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,