Barbell Shrugged - 148- Proper Strength Progression

Episode Date: October 29, 2014

this week on barbell shrugged we’re going old school. It’s just me, Mike and Doug talking training. We sort of geek-out on the topic of strength progressions. It’s a discussion that you need to hear if you want to become strong. “What program do you guys think I should do? No matter what I try, I can’t gain muscle. I’m lifting 6 days a week, but still, my lifts are going nowhere!” It happens all the time. This week marks the 148th episode of Barbell Shrugged. That’s a lot, but I can promise you that I’ve been asked this same programming question at least 150 times this year. The cycle repeats. People get very excited and motivated early on when it comes to training. I know the habits because I have been there before. You use three different colors of dry erase marker to graffiti the training goals across your whiteboard. Also, we cannot forget the name-brand gear, the crispy clean weightlifting shoes, or the finest lululemmon board shorts that money can buy. It all seems important enough, right? All of that stuff is great, I guess, right up until you go window shopping for the actual training program. That’s how it usually goes, right? You click around on the internet, or ask around at your box, “What program are you guys doing right now?” You end up doing whatever seems cool and exciting at the time. Forget reason, evidence and personal experience, this is more random chance silliness. How could you be surprised with a random or negligible training result? You cannot. You have a certain amount of years to pursue the development of your training career. It’s like any other career path you would take. It comes in phases. For a few years you pay your dues and put in your work. Before long you’ll do well, but you always have to be learning and hustling to build your skills and keep your edge. That process doesn’t ever stop, not if you want to keep making progress throughout the progressively harder years ahead. You will climb and climb, with clear markers of progress all along the way. But then one day you’ll know things are getting a little too hard. You won’t be able to keep up that relentless edge. Retirement or a brand new challenge become what you need most. Do you know what program hoping really is? It’s quitting a job 3-6 months in because the retirement benefits aren’t coming fast enough. Or, how about this? Would you ever consider working 2-3 jobs at a time? Probably not, but have you ever done more than one training program at once? Right, this sort of mixing and matching can be done with some experience, but you have to be really careful. Most athletes are reckless in practice. What everyone needs to understand is that strength is the result of intense, persistent and cumulative effort. Your $30 eBook or weekend long training seminar is worth little more than a pamphlet at the local job fair. You’ve still got to commit to something and do some real focused work if you want a real reward. Strength is rooted in the fundamentals. Before you think about switching programs, make sure you’re sleeping 8-9 hours a night. Eat more real food. Make sure you utilize basic recovery methods, including sauna and message. It really does make all the difference. And when it comes to training, just try being there for a while at first. Find a gym that has some strong members…And then be there, 4-5 times a week, every week for a year or so. You’ll always have a better understanding of training if you do that first. You can search for the secret sauce later on. When you are ready to pick a training program, start with your needs and nothing else. What do you what to get really good at? What must improve? That will take the focus of your programming, along with a series of very similar assistance movements that will bring up your lifting skills quickly. It’s only then that the brand of progression becomes a critical thing. To get really strong, you have to add weight to the barbell. At first you will do it weekly, or just about every time you come to the gym. Be patient, 5 pounds a week adds up. This is simple and linear, but you’ll be a lot stronger than you are now with zero fuss. It’s an amazing way to train. To skip this phase is foolish. If you do that, you’ll never reach your full potential.  The only time you ever mess around with your progression is when the progress train stops. In that case, you rest for a while, eat some fattening food, and you come back at it. If you ever find yourself failing and failing again, then you know you’ve graduated. You now need to consider spreading out the loading to every other week, two weeks, etc. These styles of programs look more like undulating waves if you graph them out. The most ideal, in my view, is when you ramp up your work to a tough record attempt on week 3, then unload. That works so well it’s silly. I would only recommend one other approach. It’s something I arrived at in my powerlifting training after years and years of trial and error. My wave was still 4 weeks. I still went for my really heavy record attempts on week 3. The last week was devoted to unloading work and recovery. The difference is that week 1 was my second heaviest week, with target loads around 95% of my best. I then used my second week to restore speed to the barbell, explode through t 70-85% weights. That left me feeling explosive and bulletproof for my record attempts on week 3. Those are just a few ideas. In truth, there are endless ways you could progress your strength work. I think you’d be wise to get yourself two books in the beginning, “Starting Strength” and “Practical Programming.” Both are authored by Mark Rippetoe. You need those books. Learn all you can starting now, the rest will sort out. Just keep your barbells heavy. Cheers, Chris Moore

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we talk about the key to getting strong, both in the gym and in life. It's proper progression, baby. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. This is an issue that keeps coming up. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe. I'm sitting here in Memphis, Tennessee in Chris Moore's fabulous office.

It's probably a study, actually. Yeah, a study. Here with Doug Larson across the way from me. Yes. And we have zero guests. We haven't done this in a while. we haven't done this in a while we haven't done this in forever yeah uh we have ctp behind the camera he'll probably throw up some questions here and there today we're going to be talking about strength progressions and you know just about life in general you know how it goes here we'll go off the wagon and then bring us back on

point but it'll be a fun journey mike's been the best that lately. I've been loving getting off the wagon and Mike's like no no no we need to like bring it back. Yeah so we go through phases. Every once in a while we switch roles temporarily. What was the movie in the 80s CTP where Fred Savage and the other guy switched personalities like switching places. Big. Oh yeah that's another one.

There's lots of those movies. There's Fred Savage and Tom Hanks in Big. No you got that mixed up man. That's not the same movie. There's Fred Savage and Tom Hanks in Big. Oh, really? No, you got that mixed up, man. That's not the same movie. There's this movie that exists five times. Yeah. But it does happen. Let's not get too far into it.

Before we get off into some movies. See, he's bringing us back on. Fred Savage. Make sure to go to barbellshrug.com, sign up for the newsletter. If you're wondering how we keep this fantastic uh podcast going traveling all over place introducing you to uh the most amazing people in the world uh it's because of some of the things that happen behind the scenes and we'll tell you a lot about what happens back there if you sign up for the newsletter and there's some characters coming up that you want to

uh explore more of as soon as possible like there's some shows coming up where you want to know quickly what's going on with them we're gonna surprise knock your socks off i think should be very very fun talk about strength progressions today so uh we're talking about this because we have a lot of people that ask you know you know what's the best squat program and i i talk to people in the gym or i'm having dinner with some folks and they're you know they just got done with one squat program they got some good results and then they they're like, I'm going to try this other one now. And then, or they'll get halfway through another squat program. Like, oh, it totally destroyed me.

Like, you know, this one worked real well. It ran for 12 weeks. And then I just randomly chose this other one. And for some reason it's not working out. Maybe I should go back to that one that worked for me or I got bored with that one. It's too much of the same. And so i wanted to like try something new they pick out programs like like new albums like listen to it they get so they get tired of it and they try to find another album they like right yeah but they forget that that's not really what makes a program a program like

it's that's what you see but the this was the mechanics of it i guess is a good way of saying it the driving force is is a system of progression. If you don't understand that, then nothing will work for you. Well, a lot of people have put out like 12-, 16-week or even only four-week programs, and people treat them as these isolated events. You know, I'll do this over here, and then I'll do this over here. Like you're making a soup.

But the, well, I mean, going to the recipe type thing, that would be like saying, I really don't like eating turmeric by itself, but when I add it into this recipe, now I bring, you know, it's the spice of whatever. Are you into turmeric right now? There's a lot of evidence on turmeric. Dude, I love my turmeric.

Isn't that shit like magical? It's definitely good for inflammation. Somebody was going to say, you guys are being sponsored by big turmeric, aren't you? Sneaking those turmeric plugs into the show. Well, you know, that turmeric lobbyist got his claws in me pretty deep. It looks like little versions of ginger, right? It is. I actually consume turmeric probably on a daily basis.

Well, see, I use that instead of ginger in my juice sometimes. All right, we're off in the weeds already. But that's a little chunk of value for people who are making juice. Yeah, so anyways, it's cool to try out these isolated programs. It's a lot of fun to try out different things, see what things jive for you. I personally have tried out a ton of different things. And then some programs I'm like, I am bored out of my mind. My body feels bored.

Things aren't clicking. It's not right. And there's been other programs where I'm like, oh, my God of my mind. My body feels bored. Things aren't clicking. It's not right. And there's been other programs where I like, oh my God, this is really resonating with me. This is making sense. I'm getting stronger. The recovery time is just perfect. I can party on Saturday just a little bit and still recover and all that kind of stuff.

Of course. Yeah. That's sensible. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. Come on, Michael. Well, a little bit for me. I do think it's interesting how you said earlier about how people treat the strength program as its own isolated thing like they can do a strength program and that's like what they add on top of

everything that they're already doing right or even if they are hopping programs you know basically randomly in some cases they're not actually even stop. They're not actually stop stopping. They're not stopping the current program that they're doing. They just add on a new program, right? We see that all the time. Like, well, we have our muscle good challenge and our road to regionals program. And we just added shredded bikini. Every time we launch a new program, one of the questions I get inevitably from like half a dozen people is, um, can I do all these workouts on top of all the workouts I'm already doing at my gym? And I'm like, no, this is a comprehensive program. We're handling all the workouts for you. If you ever, once in a while, I want to like go to your gym and still do a workout with, with your, you know, all your friends and your crew and you want to

switch out a workout here and there, or you want to say, Hey, you know, you guys are doing this work today. I have this workout program for me. If you want to come with me and do it with me you know you can still work out with your friends you don't have to like work out by yourself forever but they always inevitably every single time we launch someone wants to know if they can just add five workouts a week to the five or ten or fifteen workouts they're already doing that week in some people's cases and i'm like you can't just add workouts you have to like either switch programs or you can add like a few things here and there you can't just put two programs together and call it your program it's like it's like if you went out like i left here and i went out shopping like everything i needed

but i also saw that somebody was offering really awesome dogs for sale and it was such a bargain and they were cute and i loved it so i got it and i took it home you put it in your stew no no no let's say out let's no come on dude that was a i was like what in the shit was that supposed if you got a dog and brought it home and your parents were like or your family was like we don't like dogs or somebody just didn't like the dog they want another kind of dog if you just brought an element into your home it would disturb everything if you didn't think about how it would just sort of jive or if you didn't see how other sort of key things in your household would work with that thing so in your life or training you didn't see how other sort of key things in your household would work with that thing. So in your life or training, you bring in a big, key, important thing like strength training.

And then if you're also working with other coaches and stuff, you're offending them. They have ideas that are not maybe jiving with the other ideas. You're trying to plug things together that may not get along at all. And you're going to find out by injuring yourself or wasting time or having a shitty result. Yeah, or like Mike was talking about the recipe idea earlier. Like if you are baking cookies and because you want cookies and then you decide, I don't want cookies anymore. Now I want to have like a loaf of bread.

And then you decide, I want the goal of a loaf of bread. And instead of just switching the whole recipe and just using a bread recipe to have a loaf of bread, you take all your cookie ingredients and all your bread ingredients and you just mash them all together and you hope you get bread. you're gonna get something but it's not gonna be bread it's not gonna be bread it might be awesome it might be terrible probably better than bread it's gonna taste awesome it's got chocolate in it and sugar but maybe but you're not gonna get it might turn yeah it's gonna be an epic failure is what it's gonna be yeah but i want cookie bread you gotta make that shit for me doug yeah and you gotta consider too people are jumping into

programs a lot of times that are written for someone more advanced uh don't jump into kendrick ferris's program it took him like 20 freaking years to get to where he can handle the training volume that he's doing today i think i was talking to on travis's podcast barbell life i pointed out to him like people forget like they want that's what made me think of it was your yeah i was like that sounds familiar but like yeah you look at you look at kendrick now people get how did kinder get so awesome like what's he doing i want to do uh you know kyle pierce's programming too and you'd go down and you would learn stuff but what you forget is like dude i remember all of us sitting around

it might have been like 2006 doug you were here so did you get in 2006 into grad school so i think we would pull up on like computers on on our massive laptops at the time. Like in the training hall. You have a laptop back then. There's some laptops that weigh 15 pounds. With a big fucking, big monitor, computers that were in the lab.

But pulling up like a video of this young kid, this Kendrick Ferris guy doing a squat jerk and going, what in the fuck? He's the first guy. He did a squat jerk back then. It was a kick jerk. Kick jerk.

Yeah, yeah. That's the only reason I knew who he was because I was like, what is that guy doing? I've never seen that before. That guy's a terrible jerk. It looks horrible. Yeah, so that's's the only reason I knew who he was because I was like, what is that guy doing? I've never seen that before. That is a terrible jerk. It looks horrible. Yes, that's 2006 and that was 2014.

And then he was not a beginner then. He had already been grinding. So you got to think for him, his recipe to get to where he is now where he's sponsored athlete and Olympian and sought after author and a speaker and a really good guy. Man, he's been working on that a long time. Yeah. He went through a lot of stages of just like doing a lot of practice yeah so don't follow doing a lot of key habits before he'd fucking worried about everything else so don't follow kendrick's training today go back to kyle go back

you know it's like well dr kyle prayers and be like how'd you build this what did kendrick doing is 14 and can you give it to me when i'm 14? Can I go back in time? If you're 21 and you're still going back to what Kendrick doing is 14, that might be inappropriate as well. And the other thing you have to consider is if you're doing a program that's more advanced, it's probably for someone who actually knows how to recover. I find that most people have really poor recovery habits. There are programs that are written that are for three or four days of

training. And that's for someone who is more of a beginner who may not understand all the recovery methods or take it as seriously. Even if you know how to do it, are you doing it? And if a program's tearing you up, it may have everything to do with just how serious are you taking recovery. It may not even have as much to do with experience, but usually experience and recovery kind of go hand in hand together.

You might be doing a Russian secret squat training program, but you forget that like there's a really cool. You guys and I just go out to YouTube and type in Klokov Shiko Shiko. I forget how you put S-H-E-I-K-O. You'll come up with a channel and there's an hour long interview with Dimitri. He talks about his business and training ideas and everything. It's really awesome. Read it. You won't be able to listen to it because it's in Russian, but read it.

But he makes that point. What you see is what you're missing out of this CrossFit culture are a few things. One was the culture of physical sport where you don't step over or slam bars necessarily. There's a way you behave in a gym. Another thing was you don't understand that we are driven to succeed. There's no outside work or screwing around. You train. And I think he said specifically like,

you do fuck else, but sauna and eat and sleep. He goes, if you're not sleeping, what's the point? Like he even says that you can have the training program. All your activities are going to be a better weight. You can have all the borscht you can fucking eat. You can have all that. You can have Russian chicks massaging. He didn't say that, but it'd be awesome. That's a plus.

But like he makes a point. He said all the pharmacologists you can speak of. It's like, but if you don't sleep well, none of it matters. So he's, he's these fundamentals. Like,

so if you're not doing like big recovery methods, like some sauna or light massage and like sleeping properly and knowing how to feel your effort and building a habit of strength and nothing else matters, you know, no fancy, you won't be able to do a 10 week cycle of squat training and survive. you just legs won't stop it'll stop working three weeks into it yeah that's all he has to say about that close the book on that i'm with you on that though like basic job chris

basics are always best like people come to me and they'll be like man like i know the bottle of my zma says i should take three pills a night but i'm kind of a bigger guy do you think i should like take four pills a night instead and they they're like, that's like this little, little, little detail. And then I'm like, well, I don't know. Like, have you tried three yet and felt the effects or have you tried four and felt the effects? You're not really going to know. Just try it out and see how you feel, which is a very loose answer. This is not fertilizer, bro. But then you ask them something like, well, you know, are you getting enough sleep already? And then they say something like, well, you know, I sleep six and a half hours a night.

And you're like, well, fuck, like you're not doing that. Your ZMA doesn't really matter. You get way more results by getting a little bit more sleep, which is way fucking easier said than done. By the way, you'll know when you start taking too much ZMA because the side effect will be that you'll get the squirts. Yeah, you don't get the squirts. See, you got to go to the edge and then come back. I've been to the edge. I've stepped clear over it.

I have found it, and now I can report back. I thought it was afar, and I had to step back from the edge. The same thing happens with beta-alanine, by the way. But I think in training, people always assume that training is, I don't go too deep in the weeds, but they think training is all about escalation and ever-increasing complexity, right? Like add more shit in and you get a better result.

But really it's like add in enough where you discover something. And then it's helpful to cycle back through and go back and relearn things with new context and then build a little bit. And cycle through and kind of break things back down into fundamental parts and remaster them. Then step forward again. I think one reason why I love Diane Fu so much is that I think she's like a new breed of strength coach who sees that more isn't better. It's also awesome. Instead of growing the biggest tree possible,

you grow the most awesome bonsai tree. We were always trying to make it the perfect shape. Where you build and you come back down and you relearn how to pull again and shit. This Chinese guy comes in and teaches you, well, you could also think of it like this, and you go, whoa, and you work on your pull more. You build a craft out of it.

Then you don't even worry about the weight because then you realize that, well, I've mastered it so much, I can snatch where the fuck I want. It doesn't matter at that point. You realize that progress comes from craftsmanship, not necessarily just a rush to build. You get a big, shitty building if you rush to build something. I mean, you see people do that all the time.

They're doing a squat program, but their mechanics are still really poor they're they're folding over at the hips heavily because they don't they don't have requisite ankle mobility you can add weight it's kind of like that guy he he drops in a group um he's in one of our i think he's in our muscle gain challenge group and he's like mike how can i get better overhead squats i need to get stronger overhead squats my shoulders are giving out on me i think i've even talked about this on the show once before it's a great example it's a perfect example of the misconceptions that people have and he's like how can i get better overhead squat and i look at the video and he is like his torso is 45 degrees he's putting his shoulders in a position they're not made to be in.

And it's all because he lacks ankle mobility. And I go, he's like, what do I need to get stronger at overhead squats? I said, you need to work on your ankle mobility. Or if you tend to work on that after you do like, CDB tried to do that shit last night in my garage. And he looked like that, but because his legs were crushed from the shredded workout. Yeah. So if you're trying to work on it on days that don't make sense to work on like if your legs can't even bend and you're trying to work

your overhead squat positions that's like your day for working snatch technique yeah but you just did like prowler sprints or hill sprints or something the day before and you did like five by five squats now like my shoulders are so stiff like and yeah my legs are also crushed like that's another factor that would make you yeah not perform well well the other thing the thing is is like the the guy wanted to come back and be like, yeah, but how can I make my shoulders stronger? And I was saying... Give them a chance.

That's how you get better. You're missing the point. And a lot of times people just want to try harder, just like you were saying. People want to just stack shit instead of going back. You'll break it when you stack it. And so the best answer for that guy is if you want a heavier overhead squat is fix your ankles yeah there's ways to keep getting stronger

but doing more overhead squats is not the answer trying to do sots press may not be the answer the answer is work on those ankles hammer those ankles if you do that for three months you're going to get up you're going to see bigger jumps in your overhead squat than you ever would have with any weight training. And people make a mistake with that, though. You're just out of position the whole time. Yeah, people will make a mistake with that, too, and then they'll start putting all the focus on some of these things and they'll forget that they need to also be training with purpose, too.

It's like what you were saying. I was like, you know what? It'd be cool if I could go back and do my power thing again. What I would do is probably for a training block where I want to prepare my general fitness and general strength and work up and then do a competition that was big. Like maybe it's a year of training or six months of training. It'd be cool.

Like if I knew I had a problem with my ankles, then that's fine. I'll just push and I'll, I'll know what something I work on, but I won't just be distracted by it. I'll build and build and get strong. And then when I do my meat and there's another period for general preparedness, it makes sense to say,

right. Instead of just charging forward, like most lifters do with a bad habit because they can still get stronger why not like just be a little patient spread out your training goals the things you want to hit and go like you know i'll go back and i'll work on this training cycle repeat that effort but with a little bit more uh upright posture let's say a little bit better shoulder rack my bench will improve a little bit because I'm not wearing my shoulders so much. I can drive my angle range of motion up a little

bit. The loads won't come down drastically because I'm just working on a little bit. I can still progress and not feel like I'm losing ground because I'm still going to be right where I'm at. If you had a couple of big long cycles where you refined yourself like that, you'd be really strong. But you would have resolved things in a way

that didn't cause you too much delay. I think most people, they need a lot of experience before they get to that point. I think it took you a lot of experience to get to that point. It takes a lot of injuries and kind of training for 15, 17, 18 years, and you go, oh. well, hindsight, sometimes, sometimes taking a step back is the way forward progress. Was it, I saw a cartoon the other day, you know, uh, it's not always a step forward. Taking a step forward might be the step right

off the cliff, you know? So sometimes progress is, is taking a step back. Yeah. You don't appreciate progressions until you have some amount of experience unless you can't physically do a movement like if you can't do a dead hang pull-up then you're like man i need a progression and you let you jump right to it you really appreciate it but if you walk right in the gym and everyone's doing back squats you want to do back squats too you're not like whoa whoa whoa i'm gonna go goblet squat while y'all back squat right no one does that right off the bat until they they try to back squat maybe they can't do it for some whatever reason their technique doesn't work or doesn't

work they're they have bad mobility they have bad technique yeah uh they're they can't maybe they have poor shoulder mobility they can't even reach the bar like something shit like that happens and a gobble squat or front squat is probably better for that person but they'll try to back squat anyway and just be like all all in a screwed up position You see that in bodybuilding magazines all the time where like their fingertips are barely on the bar. They get this wide grip and they can barely reach it. They still want to back squat instead of just front squatting or using the headline is squats are squats safe.

And you go, well, not in some ways. No, I mean, not like he's doing it. Back handsprings for me aren't safe either. I don't have to do this gravity and shit.

Chris, you were talking about uh kind of tying in personal development with progression as well as like i think i think uh part of some of the lessons that you've learned some of the lessons i've learned in strength training kind of coincided with some yeah some things that happened with us and probably doug as well as like person things happen in our life that helped us on the personal development side that kind of- We all know people who-

You step back and you look at just progression in life in general. It's not just about strength progression. It's about progression in anything. People who really love the barbell, like you could probably pull out these stories that Zach Evan Nesh and Diane, all of us and like all of our mentors,

they'd probably tell you that the barbell was a tool of like self-development like what it really is like an evolved chunk of metal that we have worked with and it's worked with us until it's now like on a legal level and we are now people who see the value in training it's like as you go along like there are people we know right now in our old like fighting clubs and powerlifting circles and if we did some bodybuilding you can think of the guy you knew in the bodybuilding gym who this fucking guy had been there forever. He's still there.

He's going to hit the same thing. He's going to work for the same like cycle of movements, but just the progression doesn't lead him to like trying a new sport. Like for us, we fucked around with bodybuilding stuff because it was so fun and still worthy of fucking around with and working with because it's got a lot of value it'd be good to have some progress built in but i love that time of my life because i got to try everything and have fun and kind of the festering there allowed me to kind of learn the culture and observe some of these characters and there's a

group of palethers who influenced me like they were saying shit like man you need like 12 weeks to like build something i was like well what do you mean? I had no idea what it meant to work on a plan to step up. I just figured you come in and you pump a big tire that was strength. The more you just did this shit, the bigger you got and the stronger you got. I'll just keep doing three by 10 until I'm fucking huge. Hulk Hogan in his prime. That's what I did too. Yeah, but that was just an interesting way of strength to see and strength that works.

It worked. It worked. It did work back when you were doing it and it probably still works to some degree it's not necessarily bodybuilding even it's it's just resistance training bodybuilders happen to use resistance training that's preparation three sets of ten if it's an inclined dumbbell press like crossfitters don't do that often bodybuilders tend to do it more but it doesn't make it bodybuilding necessarily it's just resistance now the thing the thing that i missed when i was doing that, I was doing a three sets of 10, five sets of 10 or whatever like that, and I would change programs every five or six weeks. I would change the rep schemes and things like that, which is good.

However, there was no progression in mind. I made changes so that for variety's sake, I didn't make changes for progression's sake. Yeah, that would be useful and the progression i mean my idea was squat a lot press a lot pull a lot and i did that and i just kept variety in there which this is this is pretty common with most people i think but i never thought about progression and volume never thought about progression and intensity i never thought about deloading uh so and at 15 16 years old when i started why even consider deloading you know what i mean uh i certainly didn't need to do it as often but no yeah potentially not necessary especially if every

few weeks you went to like summer camp or something and that was some if i was going to summer camp at 15 some progression is what you want some progression you want like you're saying but you also we want to make it clear that a few years doing this at least, or in our case, like maybe a decade of doing it, is really good because you build a lot of musculature

and your skeleton adapts and you learn how to do all kinds of pulls. If you go on for a quote back day and you know that I'm supposed to pick a deadlift movement, it's like some days you might do like a machine thing or something. Well, then some days you'll do like a deadlift, and you go,

well, this is harder. You'll discover. Some days you'll do a dumbbell. Some days you'll do like stiff leg style. Some days you'll do it like on some kind of other apparatus or a different kind of barbell or a fatter barbell, whatever. If you came in and did a pull and you just worked up to something heavy and you always try to improve a little bit,

if you didn't have a ton of structure, that's okay because you're just discovering yourself and you're building a good habit of going to the gym and thinking of ways to train yourself and you're learning and all this it's it's a great phase you need it like crossfitters skip it go right to like a five three one thing immediately or they go right into like a they find on a blog a big training program that somebody they know is doing but they've skipped the preparation they haven't like spent 10 years doing a bunch of back raises and glute hams and ab work and bracing exercise and they haven't learned their pulling mechanics

from the age of 13 like you've skipped a lot of things that the kindreds of the world do or the strong men or the power elders or whatever the people you see who you admire you're skipping their stages i think with a crossfit the that's kind of like the that's the first step in a progression for a lot of people is just showing up to the gym a few days a week. And I see too many, like, you know,

I want to talk about, you know, what a progression looks like for a beginner. And I think a lot of times, should we take a break? Should we, we'll take a break. And then when we come back,

we'll talk about what, what a progression looks like for a beginner. We could probably go a long time with this one. Part five coming your way. This is Andrea Ager, and you're listening to Barbell Shrug. For the video version, go to barbellshrug.com.

Barbell Shrug is brought to you by you. To learn more about how you can support the show, go to barbellshrug.com and sign up for the newsletter. And we're back. Oh, man. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so talking about

what exactly a progression looks like for a beginner and i think even we what we end up doing is we start thinking about the science of things and we start thinking about training programs and these are the first things that pop in our heads but as we were discussing talking about the topic of progression we start talking about people who are starting to train is the first step in your progression is probably to show up to the gym three days a week the second step in your progression is to show up to the gym four days a week and until you're showing up to the gym four days a week maybe five um you know i say four is probably the minimum before you have to start taking like

yeah you know like let's really start picking out a program here is, is until you're showing up and working out four days a week, the biggest gains you can make is just being there four days a week, every week. Your one page pamphlet is quote, be there. Yeah. All too often,

all too often people want the secret formula they think that doing this special squat program or this special diet or whatever because all this progression stuff also uh you know is the same for food and supplements and all that kind of stuff you know why jump in and to some advanced nutrition stuff when you haven't even mastered the basics you can you change the conditions you're living in, then nothing in your life will change. Like you have the conditions that promote sleep and the conditions that promote physical activity

and the conditions that promote good nutritional habits. Like Doug always says, like if you want to eat well, you don't only pick out a program or a diet to sell, you have great fresh produce and shit in your house. And because it's there, you're going to eat it. That's the first step. You don't have to go past that until you know that you need to buy great food and have it around the same thing goes for training if you're in a gym okay you're there and there are fit people

all around you that's already enough to have you start getting fit because you're gonna start just doing what they're doing and realize it's fun and now you're off to the races so these are the basic habits where if this isn't in place first then nothing else makes sense yeah the people you surround yourself with are that's one of the biggest influences in your whole entire life so if you go to a crossfit gym all you have to do is show up like to your point if you go to regular gym maybe not you show up and kind of confuse your loss you walk around you just kind of look look at the machines you go i should do that one i don't know i guess i'll stretch and then you go home yeah if you're really confused you're brand new you don't know what to do you go to a crossfit gym you can just walk in there's people

all around you that have similar goals that they they new, you don't know what to do. You go to a CrossFit gym, you can just walk in. There's people all around you that have similar goals. They want to get fit. They know how to train. The coach is going to show you exactly what to do. Everyone's going to do it all together. All you have to do is walk in the door. It'll handle itself, and then you can walk out. That's the main benefit of being at a CrossFit gym specifically.

If you don't have a CrossFit gym, say you have the garage gym, or you're at the Globo gym where there's not any coaching going on, or groups going on, do a program that you can do three to four days a week, maybe five days a week if you want to get aggressive. I recommend just doing three or four if you're a true beginner. You can always add later. Yeah, so the idea is let's show up at least three days a week

and do something fun. Do something you enjoy. You want training to be enjoyable. And if that's something that's not CrossFit, that's okay. If it's not weightlifting, that's okay. If it's playing lacrosse or something, maybe that's just what you need to do for now. But show up, do it three days a week for at least 12 weeks. Until you've done that, you have no business trying to find the secret sauce,

trying to find that program that's going to work for you because that training frequency is going to be the most important factor. It's like you jumping behind like an F-150 steering wheel and freaking out and crashing and dying. You don't want fanciness up front. You won't know what to do. Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to teach a kid

how to drive a Ferrari on the first day. It won't make sense. No, no sense whatsoever. It's awesome. It's fucking righteous. It'll get you laid. It's sexy. But you'll die before you can get it.

But if you don't know what you're doing, kid, you're going to get hurt. Yeah, so once you get past that stage of you show up to the gym three days a week, you're showing up frequently, you're eating right, right-ish, and what do you do now? You feel like you want to start making progress. Like, you're showing up frequently. You're eating right, right-ish. And what do you do now?

Like, you feel like you want to start making progress. You want to take it to the next level. Whatever. I think the first thing people should do when they start looking for a program with progression, like, you got to define your goal. You have to have a goal to start with. You know, some people go, oh, I just want to get stronger it's like what does that mean strength means it means anything and everything man you gotta define it really carefully so what does that mean to you i think most people you know

it's like hey i want to be able to bench press more i want to be able to squat more i think those are pretty normal goals to have and find a program that lasts 12 16 16, 26 weeks, whatever it is, and do that program and stick with it for the duration and find something that's a linear progression. So that means that you're doing just a little bit more than you did the previous week. Just find something that's very simple. That's made for beginners. Don't jump on an advanced weightlifters programming don't go look for i'm not i've never done the small off uh squat routine uh but from what i understand it gets pretty aggressive at times i just find something simple something like the texas method yeah i was gonna say people should get mark ripto's practical programming book that's excellent you should pick a program

but as you pick it i think you should take some time to understand why it is an intermediate style program, how it's different than what you did when you just came into the gym and you just added weight on everything whenever you could. Like now you, now you're going to get strong enough to where you're going to cause fatigue. And now you got to know how to manage that. So you can go to get strong again.

So that's going to teach you why it's important. And it shows you some things like, I think the best intermediate program for somebody, if somebody texted me, it's like, Hey Chris, I want to get strong. I've been lifting the X amount of years and i want to press the intermediates like texas

texas method no i'm saying once you once yeah once you do the work and now you're ready to do something serious like those kind of the texas method style programs and mark's book is really excellent at kind of teaching you why this phase is now important and necessary yeah mike touched on linear periodization like a lot of advanced lifters people that have been lifting for like 15 or 20 years like if you squat 800 pounds and you're like we're gonna do on linear periodization. Like a lot of advanced lifters, people that have been lifting for like 15 or 20 years, like if you squat 800 pounds and you're like, we're going to do a linear periodization program, they're going to be like, oh, sure. Like, yeah, maybe like 15 years ago I would have done that when I was a beginner.

So a lot of advanced athletes will slam on that. If they've been in the game for a long time, they're like, well, that doesn't really work for me anymore. I have other things that I do that work for me. Beginners here here saying that mike yeah mike was talking about for beginners or maybe even some intermediate athletes to do something that is linear periodization base is a really good idea basically what it means is that you're just going to do something and then next week you're going to do a little bit more of that something and then a little bit more of that something the next week you're just going to build and build and

build week over week over week with a little bit more than you did the week before and because you're doing more than you've ever done before you're going to get a little bit better people hear the chatter that will pitter out after a while and that's why super advanced athletes might not gravitate towards it but for beginners intermediate athletes it actually works surprisingly well people hear the chatter and the arguments in a popular blog post that bash one periodization style over another and it's not proper it's that it's like you don't bash certain knives or the other ones there's certain things that are made for certain jobs and linear periodization doesn't work for some people

because they're now too experienced to rely on that. Some people still do it. There's a lot of good power authors who still do progressions of linear work and they fucking deadlift 900 pounds. It's not like you do it and if it stops working, you just try something else. That's all it is. If you do it for a while and you find that you need something with more variety

because you're getting injured more often or you're not recovering the way you should that's when you just build it in and you do only enough to get the progress going again so you sort of slowly arrive at something that's really varied that's when you know it's time to switch yeah when it stops working you switch yeah because it will everything you do will stop working eventually if you just do the same thing over and over and over again it will stop working guaranteed and then you got to find something else to do and that doesn't mean like drastically overhaul your whole program necessarily. It just means like make little tweaks so you can keep making some progress.

So back to the beginner versus advanced athlete. If you take a beginner that squats 200 pounds for a set of five and you say, okay, do five, five by five at 200 pounds. And the next week do five by five at 205 pounds. And then the following week do five by five by 210. You can't get all five sets. You can do the four the next week. Try keep the same weight but do the fifth set like keep just looking for ways to improve and you're going to get really fucking strong right and that's a good example of making a little tweak without overhauling your whole program just like i

mentioned but you could add five pounds per week for that beginner and they probably can do it every week they get five pounds stronger and it's fantastic better and better every week yeah you make the tweak but you can't do that with the advanced athlete if you if you squat 800 pounds don't just go well next week just do 805 and then the week after just do 810 and then do 815 820 you just keep going up forever yeah they work like that the other comical thing your back breaks the comical thing with that is you know i do a lot of uh linear progressions with some of the programs that we do and especially in the the beginning of the program, we'll start off with some linear stuff, and then it'll start changing over time,

because I know that the athlete has been in the program for six months. We now are going to start doing something that might be something I would call undulating or something like that. That just means that it's not a linear progression. I do love the word, undulation. Today, everybody, we're going to do some undulation. Undulation or nonlinear, whatever you want to call it might play around with some conjugate stuff for two three months something like that so uh these are things that happen uh when when you have a coach that has

been watching you for a while and knows okay but what i think is sometimes comical too is people try to do that linear progression model without deloading without that unloading uh phase where they take a break and they go oh it stopped working it was like well you can't add five pounds every week for the rest of your life yeah you take like three months to just swim and play ping pong and shit after you do that because it's really it gets really hard to recover say what well you feel like a chinese person ping pong everyone add that into your programs you've been you've been trying hard for a couple years, you hit a peak, you should like, you have a time to play.

Just so you know, I have no idea what he's talking about. There needs to be a time. Listen to me. I'm talking about weeks into it, not years. No, I'm saying like, once you do like a whole year long linear thing,

which people do, they do that, or it's a couple years where they started new and now they squat 500 pounds. Now they're getting to the point where they need to make a change. It's useful then to stop that one.

What I'm saying is, and take a break break if you put five pounds on every week for six months and you know say 25 weeks oh yeah what i'm saying is you unload for like two weeks that's what i'm saying is you can't expect because i i have a feeling people are going to hear this and go i'm going to add five pounds my back squat every week well that's not how it's going to work at some point you're going to go, okay, that fifth set got really, really tough. And then that might be the next week you might need to unload that next week and take a break for a week,

let your body recover, and then resume training. And maybe even take a couple weeks back. Maybe you were doing 225 for five, you know, five sets of five at 225 you take a week off maybe you do some lighter reps or something like that when you come back the next time uh trying to hit it hard go back start at 215 or something don't start back at 225 there's things you can do where you can kind of progressively wave up and people get uh you know they want to put if you put on five pounds a week

for 25 weeks you know that's going to be 125 pounds in six months that's phenomenal progress it's only a beginner probably not going to happen i have seen it happen with some people in our programs for sure uh you know they're like i'm like even i'm surprised i'm like you must have been a really you must have been a very big beginner, more beginner than I thought. They were ripe for strength. You know, people make a lot of progress in a short period of time.

I'm going, okay, that's a beginner. And at some point, yeah, they're going to, as you were saying, Doug, they're going to pair off after a while. You can go for a long time. Like when I was in high school and I first started squatting, when I first started doing high bar back squats with my strength coach, Mark Reald back in Washington state,

the first time I ever did a true 20 rep back squat, I only had 155 pounds on the bar, which is about how much I weighed. I weighed, I probably weighed one 65. What did I say? One 65. Yeah. I weighed basically the same amount as the weight that was on the bar was one 65. And I weighed right about the same cause I was wrestling one 68 that year yeah and i put five pounds on the bar for my 20 rep squats every monday um for i don't even know how long for months and months a single set of 20 yes every monday i built up to a single set of 20 and that was it and then i then i usually tried to do the same weight for a set of 20 on rdls and then i would do my lunges and everything else and and I put on five pounds a week pretty consistently for a while. And then a couple of times it happened where I only got like 17 or 18 or

like, I didn't quite get 20. So the next week I would stay with this same weight and I would try to hit 20 again. I would get the 20, I would add five pounds. And then maybe the next week, I again,

couldn't quite hit the 20 or maybe my form was like starting to get bad. So I would cut the set off or whatever. And then I would wait until I got 20 reps and then I would add the five pounds. And I did it for a long time and the last set i can remember doing in high school i got to 255 for a set of 20 i did like 90 pounds over the course of like it's probably like a year and a half or two years it took me to really do that and there was probably you know i'm sure like there were some weeks i didn't do it like every single monday but

but i added five pounds super consistent in high school like here's the thing is people start feeling good one day and they want to add 10, 15 pounds. Yeah, don't do that. I would suggest just five pounds a week is fast enough. You only have the rest of your life to get strong. You don't have to get 20 pounds stronger today. Motherfuckers, do not forget Joe DeSina. Do not forget Joe DeSina.

For the record, those are awesome squats for putting on weight. Doing 20-rep squats squats they're super hard they're like running they're like running you know uh 100 full speed 400 meter sprints they're rough sets yeah but they they do great for putting on muscle mass like i ended up bumping up like 20 pounds and i went from wrestling 168 like i just said to wrestling 189 the next year and also you probably set your legs up to be fundamentally more strong than they would have been otherwise for the rest of your life because you did that.

They're always going to be stronger because you did that for so long. Oh, yeah. Huge work capacity bump from that. And that's another thing you're going to see with beginner programs. A beginner program

should have relatively higher volume. And all that means is more reps. So you're going to be doing a lot more reps because a big piece of it is just practice. You need 10,000 hours, man.

The more times you do something, the better you're going to be at it. The guy who squats the most has squatted the most. Rich Froning's probably done more CrossFit workouts than any of us, and that's why he's the best because he does like five a day. It's math. It's just practice. He's just done it more. So anytime anyone's done something more than you,

there's a good chance that they're going to be better at it than you. So a beginner program, a good one, isn't going to be like one rep max. And then it's not going to be like just – an advanced program you might do like a total of 10 reps on back squat. But that is definitely not what you need as a beginner. So as a beginner, you need to be doing 20-plus squats in a workout because you need those practice reps. It's not even about the weight you're doing intensity, you know, all this stuff, you know, people are

percentages and all this stuff has, you know, forget about that and just worry about how many reps you're doing in a workout. Again, you know, when we, when I start beginners in a training program, we start with a higher volume training and then we work towards lower volume training where you've already mastered the movement your movement's good the muscles are prepared and then you can add the intensity and later but people all too often they try to worry about their one rep max and they're not even back squatting their body weight yet this might be out there michael but you were in the navy did you actually ever have to like for the first part of your Navy assignments, just swab the deck for endless hours? Is that a real thing?

Oh, well, yeah. When I was in school, yeah, there was a lot of cleaning going on. Yeah, why do they make it clean so much and shit? Fucking asshole. Why would they tell a young Michael Butts, look, hey, I know you want to lead a force of men or whatever, but first get your ass out there and mop that deck for the next

three hours. Is it also kind of a similar thing where just the amount of being somewhere for a long period of time and repetition is going to do a whole lot of lifting early on? And then also attention to detail. I think the cleaning had mostly to do with attention to detail. And if you spend hours a day

practicing that attention to detail, you're going to notice a lot of small things that are going on around you that you might not have otherwise it's the same it's the same skill of like learning to clean you know swab the deck and make sure every ounce of that is clean is the same skill that's necessary uh to make sure you don't get blown up or something like that because now you can build a team that doesn't have any dirty spots either you know that's the whole fucking point people go go, I want to be a commander. Why the fuck am I learning how to clean? I already clean shit.

Well, your attitude sucks from head to toe. You're a piece of shit. You need to mob this deck. So mob it. Or swab it, sorry. Not mob it. Swab the deck. No mopping happens.

That's actually a big deal. People first get in the Navy and they use the word mop. Man, fuck you. It's called swabbing. You're about to get jumped on, bro. That boot camp instructor is going to be deep. So that's what you do. At least about to get jumped on, bro. That boot camp instructor is going to be deep, you know. So that's what you do. At least elbow deep in your ass, yeah. So when you come in and you're going to slam bars

and talk about band of squats and shit, you're being the guy who's saying mop. What you need to do is just master and appreciate the snatch for what it is and learn how to really get comfortable with it. You're learning how to play guitar. You're learning all your chords and shit. You're learning how to pull the right way.

And then later on, you can do what Kloakov does with his shirt off. But not until you learn how to do this shit the right way yes and with the higher volume training i think you also learn to recover too because anytime you do higher volume training uh more recovery is usually in need and hopefully you have enough money for food because you're gonna start like oh shit you wake up in the middle of night wanting to eat everything that's what the side effect of growth. So we talked about the easiest, obvious way to do some type of progression by just adding five pounds on the bar each week,

which it sounds so intuitive, but a lot of people don't do it in some cases. It's too simple. They'll put on 225 for their bench press or their back squat or whatever, and then they always just use 225, and they don't want to use the little plate. They don't put two and a halves on the bar. Also, it seems like, why would I even bother with two and a halves't put two and a halves on the bar. Also, it seems like, why would I even bother with two and a halves? Those two and a halves are magical.

They make them for a reason. They're there for a very good reason. You need them. Good quote. World records are set with one kilo plates or half kilo plates. Yeah, you'll see Klokov and his guys training and training, and a lot of times they're snatching just tiny metal plates. Yeah, but some people go years

using the exact same weights they use every time. They're like, Oh, I always bench pressed with one 85 and they never try to go until, until they can make the jump to 20. Press one 85. That's exactly right. That's right.

If you always do it, you're always going to do it. You're only going to be able to do it. So we can talk about beginners a little bit. I kind of touched on advanced stuff, but usually like if you're, if you feel like that, that linear periodization model is kind of, you past that i really read out i really think i really think

like finding another program is not your best bet your your next choice is coaching is is finding a coach that understands where you're at in that moment yeah because then and then they can they go okay because at that point you need somebody to tell you when you need to rest more because now you're not able to figure it out. And you need to tell them when you should lift heavy because you're going to want to lift heavier than you should. But what you need now is just for – like linear is not the way you look at it. You look at it in terms of like spacing between doses of a stimulus.

Like Mike Stone always taught me, our mentor, that strength is really – you can really understand like medication. Like there's a certain response you're looking for from a dose. Like at first you might get a lot from a little, then you need like a big dose of maybe careful regulation. And when the next big dose comes, if you want to keep like getting that drug to work, there's this escalation and a timing and a strategy. So from the beginner, doesn't need much of that. You just need little doses and you're so weak that you can just keep adding weight. But when you get strong enough to do damage to yourself, you have to have somebody tell you, you got to space it out. You want to squat heavy again,

I know, but really now you need to worry about it next week. Or as you get stronger, now you need to worry about every three weeks going for a five pound thing. Or when you get really advanced, you need somebody to tell you it's been three months of good training. Now we think you're ready to go for a big snatch PR. Like if you're Mike McGoldrick, maybe that's a year to work on a lift PR. You won't do that on your own. You'll get greedy or you'll get impatient or you'll criticize yourself too much or whatever. You need somebody to help you see what you can't see.

I think finding your weaknesses and programming movements and exercises to annihilate those weaknesses so that you can improve this other thing over here that may not make sense to you. It's not an ego thing. Some people don't want to have a coach. He's like, well, I can figure this shit out for myself. Yeah, you can. this other thing over here that may not make sense to you. It's not an ego thing. Some people don't want to have a coach.

He's like, well, I can figure this shit out for myself. Yeah, you can, but for me, right now, if I wanted to really seriously try to, let's say, go into a meet and do a bench press record or something, I wanted to take it seriously and train. The best thing I could do, even though I've been training for 23 years, I should probably just pay Travis Mash or maybe Mike to say, look at me, watch me train, let's train together a couple times.

What do you see I need to work on? Even I can't see, because I'm a primate who's going to go towards his weaknesses or his strengths and avoid his weaknesses, and I'm going to cut corners and shit when no one's looking. I'm just going to do primate shit

because I'm not being held accountable. If I got Mike working with me, I'm going to hit what I want to hit in the meet because we're just going to make sure it happens. You just need to be an objective eye. It's hard to be objective with your own training. And the other thing to note on this and i think people in the cross community are really good about this is education you know uh usually after people you know the first thing you do is you know you embrace that that you know uh the linear periodization just making a little

bit of progress from week to week and then when that stops working for you it's time to get you know maybe get educated so hiring a coach or learning about different types of periodization models and taking your education to the next level we talk about self-development earlier we didn't quite make that point i don't know about how the guy who always benches 185 in the gym to doug's point is always going to do that he's always going to be the guy hanging out in the gym but like the powerlifter might discover powerlifting because he started there and found some guys and progressed to a stage where he wanted to develop and squat more.

And he did that for a long time, and he squatted 800 pounds. So instead of just spending too much time in that search, you get a clear result because you went at it in a clear, progressive way. Now you go, well, I've been there, and I've been strong. I want to maybe use this strength in another way. It might lead you to CrossFit because you're doing what Mike's saying you study as you go and you accumulate knowledge and you take what

money you have even if you're a poor college student you get to a gym you study with a Kyle Pierce if you're lucky or a Diane Fu or whoever you can you absorb you absorb absorb dude if you progress you're just a meathead who's doing training cycles of 12 weeks and you keep it up and you keep making these kinds of discoveries.

In five years, you might have a podcast where that's your job is to talk about what you've learned in your journey. You could be an Olympic athlete. There's no telling what kind of profound transformation will occur and what you'll discover because you just kept making little jumps, little well-organized tweaks in your life. You didn't want to just stay where you're at. That mechanism drives huge change in people's lives. We're really trying to facilitate that with what we're doing with Barbell Shrugged as a whole. So not only are we trying to, when people are saying, I don't know what to do next, I want to get bigger and stronger,

I want to prepare for CrossFit-style competitions, I want to get bigger and stronger. I want to prepare for CrossFit style competitions. I want to, you know, get leaner or whatever. We develop programs so people can do that. And if you want to check those out, just, you know, go to barbellstrug.com, click on the shop, sign up for the newsletter. We'll notify you about that stuff. So we have training programs

and they're built to be ramp you up from like beginner level. You know, if you've been training and having fun but you kind of like now you want to do something that's beyond like i just want to be generally fit and look good naked but you know i want to really you know go towards a very specific goal we've developed programs that go to very specific goals and it's not just a training program but it's also a lifestyle program you know teaching you know, good lifestyle habits to help you reach those goals. So it's not just about, all right, this is how you should squat. This is how many

sets. I mean, we do that, but it's also, you know, this month I want you to really focus on sleep or, you know, these are some recipes for success for this very specific goal, because if you're trying to gain weight versus lose weight versus perform at a high level doing higher volume training the nutrition is going to look different some people may want to disagree with me but uh they don't know what they're talking about so uh but you know it's a whole lifestyle program uh and we understand that now if we had had people i think doug had this person growing up. Chris Moore and I did not. No. It had someone going, hey, you know, it's not just about what you're squatting.

It's about how you're eating, how you're sleeping, how you recover. And in addition to that, just like other stresses in your life, you know, what is going on in your life other than that? And so we try to kind of cover those bases in our programs. And we're also developing things like Barbell University. So when you do reach that point where you go, I want to know more. I don't want to just know that this squat program works. I want to know why it works.

I want to know like how, you know, when it's appropriate to do it, when it's appropriate to prescribe it for somebody else. These are all things that we want to cover. So we kind of, our goal is to really cover these bases. The questions that I had when i was younger that i really wish were answered when i was a young young man it would have been would have shortened this path quite a bit oh yeah so uh the goal is and and i learned from

some people and i learned from some magazines and i eventually learned from some people who are very educated and what i want to do is make that access uh very obvious and accessible to to anyone who really really wants to learn yeah i'd say if i if i had two missions for what we'd want to do i'd say teach people how to shorten their path because if they can do that they'll exceed what we do and one day they'll just carry the path forward like they'll do something cooler that we could never have thought they'll do something cooler than what we're doing if you're 20 if you're if you're a college-aged kid listening to this, realize that when we were in college, there was fuck all for listening to.

We listened to some music maybe. Maybe you found something online. The internet was sparse in those days. We had to read science books, for Christ's sakes, to get our education. But now things are different. Now you can be 21. When I was 15, the internet was just trying to load one

of those gif or jpeg files from playboy.com we're like damn when are the nipples gonna show it took forever for jenny mccarthy to show up you know it was like but you know but when it showed up you're like this is great yeah but we now have the technology where we can yeah pass this down much sooner in life but listen to me young, young minds, young college-aged individuals. Or high school. We've got some high school kids. Or high school, yeah. If you take these lessons, you shorten your path,

and you do go get that Repetot book, or you read a book by Mark Devine. If you listen to what we're saying, or Zach's excellent book, The Encyclopedia of Strength. You know, Zach? Or Freestyle over here by Carl Powell. Man, we just got books all over the place. I love books. I love books. Or Chris Moore's new book, Get all over the place. I love books. I love books.

Or Chris Moore's new book, Get Changed. Yeah, I love books so much that I've written three. It's not the easiest way to try to make a living. But what's in Zach's book, The Encyclopedia of Strength and Conditioning? It's like this guy, this is his whole reason for being alive. You guys agree? This is all Zach was ever going to do was experiment on himself and help people out righteously.

So he's taking everything he's learned, he's put in here. If you read this this you learn these lessons you be short in your path if you just keep at this curiosity you've got you keep learning you keep discovering what you can discover and keep adding five pounds in whatever way you can add five pounds that means like maybe like a little unit of

knowledge today a little more of this a little more of that you keep doing this by the time you are 33 34 like we are whatever or you know you're like 20 time you are 33, 34 like we are or whatever or you're like 20s you're not going to there's what you thought you would be and then there's going to be what you are which is something that is really profoundly prepared to go out and fucking educate

and inspire people to change themselves and you're going to know all this shit like the back of your hand you're going to be able to speak intelligently about how somebody should what they should do to fix a certain kind of problem based on where they're at in their life you're going to know all this shit and then you're gonna think of something much cooler to do than what we've done to up to this point that's what we're gonna try to do i hope so we're gonna try to also maybe just make you see that strength is not just how much weight's on

the board so a lot of ways you can define strength yeah we're gonna try to show you yeah i'm excited about balby university man i feel like that's gonna like push the entire industry forward like that that's a fucking game changer i love it's full circle for us because we can bring back in people who like sometimes i get bummed like well now i just tell dick jokes and distract my friends in front of a microphone like i'm not using my sports science skills but now we because of this we can go back and pull and remind people that no we weren't like podcasters we weren't like just gym owners we were students of strength and conditioning for a long time we studied with people who were masters of that craft and we were young aspiring scientists and grad students and

people who were more than happy like thrilled to to take like 700 bucks a month in exchange for our life being strength and conditioning for two four or five six years where we were doing grad work and working shit jobs just to keep in the gym and train and like and to have the opportunity to talk about like discovering a young kendrick ferris like what does this guy's technique mean like fuck we're bowing away like we thought there's only one way to jerk look what this guy's doing yeah like why is he doing it like why this one day this guy's gonna do something and he does you know yeah i like having the mindset of always being a student no matter how much you know you don't know at all style that's right man that's always a student always be a white belt

that's right that guy's the man we started talking to bc before that podcast we did with him if you have not seen it stop what stop this podcast and go listen to 144 that shit was amazing when i started talking doug talked to him first i'm like ah doug's talking to this old guy we're gonna get him on the podcast i thought the same thing like fuck who's who's joe make us now joe's gonna be wrong joe yeah yeah joe i stopped questioning that guy his books right there too we got too many we got too many books or spartan the fuck up depending on the laptop yeah so uh the thing about fred bc is when i started talking to him he was like he was excited about coming on the podcast so he could learn he was like he's like maybe is there something that you could teach me he was excited about coming on the podcast so he could learn he was like he's like maybe is there

something that you could teach me he was asking me questions beforehand i'm like i'm gonna interview you but yeah he was like he was most excited about learning and that's why he is where he is today um 85 years old and he's running hill sprints just yeah running hill sprints 85 i want to be able to do that i can barely do that at 33. He's an idol. Oh, God. That dude is someone I look up to. I'm probably going to, I've got his card. I'm going to call him up when I got questions now. But like a ruthless pursuit of daily innovation in your life,

coupled with lighthearted curiosity, will fucking make you change the world in your way. You're going to find out what you can do to change the world some way. I just believe it. Statistically, it's going to happen if you just keep chasing it. You gonna find something fucking cool you're gonna find a big weapon you're gonna be able to use it for good yeah i've got to go to i'll go ahead i was gonna say i find all the people that that i know that are really really good and really really educated none of them think they really know it all they all they all are smart enough and have enough education enough experience enough knowledge

and understanding to to realize that they know a lot but they also don't know what they don't know and they always are seeking and they know there's a next level to get to and they're always striving to get there and once they feel like they they've reached a certain level and they've they've learned all they can a certain category they're like awesome moving on to the next category and they're on the next thing they're not like i did it i'm done i'm there yeah they'll be like saying like i'm strong now tony the fridge said oh i told the fridge yeah so uh what day is it our last day in vermont for the last episode uh we did with joe is coming out soon but we we got up ctp and i got up shivering after going to bed like 1 30 in the morning because that's what we do we hustle baby we hustle writing show notes and getting like ctp making

sure the youtube upload's working good because we're in the fucking mountains. You can see the full galaxy above you. That also means there's shit Wi-Fi. It's a correlation. Like, there's no technology around. So, CTP's, like, trying to get it. Check it, check it.

I'm, like, writing show notes for Carl Paoli. We're just hanging out, hanging out, talking. He's never going to say his name right. Yeah, no, never. Carl Paoli. Paoli. No, no, no. It's Paoli. Carl Paoli. We'll have Carl. His book's there, too. Yeah, but if we got up. talking he's never gonna say his name right i know never call pay pay only no no that's pally

we'll have carl's books there too yeah but he probably has a progression for teaching you how to pronounce his last name but we still got up at 5 a.m because when you're in pittsfield if you don't get up and train with joe you're just missing like one of the most rarest opportunities in the world but if you also get up and being trained by a psycho but if you also hey listen man if you also get up and being trained by a psycho, but if you also, Hey, listen, man, if you also get up and also another guy who's going to hike happens to be Tony, the fucking fridge.

Oh yeah. You better get up and join him. If you don't know who Tony, the fridge is, he's that guy's coming on this show. That's probably two to three weeks. Is he going to be posted by the time we post this? It'll be posted.

Oh no. Maybe. Okay. Yeah. Whenever you hear this, if you haven who he is? If not, he's coming. Okay. Whenever you hear this, if you haven't, search Tony in the Fridge now. But we climb up there, and at the top, the night before we had done the show with him, I asked him, I go, hey. I put my iPhone up. Hey, Tony, can you tell me what it is you said about climbing hills?

Or like reward. I said rewards. What does it mean to get a reward? Is it something you deserve? Whatever. And he goes, what does it mean to get a reward? Is it something you deserve? Whatever. And he goes, you know, what does it mean to be at the top of a hill?

There's no celebration at the top of a hill. You just, you ask yourself next hill. You don't need to celebrate it. Just keep going. That's a great accent, by the way. Yeah, you're doing really good. Thank you. Yeah, watch that podcast. Be prepared to cry. I've got to go. Oh, yeah.

I'm actually in Memphis just for a couple days, and I have to go eat lunch with my mom and her new boyfriend. Let me do the newsletter plug. Yeah, so make sure before we go to pick up Chris Moore's book, Get Changed. Where can they buy this? Barbell Shrug website, I'm sure, right? Yeah, next week when the, well, at the time this pops, you're're gonna be able to go to the merchandise store and see it as well yeah so you'll go to the daily um there'll be a merchandise shop you'll see linked all over for shirts and shit but we'll send out an email

and you'll be able to get this book I have read the first 60 pages uh yesterday I was I was uh on the couch my couch and I was like this this was the best thing Chris Moore has ever written, and I'm going to finish it very soon. I love it. I appreciate you saying that, man. Can I do the official live version, the newsletter plug to finish it up, Doug? You want to?

You going to talk about the daily while you do it? Oh, yeah. So those of you who don't know, the Barbell Daily, barbelldaily.com, is a new daily resource we are launching for you so that any day of the week, baby, you can get up, you can get your morning coffee going,

you can go to the daily. So you type in daily.barbellshow.com or barbellday, it doesn't matter. You come to the daily, baby, you're going to see a nice high value featured article there

by somebody you know who's going to teach you something useful for your pursuits. We're going to do that every day and on there, you're going to find a whole bunch of really

high value information coming your way very soon. By the time this launches, every day. And on there, you're going to find a whole bunch of really high value information coming your way very soon. By the time this launches, you'll have it. Yeah, I got a big collection of articles from a ton of people that have been on the show, some that haven't been on the show yet,

but it's a big aggregation of awesome training articles from a bunch of people that for the most part aren't us so far. It's all of our friends that are writing and contributing. I did it because I wanted to create

a place where ideas could mix. That's what makes me more interested in anything. We can sit here and blabber on all we want, but when we get guests in here, we exchange ideas, magic happens. And if we can do that every day and do it for the audience and give them an opportunity to both submit stuff,

you can go to publish.barbell, or publish at barbellshark.com. You can send us an idea. We'll help you write up something cool and get you exposure. We want people to hear your voice. But also now, very simply, you can see a cool comment or a cool post from Diane Thu or somebody. You can ask questions.

We'll get Diane on and maybe answer a few. I'll jump in. We'll all jump in. We'll create a daily place. We can just mix ideas and create an environment for learning. So it's pretty awesome. So basically, we're about to have a fucking explosion of new free content. Yeah.

Every single day. 10x the free content, Yeah. It'll be like, it'll like 10, 10 X of free content basically within a very short amount of time. So people will just not have much room for complaining about what we're doing with our hours during the day, making you shit. That's going to make you better. That's what we're doing constantly, man.

Seven days a week. Yeah, I'm serious. Every day you'll find something, even if it's a short little useful thing, you don't need to be anything complex. You need to break down in 10 hours of study, but you'll find something valuable for you.

It'll make you better in some way. Fantastic. Also, I want to do a quick plug for Barbell University. We're not doing this right right now. It's probably going to come out sometime next year. But if you're a college professor or you know a college professor that has a ton of training experience and they're a competitive athlete, especially in the CrossFit space, and you want to be a potential contributor to Barbell University, you might even want to teach a course or you just want to help out in some way, definitely email us, email help at barbellshrug.com and just let us know who you are and kind of what your thoughts are on it.

That way we can connect and start that conversation. I got a plug too. Yeah, go. Put CTV plug in. If you like this episode, please share it on Facebook, go to iTunes, subscribe, and give us a five-star review because that stuff really does help. And best of all, to find out how you...

I'm going to drop the ball in the live version. To find out how you can support the show, go to barbellshrug.com and sign up for the newsletter. You nailed it.