Ep24: Eric Fiorillo on Heavy Lifting and Stones

Eric Fiorillo shares his stories of heading to Iceland to carry the legendary Husafell stones and more, in the ultimate test of manliness. On this podcast you’ll learn:

• How to build Body Density
• Partials, Isometrics and Dead Stop Lifting
• The Importance of Carrying as an Exercise
• Why You Need to Go Heavy
• What an Average Training Session looks like for Eric
• Hip Girdle Training
• His Complete Warmup Routine
• Sipping Hercules during Workouts
• And Much More

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Eric’s Muscle and Motivation podcast where Logan is a guest every other week.

Also find more at Fiorillo Barbell Company.

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Click the link below to access the complete transcript.

[spoiler]

Logan: Welcome to The Vital Way podcast. I’m Logan Christopher and I’m actually recording a few different podcasts today. Today, my guest is Eric Fiorillo and if you guys aren’t aware, I am on his podcast, the Motivation and Muscle podcast every other week. We often talk a lot about strength. We talk about herbs. We talk about hormones a whole lot on that and we generally have quite a good time. We actually just finished up the show for his podcast and now we are doing one. I thought I’d bring him here to introduce him to you and what he’s doing in the strength world, which is really interesting because I know we have a lot of people that are interested in taking herbs in order to support their athletic performance. So thanks for joining us today, Eric.

Eric: Thanks for having me, Logan! It’s an honor to be on. It’s different. You’re in the driver’s seat. It’s like now I got to behave, kind of. It’s great to be here and like you said, we talk about a wide array of subjects. I’ll get it back right to you but we were talking about one-arm lifts today and getting into shovel. It’s just very interesting stuff and Logan and I love doing testosterone shows because we usually laugh through half of it but it’s good. But no, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Logan: Absolutely. Could you give us a bit of your background? How did you get started with the stone lifting which we’ll definitely be talking more of but really in the strength world and everything?

Eric: Sure. Well right now, I’ll just go back a little bit of what’s going on. For the last two and a half years, close to, I’ve been trying to get this company up and it looks like we’ve turned the corner, Fiorillo Barbell Company and of course Motivation and Muscle is our podcast show. I’ve been lifting for a few decades here. Well, you can trace it right back to the beginning. Obviously, Logan and I talked about on the show just a little while ago, sand weights and wooden bench. I knew I loved it, kept going. Equipment, drove over with a truck, loaded it and had it all down in the cellar. I thought my father was going to have a heart attack when we pulled up with that thing.

Guys all over here, just big camaraderie, big thing. Moved to California for a while after college. It didn’t work out. Came back to New York. Trained at a big club called the Steel Pier. It was a nationally known club in Colony near my home. Eventually, it went the way of everything else. The wrong people got in. It got to the point where they had to call the police to get us out of there. It was so bad. It was not a great way to end a perfect place that brought a lot of great memories and trained with a lot of great people.

At that point, I knew things we changing. My training partners and I split off after being together for over ten years. I had started to get in to more power rack training, the singles, the dead stop stuff. They didn’t see a lot of validity in it. It caused a lot of friction, which ended up me going solo. My one buddy, Rich, used to come up from the city a few times a year or a few times a month and we started training a lot together. He was a great big time Olympic lifter, not a big guy, strong as a bull, on and on and on.

Well, it got to the point where once the club was gone, it was time to make a decision. I decided you know, we weren’t using our one-car garage. I didn’t have a lot of money in the beginning but put a power rack in on a platform, add a thousand pounds of steel and a York Olympic bar. I started from that, progressed big time. Training alone at first, you’re like whoa. But for me I had the personality and disposition to keep going. Well, I built this place up into something you can’t even imagine. Now most people that come in are like, could you even get another piece in here? Well, it works for me and it would work for one other person. And the progression just kept going. We got into the heavy, heavy rack training, the partials, the holds, the isometric holds, all the things I love to do which build the big body density man and like we’re talking about, the ligaments and tendons.

Now we’re going to fast-forward about maybe five years and I’m reading articles in MILO by a guy named Bill Crawford and they’re talking about stones. But before I got to Bill, I saw a big thing about Steve Jeck. I have read a lot of his stuff through the years in MILO, which for anybody that doesn’t know that’s Randall Strossen’s magazine. All of a sudden, he’s talking about taking a trip to Iceland to lift the Húsafell Stone and I’m like holy cow, this is really interesting. To make a long story short, he goes there and he releases the DVD. I watched it. It took him three times. He got around the pen, which is a 418-pound volcanic stone, smooth as a baby’s butt and I got news for you, walking 50 meters with that. As we say, that will test your manliness if you can even get it off the ground. It’s that big, that slippery and there aren’t a lot of hand holds. Even when it’s dry, it’s still very talcy feeling.

Well then I’m like I’ve got to go do this. I’ve got to go lift that rock. So I go out and I start getting stones, river rocks. We’re stopping on the sides of roads out in the country where it’s got “Private property” posted and we’re pulling stones out, throwing them in my buddy’s truck and taking off because we were like we’re going to get shot out here and no one will ever find us. .So we started out with that.

Well, I decided at that point, we kind of gotten an idea of dimensions and we decided to build steel stones that mimic the Húsafell. We load them with shot and we have these plate trees on the top on each side where I can load plates on that. The reason why I did that is because let’s face it, you’re not going to be able to put mega amounts of shot in there when you’re first trying to use it and get used to it because it’s huge. It covers the whole front of me. It does a lot of damage initially to your forearms, your biceps. Everything in your body’s tested especially your wrist, the way you’ve got to curl in to carry this beast.

All of a sudden, there’s an article in 2008 and it’s an invitation to come with us to a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Iceland with Bill Crawford. So we and Randall Strossen put this thing out. There is a way to get ahold of Bill. Bill’s an MD in New Hampshire. I was like hell man, I’m going to go for it. So I called Bill up, sent him the money. The whole thing was arranged, sponsored by Toyota. We had guys from everywhere, from the UK, obviously Scotland. We had obviously Icelanders there. We had Stephy there who was in World’s Strongest Man, great guys. Peter Goodmanson is chief of police still there. He organized the whole thing. Toyota was behind us all the way.

We were road dogs, man. We went from Dritvik to Húsafell I believe in four days. We covered over 1,200 miles in those Toyota Land Rovers or Land Cruisers, whatever they call them. So we get halfway there, we go to one spot—not Leggstein, it was Latra—which had three huge stones, the Judah stone, the column stone—it was incredible—right on the ocean, literally the water come up and you could get hit by it. It was insane. We got to there. I got to the third stone, which I think it was 396 and I went to pull it. I got it up maybe to shin height and I heard, the best way to describe it would be like a paper tear. I knew it right then and there I tore my bicep. We had to go obviously to get it ministered. But I’m a big believer in you don’t leave your friends behind. I stayed with the team all the way through. They were very good to me because I was feeling pretty low at that point.

Well, we got to Húsafell and I got to tell you, Húsafell, all those three places, Leggstein, Latra, Dritvik and Húsafell, the stones are incredible. If you’re a stone-lifter or you think you want to be, go out and look those up. I’m telling you. Peter Martin and Steve Jeck wrote a book, Of Stones and I can’t remember the rest. Do you know the name of that book?

Logan: Of Stones and Strength?

Eric: Of Stones and Strength, that’s what it is. You can go in and read it. It has all those different stones in about it. If you love that stuff, I tell you, go check it out. So we go to Húsafell and obviously it’s everything like I saw in the film that Steve had put out. When you’re driving up the road, Húsafell is this very small village or town, whatever you want to call it. It’s about two and a half hours from Reykjavik which was where we stayed. You see the one-roomed steeple church. When you see the big gold cross, you know you’re there. You drive in. Snorri Bjornsson who basically built the goat pen—well, it’s a sheep pen—the history of the stone obviously is he’s milk one side, block it with the Húsafell stone, etc., go back and forth. Well, he became so proficient with this stone he could walk the 50 meters with it and more than once. It was incredible. His great, great nephew is still there. He lifts it. He’s got a hobby house built right into the mountain.

It’s just incredible. I could talk about this all day and I know we don’t have the time to do that but it’s very interesting stuff. Manliness to me is a big thing and I think this is the ultimate test. I do believe that this is the greatest manhood stone in the world. Well, we got there obviously and I couldn’t lift it but being me, I stood the thing up and wrapped my arms around it because I had to feel it and touch it and get all the power from the individuals that had touched it before me.

Now Bill who had organized this had gone in 2006 and was successful with it. He carried it around. It was beautiful. It was one round full stork or fully strong, he was there. Well, we got there and he had some trouble in Dritvik. We heard some sounds when he lifted something. He had kind of a black and blue on his bicep. Bill lifted the thing easy. He got three quarters away around and the best way I could describe it would be it sound like a shotgun going off. His bicep just blew right off, the tendon, everything. Immediately, he dropped it. Being the warrior Bill is, and it was getting black and blue at the time, he tried it. He could pick it up and go about two feet. That was it. So Bill and I, as the Icelanders said to us, we’ve got a permanent scar on our bicep for the rest of our life. At that time, I didn’t look at it as though it was like real funny but I think about it now and those guys are right because most there were two or three guys there that had blown biceps doing tire flips, whatever they’re into, commonality but not the same thing.

So I couldn’t let go of this thing. We got back and of course, that was the longest plane ride I ever had in my life. You’re coming back and obviously I could have had it fixed there but I wanted a doctor in the States to look at it. They treated me great in Iceland. The chief of police was with me the whole time. My nephew was with me so I had family. It was a nerve-wracking time for a guy who never had a major injury. The thing I was concerned about, and it’s like anybody, the first thing that goes through your head is, am I ever going to be able to lift again? I know that sounds insane to people listening but most guys and gals that I’ve talked to say the same thing. You don’t know where you’re going to be. Logan and I talk about what’s going on in your head all the time and this can definitely affect you for the rest of your life. Logan, if you want to ask me questions, I’m just going to try to peel through this as quickly as I can. I don’t want to hold you off.

Logan: Yeah, I’ve got some things but if you’re on a roll why not bring it up to current day?

Eric: Well, I guess I’ll bring it up to today. Yeah, it won’t take long. I’ll make it quick because I know that you got stuff to ask. To make a long story short, I had it fixed. I went in 2011, lifted it. We were in a storm though that we could have got killed in Iceland weather. Icelandic weather changes. You could snap your fingers and go from over 3,000 feet up with snowcapped mountains to being in the dark within like two minutes. We had elements of rain, hail and sleet, and everything you can imagine, freezing rain coming down at us where we had to take our equipment, cover it and dump it in the rocks. And it was making noises where the gentleman that was with me is like, we should get out of here; something could happen.

I said to Dennis, go ahead in the car. I said if I get struck by something, you can bury me here. I was so committed to this, okay? Literally, and I was like I’m not leaving here without at least not lifting this thing because I knew I couldn’t walk with it. There was no way. You could barely hold it at that point. I couldn’t even see in front of me. You’d have to look at the sheep pen. It’s not pretty, concrete or blocked off. You fall on that with this stuff and you’re a dead man. I lifted it, stood up with it, take a step or two and dropped it. The best way to describe the weather there at one point, I had a flannel shirt on. Of course, the back of the collar was open a little bit. Just think of somebody sticking a garden hose full blast down your neck. That’s how it was and that’s no exaggeration.

So let’s fast-forward it right now. I’ve been training on and off for the last four years. I’ve got a little bit of tweaking right now but with all the high expectations. 2015, we’ll be back I hope no later than in October. We’re going to finally put this beast to rest. We’re going to pick that up, get around the pen and thank a lot of people and throw my arms up in victory because it’s been a long haul. There’s been a lot of stuff back and forth with the business that I’ve not been able currency-wise to get over there because it’s quite an expensive trip. But I never lost faith that we wouldn’t get there and I loved the sport. I love Húsafell and that stone. I love Iceland. Unless an act of God kills me, hopefully we’re going to be there this year.

Logan: Excellent. I definitely have a lot of questions I think listeners will be interested in. Stone-lifting, you described Húsafell, it’s the ultimate test of manliness but I imagine a lot of people listening have not thought about or ever tried stone lifting before. What would you say are some of the biggest benefits that comes from doing this?

Eric: Well, I think one of the biggest benefits I’ve learned right now, Logan, is this – I wish I knew about carrying that I know right now than when I started weightlifting and I’ll tell you why. The carrying is unbelievable. I’m a big believer now and I never was a guy that did just arms or whatever. You would do it obviously because it’s good to strengthen them but I was always a big believer in working the body from top to bottom. I don’t think there’s anything out there that I’ve ever tried that test you from top to bottom. Obviously, working various degrees of the stone.

Look, we have a setup which I think is one of the best things I ever came up with. I’m sure other guys and gals do it. I’ve never seen it. We go out and buy barrels. We can go to any place that sells barrels. It’s like a big port here in Albany where it’s all shipping and stuff. We go out and buy these big, huge, plastic barrels and we can take and set these up at multiple footages. So I’ve got 95 feet in my driveway. I’ll pull the thing. Right now it won’t come off the ground yet because I want to save the lower back. Let’s say we pull it 6 to 12 inches off of some type of platform. Here we go, lock it in. We might go down 25 feet, dump it on the barrel, add plates to it, go down the rest of the way or say another 25 and then finish it off with 45 to 50. Obviously, we’re coming back like that and what I found like that it’s a great way to build endurance, man.

Not only that—I sent this to you before I think on our past show—the forearms and the biceps especially and the wrist take a hell of a beating and I mean hard, too. You’ve got to toughen up. For anybody to say wow, you’re a pussy cat because you can’t take a 250 pound stone and walk it 95 feet, well, I probably could but see I’m a little bit smarter I think at times than some people. I think it’s a good way to break in. It’s a good way to really load stuff. I might only set a barrel at 10 feet but I’ll load that thing to 440 pounds and go down to 10 feet. You don’t realize what a confidence builder that is and how you just want to just chew the stone in half.

I would say carrying out of everything is probably the most beneficial thing. So anybody that wants to start and is interested, obviously get some small stones. Learn the proper technique of pulling the stone, bear-hugging the stone. Learn your breathing because it puts a lot of pressure on your chest and obviously your heart is there, your ribcage. There’s a lot of things that go into doing this. It’s just not trying to brutalize up a stone because you’re only going to go so far with that. You’ve got to learn how to sometimes tilt it, etc. So the answer to your question would be carrying would probably be the best thing and the transference obviously to everything else with it.

Logan: Excellent. I agree completely. Asking these questions, I could go off on it my own but I definitely want to get—

Eric: Well, go ahead.

Logan: Now my next question, you mentioned doing the sort of the split with your training partners. You went more into doing partials and isometrics and kind of like the stone lifting. These aren’t things that aren’t done conventionally in fitness. You mentioned building the body density, which I like that term, but also the tendon and ligament strength. Could you go into a little bit more detail about the benefits you’ve gotten from those?

Eric: Sure. There have been a few people that I’ve had some definite, very positive influence on me through the years training. It all started probably with Doug Hepburn. I’m a big fan of his. He’s a Canadian strong man. He had a lot of limitations, club foot, one leg was shorter than the other and I do believe he was cross-eyed, too. This man fought an awful lot of things. Like a lot of the guys and gals in our sport, they’re incredible athletes. They’ve had things happen to them and they rose above it through physicality and I love that.

When I read his stuff, it wasn’t so much the iso holds but it was the varying heights of training in a power rack. Now for any of you folks that don’t have training partners, let’s face it – safety is paramount. I knew that and I knew stuff that I was handling if I couldn’t come up with it or push it off me, there’s a very good chance you could die or get maimed for life. Well, when I did buy that article and dinosaur training was out there, there’s a lot about partials and singles and of course Bud Jeffries was big in the early ‘90s with the thousand-pound squat, there were just different things that I was looking at and I kind of took a lot of different things in my own formula and set it up. I started doing strip power rack training. Not knowing a lot about it but having the ability to figure it out and read things, I ended up implementing a ton of stuff, whether it would be low, medium or high squats.

But here’s the clicker to everything – I was no longer doing rebound lifts. I was doing everything dead stop. It didn’t matter if it was standing pressing, floor bench pressing—I call it the floor press like everybody—obviously the dead stop squat. We all know we pull from the floor with the dead lift but I wasn’t pulling in the areas I really wanted to pull in which might be mid-shin, right under the knee and I would lift mid-thigh.

I found by doing this I became extremely strong and I’ll tell you what – I would do things where I do reps in the rack like Paul Anderson would do. These people would say well, you don’t get any endurance. Bullshit, you don’t. I’ll tell you right now. Take the 350 pounds dead stop squat and I’m talking right at the bottom position and do 25 reps with it and see if you can even make 25. If you want to build serious strength-endurance, endurance-strength, I think the rack is insane. I knew I was thickening stuff up. I was building this muscle density and of course that’s diet, too. I’m a big believer, I drink a lot of raw milk. I still do. There’s a certain protein powder I like to use that I know works and I do mix cream. I’m a big fats guy, coconut milk, things of are at nature. Well, when you put this whole puzzle together I was gaining size, speed and power like I never did before and I was like, guess what? I just hit upon something.

The thing I always meet up with is you might have somebody come and want to do it but they don’t last long because it is a deliberate body beating. Just think about going into a ring and getting your ass beat for 15 rounds. But there’s a good thing with this strand that works through this that I love. Logan and I talk about this all the time and I’ve got to just say it quick before we go back. It’s the mental thing with these stuff. If you aren’t mentally charged and mentally set up you will not be able to do power rack training. You will fail miserably. I would never tell anybody not to try it but this is something that’s so intense and so direct, not only mentally and physically. You’ve got to be able to go in there and just rip at it every time. You’re going to have times where you fail. I do, too. But the idea is you got to be able to come back all the time.

Logan: And it’s just plain fun to lift some heavy weights.

Eric: It is. Look, there’s nothing like a feeling you know that you get into things, you know you plot them out and you’re like maybe this is going to take me three months or six months but you’ve already seen the final result in your mind’s eye. You’re right. It’s such great satisfaction to be able to carry something now. And not only that, like you said, something heavy, man. Nothing feels better than heavy, whether it’s in your hand or on your shoulders or you’re doing some big heavy neck work or you do some amazing stuff with kettlebells. All I can say is this: if you haven’t done it, man, go out and try it. Go. Eat it up, right? Seriously.

Logan: Yup, absolutely. I have a question and we haven’t talked about this before but you mentioned going from training partners to training alone. Do you like one of those more than the other? What do you see is some of the benefits? This is something I’ve written about a bit myself, a little bit of different benefits with being with a partner versus training alone. I think they’re both good. What are your thoughts on that?

Eric: The guys I was with, one was my brother and one was a guy who was just like a brother. It got to the point, Logan, where there were starting to become way too much divides. I was starting to float off more and more. I was going in once a week. If my buddy, Richie, came up, we’d be training on Saturday in the rack. I just think we outgrew each other. Did I miss him? Absolutely. I lost them as friends, too, for over ten years. That was not easy for me, especially your own brother. But Joe was just as much a brother to me as my brother, Mark. That was the worst thing to have to do. We’d see each other sometimes and we wouldn’t even speak to each other. These are people that I’ve been around for 12, 13 years of my life, man. It was like suddenly that big void was there.

But here’s the thing, I’ve trained with a lot of people. I think I’m more of a lone wolf trainer now and I’ll tell you why. I have everything here at the house where I train people and obviously myself. I like one big thing. I can go out anytime I want and train, though I do keep myself on a schedule as much as possible. But sometimes things come up. If I had a gym, I’d have to travel, etc. But number two, what I found with training alone and at first it’s not easy, man. When you’ve been used to being around people for 10 years, it’s a big eye opener. You might have a few doubts and a few questions but I just think that it had to happen with me. It lent to me as a person.

I’ll tell you right now, if I hadn’t made that move, you and I probably wouldn’t even be talking right now and because one thing just led to another to another to another. What I liked about it is I got real creative. I’ve created a lot of equipment. I’m creating another piece that we’re going to be prototyping soon. So it just seems like it was the right thing to do. And not only that, you know from doing this stuff you don’t really get a lot of takers that want to come over and grind out dead stop stuff, lift stones, flip tires and sling sledgehammers and all that. So for me going out on my own was the best thing I ever did, period.

Logan: Oh, good to hear. Yeah, I’d say I’m more of an alone lifter, too, but still from time to time I go train with people.

Eric: Oh yeah. I do too. It’s nice but you know what? Did you ever notice you’ve got to have somebody really good with you when you train with somebody, especially when you’re alone? You’ve got to build a rhythm with that person. It’s like my brother-in-law comes over, he and another friend of mine at times come over, but with my brother-in-law, he was a semi-pro football, he’s a teacher and a coach for varsity football, the head coach. Dan and I have always had a good rapport. He can train still heavy even though he’s got five kids and his ass is so low all the time. He comes over though and he and I just are able to click. It’s like we load this, bang. It’s like get back into it, here we go. We push each other in a way that is a very positive way we do things but it’s also a way to really motivate you even more. I like that because sometimes training alone, it would be nice to have somebody say I’m going to kick you in the butt to really get you moving tonight. At times, I do miss that at times. But I like the idea of it has fallen on me, it’s my responsibility and I make or break it and that’s it.

Logan: Yup, absolutely. I know every training session is a little bit different. It depends on what you’re focusing but could you give an idea of what sort? If we were to pick an average training session or just a recent workout, could you sort of spell that out a little bit step-by-step to give people an idea?

Eric: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll give you the last one I did the other night. I warmed up. I do a series of bodyweight movements that we have out. First thing is I do a squat pull up. The bar is about at chin height in the power rack. I use a straight bar. Basically, your palms are going to be facing at you and I go down into a squat and I use the arms and legs to pull me right back up to the bar. I’ll do multiple sets of 50 with that. Then I go to a thing, it’s called a long strength good morning. Picture yourself doing a good morning but you’re not holding the bar behind your neck. You’re on to something. You can use dip bars if they’re low enough and you’re going to hold on to either side with your hands. Basically, you’re going to kind of get in a crouch position and you’re going to bring your torque from your navel up to your head and basically you’ll be parallel. You’ll come back up, repeat, repeat and repeat. I do multiples of 50s of that.

Then I take anywhere from 3 pound to 10 pound heavy hands, which I’m a big fan of those. I think Leonard Schwartz in the ‘80s and early ‘90s hit it right on the head. I go up and down the driveway multiple rounds, usually five round and all I do with them is I have them going over my heart because they found that the skiing not only produced the best as far as heart rate working, your whole body head to toe, but they found that you had the most oxygenation in the blood when you were doing it like that. Why I do these, I got that not only from him but John McKean who’s an all-around lifter. He used to write for Hardgainer. He’s a great guy. Well, he’s like 65 now. He had written a lot of articles. I adopted a lot of it and I’ve talked to him multiple times about it. That’s my warm up. The thing I like about it is when you’re so fired up for about 20 minutes, you’ll come in and want to chew the bar in half.

After I did that, I’ve been using the trap bar for my deadlifting, mainly because of bicep issues. Supination, for anybody out there, is really a good way to go. It really protects the bicep. After the warm up, I set up with that. I did initially 200 for 3 reps and I successfully went up to—let me see—from 320 for a single, 400 for a single, 450 for a single, 500 for 2 singles and I was done with that. After that, I’m a big believer in the old York iron boots. For anybody that doesn’t know what they are, you type in “iron boots.” You can go out to Atomic Athletic. He sells them. They’re all over the place. They are a great shoe to do anything with and that’s what they used to call them, a sandal.

Basically, the whole thing with these are they’re 7 pounds apiece and if you get very good with them like John Grimek did, you can put a one-inch bar between them and you can load plates on these things. They’re insane. You go in there, you put your foot in. Obviously, there are these bands so to speak where you run them through. Tighten them up in the front. Tighten them up in the back so they don’t come off. I did 5 sets of 10 with the leg curl, which would mainly hit the hamstring real hard.

From there, I went in and I did calf raises. Now I have a calf machine from Nebula when Roger worked there that has a 3 to 1 drag. So anything you put on there, like I do, you put 90 pounds on you’ve got a 270-pound machine. When Steve was here, he was like no way. I was like yeah way. Well, he did it and he was like holy god. He calls me the next day and says, “I can’t even walk today.” He did his traps on there because he was a big trap guy, right?

Last night, I went—let me think—I did 270 which would be two plates for 3 sets of 5. That’s all I did on that. I did them real slow. I cranked – the feet were straight, the feet were out and the feet were in. I felt that I had enough on my lower structure there and basically they just blew up like balloons. From there, I did some neck work. I went a 25-, 35- and 45-pound plate and I did those for 1 set of 10 each. What I did is I laid on a flat bench, hung my neck off. You can use a towel or whatever. I don’t use a towel. I use deep dish plates for those so you can grab onto them good. I lay that right in the center of your forehead. Your head is in a down position. You want to curl your head up. I hold it for like 1, 2 and go back down. So I went a 25 for 10, a 35 for 10 and a 45 for 10.

Then basically I like doing hip work. I failed to mention after I did the reverse curl, I did iron boots. I hold onto my big tire against the wall and I like to take my legs and bring them up as high as I can on the sides so I’m working the hips. Very important. I feel you should thicken your hips up and the hip girdle because my belief is always that you drive much harder like that. So I did that on. Obviously then the last exercise I did after the calf work, I pulled out my grip machine. I hadn’t done that in a while because of the shoulder and bicep. I started out with 100 for 5. I went to 140 for 5 then I went to 180 for 5 and I called it a night. That was the workout I did two nights ago, Logan.

Logan: About how long does that all take?

Eric: I think it was about an hour and five. I try to barium a lot less but here’s the deal: the loading and the de-loading of the bars, especially when I’ve got that out at the driveway, that takes some time to do that. If I had to guess, I bet the workout was probably maybe 48 minutes but the rest is stuff is loading and unloading. In my garage, I don’t have the luxury of spread out all over. I might have to move three benches to get at one bar. And I like it. I’ll tell you what. I think it’s a good thing to build strength. It can be a real pain in the butt but it works for me and I kind of do things like that purposely just to kind of test me a little bit. That’s all. That was it.

Logan: Absolutely. I got one final question for you here. Superman Herbs is sponsoring you for your upcoming trip to Iceland and I know we sent you a lot of things and you’ve been kind of one of our testers on some new formulas but what are your favorite herbs and formulas that you’ve had so far?

Eric: Well, the tongkat ali, you can’t beat that. Pine pollen is super. I like the brand new formula used in Hercules II. I put more than one tablespoon in that, too, before I go out to lift. I don’t know if you’ve done this, I haven’t told Cloud this but I’ll tell you this. I do sip it sometimes when I’m training. I’ve found good things with that. I use the Titan. The one I want—I haven’t opened this up but I’m very excited about using—I hope I say this right—the he shou wu?

Logan: He shou wu.

Eric: Okay, I’ve read things with that. What can I say? Obviously I’m using it for this injury. Let me put it to you this way: if you want testosterone and you want to bring your estrogens down, obviously the mega dose of the pine pollen is going to be the big—if I remember but I don’t remember how big that was but that comes in a very big container. I would definitely do that. I sent a guy to you a couple of weeks ago that’s taking it now because he was very worried about estrogen. I like the tincture. I’ve used the tincture on many occasions. I probably overdo it but I like using that.

There’s nothing I have taken here that isn’t good. The problem I’ve had with me, and we’ve talked about this, is I like using like all different ones all day. You and I got into talking one time well, maybe let’s take one for a certain amount of time. Yeah, I do it but then I’m like I want to use more of this stuff. It’s not that we’re using coffee all the time you know or grapefruit juice. I’m just dumping in stuff on. In the morning, I’ll dump like—it depends—the tongkat ali no matter what. I know you should rest a couple of days on it. I’ve been using this stuff. I’ll tell you one thing guys out there: if you start using that stuff a lot, I hope you got a girlfriend or you got a wife because the stuff is absolutely incredible.

But one product I like that you got me really into, I love the Spartan formula. We’re all under, I really hate saying that word “stress” because I think it’s just used way too much but I’m under a lot of stuff right now with the business and getting ready to go away. It’s like everybody. You stumble. You fall. You have all kinds of stuff going on. I’ll tell you what. I would go with that formula and I take a lot of that, too. I’m not going to BS anybody. I probably take more than you’re supposed to but that doesn’t really matter to me because I’m not having any repercussions from this stuff.

I’ve been telling anybody out there that’ll listen hey, you got to try this stuff because one thing I like about it because well, I know where it’s coming from, number one. But number two, if you’ve been paying attention out there, they’re banning everything. Whether you believe in pro-hormones or not or you get involved, you don’t want to be doing illegal things. I’m not condoning that at all but we also know now it’s not so much getting caught with them. You get caught with any type of needles or anything, especially New York State where I am you can go get locked up for a lot of years for that. I just don’t think that is worth it when you can get high quality herbs like this.

You know that Logan is always coming out with something new or they’re working on something in the literature. That’s one thing I like. I like going out and reading stuff on his site just to get refreshed with it. I just think anybody that’s really serious about weight training and wants to get stuff that’s going to recover them. You’ve got injuries. Obviously, testosterone is extremely high. We’ve talked about testosterone and growth hormone on the show. These are all the ingredients you need and he’s got everything. Like I said, I always cap it off with the Spartan formula because everything in there obviously is when you’ve gone to the limit or your mind is just junked up, as they say. And that’s all I can say. Logan, I can answer anything else but you know.

Logan: Well, it sounds like we paid you for that. Well, we are sponsoring Eric so we have been sending him lots of herbs. It’s good that you are putting them to good use.

Eric: Well, I would tell anybody, seriously with that Hercules. I didn’t tell this to you today because I wanted to see what was going on. I find like tons of fire, man. It’s like as we proceed and everything heals, we’re going to be doing a lot of video obviously and obviously you’ll be mentioned in all that stuff. I mention you on the show plenty of times because of the appreciation I have for all you’ve done for me. Anybody I know I try to get them to go to your website and send them to you but I’m not doing it because you’re doing me a favor. If I didn’t believe in this stuff, I would just say Logan, I don’t need you to send me anything anymore.

Because the whole idea of this is you’ve got a hell of a product out there and the way things are going now you fill a big void for people. I’m not getting paid for this. I’m just telling everybody that this is what I’ve experienced with these gentlemen and anything they sent me is top quality. It’s all sealed. You open it up, you seal the packet and then the packet it’s in has got a way to seal itself so it can’t go bad. You know what I want to ask you just quick and I know we got time right now. I’ve always wondered this – could you refrigerate this stuff? I’m not talking about shelf life either. Would that give any type of boost rather than keeping it in my cabinets or not?

Logan: No, it really wouldn’t make a difference. The important thing is keeping it away from light, heat and air so yeah, resealing it is going to be very important.

Eric: Does that answer you?

Logan: Yup, that’s good. So I would highly suggest people to check out the Motivation and Muscle podcast. You can go to MotivationAndMuscle.com. Is there anyone else you want to send people?

Eric: Well, they can go out to FiorilloBarbellCo but like I told you guys today in the show, you’re going to see big changes in the site. There’s big stuff happening and we hope that Logan and some others are going to be a big part of it down the road because as Eric Guttman says, and I think he’s right on the money, he’s a guy that wants to build relationships and he hopes they last at least 25 years or more. Logan, I hope that you and I are affiliated for a long time and I thank you for being on the show. I really appreciate it. I mean that when I say it’s an honor. I thank you for your support and everything because we’ve been going through some rocky times, let me put it to you that way. Well, we’ve already succeeded as far as I’m concerned.

Logan: Excellent. Well, I think that’s going to do it for us today and I’ll have links to everything in the show notes and details and the transcript will be coming and all that. If you enjoyed this podcast, if you guys listening have any suggestions for people you’d like to be on the show, I’m definitely open to hearing that. As always, leaving a review on iTunes is much appreciated. Thanks everyone for listening.

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