Barbell Shrugged - 48- Live at The Garage Games One CrossFit Competition

Episode Date: February 20, 2013

On this episode of the Barbell Shrugged podcast the gang traveled to Atlanta, GA for the Garage Games One Event.  Mike, Doug, and Chris sit down and chat with two 4-time CrossFit Games athletes Shana Alverson and Brandon Phllips, CrossFit gym owner/athlete Steve Mullen, Female winner of the 2012 Open Emily Bridgers, CrossFit athlete Emily Friedman, CrossFit North Atlanta Director of Operations Matt Baird and his fiance Taylor Flynn, and world jump rope champion Molly Metz.  Don't miss this jam packed episode of the world's best CrossFit based podcast!

yo this is ctp and you're listening to the barbell shrug podcast the number one strength and conditioning podcast for crossfitter if you want to check out the video version which you should go to fitter.tv and watch that because it's way cooler than just listening. And how do you spell fitter.tv there, Mr. Bledsoe? F-I-T-R.TV. He's a good speller. All right, while you're there, definitely go and sign up for the newsletter. As part of signing up for the newsletter, you'll get a video that Mike made where he shows you the top seven snatch mistakes that you're probably making that are keeping you

from hitting that next PR and lifting some big weight. Yeah, look at the seminars, tune into the show, and get ready to become a more awesomer version of you. We give you the tools you need to succeed. You become a tool. Are we ready? Yeah, we're recording. Let's do it.

Alright, Mike Bletzer here with Barbell Shrug. Yeah, that's what we do. That's still what we're called. We're hanging out at the Garage Games 1 event in Suwannee, Georgia. That's near Atlanta. Got Chris Moore here, Doug Larson, and we brought our guest in, Steve Mullen. You old fan of Steve. To hang out with us. So real quick, quick promo.

Make sure you go to barbellshrugged.com, sign up for our newsletter. Go to our fan page and like us on Facebook. Go to iTunes. Give us five stars because, well, only if you think we're awesome. And if you do that, we will send you with our minds a Barbell Shrugged man hug. Good vibes. Right to you. I've actually done the five-star review,

and about a couple days after that I saw some performance increases. I gave you a hug. I'm serious. I could feel it. My brain. I could feel it. Brain hugs. Doug gave you over-the-pants H.J.

Yeah. With his mind. Steve and I have hung out before out in California during the CrossFit Games in 2011. Yeah, 2011. We had a great time. Yeah, it was a good time. Yeah. I don't remember all of it, but.

Yeah. Did you drink some alcohol? Maybe. A little bit. Took a little bit down. And Redline. We mixed Redline. Oh, Jesus.

Oh, yeah. A perfect combination. The only time I've seen anybody actually drink Redline was at the honor class where that guy fucking passed out and had a heart attack. Do you remember that? They wheeled him off in a stretcher. Seizure on the platform. He was going out, and the guy just dropped. It looked like he dropped dead.

Wow. Yeah, that doctor came back and was like, see these? Don't do this. Never drink one of these. I was like, okay, sir. But yet they banned my 1, 3 dimethylmethameth because it's dangerous. I love that stuff. Steve here is a coach at CrossFit North Atlanta

and a CrossFit competitor. Yep. What have you done in the past for CrossFit competitions? What's your most notable achievement? So I guess 2011. I finished, like, 30th in the open in our region and then went down to Jacksonville finished 18th or 19th that year 2011 then last year finished 15th in the southeast in the open and my daughter was scheduled to be born and was born the weekend of regionals so I actually

didn't get an opportunity to go down and compete so that was uh that was kind of a tough pill to swallow having to train for months and months and months and you know you just you know you just did well you really don't know like when they're you know did you hold your precious newborn daughter like I love you so much but you crushed that all we've been talking about is 2013 so yeah give her a kiss on the forehead you let me down but I love you one fucking day I'll ask one day this weekend I'm sure your baby girl on your phone no it's gorgeous it's great yeah it's actually

been a big adjustment the past year, you know, continuing to keep up with training. How much do you sleep, my friend? I mean, you know, in the previous years, you know, for training, you know, like, you know, McGoldrick was saying, you know, shoot for nine or ten hours a night. That's what we're trying to get. It's a fucking pipe dream. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, like, no, I mean, you know, I definitely get at least seven, you know, every now and again. That's good. Eight, eight and a half. If I'm doing that, then I'm definitely doing well. My son's a little over a year, and he wakes up five times a night screaming. Yeah. Usually. Like 4 a.m. today, he was yelling and screaming and in the bed tossing and turning.

No sleep for me. Yeah, yeah. It's tough. It's been a tough adjustment, but continuing to have people around me. I know you guys know Matt Baird. He does some work with you guys. Yeah. We love Matt.

We love Matt. He's our boy. Keeping him around. We train together sometimes, so that helps. And I have a coach as well, so keeping on the programming and that kind of stuff. Who's your coach? OPT. Okay.

Same as Mike. I've been with him since, actually met him here when he did the talk here two years ago. And he competed at the Garage Games 1 event that we're at right now. And at his talk, you know, there was one thing that he kind of touched on, which was he said 18 months. He was like, if you've been doing CrossFit.com workouts for 18 months, get ready to start seeing plateaus. And I was at like 16 months at that point. So I was like, wait a second, wait a second. So that's the very first time that I thought about getting individualized programming, individualized coaching. And as a competitor, it's like there's no way i can go back now i i can't there's

literally no way i could go back to going without having a coach without having a set program and can at least to consider myself to be a competitor but i guess i'd ask you this if you could go back and do it again we kind of had this discussion yesterday on the show we shot then would you not do that would you go the customized route earlier or do you think that was essential to get all that early work in and then progress to something more complicated yep yep i know a lot of our answers that i've heard on the podcast before everyone always says it depends but like but it's i mean it really is the truth uh i i do think it was beneficial for me to

really just kind of quote unquote go through the grinder yeah um you know just get as much done as you can you know you're doing two or three workouts a day and you really think you're developed but you know i i feel like that helps now i probably could have done that for like six months and then got a coach yeah um but i i mean I think at least on the point of anybody that thinks they want to compete at this now you need a coach you need someone programming for you you want a legit shot at doing well oh yeah I mean there's there's no chance I mean it's it's so because rapidly evolving to escalating quickly absolutely how does the coaches programming individualized

for you differ from what you were doing before? Well, so before, just like anybody else, you know, I was just doing the gym workout. That's how it started, just doing the gym workout of the day. And our gym originally went off of.com. Then it kind of went to its own programming, but still, you know, just normal.com workouts. And then after that i kind of started to see like man i i think i need to get stronger so so then i started adding some lifting in like before i would do the workouts and i you know i just didn't really

know what i was doing so i was just i was really just pounding myself into the ground you know i just i had no idea it's experiment exactly exactly so that's kind of where I was and where I led up to up until going with coaching with with OPT yeah so adding strength work was the biggest thing yeah that was I just knew I needed to get stronger you know I saw the guys at the competitions and I was like okay okay, I can run with those guys. I can do pull-ups with those guys. I can do that kind of stuff.

You saw clearly that you had the potential to take the next step. You just had to sort of put it together a little better. Yeah, and at 170 pounds, I've got to be as strong as possible for my body weight. You know, I mean. I was telling these guys last time, last time I was under 200, I was practicing my cursive with a fat pencil in grade school. I can't remember what that feels like. Yeah. That must be awesome when you're doing pull-ups. Oh, yeah.

Holy shit, look at this. It's like I'm on the moon. Yeah. Yeah, but having someone that programs for you, you know, they can also do it kind of around your lifestyle. So last year at this time, my programming was definitely different than it is now. I'm making that point this afternoon, my friend. Yeah.

Some people, they see a workout on a whiteboard. They go, there's the workout. I must do that no matter what. Yeah. But the point is, you have your life. You've got a family. Absolutely. You very likely work hard.

You're thinking about training. Things aren't so easy to define in terms of boundaries and deadlines. And my phase one starts here. This one's going to start here 14 fucking weeks from now, even though I have no idea what's happening in 14 weeks or how I'm going to respond to my training. It's not a very good way to plan. Unless you're a student athlete who's locked into a schedule where the coach is going to

make you do some shit, like the athletic training center where your whole life is just this thing, then it's great. Everybody can do a similar kind of thing, assuming they're talented enough. But not for us. We can't do that. Yeah. And having a coach, having someone to program for you where they can do it, like you said, around your lifestyle.

You know, I don't work within the fitness industry. Like, I train classes at CrossFit North Atlanta. But, you know, I don't program. I coach one class a night, you know. And, you know, my wife and I have an insurance, you know, insurance agency, a state farm agency here in Atlanta. Call us, Lindsey Mullen State Farm, if you need insurance. Get insured, homie.

Shameless plug. I love it. Protect your family, bitches. So if you live in Georgia. Live in Georgia, give us a call. We are the official CrossFit insurance providers for anybody that does CrossFit in Georgia. Oh, that's pretty sweet. Official.

You merge the worlds together pretty nice. Exactly. I don't know if I mentioned official, but we're the official ones. How do they get in contact with you? Email, phone number? You can go to Lindsay, L-I-N-D-S-A, Mullen, M-U-L-L-E-N.com, LindsayMullen.com. That is my beautiful wife.

Go to the website, or you can give us a call, 404-728-1000. I'll tell you why it's a good thing. When you call your insurance provider and you're trying to get coverage for yourself or family, you say, well, I do this thing where I compete in a crazy-ass sport where I punch myself. They go, yeah, yeah, CrossFit, we do it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They don't look at you like you're an asshole for pushing your limits. Yeah, yeah.

They don't double your premium. Yeah. Yeah, but, you know, getting back to the coaching and the programming, you know, I just don't have the time to, you know, do a two-hour session in the a.m., maybe do something at lunch and then do something at night, you know. So I got to have someone that knows my life, knows my lifestyle, and can program for what I need to get accomplished around that, you know. And they know the timeline. They know the open, you know, and they know the timeline, they know the open, you know, and OPT was a good choice for me. I liked, you know, I just liked that he did CrossFit,

was successful at it, but at the same time, before CrossFit, he had had, you know, 10 years of strength and conditioning kind of before that. Yeah. You know, I love CrossFit, but, you know, what is fitness? I mean, you know, I don't know, man. I mean, there's a lot of – Let's get philosophical here. You know, there's a lot of different definitions you can get into there. I mean, it's, you know, it's kind of like, you know, I feel like, you know, the games, they're producing some amazing guys, you know,

but, you know, I feel like the games, they're producing some amazing guys, you know, but the weights that they're, I mean, it's definitely geared a lot more to Olympic lifting. I mean, I'm not saying there's anything bad with that. We were talking about that last night, how like that guy, he runs that blog where he does the statistical analysis of the competitions. Yeah, yeah. And he was like, you know what, the number one movement for CrossFit is snatch. Yeah. Yeah, so it's like, there you go. I don't disagree what would you have that's a more well-rounded test of everything no yeah it's good

it's good it works out like that absolutely if it was the box jump i'd be like this is yeah who cares i know god i just know they're about to program another high rep box jump workout in the open and i'm just going to be like, God. It's 8 a.m. You've got 12 hours to do 5,000 box jumps. Go, go. If you tear an Achilles tendon, you're not very fit, are you? So I know recently you've moved towards having the garage gym at your place

because Max takes up so much of your time. Has that been something you've considered? You know what? Getting a rower, an airdyne or something you know what intervals my wife was she was fully backing and uh my daughter was born last april uh april of 2012 and so starting at christmas of 2012 i started to slowly acquire got a barbell got some weights put some rubber down in the carport uh yeah i do have a way to go i got a rower at the house now. I got an airdyne at the house.

I got pull-up bars. So I slowly started to acquire those things. I still go to the gym three or four times a week, but on those days where, you know, you do have an a.m. session and you got to row, well, at least I don't have to drive 15 minutes to go to the gym just to row. Exactly. It's not practical. What I always tell people is that if I'm going to do X amount of work,

let's say I'm going to squat and deadlift and press, if I have to go to a gym, I can maybe do it three days a week. I can cram all that into one session, and I can't focus on any one thing. If I can divide it up into multiple sessions, I can focus just on the one thing at a time, so I'm going to put more effort into it. If I divide the same amount of work and spread it out over the day, I'm going to automatically recover better.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like having a big, huge bump in your performance just by doing that. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it helps the lifestyle, makes mama happy, makes baby happy, makes daddy happy. So, you know, that's definitely good. That's the thing. Your wife will start resenting the shit out of you if you go, I've got to go do my extra

rowing session, babe. I know, I know. And she's nursing the baby, and in her head she's like, oh, it's fine, it's fine. But no, you're an asshole for doing it. Yeah, three weeks later, it's not fine anymore. Then you start getting the sarcastic jokes, and they start getting a little heavy, and then she just calls you out on it. Better just to throw down the $900, get you a railroad in the garage. But it definitely takes a very motivated particular person to train by themselves a large portion of the time. I know a lot of people, and I definitely think people can benefit from a training partner and having other people around.

But it definitely takes a special kind of person to be able to do it all the time. I mean, I don't do it all the time, but it's a lot tougher to row a, you know, 40-minute map rowing session just by yourself in the carport. All right. Probably the majority of my training sessions I've done over my entire lifespan have probably been maybe 50% by myself. And, yeah, when I have, like, a consistent training partner, that's when I make the most progress.

Yeah, yeah. It definitely helps. It definitely helps. What's this guy doing over here? We have hundreds of people walking over there. He's going to do 500 for 5. CTB, can we commentate? Well, you probably won't get to see it.

Yeah, we're not going to be able to see it. My back is too. I did talk to him earlier. He competes. My back is too... I did talk to him earlier. He finished second in either the World or Nationals 168-pound class. Powerlifting? Yeah, and he's got an over 1,800 total.

Raw lifting? Not raw. I come from that world, so you're speaking my language. I know. So you want to give some perspective on how good that is. For people. Yeah.

Let's just wait class one one sixty eight. Yeah. So one six hundred sixty three. Yeah. One hundred sixty three pound guy who with a belt on is going to do five hundred four five is about as equivalent. That's about as strong as you can get pound for pound. I can't think of many guys who can do more than that Yeah, triple body weight for five

Everyone's counting. Yes Wow that day is very high. Yeah, but that's the problem. He's moving fast He's not he's not he's not grinding those reps out. Yeah, I don't see him do some more prep like 400 pounds He was coming up fast. Yeah, yeah. See, in the warm-up pile thing, if you can squat triple potty weight for a set of five, that's pretty good, isn't it? I just heard six. I think he just did seven, actually. That's pretty good.

Yeah. So my best. Yeah, that's pretty good. You know, yeah, I mean, it's almost as good as my 350 for two. Yeah. His relative strength is really awesome. My best reps squatting was about a year and a half, two years ago when I did. I did the easiest set of 10 at 500. Maybe not the deepest I could have gone.

So, yeah, that's really good. I was like 315 at the time. Yeah, that guy's like half your size. Yeah. Unfortunately. I will make the point. I'll make an important point i was thinking about earlier in the week like for me i'm naturally inclined to be over 300 if i'm just lifting

and eating what i need to eat to get down to a lighter body weight to have that like ratio better i gotta deprive myself of food yeah so if mike like what do you walk around at mike 175 so if you want to bulk up and eat all you could possibly hold and have all the excess calories possible, you might be able to inch your way to 200. So that's a prime state of performance for you. 200 is hard. I've done it, and it's tough.

For me to try to meet you. Everything I got. For me to try to meet you. Were you having the meat sweats? My wife hates it when I put on weight Because I'll get in bed at night And she's like, hey baby I'm like, don't touch me I'll make the point about being a lighter versus heavier lifter

Everybody goes pound for pound Everybody needs to remember it's not like a linear relationship If you keep gaining weight You won't necessarily get stronger, stronger, stronger It starts to taper off It's called the Sinclair form If I want to gain weight to get stronger It won't be the more I gain, the stronger I get It starts to taper off. It's called the Sinclair formula. Yeah, the Sinclair formula. So if I want to gain weight to get stronger, it won't be the more I gain, the stronger I get.

It starts tapering off. But for me to meet you in the middle to improve our formula results, I've got to deprive myself and go into a state of starvation. So it's not necessarily a fair thing to say, oh, he's fucking half your size and squatting twice as much as you. Well, you know, it's a little more complicated than that. Out of the three or four guys that have ever clean and jerked triple body weight, they've all been in the lightest two weight classes.

They all weigh like 120, 130 pounds. Yeah, it's not quite the fairest thing in the world. Especially if you see a guy who's like, I weigh 170 pounds, but he's four feet tall. He's put like a brick shithouse. Yeah, that's one thing that kind of upsets me when i see within the crossfit world anyway uh when people post their you know oh back squat or you know you know i or i front jerk you know front jerk this or something and then they put their body weight right you know what until we have weight classes in crossfit like i i don't care and everybody's got the thing it's cool but

you've got i'm getting used to this term the goat we're gonna make a t-shirt that says i'm a lot more impressed with a guy who's 175 he's back squatting a certain thing than if you if you if you're crossing your 225 and you're back squatting 400 i don't care yeah no you're right you're right you're right that's probably just me being uh you know but there's a tendency to showcase the thing you do well then you're not posting videos you're doing your shitty handstand push-ups or whatever yeah yeah yeah everybody's a tendency to showcase the thing you do well, then you're not posting videos, you're doing your shitty handstand push-ups or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody has a tendency to go away from the goat and hide the thing that happens to suit

their mechanics or their leverages or whatever the hell they're doing. For me, you'll never see me post anything that's over three reps. I can do any CrossFit movement, anything really well for maybe three reps. And after that, my form starts breaking down. I'm going to show you a muscle-up demo.

Here's one rep. Look how awesome I did. That's definitely how I show double-unders. I'm like, it's like this. All right. Did you catch that? Y'all go try it. By the way, later on we're going to get, I think her name is Molly.

She's going to be showing us some jump rope stuff. Oh, man. So stay tuned for that. Is that the chick that does double unders for 10 minutes straight? Yeah, I think so. She's going to teach us about how to do double unders. She was doing triple unders consecutively earlier. Yeah.

Oh, that's the jump rope girl. Yeah, I think she's the jumping rope woman. Yeah, they're trying to rope me into getting in on the thing, and they're making me look very foolish. Yeah. Everyone on Twitter is like, oh, you should do that and i'm like ctp i want to i want to do that i'm going to be on touch point oh i'm going to do a technique wad where i just go hey this is chris i'm going to show you how to triple unders i'm going to wear neon shoes you can get a wide shot and you can zoom in it's going to be her feet going, I'm sweating like, how was that, everybody? Told you.

Told you I could do it, guys. You just saw me do it. Alright, guys, we're going to wrap this up. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me, guys. You bet. Yeah. I think I've got to start warming up here. Yeah, you've got to compete here in the next few minutes. We'll let you focus on what you came here to do.

C2B, get his neon shorts. Good luck. Fade out with the neon shorts. Behind you. Those are glorious. Oh, shit. All right, thanks, Steve. Yeah, man. Hey, guys, this is Rich Vroning,

and you're listening to Barbell Shrugs. For the video version, go to fitter.tv. All right, we're back here at the Garage Games 1 event, hanging out with some athletes. Doug and I are here. Chris went off to do his talk on whatever he gave his talk on. He's been very vague about describing his talk on the show. I think that he didn't know what he was going to do it on.

Maybe that. We have Shana back. She was podcasting with us last night. She's filling in for Chris. What's up? She's going to tell all the ball joke, ball and dick jokes. Just pretend like I'm a 270-pound white bald dude. 270-pound bald powerlifter.

You can picture that, right? With a very high voice. And we have Brandon Phillips here. He's competing this weekend. Brandon, I hear you're here just for the money. Just for the money and two for the show? No. He was hot for the money.

So hot for the money. I wish I was here for the money and two for the show? No. He was hot for the money. So hot for the money. I wish I was here for the money. Not doing well for the money right now. If I were you, I would just quit. I might. You should just throw all your shit down and be like, I am going home right now. Fuck this place. Good job.

You sound like Chris. You got to derail us with some ridiculous story. That's your job. That's my job. I got it. You were exposed to that last night. Brandon, we were talking the other day about raising kids. We were talking about how you need to put together like a seminar

or something like that on parenting. Yeah, I kind of get a lot of my parenting advice from Ron White and the way he takes on life. From the comedian Ron White? From the comedian Ron White. He's got a great bid. Are you talking about tater salad, Ron?

Tater salad, yeah. Tater salad. It's like, you know, kids nowadays, you know, they blame it on guns and all that kind of stuff. Well, it's not a child problem. It's a parenting problem. They just need to bend the kids over their knees and give them a good whooping every now and then. I think that would solve a lot of problems in America.

For all of you that don't speak BP, whooping means to beat your child. Either with the hand, a wooden paddle, or sometimes a leather belt. The iron fist. The wooden paddle stuff still going on these days? Oh, my God. My dad had a wooden pizza paddle that he kept under the kitchen sink. A pizza paddle? Yes.

It was one of those things you flip a pizza over with. We got beaten. Like this big? I turned out all right. He's right. It works. 36-inch pizza. Mom holds you down and he's just beating you.

Were you a fat child? Like you needed that thing to battle? No, my dad was just that mean. I had my dad one time. I got pranked calling my cousin or something like that. I ordered a burrito in his answering machine or something stupid when I was a kid. My dad, as I was jumping on the trampoline having a good time, my dad's like, in the house. I went in the house.

He grabbed me and threw me over the bed, and somehow my pants went to my ankles at the same time. And he repeatedly lashed me. Mom came in the room. We're all in there crying and everything else. She was like, what did you do? He was like, we was prank calling, ordering burritos and answering machines. She was like, that's it? That was my story.

You hellion. Brandon turned out okay. Yeah, I turned out fine. I have not prank called and ordered a burrito ever since. Maybe that's why we're both such consistent competitors. We were routinely beating as children. In a good way, though. I still love my parents very much.

There you go. You know, and I would do anything for them. If you're listening,'re listening mom i love you yeah all right so everyone that doesn't know you that's listening to this on on itunes or over youtube tell us a little bit about yourself well uh i've been competing in crossfit since 2009 and i've been fortunate enough to make it to the games just like shana since then and uh and uh you know crossfit's helped just change my life and help me you know grow as a person. And then, plus, I get to meet really cool people. And I finally get to be on a podcast.

I never thought I would ever be on a podcast. You have arrived. I've been looking forward for years. You have arrived. I know. Stardom has arrived now. But other than that, though, I was working at a school for the past five years while training for the games. And now I'm opening up my own box, CrossFit CrossFit bound it's going to be open here in two weeks

or so two three weeks I'm excited about that to me in Kennesaw and looking forward to you know changing lives in the box yeah it's Kennesaw Georgia right outside of Atlanta right outside of Atlanta okay I heard you got a pretty good space yes it used to be like a like a globo gym but you're gonna turn to a cross with some jealous because he has locker rooms. Yeah, locker rooms, air conditioning. Air conditioning. Unheard of.

H-back. What the fuck? H-back. H-back. H-back. H-back. H-back. H-back.

H-back. H-back. H-back. H-back. Yeah, I've heard stories about y'all's meat box up there, how cold it is and then how hot it is in the summer. We don't have people fall out that often, but yeah, in the summertime, you walk out soaked to the bone and sweat.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. What we actually do, as soon as it hits, like, 90 degrees, I don't do any conditioning sessions for, like, regular classes that last longer than 10 or 12 minutes. I don't do anything that lasts longer than 10 or 12 minutes. I mean, I personally don't. But I stop programming, like, the long stuff.

Because I feel like once you get to, like, the 15, 18-minute wads, that's when people who may not be as conditioned will fall out when it's 100 degrees inside your place. Oh, yeah. For sure. But, see, now I can do that in my place. So if you want to come to a really good gym, you can come to my place. It's a cool 66 degrees all the time.

Year-round. You know what's going to happen is you're going to be having to pay that utility bill, and then you're going to have to, like, your clients are, now they know that you have air conditioning, and you're not going to be able to lie to them. Because if we had air conditioning, we would never let our members know about it because I wouldn't want to pay that bill. It's broken.

It doesn't work. It's been broken for eight months. I'm just not as nice as Mike is. I feel like... She's not as nice. That means that I lie and she doesn't. I think that's what that means. No. We

legitimately do not have air conditioning but when June 1 hits it's 105 degrees in that place and it is hot CrossFit. Like hot yoga, but CrossFit style. Bikram CrossFit. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I was trying to say.

That's what it's going for. When people get naked in the gym. Hey. Yeah. That's one good thing about it. That's how you get all the girls to take their shirts off. I was going to say, how are you going to get the girls to take their clothes off if you've got air conditioning? That's ridiculous.

I got Jessica. She'll lead the way. It's broken. That's ridiculous. I got Jessica. She'll lead the way. It's broken. Jessica will lead the way. If she just begins a workout, she's like rich. Just the shirt comes off. I don't know why. Cool.

So that's going to open in about two weeks? Yeah, it's going to open up in about two weeks right here. We finally got everything going. You're going to be open in two weeks? I'm saying two weeks. I'm putting two weeks down. That's fast. Well, no, I've been working on it since January.

It's February. I've been working on it for two weeks, so in two weeks it'll be done. When you've got to make things happen, you've got to make things happen. We have a sense of urgency going on here. There's a sense of urgency going on. He opens gyms the way he CrossFits. Yeah. Fast.

It happens. It happens. You could have made some other jokes there. Yeah. Poor Jessica. Sorry, honey. She's going to be so mad. So, once you open, where in Atlanta? Is it going to be Kennesaw? It's going to be so mad. So once you open, where in Atlanta?

Is it going to be in Kennesaw? It's going to be in Kennesaw. I took my headphones off for a minute. Yeah, we've already discussed this. Thanks for coming back. But, no, it's going to be just north of Marietta in Kennesaw, probably about 40 minutes out of downtown Atlanta, a 4,500-square-foot space.

Like you said, we've got locker rooms in there. It's going to be really nice. I'm hoping that we can get some really good CrossFit programming in there and get some really good clients. They're being a ton of CrossFits in the Atlanta area. What is going to be different about your gym

and set it apart? That's one thing we've been talking about because there's a lot of CrossFit gyms in that area. What I want the gym to be is the best coach, best program gym in the entire state. You know, like I've been fortunate enough to be around some of the top coaches and top athletes in the sport and some of the top businessmen that, you know,

I get to sit with in the podcast and just picking their brains about how to run a gym. Just picking their brains about the gym and find out what works and what doesn't work. But, you know, our gym is going to be solely focused on the client and what their need is and just trying to change lives for the better and everything we do. I wish more CrossFit gyms went into it with that mentality. I could be wrong, but I feel like a lot of times there's some half-assiness going on. Oh, there's a lot of half-assiness going on.

I mean, you walk into a lot of gyms and all you see on the board every day is just some random Metcon they put together. You know, like nowadays, I mean, we know how to train energy systems. We know how to train a certain client. You know, if some client needs to be scaled down to where they're not even touching a barbell or anything that day, then you need to do that. You know, we don't need to force people to be in uncomfortable situations because a lot of us are not games athletes.

You know, we all don't have to be in an uncomfortable situation. Yeah, probably like 99.9% of us are not games athletes. Or competitors, you know. I mean, that's a very small percentage. Like these people out here today, that's a small percentage of the population. And what I want to do is help that other 98% of the population and bring them up and in the process, hopefully have a couple of real good athletes come out of the box.

Cool. That's a good point, too, because I think, you know, you said there's some shenanigans going on lately. I think there's a movement towards people who are opening CrossFit gyms and they think it's going to be a party all the time. You know, oh, I love CrossFit so much. I'm going to open up a CrossFit gym. Well, it's still a job.

And a lot of times you open up a gym and you don't have time to work out, so you don't realize how much really goes into i'm going to talk a little bit about that tonight it's like you know why what's your motivation to open up a gym or what was your motivation and and what are some like good motivations and what are some not so good motivations you know a lot of times you're like i love crossfit people like i hate my job and i love crossfit i'm opening a box and you're like i'm not so sure you've got the whole idea how this shit works yeah there's a little more that goes into it and you know truth be told that's kind of how I did it I didn't I wasn't like a businessman when I started businessman businessman I wasn't I wasn't into

business when I started I just loved CrossFit and I want to open a box I wasn't trying to make money either though but all that changed one day when I realized I was gonna have to get a real job I didn't have to make money either though, but all that changed one day when I realized I was going to have to get a real job. I didn't have a job at the time. I was in school, just a full-time student. And I was like, I'm going to have to get a job. My GI Bill is running out. And I was like, well, I guess we have to take this seriously now.

But the thing is, is like most people who open a gym, when I talk to them, they have the same exact mentality I had when I opened mine. I was like, oh, you're going to be in trouble. Because a lot of people opened theirs around the same time I did and they didn't progress, I don't think. Or they're progressing slower, I don't know. So I think there's actually a big opportunity there to help teach other CrossFit gym owners how to run a good box and an opportunity opportunity for like if to differentiate yourself in the market

possibly just running a good business in itself could help you you know be different right so that's one thing that we I think we try to do is be really organized about you know how we deal with the clients the they come in, they have to sign up for classes. Classes start at a certain time. You can't just come in and grab some equipment and start working out. You have to be a part of the class. And I think that is different than a lot of CrossFit gyms operate. Do you guys do fundamentals?

Yep, we do fundamentals. So we used to do, when we first, I mean, we tried, we opened up probably around the same time you guys did, almost. We're about to have our five-year anniversary. But we've tried a bunch of different ways of bringing in new people. And there have been ways that we tried differently, and then we're like, this isn't working. We're going to go back to the old way that we did it.

Yeah, I think a lot of gyms uh like maybe they they're not willing to experiment and i think like you know i think there's a crossfit article like you know the groupon thing like you know for some for some gyms in certain markets it's going to be a good idea and for some gyms it's not going to be a bad idea and you know you just got to experiment and try to try to see if that works the biggest thing there is having things to measure. Like if you're not measuring, like if you don't know how many people come to your website, how many people are signing up for newsletter, how many people that are signing up for your newsletter are actually coming in the gym.

If you're not measuring those conversions, then you really don't know what's working. And I think a lot of times people go, they say, oh, we're going to try this Groupon thing. Well, I feel like there's more people signing up, or I feel like there's more people coming in. Are you guys tracking those things, Mike? We track everything. We track it a lot. Doug actually... Do you guys do any print ads at all, or you do...

We don't. We have in the past. For us, in our market, we found that print ads just don't do nearly as well as our social media presence. We do a fantastic job of social media presence. And actually, CTP here behind the camera, he has been doing a lot of studying and he's got it pretty nailed down, especially with Barbell Shrugged. So not just with Fashion and Strength and Conditioning and our other gym, CrossFit Cardio, but with Barbell Shrugged, he's done a

really good job of promoting us via social media. I think every gym should learn how to utilize social media because it's free. Most people, especially in the beginning, have way more time than they do have money. You're tracking. You've gotten a lot of results from social media. I would say 95% of our incoming business is all referrals and word of mouth. We tried to print ads, too, and we got zero hits back because we were trying to track that. And we got nothing from it. Right. Yeah.

Maybe it's just that it's 2013 and people don't read print stuff anymore. No, I don't think that's necessarily the case. They're all getting their information from social media. Yeah, my opinion on print ads is that print ads are kind of like exercise. If you've never exercised before, you're going to try exercise and conclude that it doesn't work at all because you don't know what to do and you're not an expert on exercise yet. Print ads are the exact same thing. If you're an expert direct marketer and you know exactly how to write ads that convert,

then I think you can get a lot out of that. But most of us didn't grow up being direct marketing salesmen. So we don't know because we're brand new at it. Yeah, if you see a CrossFit ad, it's probably terrible. Not because you're a bad person. It's because you're not a marketing person. Right, you're probably a good CrossFit coach, but you suck at marketing. Well, I know the ITF guys, the Iron Tribe Fitness that's in Alabama, they've had amazing results with billboards and print ads.

But when they opened their gym, they had a guy come on that specifically did marketing, and that's all he did. I've looked at that guy's marketing. That guy's marketing is spot on. It's very good. It's pretty genius. And he comes out of the direct marketing world.

You don't have to ask him that. You can look at his ad and be like, oh, that guy has training in direct marketing. He's done this before. Yeah. If you read direct marketing books, if you read Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples or Old Movie on Advertising or the classic books in marketing and advertising, you can look at his ads and be like, he's read those books and he's following their advice.

If you couldn't tell, Doug loves to read marketing books. I can tell. I do. Nerd. It was funny when we first opened the gym before Doug came on board like I wasn't tracking anything. I was kind of going off of how I felt things were going. He asked me. How many members do we have? Like oh I'll have to check and see how many members we have off the log into the system see how many people were billing all this stuff and then when he came on board he's like well I'm, I'm going to make some spreadsheets,

and we're going to start tracking this thing. I was like, man, that sounds hard. So he did it, not me. I just show Mike the pretty colors and the way the line's going. I just request at the end of the month to show me some graphs and some pictures. I'm like, oh, that one's going up and that one's going down. Is that good? Oh, okay, cool.

I need a dog. That's what my gym needs. Every gym should have a dog. That's a part of his talk, actually. Like, every CrossFit coaches and CrossFit gym owners, they all kind of run in the same category. They're very creative. They like a lot of variety.

They can board easily. They're type E entrepreneurs, and that's cool, but you've got to have the balance between having the creative person and having the organized person. The dynamic between the two works very, very well. If I ran a gym it would be super organized

but people would get sick of it because I would never change anything because I'd be like this is the right way to do it. Like this. And I'm never going to change. And then Mike comes in there

and fucking always changes my shit. But that's good because people like it. I don't think Mike knows what he's going to be doing this afternoon. I know he's going to take like it. I don't think Mike knows what he's going to be doing this afternoon. I know he's going to take a nap. I probably will take a nap.

You guys are like yin and yang. So beautiful. That's right. It is. I would not describe beautiful. Do you want a hug right now? Beautiful to describe him. My wife gets jealous on a regular basis, that's for sure.

A hug? Yeah, yeah. She thinks that he's my soulmate, actually. Oh, y'all have a bromance. Bromance, that's right. That's the term for it. Brothers gotta hug. And CTP is our child, actually. I see the resemblance.

I don't know what you're saying! Oh, that's right. You can't hear us right now. We're just looking at you and laughing at y'all. So you actually have that dynamic at your right. You can't hear us right now. We're just looking at you and laughing. So you actually have that dynamic at your place. Like you focus primarily on training for what it sounds like. And then Matt and Jonathan, right, do have more of a business role. Yeah.

Like a little bit of fitness, but mostly business, especially talking to Matt, who I talk to mostly. Yeah. So you have that dynamic between someone who focuses on fitness and creativity and making you know it making um being there a fun place to be and then you have someone who organizes everything and make sure the things get done systematically on time when they're supposed to get done yeah it's actually good now that we did get so busy that i at in the beginning i tried to do everything and you just get to the point where your business can't grow if you don't delegate and hand things off anymore. Right. So, you know, Jonathan does the bookkeeping, and then Matt does the management stuff, and that really allows me the space to be creative.

I can do the programming and try to keep it engaging and interested, whereas if I had my head full of all the numbers and all that stuff, I don't think I would have the energy to be as creative and try to keep people engaged in the workouts and not get bored. You know, I don't want to program the same stuff all the time. I want to make sure they can never predict what's going to come on the next day. So it's really nice to have that freedom to be able to do that. Yeah. Is that something that you've thought about?

Do you have someone who, BP, do you have someone who's going to kind of be the other half? Like, are you more of a creative person or more of an organized person i'm neither one of those neither one of those you're everything but nothing brandon doesn't know what he is i don't know i just i like to work out that's all i know there you go no uh no i've got a couple of them they uh no i got a couple of friends that are going to be helping out, but I've been fortunate enough to have the investor in the gym. He was a Georgia Tech grad, and he's been recognized nationally for his business plans and business models that he's done for his company that he has now.

He came over one night. We sat down for about five hours, and he created a cool spreadsheet with a lot of numbers on it and all that kind of stuff, a lot of colors. Spreadsheets are scary. I don't know what that shit means, but it looked good. It's contagious on Doug now. He's talking BP. That's right. I'm talking BP language.

And so we sat down. He just kind of took me to school in the business world for that amount of time. And so it's going to be exciting working with him. And then I've got another buddy of mine. I'm not going to say any names now without the gym coming up and all that kind of stuff. But he's very organized. He's very creative. He's going to be helping me out in a bunch of the inner aspects of the business world as well,

especially with organization and all that kind of stuff, keeping up with clients and keeping up with the workouts and making sure I'm not clients and keeping up with the workouts and making sure I'm not staying in one path, the workouts, but being very diverse and being open and trying to engage, keep it engaging for everybody involved. Oh, good. That'll, that'll let you stay in your strength, which is fitness and coaching and all that.

And they can take care of it, of the business stuff, which may or may not have an interest for you. I have no interest in that. Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah. You don't want to be doing all that stuff if you don't have an interest in it because you're going to do it poorly. Give it to somebody else who's good at it. I just hope to have

athletes there to coach and people there to coach and I know if I have that every class then I know I'm doing something right. Are you going to be the primary coach in the beginning? As of right now, I'll probably be the primary coach. I just got offered a job as a strength conditioning coach for a school I was talking to you about the other day

and if they give me the right price, I'll probably take it. It's a great school and I love everything there about and so then I'll take a backseat as a head trainer and let Jessica take over his head trainer and I fully trust her as a trainer. I've seen her coach

people I've seen her coach Olympic weightlifting which is she's great at. I've seen her do coach gymnastics, you know, coach Olympic weightlifting, which she's great at. I've seen her coach gymnastics. She's just a really good people person. She makes everybody feel welcome. So I have full confidence in her in doing that if I take this job. Excellent. Those are definitely two things I look for.

You've got to have a good personality, and you've got to know how to do Olympic weightlifting. I've seen too many CrossFit coaches teaching a class, and they're doing the whole snatch wrong. Yeah, you just cringe. You're like, no! Actually, I was going to say, like, usually when we travel or we go out of town, we like to go visit a lot of different CrossFit affiliates just to see what's out there, what people are doing, how they're running their business, what their classes look like. And I think nine times out of ten, we see what not to do instead of what

to do so I think there's something to learn and like there's some really I can't mention any names but now though I know I was a part of the outlaw way and I'm still good friends with Rudy and I'm still involved in the outlaw way and we started hosting camps going around and the first year we hosted camps we were having Olympic weightlifting sessions. And we had to stop everybody and get PVC pipes out, break everything down. The second year we started doing camps, man, it was amazing to see some of these athletes come out and some of the coaches that are producing these athletes. I mean, now we're seeing a consistent, you know, 205, 225 snatch with guys that weigh 160 pounds, 170 pounds.

I mean, that's awesome for the sport of CrossFit and the sport of Olympic lifting, which a lot of Olympic lifters, they hate the CrossFit sport, but we brought more notoriety to them. It's like a CrossFitter understands what a 315-pound snatch and how hard that is to get there, and they admire that for that individual. I've seen a lot of really good things coming out of it, but then I've still seen those coaches that are trying to add it in, and then you're just like, man, go get some education, step back,

let somebody else do it, or hire a good Olympic lifting coach. You know what? Five years ago when we were running our gym and we were starting and I was fumbling through trying to teach people how to do Olympic lifting, and I'd had a good coach, and I was probably not nearly, you know, I look back on how I was teaching the Olympic lifts now, I'm like, oh, my gosh. Like, those poor people. But, you know, you've got to practice on somebody.

But back then, the education wasn't as accessible. Like, it wasn't as popular. Right now, I don't feel like you have the excuse to not go learn how to do this. There's no excuse to be trying to force everyone to do all these big snatches and stuff like that and not have the education to learn how to teach it properly. There's a ton of books, websites, seminars online, DVDs, and you can travel. There's a lot of great, great, great weightlifting coaches who are doing seminars. A really great prize.

We've got Glenn Penlay coming to our gym in April. Yeah, a lot of guys are traveling around. He's pretty good. $200 for a day. Okay, coach. That's incredibly cheap. It's like nothing. Well, it's a two-day.

So the first day is like he covers technique and stuff, and then the second day he talks about coaching and programming. But for a whole weekend to spend with glenn penley or if you just want to do the technique part like 200 bucks yeah to learn olympic weightlifting from glenn penley like no it's well worth it sold yeah in there yeah yeah there's no excuse there's too many coaches traveling around um most people most a crock, like a weightlifting coach, someone you can go to. I, I personally, every three or four months travel somewhere where there's like high level weightlifting going on. Sad to say, we probably have the highest level weightlifting in Memphis. So there's not like another coach I can go to in my area. So

I have to leave town. And so I do. And so like, if you live in a town where you're the best, you should be leaving town or inviting someone from out of town on a frequent basis. But if you're somewhere like Atlanta, there's a ton of weightlifting coaches that can really help you out. If you're ever in Atlanta, go to Coach John Coffey. Coffey's a dude. I actually have never met Coffey before, but I've heard so many stories about him. I want to podcast with him. I want to podcast with him. I heard it would be fantastic. It's the man. I actually have never met Coffee before, but I've heard so many stories about him. I want to podcast with him. I want to podcast with him.

I heard it would be fantastic. It would be epic. Epic. With that, we're going to wrap it up. Got anything else you want to say, promote, Brandon? Yeah, we got a lot for calls coming up down here and raising money for the homeless in Renette County. And CrossFit no excuses is k

Calamity is gonna be there speaker, Chad Barnes is g March 30th at the mall he up on the internet, want a great thing to be a par especially bringing the C together. I think they're $100,000. What's the webs

for a cause for a cause. Watt for a Cause. Yeah, Google it. I got it right here. I know I should know it off the top of my head, but I don't. Wattforacause.com. Put it up there. And it's going to be a really, really great thing. I can't wait to be a part of this. And like I said, my friends, Ben Davis and Kyle Maynard, they're putting it on. And those are really great guys.

They've got a heart to serve the people, their community, and the CrossFit gym. We're looking forward to going out there and helping them out right now. Very cool. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. All right. Hey, welcome to Barbell Strug. We're still here at the Garage Games 1 event, podcasting with some athletes and coaches,

gym owners, all that stuff. Doug and I are here. And that's just you. And that's just me. I like to talk about myself. I've never thought about it like that before. I am pretty eclectic and awesome. Chris Moore took off on us.

He's got family obligations. We have Doug Lawson. Yay. Yeah, that's me. The mad scientist. That's right. He has all the titles I have. Plus some. Yeah, that's me. The mad scientist. That's right. Actually, he has all the titles I have. Plus some.

Yeah, probably. But less nicknames. Less nicknames, but he can also beat most people's asses. And a shorter criminal record. He has a much shorter criminal record. He's been arrested a few times less than I have. And I haven't been sued as much, curiously. Yeah, if you ever want to hear about how I got sued, you will never find out.

So, we have our guests. Unless you listen to the podcast already. Oh, did I go over that? I think you did. Well, alright, sorry. I just like that CTP's in the dark right now, and he has no idea what's going on. He's just guessing right. For the record, it's too loud in here

for CTP to hear any of us speaking. The mics are picking us up for the show, but he's guessing who's talking. He's doing a pretty good job. Our guest today is well, kind of a guest, Matt Baird, recurring guest now. Thanks for having me back. And his fiancée,

Taylor. My lovely fiancée. So I got into a bit of trouble the last time I was on this show because I didn't mention how much I loved her when Chris mentioned us getting married. We're going to let you redeem yourself. Taylor, I don't want you to talk about yourself. I want Matt to talk about you. Oh, God.

This is going to be tough for him, I know. He's like, she has brown hair. She's fantastic. Tell us about your soon-to-be wife's athletic history. Well, so here's the deal when we start talking about Taylor. Taylor, she plays the humble, you know, oh, I'm not very good at sports, an accomplished athlete. But Taylor, I don't know if you know,

was a Division I swimmer at Georgia Tech in the ACC. State and school record holder for the butterfly. Yeah, now she's going to start getting red and kicking me. But Taylor, I guess her first CrossFit competition was the Faction Games. And I think she got like seventh or something like that. And then her second CrossFit competition was the Southeast Regionals, and she got like 11th or 12th. So she's pretty accomplished,

even though she says she claims to know everything, which she doesn't. It's debatable. She leaves that up to me. So, Taylor, what do you do for training? I am coached by Matt Baird. This is a dangerous – Wow. This is a word of wisdom and caution to any man.

And, Mike, I'm sure you can sort of. That's right. You're not supposed to coach the ones close to you. This is, dude, it is one of those things where it's good some days and it's bad. I'll give you an example. Oh, gosh. A couple weeks ago ago we're kind of in the midst of ending

a specific cycle of our training and Taylor's got a pretty weak thoracic spine. She's got good levers for squatting but she's not a good squatter. She pulls me aside and is like look, I need to squat more.

I'm like okay, that's fine. You know what I mean? I was like, we need to be careful about how much we do it just based off CNS demand and where we are in the season. The fact that I'd love to have you squatting four days a week, but with conditioning needs where they are right now. You're not Mike Bledsoe. That's going to be tough to squat for this week.

Yeah, and the open starting. We've got to start at least getting into some conditioning Yeah, and the open starting, right? We got to start at least getting into some conditioning and more skill work. But I was like, fine, we'll squat, especially coming off rest days when you're fresh and you're recovered. We can definitely squat. So I dial her up, you know, like a pretty high volume amount of squats her first day. And she comes in the gym. Taylor's been hampered by a little hip thing,

which we've been trying to get out of her with some, you know, dry needling options or some massage options or things like that. Trying to refer some ART people. And she gets in there and is basically looking at me while I'm hanging rings in our new gym, like 30 feet up in the air on a fucking death ladder. And she's like, she's like, I can't do this. And she,

I'm like, what are you, what are you talking about? I can't do this. And she's like, I just, I'm not going to squat this much. Like you said,

she said, she goes, I don't want to squat this much. And I said, you told me yesterday that you needed to squat. What are you talking about? And she's like, I just,

you don't get it. You just don't ever listen to me. You're a shitty coach and I hate you. And I was like, I'm shitty because I listened to exactly what you said. And she goes, yes, you're not supposed to listen to everything I said. And I said, but last week you told me I don't listen to you enough. So what I realized, and this is a. You should never coach your fiance.

That's number one. And number two, what I realized is this is a metaphor for all relationships, is that when you can kind of compare it to tennis. When guys play tennis, whatever's inbounds and out of bounds is always inbounds and out of bounds. It's like playing on a normal lined court. But when you play tennis with a woman, what's inbounds one day might be

out-of-fucking-bounds the next. And you're basically fucking taking shots and then looking over at her for approval of was that shot inbounds or out-of-bounds. And what I've realized is most of my fucking shots are out-of-bounds, buddy. Which is why this is an intervention, really, and this is not

Barbell Shrugged, and I think Mike Bledsoe's going to coach you now. For free, because our family budget can't handle that. Always read between the lines with women. Oh, my God. Or just don't coach them. For Doug and myself, we actually, for the longest time, we tried to adhere to a pretty strict protocol that he would coach my

before I was married. He's like, you coach my girlfriends and I'll coach your girlfriends. Girlfriends. Thank God Ashley Bledsoe's not on this show right now. My many girlfriends. If you were at CrossFit Memphis five years ago, you would totally know what I'm talking about. With the plural there.

No, I'm just kidding. It was a different world before you got married. Oh, my God. For everybody. For everybody. We were all having way more fun. Back when we lived at the gym. That's right.

Literally. Yeah, literally. When we slept above the office, things were different. Oh, that place was cool, though. That place was cool, though. That place was cool. So let me ask you this. Who coaches Marcy and who coaches Ashley? Yeah, the unique thing about Marcy and Ashley is that actually you do coach Ashley quite a bit,

and I do coach Marcy quite a bit. That's how we know they're the one. Oh, no! They listen. I'm kind of concerned about you two right now. Well, you know what they say. The couple that trains together gets divorced quickly. I've definitely had girlfriends in the past, but that shit was a problem.

Well, you know what it is. It's gone pretty well with Marcy. You know what it is? It's dude. Taylor's a great athlete, but she doesn't know shit about training. True statement. I was waiting for a backlash there. No, she doesn't.

No, I don't know anything. But she lives with me. And what happens is she catches some of my verbal diarrhea, and then she starts – she's smart, so she starts to pick up on it. I'm good at bluffing that I know what I'm talking about. So she's got an incredible poker face. She's got an incredible poker face. You're going to throw out Matt Barrett buzzwords like CNS demand and hamstring intelligence

but you don't know what the hell he's talking about either. The funny thing is neither do I but I have to convey that to everyone I come in contact with that I'm not bullshitting. I want to put a reality TV show in your house. Oh, I'd love it.

So can we talk about that? No. We can't talk about it. So, dude, let me ask you guys this. With y'all being coaches, obviously, and I'm very outspoken about local events, right, and sort of quality control in local events, right, and sort of quality control in local events. How do you guys feel about what you've seen here today and about not really athlete levels, but just how do you guys feel? So, like, for example, you may or may not agree with what you see in a CrossFit HQ competition or regional, right?

But at the end of the day, the pinnacle of my sport is the games, right? So it really doesn't matter whether you agree with it or not, because that's the standard they're setting for their sport. So it's almost like they have the right to do that. So you can say, oh, well, running, you know, a thousand meters with a 70 pound dumbbell over your head is dumb, but if that's what they want to test those athletes, that's what they're going to do. Whereas the local competition opens itself up to a bit more criticism what do you guys think about these things and where they're going and what you've seen is it is it quality is it do you think they're kind of going for more like a shock and all and just kill you or is there any intelligence do you guys think to these things i mean truth be told for this event it looks like garage dance is growing a ton so they must be

doing something right but for this particular event like we were in the expo hall speaking all day yesterday. This morning we had a breakout session where we took people into a private room and did some kind of one-on-one, small group business coaching and mobility coaching. So we've been doing a lot of things besides simply watching the competitors. I see them over there working out, but I actually haven't seen what one single WOD was today. I have no idea what the flow is. I didn't even know that there was, like, individuals on the first day and team on the second day. So I really haven't been watching that much.

So it's hard to criticize when I really don't even know what the hell they're doing over there. We're just kind of hanging out and, you know, letting people know about Barbell Shrugged. What do you think? I'm in the same boat as Doug. Like, I haven't got to watch a whole lot of what's going on. I have talked to quite a few athletes. I actually have not heard a lot of complaints from high-level athletes

that have been competing. I haven't heard anyone really bitching about it was so not fair that this or that happened. I didn't really get a lot of that. What I do think is really cool is the evolution of the sport. I've been coming to the Garage Games. I think since the Garage Games started

three or four years ago, I think it's been going four years now, I think it was 08, was it 08? I don't know. Yeah, it was a long time. I think it was 09. 09 was the first year. The only year I didn't come and be involved in one way or another was last year, but every year it's improved, every year, there's an evolution in the sport.

And one thing you've got to keep in mind is that if the bigger the competition the harder it is to have that quality control that you're kind of referring to and there's a big competition people look for this all year round and there's a competition that a lot of people it's like their first one. It's a great way to like get people into it because they have multiple ways to scale things. So for this, what I find Garage Games is a lot of fun because of the people. What I look forward to when it comes to this is being able to hang out with everybody. And that's one reason we wanted to come here is because we knew that we were going to hang out with a bunch of our friends. And there's going to be a good vibe here. That and you owed me money and I owed you plates.

That's right. I'm here to collect. That's a bonus. Well, you owed me money and i owed you plates that's right i'm here to collect well you owe me bumper plates for the bar you know what you know what's right if you want if you want it this is anything in life if you want the highest quality you're gonna have to go to the to the event that serves the smallest amount of people which is going to be which is going to be a regional there's a qualifier to get in. The OC throwdown is an example of that. They only took 60 guys.

It's like, well, that is obviously the quality control can be practiced there at a level that's not possible here. So there's competitions for everybody. So that serves a specific type of athlete, and this serves another type of athlete. So I don't like to compare different. I just say this thing is different than this thing. Yeah. And so, like, you know.

It's apples to oranges. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Well, especially, too, nowadays you've got, like, judging courses that you have to take, whereas it used to be, like, my mom could judge me if she was available. Hey, Mom, can you watch my depth on the wall balls? What's a wall ball?

Well, you know what's weird, man. Count my double unders. Good luck with that. I am not as active in the competitive arena as some other CrossFit competitors. You're saying you don't compete as frequently is what you're saying. Exactly. You save your load for the one big wad at the end of the year. Exactly.

Well, dude, I'll tell you a funny story. He saves his load for when it matters. I was telling Taylor in the car that I was watching her warm up the other day, and I was getting all like oh man and I was coaching it was the night y'all were there at my new gym and I was coaching my class and we were doing the the wad from the 2011 regional the end wad the chipper that ends with a walking lunge and then a sprint so I'm like I'm explaining where and sort of demonstrating where to lunge to and then where to sprint. And I'm all at the same time like watching Taylor warm up and getting all like, oh, yeah, I'm a dirty old man.

And dude, as someone asked me a question about where to lunge to. And so I grabbed the plate and started lunging. And I go, yeah, and you're going to drop your load. I'm going to drop my load here and everyone in the class looked at me because I was like looking at Taylor she didn't know I was looking at it I'm all talking about dropping loads and I was like yeah sorry about that you're gonna train somewhere else but no you know what's weird is I was talking about these kind of digressions. I was talking about these sort of local throwdowns.

And, you know, with me not competing, I kind of like to train, man. Like, you know, and the environment doesn't have to be perfect. I kind of used to be like that. Like, I used to want everything to be perfect so I could have, like, perfect training results, you know. And in the essence of CrossFit, it's obviously not going to be like that. So that's not important to me as much anymore. But I don't compete really at all. I kind of train for, not the Open, but for the Regionals.

So everything I do is day-to-day. Did I get better today? Am I better prepared for tomorrow? And it's all about peaking for that regional. We can talk about peaking on another episode or whatever if I don't get kicked off today. But the thing about it is I lose sight. There's another world outside of top-level CrossFit competitions.

Of course there are more competitions than just regionals, right? But I lose sight of the fact that, like, dude, the community, like some of these people may never even dream of going to a regional. Or they might not be talented enough. Or they might just not be what they want, right? But they still want to be out there using their fitness in sort of a fun way. You know what I mean? Using it on a competitive level. And sometimes when I walk into these places, I'm amazed

at how many of these people, right, because you think CrossFit is such a small community, you know? It's like, I know every single individual competitor out of the Southeast, right? You know what I mean? I'm sort of Mike when he goes to the Central East and knows every single one there, but dude, there are people here that I've never even seen in my life

that have never seen me or never seen you, dude, and they've been doing CrossFit for just as long or anything. They've seen me. Well, they know. Forget what you're talking about. But it's just, dude, it's amazing. Like you said, the evolution of the sport and the fact that, dude, this is just, this is from where it was in 2009 to where it is now.

I mean, dude, we are in, kind of paint the picture, we're in like a four basketball court sort of gymnasium sports academy, and they've got like four different wads going on at once. You know what I mean? I mean, this is crazy, man. Pretty cool. I've never even seen anything like that. And that's why I bring up the thing of quality control is, you know, with an event of this size, can you really

have quality control? You know what I mean? I think there's been a big learning curve on that because that's been a big... I've never heard that not be complained about. Even at regionals, people complain about one judge

being unfair over another judge or something like that. I also think that's just because of the fucking stakes. It's high stakes, dude, especially if you think you're down in the game. That's the thing is at no level is it not complained about because at that level the stakes are really high, and when the stakes aren't as high, maybe the quality control isn't as adhered to or something like that, no matter what.

And plus, nobody's going to blame themselves, the athlete, for fucking up a lot. Well, definitely not me. Definitely not my fault. I can't believe it. He totally took those awesome reps away from me. You know what I mean? How many athletes walk around and be like, man, I really hosed that one up. No, I hear the whole –

I've done that. As soon as an athlete starts complaining about – and me as a coach, I do it myself. So I'm not exempt done that. As soon as an athlete starts complaining about, and me as a coach, I do it myself. So I'm not exempt from that. I'm not like, there's been a couple times where athletes, you know, I feel like they're getting cheated by a judge and I'm out there screaming at the judge. I'm not going to be asking. 2011 Mike McGoldrick.

That's right. Dude, he got robbed. So, like, but anyways, I mean, there's instances of that. And, yeah, but what's really cool is what was happening three years ago on the judging level across the board, from the smallest competition to the biggest competition, across the board, it's all gotten better. Everyone's much more knowledgeable, and I'm looking forward to how it goes in the future. So we're going to have to wrap this up real quick. Matt, I want you to go ahead and promote what you want to promote.

Oh, the fact that I'm a Barbell Shrugged and, of course, in North Atlanta, remote coaching, remote coach, yeah. You do remote coaching through barbellshrugged.com? I do do remote coaching. You do offer that service. So what does that service entail? Well, basically, you know, I was on a previous episode of Barbell Shrugged and sort of the sentiment I tried to create was that, you know, you've got a myriad of options as an athlete. And we'll use a CrossFit athlete as kind of an example. You know, you've got OPT, you've got Outlaw, you've got CrossFit New England,

right? And you've got, you know, all these different available resources and all of them are great, right? the fact that there is somebody out there creating a template for athletes to to make their game progress is better than just people taking shots in the dark especially because i think it takes a sort of esoteric individual to to really coach themselves efficiently right you know i coach other athletes but i need a coach for me, right? And that's something that I believe highly in. But basically, at the end of the day, what I kind of got to was that, you know,

all these online blogs are great, but if you have the aspiration of sort of maximizing your individual fitness based on your genetics and your potential and the way you move or improving all of those things, right, at some point you're going to need a coach now it might take six months it might take six years for you to make that decision you know I followed OPT and I programmed for myself and it got to the point where I was a very high level competitor and very successful and I you know basically barely missed the games on a general blog format. But it got to the point where for me this year, after three years of that, two years of that, it's like, okay, now it's time for me. I've maximized my potential without having this individual format.

And that's basically what I'm trying to bring to the table. And that's not just for CrossFit athletes. I coach professional football players. I coach baseball players. I coach endurance athletes. I coach ultra-endurance athletes, okay? And the idea is that in order to really reach this sort of self-actualization, this maximum potential to optimize your potential, you are at some point going to need a coach for

you because you might feel like shit on a Tuesday, Doug, and Mike might feel great, and all of a sudden I've got dialed up something where you feeling shitty is going to be really hampered by what we do, right? And, Mike, you might thrive and you might fail, and we might set your training back two weeks mentally and physically because, you know what, Doug should not have been, you know, maxing deadlift today, whereas Mike should have been. You know what I mean?

So it's that idea of that more hands-on, that individualized approach, that individualized format, that consistent back and forth and that communication that helps us sort of evolve the individual's prescription. So if somebody wants that individual prescription, what should they do? They should either go straight to thefitortv.com Go to barbellshrug.com We've made it easy for people now. Right, so why don't you go ahead and explain it because I'm obviously

butchering it. Dummy. If you're interested in hiring Matt Baird, go to barbellshrug.com Click on shop and then click on remote coaching and then he's listed there. If you want more information, you can email Matt Baird at?

Matt at CrossFitNorthAtlanta.com. If you live in Atlanta, you should train? At CrossFit North Atlanta, but you should keep your hands and eyes off my beautiful fiance because I'll slit your throat. And I love her so much. But he's a nice guy. I love her so much. That's a a nice guy. I love her so much. That's a mass threat. Is that like a –

That's right. All right. Wrap this up. See you all next guest. A threat in the membership. All right. Mike Bledsoe back here at the Garage Games 1 event with Doug Larson. We're sitting down with Emily and Emily.

They both placed fourth at regionals last year, but in different regions. So, was it got Emily Friedman? Yes. And Emily, last name? Bridgers. Bridgers. Bridgers and Friedman. And how did, y'all are no longer in these different regions this year?

No, I moved down here to Atlanta about four months ago, so now we're going to be a Southeast athlete. I actually feel really lucky that I have a gym where we've got some really good female athletes, especially, you know, I'm just really, really nice to have that coming down here. What gym are you training at? We both train at CrossFit RX. Okay. Oh, so you're both in the same gym. Yeah.

Are you all battling it out every day? Are you training together, or how's that working out? For the most part, we follow different programs, but we'll occasionally do the same workout, and we actually just started meeting up a little more often to work out at least twice a week together. So you're doing different workouts.

Do you have different coaches? Kind of. You know, I think it's tough to have, you know, I have a coach in New York who's still doing some of my programming, but it's also really nice to have people here who see you every day. And so MB's coach, Ben, has has been also it's just you know extra eyes and and it's great too because she and can kind of coach me as well and that's why it's really it's great to be able to work out together sometimes sometimes we can do the same wad

and like and compete and other days just to be around good energy where it's like you know i can ask her to look at something and you know it's just a good push even if we're not doing the same workout she's got evil eyes i can tell I think I think she's I think she's probably sabotaging me I know I think totally not sabotaging anything your form looks so good just keep doing it like that yeah like right now she did no it's good it's been a good environment for us and I switched in since last year and I'm around a lot more competitors. I don't work out by myself every day.

So that's been a big change for me. So did you move down here to intentionally switch regions? Yes. I know some people have been doing that. They just want to get out of the region and go to a new region. Well, I was planning to move to Africa. Oh, really? I'm just kidding.

That's really not huge. I was like, no way. I just got back from Africa., but I'm just kidding. That's really not. I was like, no way. I just got back from Africa. No, I'm just kidding. No, I did not plan this move actually. I thought it would probably move after this competition season, but things happen a little faster. And so, you know, just go with it and kind of try to adjust to,

you know, there's a lot of great athletes down here, but, you know, we'll see what happens. So did you, are you going to keep your coach for the next couple of months until, you know we'll see what happens so did you are you going to keep your coach for the next couple months until you know you're until you're out of the competition and then switch for next year or is that something that you're planning on keeping it for the long term uh you know like no decisions have really been made on that um like i said it's it's you know coach that i'm working with now started me in crossfit, so he really, really knows me well as an athlete.

But there's something also I think important about being present and seeing movements and just, you know what I mean, being like by your athlete's side. So, I mean, nothing's been really decided. I'm just kind of trying to focus on the next few months and then we'll see. Has it really been that difficult, you know, being removed from your coach? You've got to send him videos now, or how do you handle that distance? A little bit, just like good communication mainly and, you know, I mean, I feel like I'm still a newer athlete, but I'm far enough along to know when things are not going well and to just say like, I need, you know, extra work on this and that or, you know, so.

Is it really more about the accountability of that coach or is he actually making changes in your workouts? No, makes changes. If I say, you know, like my snatch is really not going well and I'm not hitting these numbers and is there going to back off and work on, you know, snatch balance for a while or this, you know, so. Yeah. Okay. All the attention has been on her. We're not neglecting you. Okay. The evil attention's been on her.

We're not neglecting you. Okay. The evil eye joke Mike gave you. Was it last year the first year that you both competed, or how long have you all been doing CrossFit? I've competed for two years. I started CrossFit in 2010, and then my first regionals was 2011. I think I got ninth in 2011 and then fourth last year.

Okay. So I've been around sort of. Yeah. I think I got ninth in 2011 and then fourth last year. Okay. So I've been around, sort of. Yeah. I still feel new. I still feel like there's room to grow. Okay. How old are you? 25.

Oh, yeah, definitely. Youngin'. That's right, you're young. So what changes did you make this year that you're hoping will kind of, you know, push you into the next level? Well, I have... I changed gyms, so different training environment.

I still have the same coach, and now we're dating, so my coach knows pretty much everything about me. So that's been a really good thing. And I've just focused on all my weaknesses, a lot of Olympic lifting. The hang clean workout last year at regionals killed me, and I've focused a lot on cleans. And just being more efficient at skills. Like, I was just really stubborn.

I was a stubborn athlete. I never kipped my handstand push-ups until after regionals last year. I didn't kip a ring dip until six months ago. So I'm just trying to be more open-minded. Still haven't made the switch to butterfly pull-ups because I hate them. But just trying to be smarter and improve on my strength numbers without getting weaker in, like, my good areas at the same time. Are you doing any swimming in your training?

I haven't done any swimming. I had a back injury about four years ago and all I did was swim. So I'm confident in my swimming ability, but definitely if I were to make the games, I would start swimming, but I'm pretty sure that's not coming up at regionals. However, I think that I should start incorporating some swimming maybe on the weekends. Gotcha. And Beth, how long have you been in CrossFit? How long have you been competing? I started September of last year, so going into regionals was like a really new experience for me. It was actually like my second competition. I play sixth, not fourth, you know, gotta be honest.

Somebody misinformed me. I don't even know why I have you all on the show now. I know, I know. Exactly. But, yeah, I mean, so I guess I'm still kind of a newer athlete, but, you know, I definitely feel my strength was probably my weakness. My gymnastics, I feel like, have come along pretty well pretty quickly, like considering, like, I don't have any gymnastics background. And I'm more, like, I'm a runner. So, you know, decent lungs and my strength is really what killed me So I've just spent a lot of time on on that and trying to know my motto is every day You have to do something that you hate and something you love because what you hate makes it better and what you love is like

Why we? Do what we do there you go so specifically upper body strength been something you've been working on lately Both actually my front squat a lot. Yeah, I did 10 reps at 175 the other day. That was good. Damn, that was really good. Good for me. Good for me.

Got the strong girls. That'll be good for regionals for sure. I mean, that's the type of strength you're going to need. Yeah. You guys cannot beat Shayna Alvison now. You don't think so? you you know shana and i shana and i both live in decatur and everybody always says you're gonna beat shana this year you're gonna beat shana this year i'm like i'm not focused on anyone else well i only said that

because i'm coaching her this year oh are you there you go i don't want you to don't beat her this whole podcast is actually set up to sabotage you both. I know. You're taking all of our secrets right now. All right. All right. I see how it is. So what other training secrets do you have?

No, I'm just kidding. I eat donuts before every workout. That's right. The sabotage is going both ways. Yeah. I don't know. I just feel like my mentality has changed a lot. When I first started, I think I had that puppy dog.

I would skip rest days and not tell my coach because I just wanted to be so good yesterday. And now everyone says it. If you don't do the right things and you don't take rest, it will catch up to you. To be totally honest, I love my rest days now. I make sure that I'm treating my body better you know and it's kind of I'm at that point where it's like I have to like I have to stretch I have to take rest days and so that's been a big change for me I'm the same with rest days I remember I used to say like oh I've been 18 days on and I'm going strong and now I'm like uh it's been three days I think it's time for a rest day and I enjoy it to the fullest

extent how frequently do y you all train every week? Do you have five training sessions? Are you having 12? Well, usually I have two rest days a week, and it just varies either Wednesday and Sunday or Thursday and Sunday. But sometimes I fall behind and miss a workout, and then I'll make it up on a rest day. So either five or six days I'll train.

Do you do two-a-days at all, three-a-days? I don't do two-a-days much anymore just because my work schedule doesn't allow it. But if I can, I do. Yeah. What about you? I would prefer to lift or I would prefer to wad in the morning and lift in the afternoon, but I can't always do that. Why is that? I feel like a lot of people say the opposite.

Yeah, I don't know because I hate lifting. Okay, really? I don't know. Oh, you think you want to knock it out early? I like to, like, wake up with a wad and loosen up and I don't know. I like to get the intensity out of the way so that I can just relax and focus on technique. But not be worried about spending too much time working on my lifts, I guess.

I like to do conditioning first thing in the morning at maybe 65% effort. That's about it. I don't like to work hard. Is that your other training secret? That's actually my one big training secret to get both of you is to do everything at 65% intensity.

All right, I appreciate that. Maximum results. But really that's one thing I don't understand in, like, training is when people say, like, do this at 80%. I'm like, what is that? I don't understand how to go at 80%. I would tell you, but you're the enemy at this point. You can't go full intensity every day. I would say less experienced athletes. I understand that you can't go full intensity every day.

I would say less experienced athletes, if you haven't been training strength and conditioning for a really long time, you can hit it pretty hard pretty frequently and get really good results out of it. It's usually the people that have been training for years and years and years, they're the ones that are having to dial it back a little bit on the intensity. One thing I do notice in terms of being able to compare my scores with other people every day now is that you can't really look at – if you can't be crazy about looking at other people's scores, you just have to – it's a day of training,

and it's not you won or you lost today. It's just you do what you did with how your body feels that day. Not every day is a test. It's okay just to train. And I've had to, like, learn that this year. I think, you know, it's also like we're at a gym now, too, where we have, you know, in my opinion, we've got, like, four female athletes who could easily, not easily, but who have the potential to finish, like, top 15.

It's so easy. Well, that's, you know, like, we have some really good female athletes, and so, you know, like, it's tough to every day be on the clock and every day be, like, competing. So, you know, my mentality sometimes is I go in and I have goals for myself. Like, I'm doing all of these sets unbroken or I'm, you know what I mean? Like, some days, you know, and I'm a competitive person, so, you know, I love Emmy.

She's actually become a really good friend, you know, i'm a competitive person so you know i love emmy she's actually become a really good friend you know to me down here and um but um you know it's tough to like every day be trying to beat everybody else some days like i just want to move like i just want to enjoy it and i want to move and i want to do like untimed you know rounds of rope climbs and walks and just have fun you know with it so i think it's important for me as an athlete it's important to have the balance of pushing hard and trying to kick everyone's ass and then be and just be in the gym having fun like it's a playground you know so i mean that's the time that you really like get better at the skill itself when you're just playing you're trying new things you're not worried about well i don't i want to try a different technique but i

don't know i don't want to slow down because i want to win you're just out there having a good time and that's when people really learn because they're they're willing to try a different technique, but I don't know, I don't want to slow down because I want to win. You're just out there having a good time, and that's when people really learn because they're willing to try something that's brand spanking new because they're not worried about how fast they're going for the time being. Then you can wad afterward. I agree. Good? It's good.

You guys have anything you want to promote? Do you have any sponsors or anything like that? Well, I follow the Squat Mafia program. If you guys want, I follow the Squat Mafia program. If you guys want to check out our Squat Mafia blog, my coach is Ben Benson. And he comes up with our program. Squat Mafia? I've never heard of that.

What is Squat Mafia? That's new to me. Is that a website? Well, it's our blog. And it's a competitor's blog. About 15 of our competitors follow it. Em does it sometimes. But she's on and off.

Basically, Ben has done my program since day one that I started CrossFit, and then this year he was like, well, I'll still do your program, but I'll do it in a more comprehensive way to where other people can do it too. Very cool. One more time, what was the gym? If you're in the Atlanta area,

what gym should they go to? CrossFit RX. Do you guys have any personal blogs or anything like that? If you're in the Atlanta area, what gym should they go to? CrossFit RX. CrossFit RX. Okay. Do you guys have any personal blogs or anything like that? Not yet, but we should join forces and make... Twitter handles. You guys have Twitter handles? Yes.

I don't use Twitter. I'm so behind. OMG. I know. Maybe I'll go home and do that later. There you go. What's your Twitter handle? It's Emily Friedman CF, I think.

That's what that is. I'm so bad with that stuff. I can't even remember my own phone number sometimes. I post most of my scores on the Squad Mafia blog. All right. Check that out, guys. All right. Thank you.

Thanks, guys. Thank you, guys. All right. We're back at the Garage Games 1 event. I'm Mike Bletzer with Doug Larson. We're interviewing Molly Metz. She is a jump rope master. That's where you jump in and say, that's right, I am.

That's right. I mean, we're done. I'm a jump rope master. Master of jumping rope. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing here at the event? Yep. So I'm here with my company, Jump and Rope, here at the Garage Games. We represent Jump Rope in a whole. We're a manufacturer of jump ropes.

We're competitive jump roper trainers. I've been a competitive jump roper for 30 years. What that means, I can show you later what that entails. But my history started when I was 7 years old. A jump rope team came to my school and I was totally amazed. So I joined the team. A year being on the team, I made the international traveling team. I went to Panama as an eight-year-old and from the age of eight to 14, I traveled to over 35 countries. So it was an awesome childhood and I got a lot of knowledge

and a lot of understanding of jump rope and a lot of passion around that. I started jump rope with the idea to inspire kids to jump rope all the time and that it's a sport and not just a playground activity. It's been six years that jump and rope has been in existence. We're in over 100 locations in Colorado for jump rope in schools and rec centers. Then I was introduced to CrossFit 15 months ago. A friend came to me and said, I do CrossFit. And I said, what is that? And he said, come to my gym and come help us with double-unders.

And I laughed. And I was like, double-unders, that's like a warm-up for us. What's with the double-unders? Okay. So that's a joke to you guys. It's easy. Yeah. We do hundreds of double-unders to warm up.

It's just a given that you can do double-unders. Yeah. We do triple-unders in our competition. So I can do 150 triple-unders in a row consecutively. Holy shit. No problem. What does a jump-rep competition look like? It sort of looks like a gymnastics competition.

We have different events like the beam and the floor, but we don't have those. We have speed, which is alternating your feet as fast as you can. Then we have double-unders, triple-unders, obviously. That's our power. And then we have freestyle, which is crosses, music, choreographed, gymnastics skills, and all sorts of things like that. Yeah, I saw some of you guys doing double-unders while doing flips. Right.

So you see like backflips, double-unders. How did I miss that? It was cool. We're going to do it again in about five minutes, actually. You're going to do a flip? Yeah. Don't you see them looking over here? They're like, what are you doing? They're like, what are you doing over here? You're messing up our schedule. This're going to do it again in about five minutes, actually. You're going to do a flip? Yeah. Don't you see them looking over here? They're like, what are you doing?

They're like, what are you doing over here? You're messing up our schedule. This is going to be awesome. We can get some footage of that and plug it right in. Yeah, plug it in. Okay. So for all the people that listen to our show that are new to CrossFit and new to doing double-unders and would never even consider doing triple-unders,

what are some easy tips on how to get their double-unders more consistent? Yeah, so the first tip is what rope are you using? There's so many people that will pick up a speed rope. The speed rope is the one you go online, you're like, I need the fastest rope out there, and that's pretty much your first mistake, right? You want to be cool, you pick up this light rope. I learned how to drive with a Ferrari. I mean that right.

Same thing, right? Bad news, bad news, right? Okay. That speed rope is light. It's really inconsistent. It's rigid. And so it's really, you can't work on form, and you cut it long, and that's just where things start breaking down.

So, yeah, starting with rope, the right length and working on that. Technique, though, is finding yourself in the right zone. The right zone meaning putting your hands on your hips and finding them in a nice rectangle. So put your hands on your your hips everybody. Do it. Okay you're going to move your hands from your hips six inches. One, two, three, four, five, six. Out three. Back in six. And back in three. So you just made a little rectangle and notice that you have a little bend in your elbows. That's where your hands can live when you're doing single unders, triple unders, double unders, whatever. Right so we have this nice little bend here. We're able to sort of open up our shoulders.

So a big misconception is that those arms are out, right? And you see a lot of athletes out here, push, push, push, push, push. Oh, yeah. Bringing the rope down because they have this huge rope anyway. The rope's too long. Right. And then, you know, they have to bring it down. They're stretching their arms out.

They're using their shoulders. And they're like, oh, my gosh, look at me. And they probably look like a dolphin too, right? If someone's jumping rope and they're getting fatigued, where should they be feeling fatigued? Yeah. Should it not be in the shoulders? All their fatigue should be happening in the forearms, pushing with those wrists. So if you're getting fatigued in your shoulders, you're screwing it up.

Yeah, unless you're using a heavy rope, which we did have that heavy rope that we threw in for the competitors this weekend. So it's a struggle between technique and strength. And what's your standard for rope length? How do you tell? A standard check-in is just to stand on your rope with two feet, pull the ropes up to your armpits. Typically that's the standard. What we like to see from athletes is about two inches down.

There's no such thing as a custom rope. Is there a custom workout in CrossFit? I don't think so, right? You never know what you're going to do, right? You do Annie. You have nice tight abs, and your form should stay tight, so your rope should stay short. But, you know, throw it in with something else, you know,

some overhead squats and some pull-ups. You're going to be pretty tired. Your form might fail, so you need to have some adjustability with your rope. Okay. Yeah. When you were competing, do you still compete? I still compete. I am the oldest competitor on the U.S. Yeah. When you were competing, do you still compete? I still compete. I am the oldest competitor on the U.S. team.

The U.S. team is composed of 50 to 100 athletes that go, and we do the world competition. So do you have, like, a specialty? Yeah, my specialty is speed. I still do freestyle, which is the gymnastics. You'll see me do a few things today. But I have really fast feet, and I'm just a quick speed jumper. What type of music do you do freestyle to?

Do you do, like, dubstep? These guys do dubstep. For real? Yeah. Oh, man, I want to see that. I'm coach now. I mean, with freestyle stuff, I'm coaching. I have one of the largest teams in the nation.

We have about 85 kids on our team. Ages range from 5 to 40. So what's your favorite music to do freestyle to? You know, I don't know. I like techno, I guess. Yeah? Yeah. I like a heartbeat. I feel like techno and jump rope go together. That makes sense. So what'd you do before there was techno?

Was techno always around? You know, this is going to sound really dorky, but I like the 50s music. What? Oh, yeah. It's so boring. I like rap, too. Mr. Conway, twit. The Big Bopper. Can you jump rope to Dick Dale?

I don't know. Surf rock? Maybe. I can jump rope to anything. Let's make it happen. Now you're making fun of me. No, I'm not. I'm going to go see Mr. Dick Dale in a couple months, and I just wanted to maybe just see if it fits.

I didn't think that 50s music would work with jumping rope, but techno made sense, so I was wondering about maybe surf music. The 50s music, it's got that beat. It just keeps going. Right? It's easy. I don't know 50s music. I'm not sure what she's talking about.

I thought she was like 30-something. I don't know 50s music. I'm not sure what she's talking about. She's looking at how old she is. I'm like, I don't know what's going on here. I thought she was like 30-something. No, no, no. Seriously, the surf rock is the only 50s music I listen to. That's why I was asking. Fine. I'll send you some links to some good 50s music. There you go.

Awesome. We should be able to share those. All right. So we're effectively way off topic. I know. I'm good at that. If you want to hear more about Jump and Rope, or they want to buy some of your products,

where can they go? What's your website? Yeah, my website is my company named jumpandrope.com. Jump in the letter N, rope.com. Yeah. So, you know, again, the company was founded with the intent that we are competitive jump ropers with the foundation of competitive jump rope. And that's where education spears from. We're not just a manufacturer of jump ropes. It's like, oh my gosh, look at our jump rope and use it. We just happen to, or I happen to have designed a jump rope technology four years ago that sort of wraps up and summarizes all of my knowledge and education behind it.

So it's really a cool thing. Like, I never thought I was going to. I have two patents on a jump rope technology. Oh, wow. It's attributed to all the fastest speed sports in the world. I think I've got one of your ropes somewhere. Yeah, well, I'd like to see you use it. Wow, that sounds like a challenge.

I'm kidding. Called out on the show. Totally called out. I may have left it in my car because it was given to me yesterday. Now I just know where it is. Yeah, it's a good thing we have a whole booth of jump ropes right around the corner. It looks like my buddy's house. But my big claim to fame in CrossFit right now is my 10 minutes of double-inners.

I don't know if you've heard of this, but I can do 10 minutes of— You do double-inners straight in 10 minutes? Yeah, no mistakes. Wow. So this came to be every fall. I host a tournament for the little jumpers in my community in Colorado, and it's 10 minutes. So we all stand up, and you just keep going, and if you miss, you're out, and if you get to 10 minutes, you win. And so for four years in a row, I've gone to 10 minutes, and it's about 1 and you just keep going. If you miss, you're out. If you get to 10 minutes, you win. For four years in a row, I've gone to 10 minutes, and it's about 1,400 upwinders in a row. I was going to ask, how many?

1,400. You can watch the video. Go to my website. Check it out. It's like this for 10 minutes. Oh, up and down. I think our gym record might be, I don't think anyone's broken 400, but in the 300s. 300s, cool, cool, cool.

I just got the evil eye from Jared. I think we're like two out of the four. Okay, well, we'll let you get out of here. So they go to jumpinrope.com, and then if they want more information, what's your email? My email is jumpinrope at gmail.com. Perfect. Or mollymets at jumpinrope.com. Can we buy jump ropes on your website?

You can buy jump ropes on my website. Perfect. Awesome. All right, thank you for coming out. Excuse on my website. Perfect. Awesome. All right. Thank you for coming out. Excuse me. Thank you for having me. Yeah.

All right, guys. This was the Garage Games 1 event, and I hope you enjoyed this episode. See you next time. Yeah.