[00:00:50] Mark Divine: Thanks so much for joining me on the Mark Divine show brothers. Good to have you here. Oh yeah, 

[00:00:54] Morris Brossette: Absolutely. My pleasure, man. My pleasure. 

[00:00:57] Mark Divine: Yeah. How you been, man?

[00:00:57] Mark Divine: You’re looking strong. 

[00:00:59] Morris Brossette: Do well. Yeah. Everything’s going well. Training’s going good. Mindset’s good. Yeah. Just, it’s, it’s been interesting because This has been the first really year, year and a half that I haven’t had a season of competitions to train for. Oh, is that right? Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:01:13] Mark Divine: Have you retired from that kind of phase of your life?

[00:01:16] Morris Brossette: Not yet. No, I still have a lot of things I want to do. I’m actually going to, it’s not for me, but I’m, I’ve got a client that I’m working with right now that wants to do rim to rim to rim in October. So I’m working towards, I’ll be doing that with him, but it’s going to be a really slow pace. But for me, the third 

[00:01:31] Mark Divine: rim, isn’t it just rim to rim?

[00:01:34] Morris Brossette: Yeah, but then you come back and you do it again. So you go from one rim to the other rim, then back to the other rim. So 

[00:01:40] Mark Divine: are you serious? Oof. 

[00:01:42] Morris Brossette: Yeah. That’s like what, how many miles is that? Uh, it’s 50 miles or just under 50 miles. But it’s the elevation. Yeah. The elevation changes is pretty significant. So yeah.

[00:01:53] Morris Brossette: Interesting. Yeah. And then my, I’ve been, I was in tactical sports for the last four years. So I really want to get back into competing in the tactical games next year. So that’s kind of, that’ll be my focus. 

[00:02:04] Mark Divine: Fascinating. So you’re all about performance. You’re the chief performance officer over at brute force.

[00:02:10] Mark Divine: Tell us about your view of what performances, what does it mean, you know, to attain either peak or optimal performance/

[00:02:15] Morris Brossette: for me and with, with what I’ve done in my endurance career over the last 24 years and working with different individuals, various people in various abilities in sport, my motto is, and it’s the shirt I’m wearing is to stay ready and I want to be able to be ready for whatever event or whatever life event happens at any point in time. So to be an optimal performance is really, you know, it’s a holistic approach. You have to make sure that your stress is managed. You have to make sure that your sleep is intact, that you’re hydrated, that you’re eating properly, that your movement is dialed in. What does that mean?

[00:03:56] Morris Brossette: That means are you focused on one thing, maybe strength? Are you focused on power? Are you focused on endurance or are you integrating all of those into a smart program that includes mobility so that, you know, if like for me, the way I train my body is that, you know, if someone says, Hey, Mo, do you want to come do, you know, this, this 50 mile ultra next week?

[00:04:16] Morris Brossette: I can say, yes, I can, and I can go do that. Or if it’s something that requires me to pick up a heavy load and do housework or something like that, I’m ready for that too. So in my mind, peak and optimal performance is really being ready for whatever life throws at you. 

[00:04:31] Mark Divine: Yeah. I love that very much aligned with the seal fit philosophy.

[00:04:34] Mark Divine: In fact, to see you, you know, just jump into the Kikoro event and just thrive in it, you know, as a testament to that hybrid multidimensional training that you do. And I think everybody would benefit from that. It’s so important to, you know, leave no stone unturned. Unturned I think one of the things this will lead to my question One of the things that prevents people from doing is they think it requires all these specialized skills, but that’s not true, right?

[00:04:59] Mark Divine: What’s your perspective on because from seal fit perspective? 

[00:05:02] Morris Brossette: It’s actually pretty simple. Listen, if you’re going to do something like an iron man, yes, then you need to be focused on your swim Your bike and your run that’s another story. But even with that, you know, you still have to implement it the foundations of strength of power of endurance of mobility.

[00:05:19] Morris Brossette: So like for me, when I was training for Kokoro, I just, I trained my system the way I would for anything else. And that enabled me to physically be ready for whatever happened. But along with that, you, you know, this, I mean, you created the program, like when you do things like that, that are designed for you to fail to see how you mentally show up, that’s where the test happens.

[00:05:39] Morris Brossette: You know, when I used to race Ironman and I coached Ironman for a decade, and I still coach people to do Ironmans, you know, you could be the fittest human out there, but if your mental game is not strong and something goes awry that you didn’t pre plan for, that can really ruin the whole day. And I’ve watched that happen with clients.

[00:05:55] Morris Brossette: Not my clients, but I’ve seen other people’s clients. So like, for example, one of the things I would do when it would come to, to training for that race is I would start with my client about four to six weeks prior and say, okay, I want you to go from the time you wake up until the time you cross the finish line, everything that could go wrong with your swim, your bike and your run.

[00:06:11] Morris Brossette: And then I want to mentally figure out a way to overcome that thing. So that way, if, and when it happens. You already know how to do it. So, you know, training mind and body is critical. Just always. 

[00:06:22] Mark Divine: We used to do that in the SEAL teams, obviously you visualize success, but you also have to visualize the potential, you know, obstacles and, and have the contingency plans ready.

[00:06:31] Mark Divine: And it’s not just like writing them down in paper or noting what they are. Like you, you practice them in your mind. So athletes can do the same thing. You’re hitting on probably a key point, like the number one thing in performance, whether both an opportunity and a limitation is mindset, right? It’s always mindset.

[00:06:47] Mark Divine: What are the key ways to train mindset from your perspective? 

[00:06:50] Morris Brossette: It’s a daily practice, you know, with me, with regard to just life. I work on my language reframing in the mindset of can’t versus can. You know, we, we tend to think in absolutes. We’ve been taught to think in absolutes, like nevers and always.

[00:07:05] Morris Brossette: Cause 

[00:07:05] Mark Divine: language is dualistic, right? Up versus down, left versus right. 

[00:07:09] Morris Brossette: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But yeah, before I. I moved to Colorado and took over brute force, uh, helped run a foundation in Dallas and we worked with critically injured veterans and civilians. And you can imagine someone that has experienced a traumatic event and say they’re in a wheelchair, they, you know, they’ve lost the ability to use their legs or they’ve lost a leg or they’ve lost both legs.

[00:07:28] Morris Brossette: And a doctor or quote expert will say, you’ll never walk again. This will always be your life. And then that mindset sinks in of, I can’t. 

[00:07:35] Mark Divine: Yeah. The medical system 

[00:07:36] Morris Brossette: is going to immediately say you can’t do this. Right. In our mind is like, why not? You know, so let’s try this. Let’s see what can happen. So the mindset of reframing from can’t to can of, Hey Moe, I can’t walk.

[00:07:49] Morris Brossette: I’m in a wheelchair. Okay. Well, what can you do? Can you take a step? Not yet. Okay. Can you lift your leg? Yes. Okay. Then we’re gonna start with that. Can you hold a plank position on your knees out of your chair? Yes, I can. Okay. We’re gonna start with that in the mindset game. When you start to focus on the cans instead of the can’ts, everything begins to shift and you learn to create new ways to accomplish your goal.

[00:08:12] Morris Brossette: It goes a sport. It goes with relationship. It goes with work and any type of performance. But really eliminating in mindset, eliminating the can’ts, eliminating the word never. And even for me, I do this and I’ve taught people to eliminate the phrase. I have to, because when you think about the word, I have to, when we were children, we were being programmed between the ages of three and seven.

[00:08:34] Morris Brossette: You have to do all the things you really want to do. Like you have to be good. You have to go to bed. You have to do your homework. You have to eat your vegetables. Conversely, you get to do the fun things. You get to go to recess. You get to save. So reframing like even the stuff like I have to go to the store today.

[00:08:48] Morris Brossette: No, I get to go to the store. I have to go through this process. No, I get to go through this process. So when you can cultivate that mindset in your daily life, when it comes to A sporting event or something like a Koro or something like a really hard presentation where you might be freaking out because you’re about to get on stage in front of a bunch of people or have this really big presentation.

[00:09:08] Morris Brossette: You cultivate the mindset of get to and I can and that shifts everything in your system. I love that. 

[00:09:14] Mark Divine: I have to eliminate the word never from my language.

[00:09:20] Mark Divine: I get to exactly, oh man, you know what? One of the big things when people hear this, they’re like, yeah, yeah, I get it. I get it. But then they’re bombarded with stress and they haven’t developed, you know, the capacity to handle stress. So what’s your antidote, right? For helping people kind of get out of hyper arousal so they can then get in charge of their mind and work on their dialogue.

[00:09:43] Morris Brossette: So the first is breath. Breath is key. If you can start with breath, and when I teach people about this, when I speak about mindset and breath work, you know, the very first thing you ever did, the last thing you will ever do in your life is take a deep breath. So if you can pay attention to it and put some intention in the middle, then life starts to work better for you.

[00:10:01] Morris Brossette: So starting your day, as soon as you wake up, I don’t have time is not an excuse. You could set your alarm for 10 minutes earlier. You can take 10 breaths. You can do five minutes of box breathing of the tactical breathing that you teach that we all know that will reduce your cortisol levels that will reduce you from being in what’s known as a beta sympathetic high fight or flight nervous system state into an alpha nervous system state where you’re calm and relaxed.

[00:10:25] Morris Brossette: And that’s where things can happen. So the breath is the key. Component to this entire process and then once you do the breath work, what I do, like when I’ve worked with people, I will literally have them set an alarm on their phone once an hour all day long. It simply reads breathe. So wherever you are, whatever’s going on, you don’t have to stop.

[00:10:41] Morris Brossette: Just put attention into taking 10 diaphragmatic box breaths and watch how your arousal starts to drop down. And then when it comes to that mindset of being stressed out, yeah. Man, recognize it. You know, I’m 49 years old, and if I started this journey, if I started working with you, like, Mo, you got to really get your stress in check.

[00:11:01] Morris Brossette: Okay, well, I’ve got to unwind. Let’s call it 46, 45 years of ways of thinking. Yeah. So it’s not going to happen overnight. And what I’ve found in coaching people with this is it’s like saying, I’m going to eliminate fear or we’re going to eliminate stress. So that’s not good. That’s not possible. You know, stress and fear are part of our existence.

[00:11:21] Morris Brossette: They’re actually the, the gateways to success, but allowing yourself to go. Okay, I’m going through this process of learning, and I know I’m going to revert back to old ways. So when I start to get stressed or I start to negatively react to any situation, I don’t beat myself up about it. I simply become aware of it, and then I choose to redirect into something that’s going to help manage that stress.

[00:11:44] Morris Brossette: That’s the key to it, and I feel like the people that I’ve worked with and spoken to, once they understand that, hey man, it’s okay. Like you’re, you’re going to react, you know, I teach this for a living, I still react and I, but I get to catch myself, you know, it’s like, it’s like meditation. The point of meditation is not to think about nothing.

[00:12:01] Morris Brossette: It’s to decrease the space and time between those random thoughts. That’s all it is. So it’s the same thing with managing stress is number one, connect with your breath. Number two, start to reframe your language from the cants and nevers and always into something positive and then be ready for it. You know, if you know.

[00:12:18] Morris Brossette: You’re going to have a day. I teach this as well. Rehearse your responses to those emotional triggers. You know, if I know that we’re, we’re about to go into a meeting and I’m going to be charged up because I’m not really happy with what’s going on right now, I’ve got to rehearse my response to that individual, to that situation.

[00:12:34] Morris Brossette: So that allows me to step into it with more confidence and clarity and not waiting for something to happen. 

[00:12:41] Mark Divine: Hi, Mark Divine here from sealfit. After two years of development, I’m super stoked to announce the launch of SEALFIT supplements and our first product, sealfit Electro Greens. This is the highest quality organic greens you can find combined with electrolytes into one powerful supplement.

[00:12:59] Mark Divine: Take with eight ounces of water in the morning or add to your smoothie to get your day kicked off right with a proper nutritional supplementation. Hydration support and you can also use it as a pick me up booster during the day or after a workout It dissolves immediately and believe it or not. It tastes great I’ve had many testimonials already saying it’s the best tasting greens That they have ever tried.

[00:13:25] Mark Divine: So who y’all still fit supplements. com, or you can find it on Amazon by searching for seal fit electro greens. Who? Yeah, let’s do this divine out.

[00:13:40] Mark Divine: That is delicious. I want to come back to mental rehearsal in a moment because you’ve already touched on three of the big four skills, right? Breath control, mental management, and sexually managing your internal dialogue and your, and your languaging. And then the third is imagery, but I love this metaphor.

[00:13:55] Mark Divine: You said that fear. Was it fear and stress are the gateways? Yes. Well, you could also flip that and say fear and stress are the gatekeepers to success. Yeah. And so you’re gonna, you’re always gonna come up to that gate. Everybody’s gonna come up to that gate. And the trained individual will know what the key is.

[00:14:14] Mark Divine: Is that opens the gate and it’s always right. The positive affirmation. I can, I got this. This is a great opportunity. I’m going to learn from this. And you bring that to the gate and the, and the door swings wide open, and then you step through and on the other side is learning and growth. 

[00:14:29] Morris Brossette: Absolutely. Yeah, and that’s it like instead of hoping that it doesn’t happen look forward to it.

[00:14:34] Morris Brossette: That’s your greatest teacher 

[00:14:35] Mark Divine: The obstacle is the way like Ryan’s it 100 

[00:14:38] Morris Brossette: percent is yeah And you might just get your ass handed to you on that day with no resolution Yeah, there’s no positive outcome that you that you experience there is lesson in that and maybe that lesson is patience Maybe that lesson is who knows But there’s a lesson in everything.

[00:14:53] Mark Divine: Right, we’re here for the lessons, not for the ease. If you, if you take the easy boat, easy street all the time, then you’re going to miss the most important, essential lessons and the juice of life. So embrace the suck and go for it and, and, you know, go to the gate of fear and stress and just, you know, unlock it with optimism.

[00:15:11] Mark Divine: Positive, you know, expectation of a really cool lesson, even if you get your ass handed to you. Use the term adaptive capacity. Let’s talk about that. What is adaptive capacity? 

[00:15:25] Morris Brossette: Adaptive capacity is our way of saying building your physical and mental body. under stress so that when stress happens to you, it has less of an impact on your system overall.

[00:15:39] Mark Divine: Is it just resilience? There’s another way of saying resiliency or? 

[00:15:42] Morris Brossette: It can be. Yes, it is another way to say resiliency, but what it is is like if I’m training for a marathon, for example, if I just go out and run 15 miles on day one, I’m going to be beat up. My form is going to break down. I’m going to be excessively sore, but building up over time, you know, miles, miles, miles, strength, strength, strength, That adaptive capacity so that when I go run 15 miles, it doesn’t have as much of a negative impact on my system overall.

[00:16:08] Morris Brossette: And so when you can train that, like the way that we train, work our programming at brute force on our app, and just how we hope to coach people to use our equipment, our stuff is that you’re, when you train with these things, when you train with something, that’s an odd object or uneven or something like that, that’s improving your adaptive capacity to handle.

[00:16:27] Morris Brossette: Something that feels a little bit different, something that doesn’t feel quite symmetrical and right. So that when That’s what Group 

[00:16:33] Mark Divine: 4 specializes in, right? That odd object or unstable load stuff. 

[00:16:36] Morris Brossette: Yeah. Yep. Odd object, unstable loads. Yes. If I’m constantly doing something that’s always symmetrical, and life happens to me and I’ve got to do something that’s off balance, where one side’s heavier than the other, my system doesn’t know how to handle that load, well, I’m not going to be able to perform my best.

[00:16:54] Morris Brossette: And in training in a way that you can build your body and your mind so that you can handle anything at any time Your adaptive capacity to handle that stress increases 

[00:17:06] Mark Divine: So we’re on the topic of adaptive capacity and unstable load Why is it that uh, peter attia and andy huberman are all raving about rucking?

[00:17:14] Morris Brossette: Yeah It’s kind of the ultimate training Apparatus and protocol in my opinion and in theirs as well. The beautiful part about rucking is you can really just use anything. You can put a sandbag on your back. You can get a backpack and put some weight in it. The thing that’s great about it is that unlike carrying like a farmer’s carry with dumbbells or kettlebells or even wearing a weighted vest, like the beauty of a weighted vest is the weight is, evenly dispersed front and back.

[00:17:40] Morris Brossette: However, once you start to fatigue, you’re still going to have a bit of hunching forward. Whereas the ruck has a tendency more to open up the body, to open up the trunk, to keep you in that neutral spinal position where we’re strong and we’re stable. So that, yeah, we can open our bodies up. We can open up our hips with Peter and with Andy.

[00:17:56] Morris Brossette: A lot of the things they talk about as well as longevity. And that’s one of the things that we preach as well. And so when you think about it, like a majority of life, Pulls us forward. You sit in a desk, you sit in your car, you sit when you go to the gym, even with, with athletes. If you’re a cyclist or a runner, yeah, it’s hunching you forward.

[00:18:12] Morris Brossette: So pulling you open with a ruck is a beautiful experience because it’s automatically opening up the core. It’s opening up the lungs for more airflow. And then you can take that And you can use that as a total body workout as well. 

[00:18:23] Mark Divine: Oh, yeah. You can literally do like cleans and squats with the weighted ruck.

[00:18:27] Mark Divine: So if you’re out in the wilderness, yeah, I mean, that’s, I love those types of tools because you know, I’ve always been saying that you’re wherever you are, there’s your gym, right? You got four limbs. You can push, pull, climb, run, jump, crawl, right? Do burpees. Exactly. You don’t need a gym and a fancy membership and shiny machines.

[00:18:46] Mark Divine: Now you just add a simple sandbag and a ruck to that. And you have literally. Countless hundreds and hundreds of different exercises at your fingertips just throw it in the trunk of your car and you’re just a mobile training unit MTU. 

[00:19:00] Morris Brossette: Yes. Yeah, exactly. I trained that way for six months for an event, but when I was still in Dallas and I mean, for six months, I trained almost every day and all I did was rock and use my sandbag and you know, I did great at the event.

[00:19:11] Morris Brossette: And also when I went back to using traditional barbells, Deadlift squats, et cetera. I was just as strong. So, you know, you probably even gained because your core was stronger. Oh, absolutely. 100%. It was. Yeah. 

[00:19:22] Mark Divine: I can’t not ask about nutrition, you know, for a performance expert like you, I know there’s a ton of information about nutrition out there, but I always like look at nutrition more from like a principle base rather than like, you know, prescription.

[00:19:36] Mark Divine: What’s your attitude toward nutrition and supplementation? 

[00:19:40] Morris Brossette: Yeah. So in order of importance, it’s. sleep stress, the nutrition, then movement, because you have to fuel your body properly. You know, I’ve studied holistic nutrition and integrative medicine since 2004, so 20 years now. I’ve tested almost every dietetic theory on myself just to see, and worked with hundreds of folks as well.

[00:19:58] Morris Brossette: What I’ve found to be the most effective and efficient is kind of a either Uh, modified paleo type of nutrition plan and or an animal based not carnivore, but where you’re eating an ample and I can appropriate amount of clean proteins and supplementing that with fruits and some vegetables and like white rice and potatoes and things like that.

[00:20:16] Mark Divine: I want to get your perspective on carnivore because it just seems to me that you’re, you’re just going to be missing a lot of micronutrients. If all you’re eating is meat, 

[00:20:24] Morris Brossette: if you’re doing it. you know, kind of a true quote carnivore to my understanding when I studied it and tried it, that’s where you’re, you’re eating the, really the fattier cuts of meat.

[00:20:33] Morris Brossette: So you’re getting your fat soluble a, D, E, and K. And then you can also supplement in the organs. So if you don’t like to eat liver, you can do, you know, like, you know, we’ve got to actually really great organ complex that gives you the vitamins of the liver of the kidney of the spleen of the heart. So essentially that then becomes your multivitamins that gives you the micronutrients.

[00:20:51] Morris Brossette: But at the same time, you know, like, like with anything, you don’t want to get too dogmatic and strict with it. So, you know, it’s like keto. Keto is great until it’s not. So with carnivore, it’s got to be a balance. You know, there, there’s a season for a reason. You know, there’s a reason fruits look the way they do.

[00:21:08] Morris Brossette: They’re appetizing. They’re there for us to eat. There are cruciferous vegetables that are good for us with nutrition. It’s finding out what works with that individual, because you know, Everyone is different. Everyone’s needs are different. So, what might work for me might be a little bit detrimental to you.

[00:21:22] Morris Brossette: So, you know, in nutrition, you know, the first thing we need to address is, honestly, it’s looking at your gut health and healing your gut if needed. You know, if you’ve been on antibiotics, if you’ve been eating processed foods, anything like that. Like, we need to look at the microbiome and see, like, okay, what do we need to do to cultivate a healthy bacteria and flora and environment so that you can digest those foods?

[00:21:42] Morris Brossette: And then we build out from there. But I’ll tell you this, I learned. When I really started diving into mindset, I took one of Joe Dispenza’s eight week courses and he said a beautiful thing during that course, which was, you can have the best diet on the planet with, you know, the grass fed meats, you know, wild caught fish, organic vegetables.

[00:22:00] Morris Brossette: However, if your mindset is toxic and you’re fueling with stress and anxiety, all you’re doing is creating organic, grass fed, wild caught toxic cells. Right. So, yeah, so teaching the body and also giving the body a chance to, to do what it does. Yeah. You know, we’ve had this massive misconception in the bodybuilding phase of the early eighties or mid eighties where you, you need to eat six times a day, six small meals that might work for some, but you know, throughout the course of history for thousands of years, we somehow subsisted on, on breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and sometimes just lunch and dinner.

[00:22:33] Mark Divine: Sometimes there’s one meal a day and sometimes no meals a day. The body is extremely adaptable, right? That’s a hundred percent. Absolutely. Yes. And what about fasting intermittent fasting? What’s your take on those? 

[00:22:44] Morris Brossette: I love intermittent fasting. What I talk to people about, the caution I use when I talk about this is that it is a stressor.

[00:22:52] Morris Brossette: So, you know, if you’re going through a hard time in life, if you’ve got a lot of stuff going on, that is not the time for you to go into an intermittent fast. You know, ladies, if you’re around your cycle, if you’re premenopausal or going through menopause, that is not the time because The beauty of of an intermittent fast or fast is that cellular apoptosis.

[00:23:09] Morris Brossette: What you need to be in a in a quote, starved, stressed state in order for that to happen. So intermittently fasting, I typically have people if I do it, I’ll start out just one day a week. On a day that, you know, I don’t have a lot going on and just allow my body to ease into it. 

[00:23:24] Mark Divine: How many 

[00:23:24] Morris Brossette: hours does it need to be?

[00:23:26] Morris Brossette: There are different theories on that. Like for men, you know, one of the goals could be 12 to 16, even sometimes 18 hours. I’ve done about 14 at most females, just because again, of hormones and things like that, it’s usually around 10 to 12 hours. So, you know, very simple. You eat your last meal at 6 PM and then, you know, you go to 6 AM, that’s a 12 hour fast, and then you can give it until maybe.

[00:23:49] Morris Brossette: Eight or nine and then you fuel and then track yourself. How do you feel? How’s your clarity? How’s your cognition? You know energy? Training, things like that, and you get to become the detective and create the blueprint for what works for you. 

[00:24:02] Mark Divine: I have a sponsor called Lumen and they talk a lot about metabolic flexibility.

[00:24:07] Mark Divine: They test your breath and they determine, you know, Hey, are you burning fats, carbs? And they tell you which one you need, you know, what type of food you need to do or what kind of movement you need to do to, to maintain metabolic flexibility. What does that mean? Metabolic flexibility. 

[00:24:23] Morris Brossette: It means that you have the ability to, to choose whether you’re burning primarily carbohydrates or fats for your energy source.

[00:24:31] Mark Divine: So you get to choose it. You can go back and forth. Your body has the ability to kind of switch back and forth at will. 

[00:24:36] Morris Brossette: Correct. Yes. And it’s all based on how you eat. You know, like for me again, when I was racing Ironman and even the stuff that I do now, the long endurance stuff, you need to be more fat adaptive.

[00:24:44] Morris Brossette: Not necessarily keto, but you need to have fat being the primary source of fuel because there’s only so much carbohydrate that you can ingest Before you run out of that energy source So being metabolically flexible so that if I need to go do something long and endurance based my body is has the ability to do what’s known as glycogen sparing.

[00:25:04] Morris Brossette: Even if I have been, you know, eating low carb and I introduce more carbohydrates in that event, my body is, because it’s been trained to, it’s going to burn more, more fat versus carbs at that aerobic state. It’s the ability, again, for your body just to go up and down and use whatever energy source it needs to./

[00:25:20] 

[00:28:39] Morris Brossette: What are 

[00:28:40] Morris Brossette: ketones? It’s a process once you essentially, to kind of keep it simple, once your body starts to utilize fat for fuel, they’re burning ketones as energy sources, as it stores fat. 

[00:28:51] Mark Divine: Is a ketone fat or is I’ve heard that ketones have like more energy than fat. And so is it something your body naturally produces or can you ingest it?

[00:29:00] Morris Brossette: You can, you can ingest it. There are exogenous ketones, like there’s a, that supplement ketone IQ is a great way to, to start to implement that as well. Okay. But you have to understand that even if I’m, if I’m using something exogenous, which a lot of people do, you still have to start eating that way to get your body to shift into burning, using more of those ketones from, for energy.

[00:29:21] Morris Brossette: You get that from being more fat adapted. 

[00:29:23] Mark Divine: And fat adaptation means you’re just teaching your body to burn fat in order to do that. You got to eat more fat, right? 

[00:29:29] Morris Brossette: Correct. Correct. Eat more fat. You can reduce your carbohydrates and you don’t have to go into, uh, strict ketosis. There is a moment, if you really want to get into it, I’ve tested it myself.

[00:29:38] Morris Brossette: I got myself into ketosis in about three days where I just severe, I just cut out all of my carbohydrates. I consumed a moderate amount of protein. I consumed, you know, fats, avocados, fatty meats, and things like that. And then I would work at a low steady heart rate. I’ll get on the treadmill, incline treadmill, and just walk for 45 minutes or so.

[00:29:56] Morris Brossette: light movements, not pushing myself too hard. So that would stay in that zone. And once I depleted the carbohydrate stores to degree, then I went into what’s known as ketosis and I was fat adapted. And once you stay in that state for a while, your body gets used to using that source of energy. It’s kind of a catch 22 because.

[00:30:14] Morris Brossette: It’s really great. You have a lot of mental clarity. You can go for a while without eating your energy stable. You know, you start to notice differences in your, in your body as far as like body fat loss and things like that. But if you’re trying to perform, it’s a different story. 

[00:30:27] Mark Divine: Yeah. Yeah. I think we found that with steel fit.

[00:30:30] Mark Divine: A lot of guys who were doing the keto diet and, and, uh, state of ketosis, man, they were just flaming out on the high intensity workouts and, you know, CrossFit and they were, they were just failing at that stuff. So that’s where I think it’s key to be flexible, right? Metabolic flexibility means you can go the long, slow, hard stuff, but your body will then shift, you know, to be the performance engine that it needs to be to perform in a high, high speed workout.

[00:30:52] Mark Divine: Right? Absolutely. So stress is a big deal. We talked about breathing. Mindset’s a huge deal. Uh, we talked about movement, you know, hybrid, you know, unstable load. We talked about nutrition. What about supplementation? We just barely talked about that. Do we need supplements? I mean, most people, it seems like aren’t getting the right nutrition, you know, micronutrient load.

[00:31:16] Mark Divine: So supplementation seems like a good idea, but there’s so much stuff out there, you know, there’s probably like a hundred million supplements on Amazon. Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:31:24] Morris Brossette: Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, yes, we do need to supplement, especially if you are, individual, whether you’re performing at work in life or in sport or all three of those, you know, just because of the demineralization and over farming of the soils, our foods aren’t as nutrient dense as they once were.

[00:31:42] Morris Brossette: So there’s actually a really great book called the Dorito effect that talks about that just because again, like of the over farming and turning over the soil, turning over the soil, like a piece of broccoli does not have the same nutrients. now as it did in the early twenties or thirties as well. So, you know, using supplementation is critical for keeping our system going the way we need it to go.

[00:32:03] Morris Brossette: So yes, and I’m not a huge fan of taking a whole lot of supplements, but I do believe that based on the individual and what their needs are, supplementation is absolutely critical. 

[00:32:12] Mark Divine: What are some of the core, you know, that we should be using? 

[00:32:16] Morris Brossette: I always supplement with magnesium. You know, there’s a magnesium complex that we actually have in our stay ready line that we just launched.

[00:32:21] Morris Brossette: Okay. 80 percent of people are magnesium deficient regardless of, of if they train or not, like you sweat, you’re losing electrolytes and we lose a lot of magnesium. So a good magnesium supplement is critical for heart function, for muscular recovery, for stress management. I like to use an organ complex for my multivitamin just because yes, multivitamins are great.

[00:32:41] Morris Brossette: We have those too. You can do that as well, but in my studies and my understanding, if it can come from a natural source, that’s where I prefer to get it. So a good. Organ complex that gives you, you know, the, the liver, the spleen, the heart, the kidney, that’s going to give you that, that micronutrient balance.

[00:32:57] Morris Brossette: I also love a greens supplement, you know, any type of organic greens, because again, those are going to give you those micronutrients that you’re not going to get from eating a lot of vegetables. Because you’ve got, you’ve got to think about it, that if I pick, say again, a piece of broccoli from the time it is picked from the ground to get to the store, could be a week or two, and then it sits there, then I get it, then I cook it, and I kill out, then I cook out a lot of those nutrients.

[00:33:23] Morris Brossette: So supplementing with a greens supplement is, in my mind, critical, because it’s going to give you those nutrients that you’re missing out on. 

[00:33:30] Mark Divine: Yeah, we just seal fit seal fit electric green just came out and that’s a pretty exceptional product A lot of people have been ditching their athletic greens for it It’s a combination of the all natural greens Very robust greens product combined with an electrolysis kind of kill two birds with one stone 

[00:33:47] Morris Brossette: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:33:48] Morris Brossette: Now another thing I’ll say is It’s a good omega 3. There was a study that came out in 2013. I think the attempt was to demonize the omega 3s because they were really doing well. But also, in the extraction process, if there are chemicals used, what the article showed was that a lot of the omega 3s out there are more toxic and inflammatory than anti inflammatory.

[00:34:09] Morris Brossette: Yeah, so you have to be very cautious with the, with the brand that you use. The one I’ve always recommended you use, there’s several. Nordic Naturals is a great brand. Carlson’s is the one I go to now. I’ve been using that for a long, long time because the optimal goal with regard to protein intake was, you know, obviously we want you to consume grass fed grass finished meats, all that good stuff.

[00:34:29] Morris Brossette: But that’s just not a reality for most people. But the unfortunate side of that is The omega three to omega six ratio in most commercial beefs, even in some of the grass fed stuff, the omega six ratio is super high and mega three ratio is low. Well, that creates inflammation. So supplementing with a quality fish oil to help balance that six to three ratio out and also to minimize.

[00:34:52] Morris Brossette: And mitigate some of the inflammation that we create in our body from life training. All those things is really critical. 

[00:34:58] Mark Divine: Yeah. That’s fascinating. Do you think balance can be found or how do you, uh, coach people when it comes to this idea of like, Hey, my, my life seems completely out of whack, you know, I’m really out of balance.

[00:35:10] Mark Divine: I need to come back into balance. 

[00:35:11] Morris Brossette: Is it possible? Yes, it is. It is. It just, it takes some time and it’s going to take intention and it’s going to take the individual really looking in the mirror and say, what do I need? To balance myself, you know, because a lot of men, like I do a lot of work with successful men that have put their careers in finances.

[00:35:30] Morris Brossette: at the forefront. And unfortunately, they’ve let their body slip. They let their mind slip. They let their relationships slip. So helping them understand and create balance of, Hey, yes, that’s important. But also we need to move our bodies. We need to take care of our system with nutrition. You know, you need to have healthy relationships in the way that I live in the way that I teach and coach is balance is critical.

[00:35:50] Morris Brossette: There’s no point where you can’t establish it to some degree or another. You know, for example, I’m working with a gentleman right now. Okay. In North Texas, and he’s in this really, really fast time where he’s up at 4 a. m. He’s out of the door by 530 and he’s in the farming industry. So he’s all over the place all day.

[00:36:07] Morris Brossette: He called the other day. He’s like, Mo, I just don’t know what to do with my workout. I can’t train for an hour. So I said, okay, well, what can we do? Going back to that can versus can’t. You can get up and you can knock out 15, 20 pushups. And then when you go somewhere, you can do the same thing. And we can do this and make it a cumulative effort through the course of the day.

[00:36:23] Morris Brossette: So when you get home, you’re like, yes, I did it. That’s balanced for him right now. 

[00:36:28] Mark Divine: If he’s driving a tractor, every time you get on that tractor before you do 20 burpees, right? You get off the track. Exactly. 

[00:36:35] Morris Brossette: It’s weaving into your life, right? Balance has to be established. That’s the way the world works.

[00:36:39] Morris Brossette: That’s the way nature works. That’s the way everything works. Like life is a, is a cycle of balanced activities that work synergistically with each other. And it’s just about you finding what you’re doing. You need to create balance for yourself in that time and understand that might change and it probably will and should change over time.

[00:36:59] Morris Brossette: So, like we talked about metabolic flexibility, having the mental flexibility to go. Okay, I’m going a little bit too far in this direction. I need to bring it back over here. 

[00:37:08] Mark Divine: Yeah. Recovery. So we didn’t talk about recovery, but I think a lot of the issues around balance are due to over commitment, right?

[00:37:15] Mark Divine: People over commit. They’re too plugged into the negative stuff, right? So they’re, they’re actually have their TV on in their home or their offices and they’re just getting soaked with all that incessant negative energy. So that really makes them feel kind of chaotic and out of balance. And the pace of that stuff is crazy fast.

[00:37:33] Mark Divine: You know, I don’t know about you, but I, I haven’t had a TV on in my home, you know, In over 30 years. So the only time I ever see TV is usually when I’m walking through an airport and I’ll pause just to see what the crazies are up to. And it’s actually very jarring to my psyche because of the, the pace of imagery and the speed that everyone’s talking.

[00:37:54] Mark Divine: I’m like, wow. Like this is how everyone’s being trained and stimulated. This guy is awful. But then also recovery when it comes to training, you know, people like CrossFit was awful about this, right? It’s like hardcore every single day, six, seven days a week. And where’s the recovery time, you know?

[00:38:11] Mark Divine: Everything that you do hard needs kind of a commensurate pause in recovery time, right? 

[00:38:16] Morris Brossette: In training, like you need to have a deload week sometimes. Right. You know, cause you gotta remember like when you’re training your body, especially if we’re talking about physical, you’re training your muscles, but you’re training your nervous system and your nervous system can only take so much before it breaks.

[00:38:28] Morris Brossette: You know, then you lay, it runs into adrenal fatigue and it runs into injury risk that’s elevated. So yeah, absolutely. Like learning to go, okay, well, how do I feel today? If you wake up and you’re exhausted and you’re tired, that’s not the day for you to go hard. And that’s not the day for you to go suck it up, man.

[00:38:44] Morris Brossette: If you’re training for an event, like if you’re training for Kokoro and you wake up on a Thursday and you’re like, damn, I don’t want to do this today. Go do it. Cause you, you have to know how to do that under stress. But even with that, you know, if I’m training, like when I was training for, for Kokoro, I injured my back about a month into it.

[00:39:00] Morris Brossette: It was like, okay, what can I do? Great balance to help myself recover, but still prepared for this event, you know, and I was able to do that. But with everyday people, recovery is the key, because you know this, everyone that listens to your show knows this when you train your system. Physically, you’re breaking your body down, you’re creating micro tears.

[00:39:18] Morris Brossette: You’re actually, Depleting your immune system, not making it better. So the recovery happens when you rest, when you allow yourself just to be, you know, in meditation and meditation teacher training as well. The first principles they teach is to be a human being, not a human doing right. So oftentimes less is more and we can then focus on the quality.

[00:39:38] Morris Brossette: Versus the quantity of stuff. 

[00:39:40] Mark Divine: So I agree with that. You need that kind of downtime, even after periods of deep work, right? So research has come out of saying, yeah, after every kind of period of deep, intensive focus, pause, breathe, and allow the brain to kind of like settle down and to assimilate there.

[00:39:55] Mark Divine: Otherwise you get overloaded. This is one of the reasons you have that kind of cognitive decline. And later in the afternoon is you just overloaded your, your psyche’s ability to process all the information, all the learning, all the lessons. And then you’re going to, you’re going to, Miss a lot. You’re not going to learn optimally if you don’t pause and just allow that assimilation after every deep work period.

[00:40:14] Mark Divine: The other thing that’s key though, is it, when it comes to physical training, I think people think that recovery means to do nothing or to do no movement. And that’s not true either. Right? So I put yoga, I put, you know, long walks in nature, in the recovery, sometimes even a, A long, slow distance, uh, jog, there, there’s a lot you can do in the recovery kind of category that, that’s not just sitting around making you feel like, Oh, I’m not being productive.

[00:40:42] Mark Divine: Right. 

[00:40:42] Morris Brossette: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Like all of my clients I work with, there’s like, it’s seven days a week of movement, but they, I have in programmed. Mobility and breath. And that mobility and breath is to open up the body. Or like you said, it might be, man, get out on your bike and just go for a ride on a 1 to 10 scale.

[00:40:57] Morris Brossette: 10 is the hardest, 1 is the easiest. You’re at a 1, maybe a 2. Like you said, go out for a walk, go for a swim, go get out in nature. But just allowing the body to reset. And it’s not about not moving. It’s about moving smartly for what the goal is. So with, with mobility practice, like when you do core yoga, when you’re doing it in a restorative manner, that light, easy movement that is coincided with the breath is increasing the blood flow, which is increasing nutrient transport into those fatigue, tired muscles, which is helping the healing process, like we want to be still a meditation.

[00:41:29] Morris Brossette: We want to be still when we’re in process of thought, maybe we’re just observing, but for the day, yes, we need to get up. We need to move. Because that’s how we were created. We are designed to get up and hunt and gather and build and create. Right. 

[00:41:43] Mark Divine: We’re going to wrap this up pretty soon here, but what’s your morning ritual like?

[00:41:47] Morris Brossette: Yeah. So I get up every morning and first thing I do is I think of my gratitudes. I got a list of about 50 guys that send gratitudes to every morning. So I think about that. I go downstairs. Actually, the first thing I do is my dog comes up and we hang out for a couple of minutes and literally just get some toast.

[00:42:02] Morris Brossette: Yep. And he comes up real slow and like snuggles up in my neck and then the other dog comes up. So anyway, after that, I get up, I make coffee. And as the coffee’s brewing, I’m sending out my gratitude text to my guys. And then once I do, done with that, we started doing this ritual. We’ll get a little salt water, about 16 ounces of salt water, go out in the backyard, stand barefoot in the grass and watch the sunrise.

[00:42:21] Morris Brossette: So we can reset the circadian rhythm and just kind of connect in ground. 

[00:42:24] Mark Divine: You drink the salt water or what’s the salt water for? Yeah, 

[00:42:27] Morris Brossette: it’s not a lot. It’s like a pinch, basically electrolytes, but I’ll use a Celtic gray salt or a pink Himalayan salt. 

[00:42:33] Mark Divine: That’s like a sun, sun salutation right there. Just being an honor for the sun and honor for the day.

[00:42:38] Morris Brossette: Yeah. And my wife, Kirsten comes out with me. We’ll stand there and she’ll say, you know, there’s a, a Norse prayer. It’s just a sway loop to the sun of thank you for your energy. Thank you for this. It’s just a beautiful process that we’ll, we’ll come inside and, you know, we’ll put on some music or we’ll, we’ll do a meditation.

[00:42:51] Morris Brossette: I did a sweat lodge last week. So now I’m really, I’ve been into this for a while, but I’d like to listen to tribal drums. So I’ll just listen to the drumming and get connected with my breath for about 10 minutes. Then I get up and start the day. I usually go train first. I’ll eat a little bit. I’ll drink my coffee and then I go to the gym and I train and then I start the day.

[00:43:07] Morris Brossette: So I make sure I take care of my needs first and then I can operate better as a business runner, as a husband, as a Friend, I fill my cup and then I take care of everyone else. 

[00:43:20] Mark Divine: That’s such an important principle to kind of double click on them. We’ll wrap it up. Yeah. You, you can’t serve others. If you’re all broken down and burned out and suffering, if you’re leading an organization or, you know, Doing anything of service, which everybody should be in service, even if you’re doing like a solitary endeavor, like trying to be the best ultra run in the world, do it in service, right?

[00:43:42] Mark Divine: To something higher than yourself, right? That’s principle number one, you know, to take care of yourself every day for the average person. Like, that’s why I think the morning we call it winning in your mind, you know, before you step foot in the battlefield, it’s not just the mind, it’s the body mind, right?

[00:43:55] Mark Divine: You take care of it. You feel, I love that. And what you said, you fill the cup. And then that cup will stay full. And as you, as you give it from the cup to others during the day, it kind of refills itself. Absolutely. That’s so cool. Hey everyone. This is Mark Divine, founder of SealFit and Unbeatable Mind.

[00:44:11] Mark Divine: And I’m super stoked to announce that my new book, Uncommon, is due out from St. Martin’s Press this summer, July 16th, and we’ve launched a pre order campaign. You can learn more about that at readuncommon. com to try to get early awareness for the book. Which I hope will help a lot of people, where I go and do a deep dive on the five mountains of personal mastery.

[00:44:36] Mark Divine: Physical, mental, emotional, intuitional, and spiritual. Uncommon. Simple principles for an extraordinary life. Check it out at readuncommon. com. And thank you for your support and being part of the change you want to see in this world. Hoo yah. Divine out. Mo, you rock. Where can people learn more about you, Brute Force, etc.?

[00:44:56] Morris Brossette: Yeah. Far as, uh, far as the company brute force, you can check us out. We’re at brute force training. com. You can also follow us on Instagram at brute force training. Um, check out all the stuff that we have. We have a really cool app that is designed for anyone just starting out in a fitness to firefighters, police, to military really tried to make that app as robust as possible for people.

[00:45:15] Morris Brossette: So just helping you out with everything that you need to, to be ready for anything. And then as far as my personal stuff with my own coaching and things like that, my Instagram handle is. Hunt underscore prosper. And the reason behind that it’s, it’s actually got it from my wife. She gave me that name, but it’s not about hunting.

[00:45:30] Morris Brossette: It’s about if you want something, whatever that is in life, you need to go hunt for it, then you prosper. So it’s hunt underscore prosper on Instagram. I try to put out a lot of movements right now, different things with kettlebells, body weight, and then some motivational quotes and videos and things like that.

[00:45:44] Mark Divine: Nice. 

[00:45:45] Morris Brossette: And 

[00:45:45] Mark Divine: the 

[00:45:45] Morris Brossette: supplements, 

[00:45:46] Mark Divine: are they available 

[00:45:47] Morris Brossette: at 

[00:45:47] Mark Divine: Amazon? 

[00:45:48] Morris Brossette: They’re not available on Amazon just yet. They are available at bruteforcetraining. com. We have six in total right now on the website. We have our grass fed whey chocolate and vanilla. We’ve got a pre workout that’s not a super stimulated pre workout.

[00:46:00] Morris Brossette: We have a multivitamin and then we’re launching this coming week. We have a collagen peptide, we have an organ complex, and then we have that magnesium that I talked about earlier. And you get that all at bruteforcetraining. com. 

[00:46:10] Mark Divine: Perfect. Probably don’t need anything else. That’s it. Mo. Thanks so much for your time today, rock.

[00:46:17] Mark Divine: I appreciate your, your wisdom and your enthusiasm and for, and your example, right? You’re doing the work and showing up every day. 

[00:46:25] Morris Brossette: Honored to be here. Yeah.