Dave Whitley interviews John Du Cane on Dragon Door’s recreation of a classic tool for advanced strength and conditioning…
Dave Whitley:
Welcome back to a long overdue episode of Advancing Man Project. Today I have a very, very special guest that I'm really excited to talk with and that's John Du Cane, the founder and CEO of Dragon Door Publications.
If you're not familiar with Dragon Door or John Du Cane, it's because you're just not familiar with kettlebells really.
John has his roots in martial arts, Tai Chi, and Qigong. He's been practicing that for decades. And in the early 2000s, he partnered up with Pavel Tsatsouline, to design and manufacture the first kettlebells that were available in the United States.
This grew into the RKC certification which I attended in 2003, which is really surreal for me to say because that's been 22 years since I started working with kettlebells. And the RKC continues to be going strong. Dragon Door has evolved over the years and I'll let John tell us more about the specifics of that to include things that have to do with body weight training, calisthenics, and isometrics.
John, I appreciate you taking time to be on here. It is an honor to have you on.
John Du Cane:
Thank you, Dave. And it's really great to connect with you again after all this time and history together.
Dave:
And I don't say this lightly. But anyone who is in the United States today, right now in , that sees a kettlebell or an image of a kettlebell or picks up a kettlebell or has anything to do with a kettlebell, we can trace it back directly to the work that you did early on with the RKC and manufacturing the kettlebell and getting it out to the public. I don't think the importance of your role in that could be overstated. So, thank you very much.
Before Dragon became what it is now, what was the original vision that you had for it?
John:
So, backing up even more, I've had a natural enthusiasm, certainly since my twenties, a natural propensity to share my passions for. I love the word enthusiasm, by the way. It means filled with the divine. So, I think it's a very cool kind of spiritual word to use in connection with sharing what you love.
And my great passions in my twenties had to do with physical cultivation, martial arts and meditation. I went to an ashram in India in where I was introduced to Qigong and Tai Chi and I fell in love with everything to do with Tai Chi and Qigong. So, I immediately became a proselytizer for the health benefits.
I have always been a spiritual aspirant and everything that I've done to do with movement and strength training and martial arts and nutrition finally has a kind of a spiritual bent to it — a desire to become enlightened or become certainly more spiritually aligned.
So that was the route that led me eventually to agree to found a publishing company with my Tai Chi teacher of the time in Minnesota. He'd had a small company previously that had gone down. He published a couple of books based on a lineage through a gentleman called Master TT Liang who I actually had already heard about. Liang was a renowned figure in the Tai Chi world. He was one of the first great Yang stylists to promote Tai Chi in this country.
So, rather impetuously I jumped I and we came out with a book called Cultivating the Chi, which was based on the Yang family's Qigong secrets. The book was a success. We then published Imagination Becomes Reality — such a great name! — based on TT’s Yang Tai Chi system.
Dave:
I love that! I did not know that you had a book that had that title. I have been exposed to Neville Goddard’s work. If you Google Neville Goddard quotes “imagination becomes reality” is one of the first things that'll pop up. I have a quote over here that says “every stage of man's progress is made by the conscious exercise of imagination matching the inner speech to fulfilled desire.” So, yes I love it.
John:
Yes, me too!. That was like a central message in my Tai Chi lineage. The original vision there was based on the Daoist esoteric principles of cultivating your entire being physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. You treat yourself as an ongoing work of art to be cultivated and refined. So that was the original vision for Dragon Door.
Now, when I started Dragon Door I had no background in business. I had no background in marketing or writing ad copy — but I had my passion and my enthusiasm.
Fortunately I had some great marketing mentors which led me to developing a physical catalog. Those were the days, , when we had paper… and I started to build up a catalog of esoteric resources for Qigong, herbs and all sorts of Chinese internal martial arts.
And it was tough! I mean trying to market highly esoteric material like that is very, very difficult, but it I really persevered and built up this respected direct response-based catalog.
Then came the massive shift for Dragon Door. I was teaching Qigong at a place locally in Minneapolis called the Open U. And this charismatic young Russian suddenly showed up on the scene named Pavel Tsatsouline, offering his own classes there.
I've always seen Pavel as a master marketer in his own right. He does not like people to realize that, but he was a very brilliant marketer. He understood positioning very well. He was very brand conscious and he was a great actor and entertainer. And I saw that right away.
I went to his flexibility workshop. There were ballerinas, grizzled old vets, bodybuilders, martial artists, every imaginable kind of person. And he was getting them immediate results.
Pavel had this whole schtick right from the beginning — even T-shirts that said Body by Stalin. Which was kind of outrageous. He was already into the Evil Russian idea. And, great credit to him. I learned to run with all that and amplify it in my own way. It was like a strong marriage, a partnership rather like say, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards getting together, where we hit it off creatively.
I approached Pavel at the end of his flexibility workshop and asked him if he’d like to be published. He was very diffident about it and said yes that would be great and we came out with the first book Beyond Stretching. People immediately became very interested,
Pavel had obviously much more of an enthusiasm for heavy duty strength training. I had always been into strength training, but not on the level that Pavel had been. Essentially, when he came over from Russia, I think when I met him, he had been probably about two years as a strength and conditioning trainer for Spetznaz, and that was it.
So, he was very young and he was actually secretive about his age in those days. He didn't want anyone to know how young he was because naturally people wouldn't really take someone in his mid-twenties that seriously. But his natural brilliance carried the day, obviously.
Pavel took my Qigong classes and liked them very much. And one of the things that I introduced him to was high-tension isometric training in Qigong, otherwise known as iron shirt.
There was a an iron shirt qigong system that he was very struck with that combined power breathing and high-tension holds. It was by Shou Yu Liang who I'd been studying with and promoting. Shou Yu Liang had been brought up in communist China and survived through some very hard times.
He'd never touched a weight in his life, but he'd been doing iron shirt qigong since the age of five with his grandfather. When he finally got to college and he was in the weight room he just kind of casually picked up a massive amount of weight and put it over his head. The local coach saw that, was astounded. He said, "So, you've been training weights for a long time?" He said, "No, I've never touched a weight in my life."
I told that story to Pavel and he lit up. One of Pavel's great abilities was to absorb a training insight that reaffirmed what he already knew and it would trigger him to really work on something innovative, which would take it to another level.
And the big, big initial impetus which did lead to I think part of the success of the kettlebell system was the understanding of how important it is to properly generate tension for strength and Pavel really understood that deeply. And out came Power to the People!
So the next step towards the successful development of kettlebells was this influential book title, which just used basically two exercises typical of power lifting where the real emphasis was on how to really make yourself stronger not just by lifting a lot but what's behind it. We were starting to build a significant following as a result of our what we were up to.
Then in 1998, Pavel said , “John when I was with Spetznaz I trained with these things called kettlebells. Do you think we could do anything with them in America?”
And I said “sure let's look at that.” Iron Mind had an adjustable kettlebell. That was it. There were no books, no videos, no workshops, no systems, nothing.
Pavel had just got some kettlebells from a Russian hockey player and they were the old style which were hollow inside. You put additional weight inside. We decided to manufacture them. We located a foundry in St. Paul, Minnesota and a small local shop that understood how to create the templates for these kettlebells.
And we thought, let's get away from the hollow kettlebells. Let's come out with a new design where they're solid. So we were the first people ever as far as I know in the world to come out with this kettlebell design. Our 16kg kettlebell did not exist in Russia in that format. We also designed unique 24kg and 32kg bells.
A huge, huge part of our success, I believe — which I am very proud of — was the creation of a certification system for kettlebell instructors.
Before I started the Tai Chi publishing company, I was the director of the certification board for chemical dependency counselors. Now, the chemical dependency counselors were almost all recovering addicts and many were not exactly credible folk a lot of the time. They're recently out of prison or whatever. They had been addicted to drugs for a long time. So, part of the certification system’s idea was how do we give ourselves credibility? Appear professional?
Basically a certification system allows you to anoint yourself as the authority. You say, "Come to us, we'll test you and we will bless you, my child." The certified person will now be a disciple, an acolyte, however you want to put it, a proselytizer.
Dave:
So it's go forth and multiply.
John:
Yes. Exactly. So that was huge because what we did is we set up an authority system and Pavel did a brilliant job with it. I gave him the idea of the certification and then it was a matter of filling in the blanks — like what are we going to test people on — the snatch, the swing etc etc.
We started started out with a very limited program really, that was based on Pavel's original experience with kettlebells but it immediately had resonance. We came out with a very iconic first book and a first video called The Russian Kettlebell Challenge that played up the whole love of the training secrets that the Russians somehow possessed — whether or not they really did.
We were able — with a lot of good hyperventilating — to make it exciting for people. Not only was it authoritative but it was a system that really worked, something that people were going to get fantastic results with.
You can hyperventilate and super-market all you want, but you better darn well have something that will truly deliver. And the beauty of the kettlebells is they truly deliver.
Dave:
Yeah. Yeah. And I I think that one of my favorite events that I ever attended during my entire tenure with the RKC was your Marketing Mastermind Intensive. And I remember I'm paraphrasing something you said there that if you have great marketing and an inferior product, you will go out of business more quickly.
To that point, obviously, there was a superior product in both the educational side of things and also in the kettlebells. I've got two RKC kettlebells, that are from those early, early years. And I still have them. And, I've thrown some paint on them here and there. They were inside for years, but for the past seven or eight years, they've been outside and they work just as well now as they did the day that I got them. So, fantastic, for sure.
When you were building Dragon Door up, it evolved from a company into like a culture. I know that you, being a student of good marketing, a student of you people like Dan Kennedy and that whole ecosystem, you don't do anything that isn't, if not planned, at least any contingencies that would be foreseeable are taken into account.
So, how much of building it from a company into an out-and-out culture was intentional? And how did you go about doing that? And how do you continue to do that now when the market is inundated? Because I know back then it's like you said, if you want to know about kettlebells, you went on Yahoo or Ask Jeeves, which predates Google. There was nothing there really.
John:
Well, I think a lot of it yes it was intentional up to a point. Definitely we were being organic in the way things developed. Pavel and I both had an original interest in martial arts and there's a sense any martial art of a strong community, of a strong camaraderie. You're doing tough stuff together to achieve certain results together so there's a very strong bond that gets established.
Whether you're in Jujitsu or Taekwondo or some esoteric Chinese martial art there's a stress on both respect for the teacher but also respect for each other and for the community that you're training with and that carried over to the RKC.
Something that was very intentional was that we set up a forum to support the whole kettlebell movement and the forum was huge in the first few years. Later on forums seemed to go by the way but initially there was tremendous amount of excitement and there were a lot of very intelligent and well-trained people who joined the forum and there was this free exchange of information. Nothing was really being kept hidden.
So I think the culture started to develop very strongly from that and I do credit myself and more so Pavel, who was passionately involved in stoking the culture and leading it.
Plus, the certifications were deliberately high-end. We'd have special exclusive dinners with the instructors. We'd have group dinners with all the candidates. There was a meet and greet the night before. We had little competitions. There were lots of different ways we would invite people to write articles, to speak, to contribute and feel heard and seen.
There was a sense of us all kind of working together to achieve something special. What is also very important, if you're going to have a culture, is to develop your own language. Yes, the development of a private language can become rather cultlike. That definitely happened with the RKC.
From my background in martial arts I had an understanding of the difference between hard styles and soft styles. I thought well Hard Style is a great name for a catalog and we came out with Hard Style as the name of our catalog and stressed kettlebell use as a hard style-like endeavor and people jumped on that.
So really part of the building of a culture is seeing what is really sparking people's true passion and interest and Hard Style became an amazing rallying cry. We put it out there and then it was taken up big time. And then we would feed that and Pavel of course was in his element playing his part. As I mentioned before, he's a great actor. He's a great entertainer. He had a highly refined schtick which he could turn on and maintain at will.
I naturally knew him extremely well personally and would have dinner with him on a regular basis. I've seen him be a kind of normal human being and then he had the ability like a lot of most successful people in the entertainment world or the fitness world to turn it on transform into a role-player.
We would cultivate our instructors and would deliberately promote them. We would do big interviews with them. We'd put a lot of special people on the front cover of our catalog which at its height mailed out to over 100,000 people. We made heroes out of a lot of our people. And heroes come in all shapes and sizes.
I think what was important for us in our culture was to have people feel that they belonged to something that was really special and we were recognizing them as being special. So particularly with the whole system of the Team Leaders and the Seniors and the Masters we were giving a very strong thumbs up to these individuals, promoting them as heroes.
But also just anyone who got results became a hero that could inspire other people. There's always this classic journey that I talk about when I teach marketing is you have a challenge that has to be met and then the right person shows up with the right system. You incorporate that and then you come out the other side. You have the solution and you triumph.
Part of the skill for anyone who wants to build a culture or build a successful business is how you take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves to you. Then the universe will say, well, how about the forum? How about the certification? How about this? It's what you then do with it. Do you stoke the fire or do you just move on and miss the opportunity? In our case, it was it was planned up to a point, but then it's a matter of going very much with the flow.
We got to the point where people were so into the culture that they were actually tattooing themselves with kettlebells.
Dave Whitley displays the large RKC tattoo on his right upper arm.
Yeah, Dave. There you are. Amazing. And very beautiful. Thank you. And that that is very heartening. I think how very heartened I am by how robust the culture did become.
Dave:
Did you ever think that it would become such a global movement that now you can go to check into a hotel in any city and in the fitness center there will be a few kettlebells laying around in there?
John:
And wherever you go, you will see ads with kettlebells as the default symbol for working out. I can’t say we anticipated that level of market saturation.
Pavel and I were very male-oriented in our approach. Based on the history of kettlebells with strong men and the Russian special forces we saw it as a very serious endeavor that would only attract law enforcement, military, people who were strong men, people who were really into the toughest type of training. And yes, we got a ton of those people and they became inspirational leaders.
However, what I think really jumpstarted it globally was that it was extremely successful with women.
Kettlebells won’t normally bulk women up. They tone the heck out of them. Women were very attracted to the fact they could become very well-conditioned, but beyond what you'd get from yoga or aerobics, you would get this very strong body that was firm in the areas that matter to most women.
Most women would like to have a nice tight, firm butt, tight midsection, firm thighs and a back that is reasonably muscular. This look became very desirable and sexy. A new style of female body was available that was beyond what you could get from aerobics and yoga and some of the more traditional outlets for the ladies. So eventually a kettlebell class would be 60% or more women.
What became very big and I think moved kettlebells to becoming a global phenomenon was group classes. It became something that went beyond the United States and it became very big in England very quickly. iI was interesting to see what countries gravitated to kettlebells. Not France, not Spain or for that matter the Latin American countries until much later in the game. But they became very big in Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Hungary and Korea. Germany, China and Japan eventually.
Now we've reached a point where you can reasonably say that tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people have benefited from kettlebells. So, no, we had no idea that it was going to grow to be what it is now. And it's extremely heartening and wonderful that it did.
I think that on a business level Pavel and I initially were naive about what we had. We just didn't realize the full potential. I don't think we protected our IP very well originally. I mean, literally everyone and their brother started to come out with certification systems based on our material more or less and it happened very quickly.
Oh well, we did still benefit well financially over the years and more than anything, I think it's just so wonderful to see people often getting kind life-changing results as a result of their practice.
I think the other thing to stress is the power of the system. What was so great about the RKC and the HKC and then whatever it evolved into was that it was a very carefully organized system of progressive exercises. There's a phrase in in the addiction recovery world, “it works if you work it.” And we had a system that was that — the strength wisdom was sitting there and if you worked it, it would happen for you.
Dave:
Yeah. I have often wondered what made that kind of training resonate so deeply with so many people, especially back in the early 2000s. But I see it as things like CrossFit, particularly the CrossFit games where people get together and compete and they go through that mutual passing through the fire that you mentioned earlier, things like Spartan races.
Most of the people who are doing it are there not competing to win but competing against a former version of themselves. I don't like the phrase “I only compete against myself,” because someone has to win and someone has to lose. What I like is the idea of I am competing against my previous best and that's how I reconcile that in my mind.
My son will be seven on Friday and he did his first Spartan race. The little kids version of it. And one of the things that they had to do, one of the obstacles they had to do in the kids version is they would get to a particular point and they had to farmers carry I think it was probably a six kilo kettlebell. And then switch hands and come back. And I'm like fantastic,. He's all about it.
How did it feel seeing it resonate so deeply with so many people?
John:
it's very inspiring and very heartening. I remember talking to I think it was Doug Nepodal, one of our previous instructors. Great guy. He used to be a bodybuilder.
And he said how absolutely miserable he was in those days as he pumped himself full of protein powders and struggled to get bigger and bigger and bigger. In fact, they came out with the term bigorexia for people who are always trying to grow and grow and grow. There was a lot of misery really in the culture around bodybuilding. There was a lot of misinformation about what really would give you good results and there was not a lot of functional training happening at that time. The machines were very dominant. it was that period.
So I think that kettlebells were very liberating for a lot of people. The system was liberating and also the fact that you had this gym in one hand that you didn't have to go to the gym. You could do it by yourself or in a group and it could meet all your needs.
And I think another thing that's lovely, a lot of people would go to the gym, particularly men, and they would mainly work out to get bigger biceps, stronger thighs, whatever, but they would not pay attention to their conditioning.
The great thing about kettlebells was you got the whole package. You became supremely conditioned. I mean, you cannot mess around with hundreds of snatches of weight and not get into fantastic conditioning and at the same time get very strong.
And of course, the other thing was the increase in functionality in your life. The great phrase that arose that was part of our culture was the What The Hell Effect. Which was supreme for kettlebells. Where else was there a device that you could use, you could do your swings and the next thing you knew you were a better baseball player, you were a better football player, you were running faster, you were hitting harder, your grip was surprisingly stronger, people were scared to touch you.
All of that I think contributed to why kettlebells became so popular and such a release from what people had had to deal with before, where again the training systems were such a mess frankly. People really weren't sure what to do and the great thing about RKC and everything that came from that was you had a very, very defined program to work with that got these amazing results.
Dave:
There are many examples of the What The Hell Effect showing up in my own training and in people that I've worked with as students and clients.
When I first found out about kettlebells and anything related to it, it was from an ad that you were running in Muscle Media Magazine that Bill Phillips…
John:
By the way, I have to interrupt. Muscle Media was huge for us during that period. Pavel had a monthly column in there which rewarded us with significant extra traffic.
Dave:
At the time I was going to the gym and I was doing a mix of some barbell stuff, but a lot of machine stuff. I was in the High Intensity Mike Mentzer/Dorian Yates bodybuilding philosophical approach. An acquaintance of mine had purchased a16 kilo kettlebell, which is one of the ones that I have now. And the VHS of that original Russian Kettlebell Challenge video. I took it home and shoved it in the VCR and watched it and thought this can't be that hard. So, I took the 16 kilo out into the front yard and I was very proud of myself for this.
I snatched it poorly, I'm sure, but I snatched it ten times with my right arm and then managed to switch hands without dropping it on a swing and ten times with my left hand, which was for my first time doing snatches. I felt really good about that. And then I set it down and I'm like, "Okay."
But then I had to sit down and then had to lay down in my yard and literally was thinking buzzards are going to come and start eating me before I even am done dying here. This is what the hell just happened to me? What the hell have I done to myself? I was moving fairly heavy weights in the gym, but nothing had ever given me that combination of both muscular fatigue and cardiovascular impact that was like running sprints when I was playing high school football, but full body.
That moment was very pivotal for me personally because I had a choice to make then. Do I keep doing this thing that I've been doing that I think I know about that isn't really working very well. I never really wanted to admit that the High Intensity bodybuilding stuff wasn't getting me where I wanted to go. Or do I want to embrace this because I was practicing martial arts at the time too. Big fan of Bruce Lee and his conditioning approaches.
And then I I spoke with my friend after that and he's like let's go to the certification. They're having this event. And so, that's how I showed up and that's where I first met you and Pavel and everyone associated with the RKC.
John:
Getting back to your earlier question, yes, I sometimes would wince or cringe at where people were hurting themselves a lot because they were overdoing it with poor technique. But finally,… all boats rise as the sea rises. I welcomed the fact that so many more people were being exposed and getting enthusiastic about working out in an intense way and still getting very good results.
So, more power to it that that many people were excited. So, I'm all for it, even if the training was diluted in some way and it wasn't quite what we thought was perfect, we were able to assert our authority to those who wanted to listen. And so, it benefited everyone in one way or the other.
Dave:
Now, were there specific moments along the way where you thought that the essence of what the kettlebell training was really about was being watered down or misunderstood by people?
John:
Oh, sure. Yes. I mean, that was happening. But again, that's okay. It's like what happened to some of the Korean martial arts when they came over here. There was a joke that someone would leave Korea as a first degree black belt and arrive as a ninth degree black belt. And set up his own system. And there was a lot of marketing. The whole creation of the belt system was very slick marketing. But look what it did. You know, it got a lot of little kids, both boys and girls, into self-defense. Maybe they didn't have the very best training, but if they persevered, they would find a better trainer.
So, I'm cool with the way these systems get used and sometimes abused.
I'm just suddenly thinking of Kiss. Kiss was so brilliant at marketing themselves and they embraced all the cover bands, all the kind of goofy versions of Kiss that came out because it only helped them. They welcomed it and let them thrive.
Dave:
You actually turned me on to Jean Simmons memoir. Oh my god. So good. Great read talking about how even when he was a child in Israel, he would strip the spikes off cactus and sell them to the troops, and then take the money back to his mother because his alcoholic dad had left them.
It might have been in an interview with him, that he said all the other bands wanted to be the Beatles. We wanted to be Coca-Cola.
John:
Interesting. I love it. Yeah. Very astute. Very astute.
Dave:
We're talking about kettlebells, but you've always not just been in the health and fitness business, not just in the kettlebell business, you've been in the Dragon Door business. Just the idea of creating a certification and establishing yourself as the authority, that's the way. It just makes so much sense.
And I also love that you've always blended along with the strength and fitness stuff like an artistic or philosophical or even metaphysical mindset. Brings some spirituality into it. That's something that I've always enjoyed about conversations with you or reading things that you've written because I had martial arts experience. I had Qigong experience before I ever knew what a kettlebell was. So that was definitely part of the hook that brought me into the mix.
How do you see the relationship between the physical strength side of things and then the more spiritual or esoteric side of things?
John:
There's a book that I really enjoyed called Go Wild, which was based on getting in touch with our primal wiring, whether it be diet or movement or whatever. They interviewed the Colombian neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas and he came out with a statement that I absolutely loved that relates to this. He said “that which we call thinking is the evolutionary internalization of movement.”
What he posits is that human beings became as successful animals as they did become over any other animal as a result of building their movement skills. Humans were able to outrun any animal over time be it an antelope or a cheetah. We were far, far more skillful in our dexterity.
We developed immensely complex movement systems. We had to develop very large brains to handle the sophistication of our movement skills and that in turn actually to takes a long time for a child to develop fully.
The problem these days is that people are no longer operating with the variety of movement skills that they are wired to use. So there's a lot of dysfunction happening in the world now as a result of our lack of varied movement.
Part of my huge attraction to movement in martial arts since my mid-twenties was I now realize the challenge of variety and skill building of movement and that's tremendously therapeutic.
I understand about strength cultivation coming first — that's a very good perspective. But in many ways my preference is movement first. Our truly exceptional attributes as humans lie in our functional movement capabilities.
So I think that one of the things that I gained and I think you gained from an understanding in the esoteric worlds of qigong and internal martial arts is the supreme value of building movement skills to a very sophisticated level. Bruce Lee is a nice example of that too in a more popular dimension.
So the tie-in is that you see that if you want to be spiritually evolved, you need also to be physically evolved. You need to integrate your cultivation of every aspect of what you are as a human being.
So strength translates backwards and forwards like a sympathetic resonance. You get to build your physical strength, you build your spiritual strength and vice versa. So it's this kind of emphasis on being a complete person and an emphasis on building your resilience against any kind of a challenge.
In Go Wild the authors asked a prominent expert on PTSD about what he finally thought helped most therapeutically for people suffering from PTSD. And he said, to paraphrase, "Well, forget talk therapy. Participation in social movement is where it's at."
And “social movement” is what is at work in martial arts, partner dancing, communal dancing. A lot of the original, shamanic Qigong was communal dancing and free form movement that was very healing.
If we get back to our animal primal roots, you can't separate your spiritual aspirations from your physical aspirations. They all tie in together. So move more! One of the great contributions that Gray Cook made was his terrific emphasis on the importance of understanding how to move beautifully. And I think kettlebells are a beautiful foundation for that cultivation of quality movement, both spiritually, mentally and physically.
Dave:
Yeah, I I agree totally that kettlebells are a fantastic tool to develop the ability to express the human body through movement. Because if a person needs to be stronger, it's there. If a person needs to be more mobile, the same tool. If I'm remembering right, there was a period of time way back when you threw out the phrase that the kettlebell is like the Swiss Army knife. It's one tool with multiple purposes.
And from a from a very personal standpoint for myself, back in February of this year, I rolled my truck. A car crossed over the center line. I swerved off the road. Didn't realize I was coming up on a curb. Rolled the truck and ended up at the bottom of a hill in a creek, lying on the side. There was water here and it was maybe six or eight inches deep.
When the paramedics arrived, I had had gotten out of my seat belt and I had stood up and I sort of scanned my body mentally and went through part by part to see if anything was seriously damaged and all I came away with was like two or three stitches in my elbow and a couple of staples in my head.
The paramedic might have noticed my tattoo and I know that part of what those people do is they keep you engaged in the conversation to be constantly assessing cognitive function and whether things are about to go downhill. So he's engaged me in conversation. We started talking about kettlebells and working out. And I told him about my history and about how I had done those things and how that led me to becoming a performing strongman and meeting Bud Jeffries.
I would not have met Bud who got me started on the path of being a strong man had it not been for the RKC. Bud introduced me to Dennis Rogers and I've told that story over and over again.
He said, "I see about three or four wrecks like this a month, and people just don't walk out of that the way that you did. If your training didn't save your life tonight, it definitely kept you from being seriously injured.”
The physical definitely has that interplay with the mental and emotional and spiritual and the inverse is also true. All of the stuff that I've learned and practiced over the years from every strength discipline that I've dipped my toe into the water has come into play over these past few months in various different iterations.
You think, I'm going to go pick up a kettlebell and I'm going to get strong or I'm going to get ripped or I'm going to do this many snatches in this time period or whatever. And that's really not what it's about when we get down to it. I owe a great deal of not only the success that I've had over the years, but just the enjoyment of life that I have at this point to the training and to the people who have helped shape my training.
And obviously you're one of those people because when you had that vision in the late 1990s, early 2000s of like, yeah, we can we make a different design of kettlebell and take it to market and see how it goes. If you hadn't done that, then who knows how things would have played out. So, I want to look you in the eye virtually and thank you for that part of it.
John:
I love what you were saying about the contribution to handling trauma and how there's still some trauma sitting there. do I recommend checking out Peter Levine and his book Waking The Tiger. He's someone who's developed a whole therapy for trauma that relates to shaking practices. And his big insight, big example is a tiger is chasing down an antelope.
At a certain point the antelope realizes the flight strategy isn't working and it fakes its death and it collapses on the ground and hopefully what happens is the tiger doesn't eat the antelope at all on the spot. Maybe drags it off into the bushes. “I'll come back for you later.”
The antelope then wakes up and starts a shaking practice. All animals except humans shake out the trauma that they've just experienced because when the antelope hits the ground like that, all of the fear and anxiety and whatever has been going rushing through their bodies is held in the body. And unless that is shaken out very quickly, it's going to affect you down the road. So birds do it, dogs do it, cats do it, all animals do it.
Humans, though, are so focused mentally, are so much in our heads that we shut down. We repress. We don't allow ourselves to shake it out when we get traumatized and down the road we pay the consequences. you with your prior training.
And it fits that you would have been able to handle your trauma very well mostly because of your practices.
Dave:
I think that we have arrived at this place of being the apex organism on earth because of our ability to recognize a threat, process that threat, and then go warn everyone else.
And I think that in our modern society, especially in a developed country, very, very rarely do we wind up in a place where there is a significant threat to us totally as an individual, but we're still wired for it. And so I think that the way that shows up now is through perpetual what I call recreational outrage.
We look for something and then we go complain about it on social media. And it feels very masturbatory. It feels like we're doing something because thousands of years ago we were, but it's still wired into us. And I think that that is one of the reasons that it's so important that we move well, that we breathe well. So, I'm glad you're recommending that book.
What do you see is the next evolution of where strength training is going from your standpoint?
John:
That’s a tough one. I'm not the greatest prognosticator, but what I'm seeing happening obviously is a tremendous integration with AI in one form or another. I've been seeing a lot of that in our own Dragon's business. We took on Paul Wade's isometrics device, the ISOMAX, as it's now called, which allows you to measure exactly the amount of tension you're actually generating in an isometric drill. One of the problems with isometrics often is that people don't have a clear idea really of how much tension they're generating.
You get what you measure for as they say that in business. So it's very motivating to measure and to see that the measurements are making a difference.
I'm not really a techie person, but I'm seeing everyone and their brother now has a device attached to them in one form or another that's measuring every imaginable variable — their heart rate, their breathing whatever — and then there's the type of device we're using.
So, I that there's going to be that much more integration in the fitness world with these different AI systems. It's kind of daunting and scary to contemplate, but where it's all leading to.
I don't have a clear idea really, but I'm seeing that there's still a tremendous interest in functional movement and I'm hoping that that will continue. I like the combination that both you and I are attracted to which is varied functional movement along with isometrics. I'm a very big fan of isometrics. As with Pavel, The Naked Warrior and a lot of his work is very iso-oriented. And part of the system in the RKC is also very iso-oriented.
Dave:
What advice would you give to the next generation of coaches or creators or fitness influencers who want to not just make a splash, but actually build something that lasts and has that kind of longevity that the kettlebell movement clearly has?
John:
I think passion is essential. You've got to recognize that you have a genuine passion for it. A genuine desire to share that, a desire to help people that is very authentic. You need to be authentic in everything that you do and preach and practice. Be extremely consistent. Be resilient. You're going to have constant challenges. You're going to feel like you can't go on. You just have to keep persisting and I think that if you do that, if you maintain all those mindsets, then you can succeed.
The paramount thing s that you genuinely want to help people and you are genuinely heartened to see people thrive as a result of what you're offering them and be very humble in that and show some love.
Dave:
Love that. And I agree completely with that. And yeah, back to the point that I spoke on earlier about coming out of the wreckage of that truck changed — that's honestly why we're having this conversation. I feel like I'm back where I'm supposed to be in and just talking to people and training people.
John:
You're a cultivator and you're getting back to being a cultivator who's helping other people cultivate and you lead by example. I appreciate that.
Dave:
What is a useless talent that John Du Cane has?
John:
I think that I'm really good at talking a lot of nonsense, in a Dadaist kind of humorous way. I'm very talented at that and actually I believe in it. I believe in play. I think I have a great useless talent in being able to be very playful verbally and talk a bunch of nonsense. It's actually fruitful in a certain way because play is essential to our well-being..
You said something that's useless. It actually does have a use, but it doesn't sound like it would be useful, right?
Dave:
What is a personal mantra or belief that you made sure you passed on to your children — who are wonderful kids by the way?
John:
Be supremely loving and attentive as a parent. I would hug my children every day. I told them I loved them every day. Touch and attentiveness and kindness and respect is everything.
Dave:
Beautiful.
If you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?
John:
100% grass-fed beef.
Dave:
And I would come over for dinner every night.
I really appreciate you being on. It's been wonderful having a conversation with you. Your business website is Dragondoor.com. Is there anywhere else that people could go to find?
John:
I think that's it. Dragondoor.com is it. Let me just say, I’m honored to be on your show and deeply appreciate every minute we spent together.
Dave:
Thank you very much, John. This is Dave Whitley for Advancing Man Project and we will see you next time.
