Watch Laird Hamilton Break Down the XPT Lifestyle Program

What is this physical training company that you're doing? You're doing something? XPT. Yeah. What is that? XPT is, I would describe it as a lifestyle program that evolved out of how we live, like what we do. And so we started an experiential thing where people can come for like two and a half days and go through this, you know, get exposed to speakers and they do heat and ice and we do pool training and breath work and mobility. So you have conferences and stuff there? Exposed to speakers? Like what do you mean? Well, I'll invite, you know, I would invite you to come and speak for an hour or I'd invite Paul Chek or we'd have somebody speak on longevity or somebody speak on, you know, during the experience we'll have a couple of speakers talk on, you know, nutrition, fitness, wellness, career, whatever, just as something as another piece of the element. And then, and then, and like I said, we have pool training and then we, and we've been certifying trainers now to kind of help people go through the process as well. And so it's, you know, it's really about rest and recovery and breathing. It's more based on, on that part. It's not just another training thing of like, Hey, how we, you know, how we can hammer you. I mean, I think that's overplayed. I think the ways we can train and, and how we're training is really overplayed. I think we're, we're not creating enough things that nurture the system, you know, and really look at trying to, to support people in their, in their, in their already, you know, hammering life. They're already just beating themselves down. It's like, let's get off the red eye and then we'll go to the gym and we'll hammer ourselves there and then we'll stay up all day. And you know, and I think we, they need some support. So breath work is a big part of it. Knowing how to move correctly. I think that's a big part of it because plenty of people hurt themselves, especially in the gym, without, you know, without some knowledge of movement and form. And then I have a pool training system I developed, which is, yeah, that's the most proprietary thing I think we have is it's a marriage between the gym and the, and the pool. Because I despise swimming. That's the eye. Yeah. That's hilarious. No, I do. I just watch you. If you said go do laps in the pool, I'd be like Shamu and I'd get the floppy fin and Oh yeah. I just, it's, I, I just, that's crazy. You're a fucking server. No, but I'm saying, but, but if you said, Hey, we're going to take these masks and this fins and we're going to swim this coastline where the waves are breaking on the rocks and we're going to go for five miles. I'm in like I, but if you said, Hey, go down. There and, and, and, and wear some swim goggles where you can't even see and swim in some murky water where you don't know what's in it. And we're going to swim a mile down there and you're going to do that every day. I'd rather step on a, you know, rusty nail than do that. I mean, it's like, that's so because of my, my disdain for swimming, that kind of swimming. I mean, if there's, if it's in the surf and the waves, that's a different, that's a different game. That's a whole different thing. You don't want to do laps in the pool. You'd kill me. I'm going to die. I just, I would rather, yeah, I just, I'd rather hit my hand with the hammer. That's so weird. I was thinking you would just enjoy moving in the water. I do with some dumbbells. Oh, okay. So carrying a dumbbell and jumping with dumbbells. Why did you start at XPT? Like what was the motivation? Because you're obviously into doing this stuff yourself, but why create a foundation or? Well, the reason why we started it was because, uh, an opportunity to expose this stuff and share it with more people. We were doing it ourselves naturally. And then we have friends come and they were like, this stuff's awesome. And then can I invite my friend? And then we were, we realized that, that if we really wanted to expose it to more people and share it, we were going to, it was going to be a limitation if everybody had to come to my house. Do you have like a website and everything? Yeah. Yeah. What does XPT stand for? XPT, uh, XPT, uh, life.com and XPT stands for, well, my, my concept is it, is it exploration in performance training. Uh, there it is. High performance fuels a limitless life. Dumbbells in the pool. There it is. Oh yeah. So this is all your idea. You have to, you have to, yeah, you have to come. Well, I'm just in the process. That's my boy, Kyle, Kyle Kingsbury. I love that guy. Yeah. The, uh, well, I have some beautiful guys come. Like I'll give you a great thing that you'd appreciate is, uh, I have this whole, well, first of all, there's a bunch of things that happen in the water, right? Which one of the things that happens is when you're underwater, the compression of the water allows the blood to flow through your lymphatic system, which normally takes about a 24 hour period. It happens in one hour. So imagine compression tights, like, you know, if you wear compression, it really helps the blood flow. Right. Well, this is the ultimate compression, the water is right. So then you deal with the psychology. So it's good for fighters. Like I, I, I, I fighters because of the psychology of what we can do because you deal a lot with stress. So we're able to implement stress in a very controlled environment. Um, and then, and then, uh, and then like, for example, uh, and Grant Hill at one point in his career, but I have a friend, Joe Kim Noah, who's a basketball player. And we were doing these, uh, we're doing these in the water. We're doing these dunking drills last summer. So he tried, I trained with him and did a bunch of stuff because you can do a lot of highly explosive, heavy loaded movement with protection because now you don't have to worry about momentum, which is what's going to pull your shoulder out. It's going to throw your hip. It's going to hurt your knee where I could take a basketball player and I can run him through thousands of jumps, thousands, which at the end of, if I did that on land, he would be broken. He's already jumping too much in his season. He doesn't need to jump more. Right. So I could load him up and make him do these dynamic movements, but now he's protected because he's, because we've taken gravity out. So we're, so it's, it's like, it's like saying, Hey, we get to go trade in outer space, but it's in my backyard. Right. Now what, what kind of results are these athletes experiencing? Well, so Joakim in his career, and I don't know how many years he's been in the NBA, he came back after doing this dunking job, just using this as an example. And it had the most dunks per minute that he's had in his entire career. Whoa. He was like dunking on, it was slamming on everybody. I mean, it helps that he's seven feet tall, but the fact is, is that he, he, he noticed now, you know, Grant Hill was talking about, he gained three inches in the last year. Last year of his career, after playing in the NBA for 20 years, all of a sudden he's jumping three inches higher. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, we're getting, I'm, that's the kind of tangible stuff that I'm, that I, that I'm getting just that there's a lot more things. A lot of it has to do with breath because, uh, in the water it's all controlled breathing patterns. So everything is controlled because you can't breathe in till you get to the top. So if you're doing a drill where you're jumping and most of the things we do are leg driven. Swimming is mostly arms. Part of the reason why people only use their arms is because you use five times the oxygen with your legs as you do with your arms. So the legs are very inefficient for swimming, but yet they create a lot of load on your heart, which that can boost your breath holding. And so there's a bunch of other, other, uh, things that happen, but a lot of it is just that environment is very protective. So for recovery too, for like what somebody's got a hurt knee, hurt hip, hurt ankle, you can go in there and start moving dynamically early before you would ever do it on land and be protected. So there's a bunch of, you know, and then we could just ratchet it up. I can make, you know, if I, I truly believe if you gave, if you said, you know, I'll get few Phelps is going to come to your house and you're going to have Phelps for three months. I could make Phelps faster. Yeah. This is, this is this I'm so I'm, he's doing a dunking drill and he's using a medicine ball, but he's having to jump out of three feet of water. Right. When he gets on land, when he gets on land, it's like, he's like a, he gets like a whole other game. Yeah. I would imagine a whole another game. Now did you invent this protocol, this whole thing of jumping and doing it in the water? What motivated you? Well, I came, the original concept came out of the, a drill, not a drill, a thing we used to do in the summer when we were kids, that's a Hawaiian kind of waterman drill where you run on the bottom with stones. So you've seen that BJ Penn does that stuff. Yeah. So you get a stone, you run along the bottom, then you put it down, then your friend swims along the surface. And then when he, when you go up, he swims down and grabs it and then he goes along as far as he can and you swim and you just go back and forth until neither one of you can do it. So it was based kind of on that concept. And then, but I wanted to expand that because that's kind of limiting. You just swim and you run and you can't isolate movements and you're not working like you can with dumbbells. I shift dumbbells into the water and I have all different weights. So depending on your skill level, you know, everything we do, and that's one thing about everything that I'm involved in is, is it usually has to have a spec. It has to be able to be, you know, for everybody to do it, it has to be old people and kids in my mind that it's not viable unless it's, it, you can appeal to everybody that you need, you need to, a kid needs to be able to do it and an old person to be able to really be valid, to really have legitimacy. You know, it's like, okay, the coffee, it has to be, there has to be things that the kids can, can have that creamer, old people can have it. It's gotta be, it can't just be specialized. I think the specialization of some of this stuff is creates the lack of validity. I don't think that it's valid if it's specialized. And so I can take a little kid, like my daughter does a bunch of the pool training stuff, right? I have an older, older guys that come and do a bunch of the pool training stuff. You know, I got Pat Riley comes in there and he trains in the summertime with us and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So we get a fairly broad spectrum of people and that, and that confirms to me that it's really legitimate, right? Because then it's like, no, this is real. Like the kids can do it. The old people can do it. The top guys can do it. The bottom guys can do it. Everybody can do it. Then, you know, that, that's something that's, that's, I just think that that's the, you know, what, what, what is real. So how many years have you been doing this? Um, XPT. Well, I mean the pool training I've been, I developed over the last probably 10 to 12 years, about 12 years now in the pool with, And you've evolved it. So you started off with a couple ideas. Well, I, I, I had like a Velcro weight jacket where you Velcro like a weight. Yeah. Jump in the deep end. It was a little scary. Yeah. Can't get the jacket off and how can you get up? So that wasn't, that wasn't too sketchy. That wasn't viable. So then we moved to dumbbells where you can drop them and, but, but we, you know, there's probably 20 exercises that we have. Which way do you use them? It depends. Sometimes we're doing, we have a move called the gorilla where we're using, you know, 60 to 70, 70 pound dumbbells where you're doing a curl press jump. So you, and you're jumping on the slope. So your curl pressing and jumping with, with, uh, with, you know, 60, 70 pound dumbbells, depending on your size, we're swimming with 50 pounds, 60 pound dumbbells. We're jumping off the bottom with 15 pound dumbbells. It depends on the exercise. So it's all depends on the person's skill, what the drill is, but we, I have a whole, I have all the weights next to the pool. So we have everything from 70s to five pound dumbbells. I love that idea of the jump press, like doing some sort of a. Oh yeah. It's all, you'd love it. It's crazy. I call it the gorilla curl. So it's a squat curl press jump. And then when you come out of the water, you just let the weights drop and then the water catches them. You could never do that. And how do you rip your shoulder out? Right. Right. How deep you do this in the water? Well, you vary on your height. So I have, I have a, about an 11 foot deep end and then I have a slope so you can choose every depth all the way. And then I have what you saw in that last video. It's about a three and a half foot shallow end. So this is the first pool I'm trying to build a couple. I'm trying to build one in Hawaii right now. That's going to evolve from what I learned from this pool. So this pool, I just kind of built it with, you know, with the hopes of designing a program and then out of it came all the, all this stuff. What are you going to alter? I'm going to create multiple depths. So I'm going to do like an area that has 12 foot. Then we're going to shift back two feet and have a 10 foot and then another flat area of eight foot and then another flat area, six foot. And then I have the magic width is about somewhere between 35 to 40 feet wide. And that's like, if you're trying to swim a heavy dumbbell, you know, we do a lot of individual limb stuff so that you isolate each limb. So we'll do pistol squats and Russian lunge squats and a bunch of other, you know, and movements that you can, you'd be very vulnerable if you did that in the gym, you can, the chances are you could hurt yourself. But because you have that stability in that environment, it totally supports you. So you can, you can be and go into ranges of motion that you don't have. Like you, you know, you might not be able to go sink all the way down into a deep lunge on one leg and press out with dumbbells in your hand on land, but in the water you can. And the water actually makes it lighter. So you have to boost the weight and stuff. So there's a bunch of great stuff that comes out of it. That sounds very attractive to people that have had injuries. Beautiful. The irony is, is it kind of, it's a little bit like what comes out of rehab where you actually get better performance too. Like you know, a lot of, a lot of rehab exercises become performance driving exercises. You know, it's like, hey, don't do that shit only when you get hurt. Start doing that and get strong that way. So then you maybe won't get hurt. Yes. Yeah. You know, so it comes that way too. It goes both directions. And do you have workouts that people can follow online? If someone goes to the XBT Life, is XBT Life, is that what it is? Yeah. XBT Life website? Yeah. And we actually, the thing that we have, the thing we have right now that's probably the most, the most kind of prevalent one, the thing that's happening as soon as we have a breathing app coming out. So we have a breathing app that has almost every different modality of breath work. And so there's some pretty cool stuff in there where you can go choose, hey, before I go to sleep or before my workout, after my workout, you know, during my thing. So we have a bunch of, we have a pretty cool breathing app that we're working on as well.