Today’s guest is Richard Aceves. Richard is an innovative movement specialist with a diverse athletic background. After a mountaineering near death experience at an early age, he worked his way back to health and training capacity, eventually working towards becoming an elite powerlifter, professional GRID athlete, and has experience in a variety of strength and movement practices. Richard is a coach, mentor, education and pioneer in the world of movement in context of the human experience.
There are always going to be pendulum swings in any profession, and sport performance is no exception. On the level of conditioning, success in sport is more about skill, tactics, speed, confidence than the adaptation acquired from grinding out tough conditioning sessions. At the same time, there is a mental, physical and emotional gold that can be found, when the body is pushed to its limits. Using physical exploration and stressors with purpose can provide a far fuller and more rewarding experience to each individual, allowing them to level up in new ways that go beyond sport, into life itself.
On today’s podcast, Richard covers his near-death experience and injury that kickstarted his journey into the inner aspects of human performance. Throughout the episode, Richard covers the physical, mention and emotional aspects of training, and how training can be modulated to address each of these important elements of both athletic ability, and our human experience. Richard goes into his warmup process, and breaks down the dynamics of a “good” and “poor” conditioning session, and how to better facilitate the conditioning process. Being able to get into the “present-minded” state is one of the most important elements in both training, and in life, and Richard goes into this concept heavily in this episode.
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Timestamps and Main Points
3:25 – What sparked Richard’s journey in mental and emotional states of training
12:28 – How the mental and emotional elements of coaching make it far more than regurgitating information
17:06 – The importance of specific mental emotional preparation to meet the demands of one’s sport
27:23 – Richard’s take on the survivor ability of the human body, and how he views the purpose of the warmup
35:48 – How mental state impacts one’s learning and adaptation in training
44:11 – Defining the physical, mental, and emotional elements of training
52:03 – Physical, mental and emotional components that go into the warmup process, as well as in more skilled sport movement, and Richard’s take on why pickup basketball is such a fantastic warmup process
1:02:08 – A practical example and explanation of how Richard takes his group through a training session, as well as the applications of music Richard will take on for the session based on the training type
1:14:44 – Links between muscles and related emotional states within muscles
1:24:00 – How Richard uses timers or songs to help keep pace in his training sessions
1:28:18 – What Richard considers to be good vs. excessive and poor conditioning
Richard Aceves Quotes
“We all understand that your best performances are when aligned emotionally”
“We cannot pretend that performance at any matter, is a purely physical standpoint, it is mental, but it’s not mental only; the emotional component is the communication between the physical and the mental in order to have the emotional expression”
“All training needs to have a combination of physical, mental and emotional stimulus”
“You cannot perform at your top percentile, without safety and confidence”
“When you put people through training sessions, how much is being done by the athlete, versus being “survived” by the athlete”
“Athletes want to show you that they can complete any task possible, they are amazing at surviving anything”
“I’m trying to get awareness and blood-flow into these muscles, higher neural connections to these muscles… and then we can apply it to the skill”
“For me, the exercise is the byproduct, the center part is the stimulus”
“In order to achieve the proper stimulus, you need to be connected to that person”
“We have this hierarchy of the nervous system, where you stop trying to be creative at your sport, and are only focusing on objective means, then you are no longer getting better”
“You do need some data point, but that needs to be balanced out with intuition, with presence, curiosity and creativity”
“For (physical training elements) I will always select low skill exercises, such as sleds, because the mind will always quit before the body. If I use a low skill exercise, I can push the intensity, and you’ll quit, and I’ll ask, why did you quit?”
“You’ll understand you are having a great emotional workout when you are just flowing”
“If you are analyzing, you aren’t acting, just act, just let the body do its thing”
“I love random variables in warmups… for me warmup songs are amazing, take any song that has a repetitive phrase, and start to listen to it, and hold an isometric, and whenever it said a word, do a concentric rep.. it forces you to stay present”
“Isometrics force an extreme intensity that you’ll never fail, you’ll always quit”
“So what’s going to quit, the mind, because it can’t tolerate the intensity that the muscles are creating in that isometric contraction, so you start to quit, so that is exposure therapy for the neural output to get higher, and for the muscle quality to get better and transfer to other skills”
“The warmup should be socialization, and the second one is being active and present while providing high amount of blood-flow to the bigger structural muscles, if we can have higher dosages of blood-flow to the bigger structural muscles, the body will feel much safer to go to the end ranges”
“When I’m doing skill set type workouts, I’ll use more binaural beats focus, and you’ll see people won’t realize there is music on, but they’ll be better at adapting to coordination skillsets”
“When you are trying to find things to do to prolong doing the task, you are surviving the situation, not thriving in the situation”
“I like to first, and foremost connect to the psoas major, and then I like going to the pecs.. the pecs bring joy and pride to self. The lats are part of the conference between the ego and the superego”
“One of my rules is, “we don’t stop breathing, we don’t stop moving””
“If you are constantly breathing and truly connecting to the bigger efferent muscles, you are going to notice a change in your perception of the environment around you”
“If you are doing (conditioning) for someone else, and it’s not for you, then it’s too much conditioning”
“It’s not about punishing your body, it’s about expressing the amount of work it can do, because you want to do it, and that changes the entire perspective on how much is too much”
“Are you going hunting, or being hunted, in your conditioning?… you start to condition this non-mental, non-emotional part of physical training, outside of the sport, which is for a very small percentage needed, but we start to lose that regulation side hunting side, that excitement of it, it becomes “tell me what to do and I’ll do it” and now you are passively hoping that this is going to help you”
Show Notes
Swami Body Awareness Session
About Richard Aceves
Richard Aceves is an innovative movement specialist with a diverse athletic background. After a mountaineering near death experience at an early age, he worked his way back to health and training capacity, eventually working towards becoming an elite powerlifter, professional GRID athlete, and attempting to get his pro card for Strongman.
Richard is a former gym owner, and pioneer in the world of movement in context of the human experience. Connecting the mind and body together in training, Richard explores and prioritizes the understanding of the physical, mental and emotional components of the training process. Richard runs a number of movement workshops and retreats, and is a sought after speaker and trainer.
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