, meaning cutting away, related to incision, you’re choosing one option among many, there are trade-offs.

So what are the trade-offs if I commit to doing four or five more episodes on crypto? One is that I start to filter out anyone in my audience who’s not interested in crypto most likely. Some will be willing to indulge me because they have followed the podcast for a long time and want to see how I tackle it. But after four or five episodes, after a month or two, I will basically have culled my audience of anyone who is not particularly interested. That is a very large sacrifice, number one, because I want a diverse audience.

Number two is that I would be training myself to succumb to audience capture. And there’s some great pieces that have been written about audience capture, but the way I would describe it, actually, I’ll give — and I apologize that I can’t remember the author’s name. It’s a really fantastic piece. But he starts with this example of a YouTuber whose channel focused on him gorging himself, just eating these kind of absurdly large meals. And he started off pretty thin and ended up, as he was rewarded for these videos and as it became the corner he was painted into, as he felt he needed to continue to rack up views serving people what they wanted, he destroyed his health completely. Became obese, put on this mask, and if you wear a mask long enough, you become the mask. I think that’s something that people miss. And I recall, just as a side note because I want to try to answer your question, but there’s a lot to it.

I remember I interviewed Andrew Zimmern, who he’s been on TV for decades now. Amazing guy, very smart. His life story’s incredible for people who want to check out the podcast episode. And he said to me at one point, because I was delving into television and I’m paraphrasing, but, “Be very careful about what you do in that first episode because if you pretend to be something that you’re not and it’s successful, you’ll feel the obligation to continue to do that. And there are a lot of risks related to that.”

And furthermore, if you’re training yourself to respond to audience demands or whims or trends instead of some type of internal compass, and simultaneously you’re training yourself, and these are often related, to basically pursue the option that has the most economic upside. I feel like particularly if you’re in the online media game in any capacity. And by the way, you don’t need to have a business to succumb to this. You might just have a personal page and you’re being trained by the platform to be in the vanity Olympics.

And these algorithms are so good. And I know a lot of data scientists and PhDs who work at these companies, you’re bringing a knife to a gunfight, psychologically. So if you encourage yourself to be captivated by those incentives, you’re lost. You’re just lost at sea, you’re going to be lost. And it’s a lot easier to get lost than it is to get unlost. And that has a trickle-down effect. So if I make decisions based on — and it’s very hard, and I’m not always perfect, if I allow myself to be steered by the most extreme things, perhaps, that guests say, what am I going to do? I’m going to optimize for extreme.

And then if I’m optimizing for extreme, why am I doing that? It’s for views. Why do I care about views? It could be vanity, it could also be for CPMs and advertising. It could be for product sales. Well, what’s going to happen to my headlines? They’re going to become the National Inquirer, for people old enough to remember that. They’re going to become the most clickbaity, exaggerated, indefensible set of claims you can imagine. And you don’t have to be a data scientist to realize this, just go look at what you’re served up in your personal feed on YouTube, and chances are there’s going to be a lot of nonsense or a lot of misleading.

And what I’ve learned is that when you develop an awareness of this, not that I’m holding myself up to be some paragon of personal excellence and integrity, but I recognize that it’s a lot easier to get hooked on a drug than to get off of said drug. And make no mistake, you’re being trained by the platform, you’re being trained by your audience. Those are all drugs that are very addictive and there are lots of rewards for pursuing that. But to come back to what I said earlier, there are lots of trade-offs. And for me, also on top of that, I would say that I have worked so hard to ensure that my audience feels they can trust me. There’s certain lines once you cross, if you do not deliver on the promise of a headline, if you do not deliver on the promise of a title, if you make a recommendation that costs someone time, money, or, God forbid, causes some type of injury, you’re done. You’re dead to that person and for good reason.

So I feel like with a great audience, and that could be a small audience, it could be a big one, comes great responsibility. And I should say also, this isn’t because I’m some type of saint, it’s also being long-term ambitious. For me, the greatest insurance plan, the greatest choose your metaphor, safety net, but also propellant for doing well long-term is not doing anything, and you’ll make mistakes, but really trying hard not to do anything that will compromise the trust that your audience puts in you. That could be readers, it could be listeners, it could be viewers, it could be anything.

And for that reason, I’m very cautious about what I recommend. I’m very cautious about who I have on the podcast. I’m very cautious about chasing any type of trend. Hence that what I think is a Mark Twain quote, it could be someone else, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” So in the case of the crypto episode, that was massively successful. I could have milked that, but it would’ve been the equivalent of killing the golden goose.

And those are a few ways that I think about my life that is, at this point, toothpaste out of the toothpaste tube, you can’t really put it back in from a public exposure perspective. There are lots of trade-offs, privacy-wise and so on, for being public facing. Although a lot of folks who are long-term listeners and viewers will notice that I’m not doing even a tiny fraction of the video that most of my colleagues or peers, certainly the up-and-comers, and there are costs to that. So I have my reasons for doing that. I want to have a family soon. I do not need any more facial recognition. I do not. I want to be very cognizant of protecting the privacy of my family. But have I left a lot of money on the table? Yeah, I have. But what are you using the money for in the first place?

And it’s like, “Why, why, why?” Just keep asking why. Why, so what, why is that important, then what happens? And if money fundamentally — I mean, it’s sort of a story, right? It’s like this abstraction, but it’s a currency that we can use to trade for other things. Now having that in savings could provide you with psychological reassurance for any number of reasons. Family, childhood scarcity, who knows? So there could be that. Otherwise, you’re trading it for things and experiences which ultimately translate to feelings. It’s like, “Okay, where else could you get those feelings? Do you really need those incremental dollars with those trade-offs?” So for me, I decided that I didn’t.

Keep in mind, The 4-Hour Workweek details my first real business, which was in sports nutrition. I know the supplement world inside and out. And when I launched The 4-Hour Body, I had a huge audience from the first book that was waiting for my next book. I could have made tens of millions, maybe a hundred million plus by launching a supplement brand to capitalize on every one of my main product recommendations. I’d be lying if the thought didn’t occur to me, especially at that time because even with the success of The 4-Hour Workweek, royalties are very slim in a traditional deal.

And the temptation therefore to do something like that was huge. I was like, “This is how I can secure my entire financial future.” And I decided not to do it. Why? Because if I had launched a supplement brand, everyone would’ve — not everyone, but a lot of people rightly would’ve said, “Well, we’re asking a barber if we need a haircut. This guy is showing his bags, he’s selling exactly what he’s recommending. How can I trust anything this guy says?” And I was like, “That is too deep a cost. I’ll find another way to do it.”

Ben Patrick: I mean, that’s remarkable because it would’ve been a shoe in.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it would’ve been a shoe in, for sure.

Ben Patrick: Similarly, you’ll know when I sell out if I’m selling a joint supplement but t’s not that I have anything against supplements, it’s that it wasn’t actually part of my journey. So if I now sold a supplement, I want to know what effect I get from the exercises. And yeah, that would be the easiest business route as the Kneesovertoesguy.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I wish. Maybe it’s just can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I mean, I consume a ludicrous number of supplements. I do consume a lot of supplements. So clearly there are brands that I trust, typically would’ve been third party verified, things have been tested because my God, it is the Wild West, folks. There’s no enforcement. So really do your homework on the supplements that you take. But that is all just a long way of saying there are some good players in the supplement sphere. But if I’m combining that, in my case, with a book that is purported to provide unbiased information, you can’t believe those claims if I’m selling exactly the thing that I’m recommending. Now, that doesn’t automatically mean that I’ve ethically compromised in some way, but people would be right to question it.

Ben Patrick: Yeah, you wouldn’t have. You would’ve made a great supplement line.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Ben Patrick: You would’ve been honest, but the integrity point would’ve been out. That’s what I find remarkable. And that’s what, if me going the rest of my career, I see that actually as the not boasting about just doing things along those lines. Because, as you know, I mean, how many young people ask you for advice and then how many of these people become successful? You leave this trickle down impact that, at this point, for me, it’s like that’s really what it’s about. And for my kids and then helping them learn these same values. Man, I feel like that’s a whole podcast to unpack, but I appreciate you digging in there because it’s very unusual. You would’ve cashed out big, but that integrity wouldn’t have been as trustworthy as you said.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks. There are times that I’m like, “Fuck, that would’ve been so much money.” It’s not easy for me to walk away from that, right? There are times that I’m just like, “Oh my God.” I remember when The 4-Hour Body hit number one New York Times and just kept going, kept going. And this book was published 15 years ago, and even Gary Brecka put out a video about some components of The 4-Hour Body and had this huge resurgence, got back on a bunch of bestseller lists. And I’m just like, “Man, can you imagine the annuity this thing would’ve been? Good Lord.” But I don’t regret it.

And I’ll say two things in addition to that, to build on this. Number one is when people think about losing trust, which is losing your reputation, right? At least for me, there are many ways to think of reputation. I mean, I guess suppose you could have an Al Capone reputation. There are many different types of reputations. But if you have a reputation for being trustworthy, losing that trust does not mean that you do something so bad that everyone says, “I can’t trust Tim. I can’t trust Ben.” All that needs to happen is they ask themselves once, “Can I really trust Ben? Can I really trust this video? Can I really trust this? Can I trust this advice that Tim has given?”

As soon as there is a question, you’ve lost the trust. And as soon as there is a seed of doubt, it is very hard to reclaim. Now, if I’m talking about long-term being, long-term greedy, or long-term ambitious, because of that trust and, for instance, being very clear on situations, say, in San Francisco where I lived at the time, having friend DAs, as some people call them. So NDA, non-disclosure agreement, friend DA is basically if someone tells you something in confidence, even if they don’t emphasize that you need to keep it confidential, basically not sharing things that anyone says to you.

And becoming a known quantity is someone who’s very good at discretion, who does what he says he is going to do on time, those were ingredients that led to ultimately the angel investing and being able to invest in a lot of these startups and work with a lot of these founders. Inherently I would be exposed to a lot of really confidential private information that’s critical to their business success. So developing that trustworthiness through actions over time and people telling other people is what allowed me to do the angel investing, which ultimately, returned much more than any supplement business ever would have.

Ben Patrick: That’s awesome.

Tim Ferriss: So don’t overestimate the value of the dollars in your bank account and don’t underestimate the value of having a consistent reputation for being trustworthy. And there’s so many ways to fuck that up. And who knows, maybe also I’m very hyper vigilant, I’m very aware and over aware and probably over emphasize dangers in the world. So maybe it’s worked to my advantage in the sense that I’m like, “If you don’t have your word, if people feel like they can’t trust that, you’re done. It’s going to be Mad Max for you and not in a good way.” I’m not sure exactly, but this is how I’ve thought about some of it.

Ben Patrick: It’s a right characteristic. The world would be a lot better if more leaders did that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks, man. I really appreciate it. And I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way. I’m sure I’ll continue to make tons of mistakes. But the question I’d encourage people to ask, and I ask this in my personal life, I ask this in my professional life, it’s like, “Okay, if you continue to do this, if you continue to do X, whatever X is, and let’s just say you do two percent more of it, or you do it with two percent more intensity every week or month over time, three years from now, what does that look like?” Be very aware of the trend line and the way it compounds. So in the case of say, YouTube titles, if you’re exaggerating two percent and people accept that and you get better results, you think you’re going to stop at two percent? Of course you’re not going to stop at two percent. Now it’s going to be four percent. And eventually you’re going to cross a line without realizing that you’ve crossed that line.

Ben Patrick: Yeah, that explains a lot. And that’s how my wife and I run our business together. She’s really much more of a business genius and thank God. But even on the integrity stuff, it’s hard to explain in a way. Okay, if I was in any country, I would want, just based on all my observations of being in business, I would want to be supporting local businesses and stuff. So we’ve got this passion for making stuff in America that really, from observing everything in this last year, and now she’s just off to the races. Just crushing it in terms of it takes calls and networking and finding people and continuing because you’re told, “No, no, can’t make this, can’t make this.”

And then you find the person who can make it. You find the factory, you find the technology that you can — if I was in Canada or if I was in China, I would feel the same way. It’s something that’s important to us. But I like your two percent thing. If we keep putting two percent more energy on that. Because when you were describing this, I was thinking, because this is something that’s on our minds a lot, and I’m thinking three years. Wow. I’m like, “Three years from now, life is going to be amazing.” I don’t know what the exact numbers will be but the amount — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it applies to the good stuff as well.

Ben Patrick: We’re breaking through all kinds of stuff that people aren’t able to make here that now we’re actually getting. And it’s so cool. You can go to the factory, see the people, see the person. Like when you blew up our wrist bar sales, for us, it makes us happier. We like it. And I like your rule. What does it look like a few years from now if we keep putting a little more? And I’m like, “That’s a life I really like.” The numbers won’t be gigantic, but they’ll be good and we’ll be super happy about it.

Tim Ferriss: And also it’s like enough is enough at some point. And what enough means will differ from person to person. But generally speaking, money’s not going to solve all the problems you think it will. And what you need to live an amazing life is much less than most people realize. And then if you cross the finish line, so to speak, with annual income or savings or some combination invested capital and low cost index funds, whatever it might be, whatever gives you the sense of sort of psychological safety, once you get close to that or you get there, which can be a lot less than you might realize. And there’s an exercise called dreamlining that if you search my name and that, you can find it, it’s costing all this stuff out. You’ll realize that the other pieces of the puzzle that are so important are not in any way addressed by money.

And you have to work on those separately. And part of the way you work on those separately is doing things that you feel good about that make you feel good about yourself. And so for instance, if part of that is making things in the US, that in and of itself can more than offset the additional cost that’s incurred compared to doing it overseas. The actual benefit, and particularly since you’re doing it with your wife, the benefit to your family collectively. And if you’re proud of that, the way you radiate that to your kids, that’s a lot, right? That’s valuable. 

Ben, so nice to spend time together. Really nice to spend time together.

Ben Patrick: As you can see, I could grill you on this whole side of things, but I appreciate it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, definitely. Where can people find you online?

Ben Patrick: Kneesovertoesguy on YouTube and Instagram are the best places where you can just go and learn everything that I know.

Tim Ferriss: Perfect. All right. We’ll link to those in the show notes. People will be able to find that. You’ll pin the video that gives people an overview of what we recorded earlier. We’ll also link to the video we did together so people can check that out because that was a lot of fun. And thanks for taking the time.

Ben Patrick: Dude. Thank you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I really appreciate it. And to everybody listening, as always, we will link to everything in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. Just search Ben Patrick, or if you want to type out Kneesovertoesguy, probably pipe — I’ll try that again. It will probably pop right up. But you can search Ben Patrick and you’ll find everything we’ve spoken about. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to you, yourself.

Ben Patrick: Nice.Tim Ferriss: Thanks for tuning in.

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Ben Patrick (KneesOverToesGuy) — 20-Minute Workouts That Produce Wild Results, From Chronic Knee Pain to Dunking Basketballs, Lessons from Charles Poliquin, Bulletproofing the Lower Body, and More (#835) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.