Prison Workout

In prison, we never knew how much time they were gonna give us in the yard for exercising. So sometimes they give us ten minutes, sometimes five minutes, sometimes twenty minutes. If you're lucky, maybe an hour. So it was important to try to maximize the time as much as possible. I would always go out with a list of exercises that I wanted to do and try to get them all done in whatever time they gave us.

So I would have a five minute cycle where I had five different exercises, 10 reps each, and try to do, just repeat that. So I would if I complete the five exercises, 10 reps each, then I'll just keep repeating it for five minutes. When the five minutes was over, I would start a different cycle of five different exercises with 10 reps each over the course of five minutes and just keep doing it until the five minutes was over. Usually resting for a minute or two minutes in between. And in prison, I didn't have, weights or any equipment or anything like that, so everything was body weight.

And that's sufficient. That really is sufficient. And when you have been completely deprived of having any equipment or weights or anything like that, that's when you really realize and understand and learn that you don't need gyms, actually, to work out and to get fit and to build muscle and to build strength and conditioning and so on. You don't need it. So here's an example of one of the types of workouts that I would have done back in the yard.

Now as you all know from my previous videos, I usually exercise barefoot, but last night I thought I'd try it with my boots on. And you can see I'm really struggling to actually get my feet off the ground here. It's so heavy. But this is one of the things I always try to do in my exercise, which is to figure out some way that I can make it harder and make it more difficult. And whenever there's an exercise that I really dislike doing, I always try to incorporate it into my workout.

Always try to take the thing that's hard for you to do and keep doing it until it's easy.

You can do that for a couple of rounds. You can do that for five minutes, one round. Do the same set of exercises for the second round, and do ten minutes of just that. The idea here is to exhaust your legs first because in boxing, if your legs go, you're gonna lose the fight. So you need to be able to exhaust your legs and be able to keep fighting, keep exerting energy even after your legs have fatigued.

So one of the ways that I approach exercise is to begin by trying to exhaust my legs. And then after that, I do the upper body and the full body type of workouts, and then I jog.

Okay. So as I said, I didn't have any weights. I wasn't in a prison where we had a weight rack or anything. I got no barbells, no dumbbells, no nothing. So you find new ways to do it, and one of the ways is with isometric training, where we would just take a towel and basically try and you hold it in front of you and try and pull it apart, you know?

And then just change your hand position and try and pull it apart in that position in front of your chest, over your head, behind your back. There's all of these different ways, and this genuinely does build muscle and build strength. It builds strength even more than muscle, but it also builds muscle mass. You have to be creative, and it just proves that actually you really don't need a gym in order to get yourself fit, fighting fit, fit for conflict, and in a top state of fitness. And you know, when you're training this way, for muscle growth or for strengthening growth, you really have to be honest with yourself because you're the only one who's pulling on the thing.

There's no nothing is determining how heavy it is and how much exertion you have to put. So you have to put as much exertion as you can, and you have to be honest with yourself and genuinely exert as much power as you possibly can when you're pulling on that towel, and you'll see the results. And when you're training like this, you really build strength of will and commitment to your fitness and to your strength because, again, it all comes down to you and your honesty about how hard you're gonna try to do this because you could just barely pull on the towel and just kid yourself and just play. But if you're serious about it, you build a kind of mental toughness and a level of concentration and, again, an honesty in your training that will serve you really in every area of life. And then you have to get creative about what other types of exercises you can do, you just use whatever's around.

Like here, I'm just jumping over the wall and then jumping back over the wall. Now by the time I was doing this, my legs were already exhausted, and as you can see, I couldn't make it on the landing. So I rolled. But even that's good practice, you know, it's just all of it is building up toughness, building up resilience. So really, even if you've just got four walls and a roof, there's no reason why you can't make yourself strong.

You can't get yourself fit. You can just find different ways to use whatever's around you to improve your fitness.