Barbell Shrugged - [6 Month Muscle Gain Challenge]

Episode Date: July 15, 2014

Info on our upcoming 6 Month Muscle Gain Challenge.

Hey, Doug here from Barbell Shrugged. What you're about to listen to isn't one of our podcasts. It's actually the audio we clipped out from a video that Mike and I shot to promote the launch of the upcoming Muscle Gain Challenge, which is one of our online training programs. We do reference our slides quite a few times, so if you're interested in seeing pictures of what the program looks like, then I highly suggest you go to muscle.barbellshrugged.com to check out the video version. And then also, if you're interested you

can sign up for the program while you're there you can sign up for the program until friday july 25th the earlier you sign up the cheaper the program is so definitely don't wait until the last minute if you're interested again all the information for the program is on muscle dot barbell shrugged.com hope you enjoy if you have any questions feel free to email us help at barbell shrugged.com what's up guys mike Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson. You may recognize us from the barbell shrug podcast. We have CTP behind the camera here, and we are here to talk on this webinar about getting bigger and stronger, specifically the six month muscle gain challenge. Uh, we put together about a year ago and it was put together because we saw a glaring need

for people to get bigger and stronger in order to be competitive in the sport of CrossFit and I don't think we we looked around and saw there really wasn't a lot of stuff out there that specifically that was specifically geared towards that yeah a lot of athletes don't really recognize their own kind of glaring limitations and so especially the smaller athletes in CrossFit that have good endurance or they came in with an endurance background, they thought they could just improve their fitness and strength wasn't really the priority. And then after doing CrossFit for even a short period of time,

they quickly realized that you have to be super strong to be successful in the sport of CrossFit because as a sport, it's much closer to the strength side of things than it is to the endurance side of things. Yeah, And even for the people who realize they need to get stronger, one of the things we did was we made this six months long for a reason, which was to keep people from hopping from program to program. That's another common mistake we see amongst CrossFitters is they've got a goal and then it starts working. So they change gears, which is something that we recognize as a problem. So we really encourage people to do something

for, you know, four to six months. And so we thought, you know what, if we can get people to commit to this for six months, then in 26 weeks, we can get them to gain 26 pounds. So that's the whole idea here is that if you put on one pound a week for 26 weeks, you can put up most of that's going to be lean mass. That's going to be muscle mass. It's not so short that people are going to feel like they need to do it really fast. It's basically the perfect amount of weight to put on. Yeah, now that we've been doing this program for over a year,

we've had many people do just that and they are completely different people. If you used to weigh 145 and now you weigh 170, you are going to be a much more competitive CrossFit athlete knowing that the most competitive CrossFit athletes are kind of in that like 185 to 195-ish range.

If you're too far below that, you really don't stand a chance. What about for the ladies? Around the 140-ish? I forget the exact numbers we calculated with the ladies, but yeah, they're in the 135, 140-ish range. All the girls that are like 110, unless they're super short, they're just not big enough to move the big weights.

They might be good at some of the gymnastics skills. The same for the guys. The smaller guys are going to be good at gymnastics. But when it comes to picking up barbells that are, you know, body weight and a half or even double body weight, they just they just don't have enough enough horsepower at that smaller weight to pick up those heavy barbells multiple times. Yeah. Another mistake. We also we've kind of recognized a lot of people try to write their own programming, which is usually a big no-no because most people want to write programs or choose to

do programs day to day that fit what they're good at you know I know I personally love to do things that I'm really good at because it makes me feel good and doing things that I'm not too good at not too much fun and that's good to have somebody putting a program together to make you do the things it may be fun for a week but after a a couple of weeks, it may not be so fun. But if you've got a coach kind of staying on you, hey, stick with this, then you'll get good long-term results. It is hard to recognize your limitations when you're programming for yourself. From the outside, a coach can easily see where you need work,

and they will consistently program in where you happen to be weak because it's just simply more fun to do what you're already good at. So beyond that, a coach will train or program training for you. That's more long term focused. It's easy to write a workout for today. Like when you walk into the gym, you go, I think I'll do this today or I think I do this other thing today, but to have a year long program or six month program put in place by an experienced coach that you're just tweaking over time and you're not just making it up on the spot really is the strategy that most of the high level athletes in today's CrossFit world are doing

to make it to that next level. Yeah, that's another reason that six months long is because you don't most. Yeah, the most successful athletes aren't preparing two or three months at a time. They're preparing six to 12 months at a time. And in addition to just training, we're talking about nutrition as well. A big component of the six month muscle gain challenge is nutrition. So we have coaches that are basically helping you along in that as well. I know a lot of people like to follow paleo or zone, but if you want to get bigger and stronger, and if you're one of those people that fall in that hard gainer category, then there's going to just have to be some changes made.

I think paleo and zone are really good choices for people who just want to be fit, but I'm not sure that it's the best choice for someone who wants to be competitive. If you look at the most competitive athletes out there, they're not exactly eating paleo zone there. And if they are, they're making some adjustments there. Uh, and then we help, uh, you find those adjustments you need to make in order to put on muscle mass. Yeah. There's a lot of nutrition support in this program and most of it's kind of paleo ish, but we throw in some other things that aren't quite so paleo just to give you enough calorie density in your meals and in your day so where you can actually put on enough weight to get stronger. So we're doing all this with the assumption that you probably want to compete someday and you're basically sick of not being

able to go RX on every single workout. If you have to scale workouts, it's hard to crush the open. It's hard to be good at the regional level as an example so having to scale or having to use the girls rx way if you're a guy is embarrassing and being able to get bigger and stronger really is the solution to that problem yeah and if you're if you consider yourself being pretty good shape but it's the it's the heavier weights that are giving you a challenge this is basically the perfect program for you this is what exactly this is exactly what you need to be doing. Beyond that for gymnastics, the key to being good at gymnastics beyond just being very,

very mobile is relative strength, how strong you are for your own body weight. So in that case, being small is kind of a good thing in a lot of cases, but really since in CrossFit, you need to get to that certain body size again in that 185 to 195, maybe even up to 200 for guys and that kind of like 135, maybe even up to 145 for ladies. You got to get to that size and they have to be as strong as possible at that size. So your relative strength is very good. That way you can still be good at handstand pushups and pistols and pull ups, et cetera, et cetera. All the tougher gymnastics skills, muscle-ups is a great one. You're going to be better at those if you're stronger at that set body weight. So this is a program for strength, not just for size. Yeah, truth be told, majority of the programming in CrossFit

and CrossFit competitions is Olympic lifts. And that's why we made this program very Olympic weightlifting oriented. However, we do throw in a lot of gymnastic stuff to maintain your gymnastic skills. And as you get bigger to kind of make sure those skills don't go away. Yeah, I mean, we keep focusing on getting bigger and stronger, but really this program is pretty comprehensive. So we designed a program to help you get bigger and stronger, but also focuses on your mobility. We help you out with your nutrition. There's lots of help with weightlifting technique.

We have different levels of the program where you can get some group coaching and even some individual coaching. And we're going to touch on that here pretty soon. So you'll be able to submit videos to a coach that can tell you exactly what you're doing wrong. So it's kind of a blend, just like a regular CrossFit gym is kind of in, in the, in the real world. It's a blend of personal training between personal training rather, and just going to the gym and doing your own thing. If you're a person that doesn't have a coach, we're doing the same thing online. It's kind of like group coaching, just like CrossFit group coaching, but we're doing it online. So you're getting some attention from a coach. He's telling you what to do, but you're not having to pay for, you know, $400 a month, individual remote coaching from a coach. He's telling you what to do, but you're not having to pay for, you know, $400 a month, individual remote coaching from a coach. Yeah. And don't be, don't be too afraid.

It's not going to be, we're not going to take away all conditioning. The idea is to keep a good aerobic base and build up your strength volume over time. So the first week, the strength volume may not seem too bad, but by the end of the, by the end of the six month, your strength volume is going to be pretty high and it's going to be higher than a lot of what really successful CrossFit athletes are doing. So that way you can roll back into a CrossFit training program and hit it really hard. Right. So the big three C's that we, that we talk about at our gym and that we've tried to try to adopt and take online as coaching, competition, and community. And that's what really makes CrossFit so successful.

It's the fact that you have a coach to help guide you, which we've provided in this program. There's competition. We haven't mentioned Wattify yet. Wattify is one of the things we use with this program. That way you can have a leaderboard and everyone else that's doing the muscle gain challenge with you, you can see how you compare and stack up compared to everyone else in the program. So that, that competition piece is still a part of it, even though you're, even though you're in an online training program, you're not right next to someone in the gym necessarily. And then also because we have Facebook groups and again, Wattify, there's a community aspect to the program where you and a bunch of other people are going to have the same

coaching. We do the same workouts at the same time. You can be on the Facebook group, sharing your videos, telling when you hit PR, supporting each other. It's very cool to have all three of those things in kind of a virtual environment doing all this online, where if you don't have a coach, you still coach a CrossFit gym in your town. For example, you have a coach online, you have a community online, you're being competitive all online. So a very cool thing that we were able to figure out how to piece together doing these online training programs. We actually had someone from the first group, a girl and a guy, they met through the Facebook group for their being in and now they're dating and I think they just got engaged.

Is that true? No, no, is that true? But it can happen. I was like, really? Your life will change. Yeah, but we have had some athlete success stories. I'm going to read through a few of them real quick. Week one, I snatched 245 pounds or 111 kilos

and could barely clean and jerk 275 or 125 kilos. By week seven, the snatch uh johnny said this my snatch went to a solid 260 pounds at 118 kilos um and a clean and jerk went to 305 pounds so uh that's that's two months into the program uh this is 26 weeks long and that was week seven so just to give you an idea of how quickly you're probably going to see uh some progress so his snatch went up 15 pounds and his clean jerk went up 30 pounds in seven weeks seven weeks yeah and it wasn't that he was starting with low numbers he was already starting with fairly decent numbers there now 245 is a great snatch are you done reading them he said you're gonna read multiple it's not a great snatch terrible

screw you johnny i figure i'll let you read the next one doug there's a lot of words on that all right from our buddy pedro down south he said i would have to say that my favorite part about the program is that you guys provide us with everything we need to achieve success nutrition solid programming and constant feedback on our videos the nutrition videos and guidelines have been really helpful not only to understand what to, but also why we should eat the things you recommend. There's no second guessing if I should eat this or that. The programming has been very solid. I've hit a PR pretty much on all my lifts and every day I feel like I'm getting stronger and bigger. All right, so we're going to run through what the program looks like. Basically, the way that we've structured this is four week blocks. Those are called mesocycles where we stagger the volume.

So you can see here on the chart that CTP has added into the presentation. We basically start you off with on week one of each four week cycle, there's a lower volume where you kind of get used to the new movements for that block. And then you build volume over time. So week two is a little more volume. Week three, you peak and you have a little more volume. You're basically overtraining on that week three. And then you come back on week four and you kind of have a deload week.

And you often, we might do some testers or you might try to hit a new PR at the end of that low volume week. Beyond that, we basically stack all these mesocycles together and then we build volume over time. You can see that we're kind of going up and then we're backing off and then we're going up and then we're backing off. And that's how it builds. And this is just example of the first six months of the program, which is kind of like the initial phase of the program. It does go beyond six months, but six months is the minimum that we recommend you try to get bigger and stronger. So this is an example of the first six months is like, and then it'll build in a very similar fashion beyond the six months. It won't keep going up and up and up forever.

You're not going to go from, you know, three sets of squats to four sets of squats to five to 10 to 12, 20, 25 to 40. It's not going to keep going up volume wise just like this forever. But this is a good representation of what your month over month progression is going to look like for the program. Yeah, there is an optimal amount of volume to be done for absolute strength. There is too little and there is too much. Most people are doing too little. If you fall in the category of not having like those requisiteite strength numbers you need to be competitive in CrossFit, more than likely, your strength volume is simply too low. What we do is we help ramp that up over time because if we were to throw you into what would be optimal range for a very competitive athlete, it would

probably be biting off more than you could chew. So the idea is we would ramp you up over time and get you to that optimal strength volume. And as Doug said, it won't go on forever because if you keep on adding volume, you no longer get the strength benefits. You may get some endurance benefits out of that, but there is an optimal volume range of weight and reps for strength training. Right. And so, as I said before, we do testers and we do maxes during or at the end, rather, of the deload weeks.

And the way we structure it for this program is that, as you can see, at the end of week eight, 16 and 24, every eight weeks, so every two blocks, basically, we do maxes for either the Olympic lifts or squatting or some of the bigger movements. That way, every eight weeks, you can see that you are getting stronger. And especially on those first two blocks, week eight and week 16, our guys make some massive jumps. And those are fun weeks to be a part of and hang out in the Facebook group and watch people post their PRs. And it's a big PR celebration with everyone's videos. Those are kind of fun weeks to be around part of and hang out in the Facebook group and watch people post their PRs. And it's a big PR celebration with everyone's videos. And those are kind of fun weeks to be around in the Facebook group. Absolutely. I do find that people want to, they start feeling good

after one month in or, you know, before the max outcomes and they get really anxious about wanting to max out because the snatch and the clean and jerk is starting to feel really smooth. But we have to like, you know, bring it down a little bit. A lot. We don't max out real frequently because we want to take time to actually get better and maxing out too frequently. A lot of times can kind of stunt your growth as an athlete. So we placed those max outs as appropriate as possible so that you can make as much progress in the six months as possible. So each training week is going to look like we're going to have five training days. We're going to train on Monday, Tuesday. We're going to rest on Wednesday, train on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then rest again on Sunday. That doesn't mean that we're not going to give you stuff to do on

Wednesday and Sunday, which are rest days. We're going to give you mobility stuff, give you nutrition information. There's going to be stuff that you're going to keep engaged with. So seven days a week, you're going to get information. Five days of that week, you're going to be training. Tell you what, guys, on your rest day on Wednesday, I'll even send everybody a free episode of Barbell Shrug wednesday every wednesday baby man this guy he's so giving i know ttp all right so here's a here's an example of what uh your days look like uh this is just day 92 um of one of the programs we've done in the past just as an example usually at the top of the page we we give some information on one of the movements that is a part of that day and then usually there's some video support to go along with that. Below that, usually there's some type of a habit. Usually it's mobility or nutrition

related. This one's talking about how to structure your anytime meals versus your workout meals and basically how to add in extra carbs where they will help you gain muscle and they won't make you fat. Below that, there's usually a for the entire week of the program we would give you the whole week up front that way if you ever need to like make an adjustment like the Wednesday doesn't work for you and so you're gonna do Wednesday's workout on Tuesday if you need to like make some adjustments you can so there's links to the entire week week's worth of workouts and that looks just like this usually just send you some type of a spreadsheet and then also it'll look prettier than that yeah that's some old stuff actually does look a lot nicer than that now but we promise below that below that we have a log sheet as well that you

can print out and take to the gym if you want to manually write in your weights and whatnot that way you don't have to keep looking it up on your phone and you can just have the whole week's worth of workouts printed up and taken with you i would suggest taking your phone and uh using the wadify app though but you know whatever yep we have we have a bunch of options we got options we have a bunch of options we haven't gotten to wadify yet but yeah that's what most people probably do is they just look up their workouts on wadify uh anymore uh we have weight lifting specific warm-ups and we have other types of arms as well But it's usually laid out right below the the workouts for the week and then there's always video support You just click on any one of the links and it'll take you to videos that show you exactly how to do

Each one of the warm-ups and then below that same thing for your workouts on each individual day when it lists your Workout for the movement and then for the technique watch. And then we also have progression videos. There's going to be a link showing you what the movement is. There will be a link showing you exactly how to do that particular movement. And then the progression video will show you how to scale either up or progress higher

or make it more difficult if that's something you want to do as well so there's a ton of video support showing you how to do all of the movements for each specific workout and so you can see these videos on the left are just demos of the ring dips walking lunges and ghd sit-ups and then on the right if you click on the technique wads it shows you all the details of doing ring dips walking lungeses, and GHD sit-ups. All right. So that is for the five training days each week, usually Wednesdays and Sundays. As Mike said earlier, that's a rest day. And usually we give you some type of either part of one of our products or some type of exercises to do for, again, usually nutrition or mobility.

So here's an example. The workout on your rest day in this case is just follow the video below, and it shows you three different stretches to do. If you click on the poster, it'll show you pictures of each one of the stretches it recommends. Today was five, six, and seven, and then it shows you exactly which stretches or mobility drills to do for two minutes each. I'll tell you what, when it comes to stretching, I can, I can train, right? I can eat, right? But the stretching is pretty tough, but knowing that everyone's doing the same stretches as

you and can talk about in the Facebook group and stuff like that, which we'll get to that, that makes it a lot easier. And I have something that just says specifically do these stretches. Like someone just says, Hey, do this as exactly how to do it. It makes it so much easier just to do it. Uh, you know, I think most people don't do some of these easy habits, things that could be considered easy just because they don't have someone saying, Hey, do exactly this. And it kind of makes your life easy, simple and thoughtless. Thoughtless.

Yeah, I mean, you really we lay the whole thing out. You don't have to do any thinking for yourself if you don't want to. If there's other stretches you want to do because, you know, you need to work on some particular area, you definitely can. But we lay out pretty much everything you need to do. So if you're a person that does well just following step by step instructions or and you just don't want to worry about what to do you like you like just walk in the gym know exactly what you're going to do and you just want to do it and get out then this is a good program for that because we tell you every single thing you need to do i got the train was one of the people in the programs when i was out of town and they fucking loved that they were like man everything's just no guessing on the warm-up

they like hated the warm-up and now i was like okay here's all the stuff i have to do ain't that right mike they hated the warm-up no no they was like, okay, here's all the stuff I have to do. Ain't that right, Mike? They hated the warmup. No, no, no. They, they, they hated warmups.

They hated warming up previously, but since it was all written out like this, they loved it. So they probably made it like walking in and trying to figure out what to do for their own warmup. Right. I actually like jumping in a class warmup for that reason. Uh,

just, just to have someone else lead it. Uh, and if you are somebody who doesn't want to just be thoughtless and just follow the directions piece by piece, especially for mobility and nutrition, what we've done is you'll get maximum mobility and Faction Foods Nutrition course throughout the program. So on the days that you're not training,

you'll have an opportunity to learn. So if you want to take it a step further and understand why things are the way they are,'s a perfect opportunity to get that information right so you can see on the next slide right below where on the rest day you would see your workout which was the stretches we just showed you a second ago here's an example of i'm getting a piece of the maximum mobility program as homework on a wed or a Sunday where I show you an assessment for getting more hip extension, basically stretching your hip flexors and how to tell if they're tight. And then right below that assessment video, I show you a presentation

that we did at Faction Strength and Conditioning a little while back explaining exactly why you might need to lengthen your hip flexors. And if you don't have long hip flexors and they're tight and you lack hip extension, how are you going to hurt your back or hurt your knees or, or, you know, what could go wrong if you never fix that problem, if you have it at all. So I tell you, here's how to test if you have the problem and then here's why it's important. Here's what to do about it. If you happen to have that problem. Uh, and again, again, that's just one example of the type of thing you'll get on a Wednesday or a Sunday. So usually some homework there.

So we do sell maximum mobility. In the past, we sold it for a minimum of $127. So you get $127 as basically a bonus as part of the program. And then you get all the assessment videos. And then again, all of the kind of support videos from the presentation telling you if you do the assessment, you find out you have a limitation. Here's how to fix it. Here's why it's important. And also, here's what you can do as far as what's safe to do with that limitation while you're fixing the limitation and then how to progress to harder, more difficult, fuller range of motion exercises after you fix the problem. Yeah. So if you're somebody who has achy joints or tends to re-injure the same thing over and over again, this is actually the perfect thing to kind of identify what's going wrong. For years,

I had different joints that were giving me trouble. And then once I understood, you know, better kinesiology and actually Doug helped me out on a lot of things to understand what need to be fixed it was really simple stuff once I figured out exactly what it was and never re-injured those uh those joints again right along with that you also get the faction foods nutrition course which again the lowest we've sold that for in the past is a down at 197 and so with that complete course we cover you know everything you need to buy and put in your kitchen to make cooking as easy as possible. We teach you how to grocery shop, how to save money at the store, kind of, you know, the old concept of shop the perimeter and what to buy. And I take pictures

of all the stuff that I buy, take a picture of what my grocery cart looks like. I lay all my food out when I go home on my on my kitchen table and I take a picture of it. Uh, so it's, it's very, it's very kind of behind the scenes. It just shows you exactly how I cook and how I shop and what I buy. So a lot of pictures from my life, a lot of pictures of my meals, like during the middle of the day when I'm, when I'm just kind of working on my computer, what kind of meals I eat then. And during, um, during training, what, what I drink in my workout shake and what supplements I put in it and what I eat for my first meal after training. It's a lot of very practical examples from my life. We talk about good carbs. I feel like I got a lot of value out of the pictures of your dumps. We know like a regular. Yeah, some solid, some not. There's a lot of variety in there.

There's no pictures of dumps. Don't worry. We also run through uh again good carbs bad carbs fruit and veggies how to get how to get variety and why variety is important good fats and bad fats um how to save money while eating out and when you're on the road like if you're if you're traveling and you're going to restaurants how to make sure that you can still get some get some good quality paleo meals and and when it's okay to cheat uh also, we talk about energy bounce and kind of how working out and nutrition work together and how to basically alter your metabolism with training and how to gain or lose weight for your specific body type, which is something that a lot of people really don't talk about. For the most part, 90% of what you need to eat is the same kind of for everybody as far as

like what's healthy. But there are awesome little tweaks you can do if you're a super skinny person or if you're naturally a heavier person that just carries more body fat and if you want and you want to be leaner or if the skinny person wants to gain muscle there's little tweaks you can do to accomplish both of those things absolutely right we also had a our buddy paul i just came and did a presentation at faction strength conditioning for us a little while back and his approach to nutrition is very different than my my approach my approach is is a little more practical just here do this and i really don't get into like the kind of the history or the of like agriculture or or other cultures and what they eat. And I really

don't compare cultures and look at like, um, archeology or anything like anything like that. Paul loves that stuff. And so it's this whole other perspective about why eating paleo works, uh, and kind of why it's really the way to go as far as we can tell in the modern world. So, uh, we give you all of Paul's videos as well. And getting that other perspective really, really kind of changed how I look at nutrition and, and it made paleo make even more sense. So we're giving that to you as well. And we sold that in the past for about a hundred bucks. So that's another bonus you get for free as part of the program. Yeah. What's great about this is, is having the different perspective, different

learning and teaching styles so if you don't connect with one instructor a lot of times sometimes it's just the style the way they teach and so if you get doug and then you get paul the bases are going to get covered you're going to understand nutrition that's right you're going to get nutrition double team all right so those are a few of the bonuses you get with with program, regardless of which level you choose. But right now, I'm going to walk through the three levels of the program. Each one has a slightly different offering. The three levels of the program basically are the solo program, the RX program, and the pro program.

Long story short, solo basically means you're doing it all by yourself. RX means you get some group coaching in the Facebook group and with Wattify. And then the pro program means you get all those things plus a weekly nutrition screencast from a coach. Basically, you can log your nutrition in Wattify and then they'll do a screen recording of them talking over what you're doing well, where you can improve. And they'll send that to you as a YouTube video every week. That way, you know what to improve specifically on your end as far as nutrition goes. That way, you can make sure that you're gaining 26 pounds in 26 weeks if that's your particular goal or whatever your goals are. And you're going to be able to discuss your goals with the coach during a Skype call, which is once a month. And then you can also talk with them over email in the Facebook group and whatnot. So the pro program, it basically has a little bit more one-on-one interaction with the coach of your particular group. The Facebook group, basically what that is for is to, again, I said earlier,

I talked about three Cs, and one of those was community. The Facebook group helps instill a little bit of community into the program. That way everyone else that's in the program with you, they're doing the same workouts on the same days. They're having the same struggles. They're PRing on the same days, et cetera. You're going to be able to be in there and hanging out in the Facebook group, posting your videos, talking with each other. And it's just kind of fun being in a Facebook group with everyone else in the program. But also, the coach is in there.

So if you have questions, you can submit your question in the Facebook group. If someone else in the program knows it also the coaches in there. So if you have questions, you can, um, you can submit your question to Facebook group. If someone else in the program knows it, they can answer it right away. If the coach is in there and sees, uh, sees it right away, they can answer it. Uh, the coach will log into the Facebook group probably, uh, usually about three times a day, kind of, kind of morning, afternoon and evening to, to answer any questions and to provide feedback on any of your training videos. So you can submit your clean videos, your snatch videos, your jerk videos, your squat videos or whatever. Muscle ups. Muscle ups. Absolutely. And the coach can say, OK, you're doing this well. You're not doing this very well. Here's what to do to get more reps or here's what to do so you

don't miss the weight and drop it in front of you or drop behind you or whatever. They can be there to give you feedback. You can go try it, make another video, submit it again, and the coach can again give you more feedback. So you're getting coached within the Facebook group. Yeah. Even though we have plenty of demo videos and technique videos during the program, those are going to be helpful in cleaning up your technique and make you a much more efficient athlete, I really think getting that interaction with the coach can be really important for speeding up the process and getting the most out of the program. Right. We also have hundreds of technique pod videos, which is great if you know what your problem is and which one you should focus on watching.

So the coach a lot of times will say, okay, well, your big problem is that your butt pops up too quickly on your first pull so here here's a snatch first pull video pay attention to about two minutes in where we're talking about keeping your butt down and they can direct you to the right spot because there's tons of information online but if you don't know which information to consume then it doesn't matter that there's a lot of it because you just don't know what to watch yeah if you don't have a somebody with a lot of weightlifting experience helping you out on your technique, I think doing the Facebook group is, is basically a good minimum for, uh, improving your technique. Right. So you can see on the screen here, there's a, an example of kind of what the Facebook groups look like. Uh, there's

questions being asked and then the coaches get in there. Um, we, me, Mike, um, me and Mike, Chris Moore, CTP, we kind of float in and out of all the groups because we have multiple groups. But you're going to have one main coach is going to answer probably the majority of the questions. And then every once in a while, we'll be in there as well to give our give our thoughts and tell you great job on your PR, et cetera, et cetera. So this is kind of what it looks like. If you're curious, most people are pretty familiar with Facebook at this point, I'd imagine. In addition to the Facebook group, if you're in the RX or pro group, you'll also have a Wattify. And as you can see here on the screen, we've got Rich Froning, uh, as, as the model for the Wattify, uh, he's who we learned

about Wattify from. It's exactly who we learned about. But, uh, if you want to look like Rich Froning and lift like Rich Froning, you'll use Wattify in the very least. That's why he's so jacked. Yeah. That's the Wattify software. All right. So if you're not familiar with Wattify, basically it's a performance tracking software where we can post the workouts on Wattify and then it has the capabilities to show you what the workouts are. And then also when you submit your score, it'll it'll take everyone in the program doing the same workout and it'll it'll put you on the leaderboard and it'll put the first or the first place person, whoever went the fastest at the top. And then it'll filter everyone else down all the way to the last place person. So you can see every day on each individual movement who lifted the most on, say, the back squat.

And then you can also recategorize by the Metcon times. You can see who went fastest on the Metcon for that day. So pretty cool that you can be in a worldwide program where people are in the United States and South Africa and the UK and Australia, and you all still be on the same leaderboard seeing who, uh, who's winning on that particular day for each piece of the workout. What's cool about Wattify too, is just that you can track your own progress. You can look at what seeing who's winning on that particular day for each piece of the workout. What's cool about Wattify too is just that you can track your own progress. You can look at what you did previously. It's a good central location.

You can log it on your computer or on your phone. And any of those results, they're logged in the cloud. So if you lose your notebook one day, you're not completely screwed and you can't remember what you did last week for four sets of five on back squat or something like that. So the information being stored in the crowd cloud is super important for me. And, uh, in addition to that, we use Wattify, uh, for, uh, the nutrition, the nutrition, uh, the weekly nutrition logs. And, uh, if you're in the pro account, then the coach is going to get in there and use Wattify to interact with you. Even if you're not in the pro account and you're not interacting with your nutrition through a screencast with the coach, you can still log that in there just for your own reference.

Right. So if you look at the screen here, you can see what the nutrition journals basically look like. There's a tab at the top of the screen that says my nutrition journal. And then you can just fill in whatever you ate on that particular day for breakfast, lunch, dinner, any of your snacks. You can also log how much water you drank, how much you slept, what your weight was, and then add any additional comments. Then you can just submit that for review. And then at the end of the week, the coach can go in there and look through each day and then make a screencast recording of exactly his thoughts on your nutrition log. So basically it's almost like the coach sitting right next to you. You're both looking at the screen at the same time and he's just talking you through what you've done

on that particular week. Yeah. My favorite thing about Wattify is the fact that we work with them a little bit. We went up and we hung out with the guys at Wattify and we told them what we thought could make it better for us and for our clients and athletes and for our coaches and just to make things better. And they're super receptive. So the Wattify program is currently really great. And I think it's going to keep getting better. Yeah. Sometimes you're friends with somebody and they start a business and then you support them no matter what. This was the total opposite. We started using their stuff, realized it's awesome, then figured we probably should go be friends with those guys because their stuff is taking over the CrossFit world right now. So Wattify is the shit if you've never used it before.

If you haven't seen this yet, here's what the leaderboard looks like. Here's an example of what it looks like. So it categorizes male and female athletes on the left and right side of the screen respectively. And then you see in the top right corner it says power clean, clean deadlift, shoulder press, Metcon. And then we had some kind of supplemental dumbbell rows at the end of this particular workout. But clean deadlifts were the movement that are selected on this screen here. You can see two sets of two at 355 pounds for Johnny. And then two sets of two at 310 pounds for Jay.

Johnny did the most. He's in first place. Jay's in second place. And then it goes on down the line. If you keep scrolling down the page, it goes to place fourth place uh down down down and then if you go back to the top left corner you could do the same thing look at the power cleans you can look at the shoulder press you can look at the metcon and it shows you each one of those so here's the shoulder press here's the metcon and again for each piece of the workout you can see who did the best at that

piece of the workout and you can see where you the best at that piece of the workout and you can see where you stack up compared to everyone else in the program. Boom. Boom. So also we've mentioned that Wattify has an app. So if you have a smartphone, super convenient, you can just download the app and put it right on, right on your smartphone. So you don't have to like go to your web browser and type in wattify.com slash whatever.

You can just click on the app. It'll take you right to your web browser and type in Wattify.com slash whatever. You can just click on the app. It'll take you right to your login page and then you can log in. You can see all the exact same stuff that I just showed you from basically like a web browser view on a regular computer. I showed you the same thing here on the app on your phone. And if you don't have a smartphone, you should go get one. All right. So that's pretty cool that Wattify has a sick app that's really easy to use. And it's a great part of this program. It's a great way for basically you to interact with the program, interact with our coaches as well. Right. And that's just that's just thrown in for the RX and pro members, just like the Facebook group is done for the RX and the pro members.

How do I get my workouts each day, Doug? All right, so we showed you one way to get your workouts. It's going to be on the Wattify app for the solo clients and for everyone. Everyone's going to be able to do this, but for the solo clients specifically, they're going to get their workouts through the Barbell Shrug membership site. So since they don't have Wattify, they're not going to be able to get their workouts on Wattify. Solo is going to have to get their workouts on the membership site, but really that's where pretty much the whole group is able to get their workouts on Wattify solo is gonna have to get their workouts on the membership site but really that's where pretty much the whole group is going to get their workouts because that's where all the support materials are going to be if you know everything

about your workout like you know how to exactly how to do all the movements and you don't want to like click the link to see what a particular movement is or you don't need any instruction or you don't have to you don't want to worry about like how to do any progressions or regressions or scaling you want to look at your app you I know how to do any progressions or regressions or scaling. You want to just look at your app. I know how to do all that stuff perfectly. You can just go to the gym and use your app. But if you need more support, especially video support, then you're going to want to log into the Barbell Shrug membership site each day and check out the videos that come with

the workouts each day. And something we added recently was I actually go in with a screencast video of the layout of the workout and explain exactly how it's done. So there's no questions about it. I know a lot of times people read maybe a workout on a website or something like that. And they ended up, they, they look at the comments later on that day and find out that they did it backwards or, uh, you know, they just didn't do the right rep scheme or something like that. And basically we started doing the videos to remove any doubt in your mind that you're doing it just the way it's meant to be done yeah there's

a video explanation every single day of the exact workout that's why you should log in and watch that definitely log in and watch that because sometimes you read a workout and you go i appreciate how to do that and then you find out like mike said that oh well i thought i thought it was 12 lunges total turns Turns out it was 12 per leg. It's usually specified, but sometimes you read it and you just make an assumption, and Mike's there on video every day to explain exactly what to do for each workout. Or I didn't know I was supposed to wait 10 minutes before I went to that next piece. Fuck!

Yeah, that happens sometimes, too. Yep. So the monthly Skype call. This is for pro members only. And basically once a month, you can hop on Skype or FaceTime or just over the phone and you can get on there

and ask the coach of your group any question you want about training. You can ask them nutrition questions. You can ask them about technique questions or mobility. You can submit some extra videos right before the phone call. That way you can talk about the videos

over the phone. You can basically ask them whatever the way right before the phone call that way you can talk about the videos over the phone You can basically ask them whatever the heck you want for 30 minutes at a minimum once per month And that gives you the opportunity to say and my shoulders really been hurting What should I do like I can't I can't do jerks right now Should I do push presses or standing press instead or should I just do push-ups or ring rows instead like how should I sub? Movements if I happen to be hurt or I ring rows instead? Like how should I sub movements if I happen to be hurt or I'm not gaining weight as fast as I probably should be? What should I do? I know you saw my nutrition logs last week. Like should I add this or that into my program? You

can ask them whatever you want. That way you can stay on track and you don't fall too far behind because you're getting that constant feedback that's specific to you. Yeah, I think this is a really great opportunity to outline goals that are very individualized to you as well. Things that may be coming up in your life that are kind of are obstacles to you reaching your goals. And that's a really good opportunity to get with a coach and talk about those things and talk about how to get past those things that are probably individual to just you and may not apply to everybody in the Facebook group. Right. So this program originally was a six month only program. And we have we've basically won when our guys finish the program. Most people in the program were like, well, we're done, but can we do more like they still want to get bigger and stronger? It's not like after six months, you're not going to want to keep getting bigger and stronger. I've

been training for like 20 years and I still want to get bigger and stronger. It's not like after six months, you're not going to want to keep getting bigger and stronger. I've been training for like 20 years and I still want to get bigger and stronger every day. Always want to get more diesel. Right. So six months is kind of the expectation. That's the minimum. And then after six months, you basically can make the decision

whether you want to keep going in the muscle gain challenge or you can switch over if you feel like you're big enough and strong enough to be competitive and you want to focus more on your gymnastics skills and your Metcon conditioning and you want to get ready for the open and try to go to regionals as an example you can switch over to road to regionals which is our other program that we've had great success with and we can have you go to that program instead of the muscle gain

program so after six months you have two great options you either continue with the muscle gain challenge or you can switch over to road to region. So each day, the workout, uh, we're aiming for 60 to 90 minutes. Uh, there will, I will say, uh, most of the time it's probably going to break an hour, uh, but it should not take longer than 90 minutes. Uh, if, if it is taking longer than 90 minutes, for some reason, we may need to cut something out, uh, for you specifically. Uh, but there's a, there's a lot of emphasis on perfecting the snatch and the clean and jerk technique, as you can see here on the page. And then the warmups, we have a lot of warmups that are really detailed and very progressive towards improving your technique on the snatch and clean and jerk. And if you have days where you can't exactly get all 90 minutes in or even 60 minutes, bare minimum, go through the warm up, work on your technique, get your squats and get your presses in and then leave the gym there.

Just because you can't. We understand that you're not going to be able to invest 60 to 90 minutes five days a week for six months straight. So if you're like nobody's going to be able to do that. So don't freak out if you can't. Yeah, if all else fails, you can just squat and leave or maybe like squat and press or do squat and do some pull ups. Do squat. Is that what I said? You can squat and then do some pull ups. And that really still just doing like some some basic heavy strength movements each day will get you at least 60 to 80 percent of the way to your goals. I've even seen programs where someone goes in the gym

and they just do one movement per day. They squat on Monday. They press on Tuesday. They do weighted pull ups on Wednesday. They come in, they deadlift on Thursday and they're just doing one movement per day and they get awesome results because they go in and they lift heavy and they do it consistently. So doing the big compound movements like squats, heavy cleans, pull ups, et cetera, at least once a day and not skipping workouts really is the key to progress. So even if you only have 25 minutes, go in the gym, warm up for 5 or 10 minutes, do 4 or 5 sets of squats, and get out. And you'll still get really great progress as long as you're eating and recovering like you should be. I would say the majority of the program is technique and strength with enough conditioning to keep you in shape, in CrossFit shape. And so that a lot of these movements aren't going to be foreign to you after the program.

However, if you do cut out some of the program, it's not the end of the world. You're still going to get bigger and stronger. Yeah, that being said, you don't have to gain all 26 pounds if you don't want to. A lot of people don't want to gain all 26 pounds. They just want to get better at weightlifting and they want to get stronger, but maybe they're already 200 pounds and they don't need to be 226. That's too big. So you don't have to really go overboard on eating. You can still do the program, get stronger and just eat normal and you will get stronger, but you won't gain a full 26 pounds. If you want to gain 26 pounds, it's definitely

available. And that really is more of a nutrition thing and getting enough calories to grow. And the training doesn't really change that much for someone that just wants to get strong versus big and strong. So if you want to get big, eat more. If you don't want to get big and just, you just want to get strong, just eat paleo. Yeah, this is very common, especially amongst the ladies. We've had a lot of women come in and they're kind of like, well, I need to gain 10 pounds. I don't need to gain 26. We're like, okay, so just take a little bit more conservative approach to gain the weight and do the entire six months, gain the 10 pounds over six months, get a lot stronger, get a little bit bigger.

And those are some adjustments that are very easy to make. Right. And on the other side of that, we can't guarantee that you're going to gain 26 pounds. Really, if you want to gain 26 pounds or even more than 26 pounds, it's totally doable, but you have to do it. Okay. We're not there to force you to do anything. If you follow the advice, if you do all the workouts, you eat like we outlined in the program and you ask questions when you get stuck, then there's, you definitely can gain 26 pounds. As hard as that sounds, 26 pounds in 26 weeks is definitely doable for damn near anyone. If you follow the program and you follow the advice as it's written. Yeah. If you follow this to the, to the T for six months, I would be shocked. I would, I would think you need to go to the doctor and see if there's

something wrong with you. If you don't gain the 26 pounds, I was out of town and hung out with the dude and the muscle gain challenge. And he had already gained it. And he was only like what, four months in and something like that. And he didn't look, he didn't like, it was like a lean looking amount of weight to be at and he looked good most people just never they've never done this much this high volume of pure strength work and force fed themselves like they do in this program and then once you do it you have the experience it seems so like obvious like why why don't i just do that before but until you do it you just don't know yeah all right kind of a logistics question uh the the workouts will post to the website at one o'clock

the day before, um, at one o'clock central time in the U S and the reason for that is because we have people all over the world or people in Australia and over in Europe and South Africa and in the United States, uh, people from all over the world. Uh, I want the people in New Zealand and Australia to be able to get their workouts before they train if they train at like five or six in the morning. So we send you love you. We still love you. Yeah, because we love you because we love you. We're putting the workouts on the website the day before for us at one o'clock the afternoon before in the United States. That way everyone will work and get them on time. So even if you aren't in the US, you should be good to go for this program. And with that being said, we actually do have quite a few clients that are,

they're in Europe, Australia, South Africa, and even South Korea and places like that. Oh yeah. We already talked about this a little bit earlier. So I was looking at this slide and I was a little, I was like, Oh yeah, we kind of touched on this. But if Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, those training days don't work for your schedule, as we stated before, you're going to get the entire week's training the week of. So you can kind of switch it around if you need to. I wouldn't flip-flop days, but if you need to do Tuesday on Wednesday or if you need to do Thursday on Wednesday instead and kind of shift things a day or two around, feel free to do that. It'll be, it's no problem at all. Right. Most people aren't able to do the

five days that we suggest every single week for the whole program. You got to make a little adjustments. You still have a life. That's okay. So you can make those adjustments. No big deal. If you're not sure what to do again, that's, that's part of the reason that you have a coach in the Facebook group. You can just say, Hey, like, I'm not sure about what to do again, that's, that's part of the reason that you have a coach in the Facebook group. You can just say, Hey, like I'm not sure about what to do for this weekend. Should I do this workout on this day or should I just skip it or what should I do? And the coach can help you out.

And for the ladies out there, I think we touched on this a little bit already as well, but yes, you can join the program. This isn't for dudes only. Uh, we're not asking people to inject testosterone or anything like that. So,

although it would help Although it would help. It would help. No, but ladies, you're more than welcome. We've had women in every group we've ever had. And yeah, you will be the minority, because most people that want to gain weight are usually dudes. But you're more than welcome. And we've had a lot of women get really good results

and go on and become really fantastic weightlifters and Crossfitters yeah it definitely seems that that the guys are the ones that really want to get a whole lot bigger mostly for the most part it's not ladies and then also the majority of people that watch our show if you didn't know are men so we we mostly kind of cater our language towards men because like 80 of the of the viewers of our barbellrugged happen to be guys. It's not our fault. I know. I'm desperately trying to get some more ladies in here. I'm just kidding. Especially CTP wants more ladies.

We're married. CTP's the only single guy. All right. If you haven't been training much lately, you might want to start training a little bit. As we talked about before, we're going to really build on strength volume. One thing we've noticed is a lot of people don't have very much strength volume under their belt. And so

getting in this program off the bat might be a little bit of a shock. So I would at least start crossfitting three or four days a week. And, you know, we have a good two or three weeks between signing up and the program starting. So you're not going to sign up in the very next day, get hit hard with five day a week training. If you're not training at all, I would start three days a week. If you're already training like three days a week, I would try to ramp that up to five days a week just to get acclimated to the volume and training more frequently. Right. We also get a lot of questions about if you're not very good at the Olympic lifts, can you still do this program? Usually we come back with something along the lines of, yes, that's exactly why you should do this program. The whole point of the program is to get better at the Olympic lifts, to get bigger and stronger and to hit new PR.

So if you're already really good at the Olympic lifts and you're already really strong, then no, of course you don't need this program. It's for people that want to get better at the Olympic lifts and hit new PRs. So if you're not going to be at the lifts, again, we have tons of video support teaching you what to do at each specific part on each specific part of your lift. And then we also have, again, coaches in the Facebook group that are there to give you feedback, tell you what you're doing wrong, tell you what you're doing well, and to help you improve your lifts over time. And of course, if you want to get technique videos on improving on the Olympic lifts, we have a lot of technique videos out there for free. However, the way we build the program over time is we introduce things in a manner that is kind of progressive. So over the next six months, you'll actually improve in a way that's more linear fashion and not jumping around, like I like to think. I like to jump around if you haven't noticed.

Everyone noticed. Also, like any CrossFit water, CrossFit program, you just scale when you need to. And if you don't know what to do for scaling, again, that's why we have a coach in the Facebook group. If you aren't sure like how much weight to use or you're not sure like what movement you could do as a substitution for some movement in the workout that is more difficult than you can do at that time, then you can ask the coach, hey, what should I do instead? And the coach will help you out. And then also we have progression videos which show you a whole range of options. Say level eight is the RX, the RX movement. There's a level one level two

level three level four level six and level seven and then there's beyond that as well nine through 13 or so so we made a million there's a way to make it really easy or kind of easy or rx or even harder than rx so we have easy to follow progression videos to show you exactly what to do if you ever need to scale or if you want to make it harder which some of our athletes do they want to make it harder yeah a lot of times people don't understand whether why they're not good at the lifts and a lot of times it's mobility and they just don't even know it because well they're inside their body and they don't have an objective coach watching them and go oh shit your shoulders are not in a good spot you probably shouldn't be overhead

squatting so we do address mobility during the program with maximum mobility but if you're in the facebook group and you're submitting videos a lot of times a coach will catch an athlete and kind of notice that it's a mobility issue not really a technique issue but the mobility is making them have bad technique so what ends up happening is we can then say hey there's a few movements you should probably avoid until you take care of these problems. And that's that's real key for being in the Facebook group. Right. Most people don't know what those limitations are, which is exactly why we give you maximum mobility. So you can test to see where you lack range of motion. And that'll shed a whole lot of light on why some of your technique might not be as good as it should be.

Yeah, for moving on from mobility, we're also going to help with the nutrition, obviously. Uh, that's going to be, as Doug said before, that's going to play a huge part, uh, that the training for gaining weight, getting bigger and stronger, uh, is going to be, uh, there, there are training programs that are more geared towards getting bigger, but the biggest piece, uh, for putting on size is the nutrition side. So we worked with Brandy Mortar. She was on Barbell Shrugged episode 10, and we made a series of paleo recipes and videos so that you can kind of get the basics down.

I think a lot of times people have a hard time cooking because they don't know their way around the kitchen, but we got with Brandy and made some videos so that can kind of show things and make everything really simple for you. Yeah. And then along with that, like I said before, we have the Facts and Foods Nutrition course and Paul's, Paul Eich's presentation called That Stuff Will Kill You that will help you with your nutrition. And then again, the Coach on Facebook group,

the Nutrition Screencast, those are all there to help you specifically with your nutrition needs. Yeah. And the community on Facebook is really good. I've actually there to help you specifically with, with your nutrition needs. Yeah. And the community and Facebook's really good. Uh, I I've actually seen people come in and go, Hey, what do you think about this? And I was like, Oh wow. I didn't think about that before, but that's something that, you know, if, if that's something you want to do nutrition wise to help gain weight, I think that's a great idea. Uh, we try to think of everything. And the more times we do this program, we add things each iteration, but, uh, keeping an eye on the community and watching what people are suggesting a lot of times, uh, that's, that can be the most beneficial part. Yeah, we really do evolve the program over time. As we get more feedback from each group that does the program, we go in and we make

little tweaks and improvements based on what people like and what they didn't like. Uh, another question we get is what do I do after the first six months? And I actually kind of mentioned this earlier about you can either go to muscle gain challenge or you can stay or you can stay in the muscle challenge, muscle gain challenge, or you can go to road to regionals, which is our competition program. We have set guidelines for the road to regionals about how strong you probably should be before you enter that program. So you basically want to be a little closer to a prototype CrossFitter. Again, the guys from that 185 to 200 range and the ladies in like 135 to 145 ish range as far as size goes. And then I also laid out some some strength

guidelines about how much you should squat, how much you should deadlift, how much you should press, how many kipping pull-ups you should be able to do in a row, et cetera, et cetera, to go into that program. So if you get done with the muscle gain challenge, you're strong enough, you're big enough, and you want to go to the road to regionals program, and that's a great switch. If you ever look at games athletes, basically the cycle year round for games athletes is to get as strong as possible and then maximize their conditioning right before competition. So you might spend the majority of your year gaining strength, getting bigger,

and then really only like the last two or three months before a major competition, you're really focusing on conditioning, especially your kind of high-intensity lactate conditioning. You should have just picked up your phone and pretended like it was Ronnie Coleman. Like, hey, Ronnie Coleman. Hey, Ronnie Coleman.

We're just telling everybody about that program that you did a while back and that's why you're so small why you're 300 pounds and four percent body fat or whatever he was uh yeah so you might be wondering uh when are you actually going to get the full max mobility product and the faction food nutrition course uh after at the end of the six months so after the program, uh, you'll be able to just log in your membership site and you'll have access to those products as if you had just purchased them on their own. Right. So you'd be getting them throughout the program. And then at the end of, at the end of the six months, we'll just give you access to those as separate products on the membership site. Another question we get is, can I still work out with my friends at my box? Uh,

that's usually a lot of fun, but I've also seen a lot of people get injured that way. We have a set amount of volume and it builds over time. And a lot of times people throw in something extra and that's when they got hurt. So I would not recommend it, but if you're feeling really good, if you're feeling good four weeks out of each mesocycle and you feel like you can do more, I say go ahead and do it maybe once a week or something like that. But you're not going to need to do anything extra to get more results. More is not always better. Right. Also for equipment, for the most part, to get, you know, again, 80 percent or above the amount of results from this program, you just need a barbell and bumpers. Like if you don't currently go to a CrossFit gym

or any gym for that matter, and you're just training at your house and all you have is barbells, some weights, and maybe a kettlebell or two and a pull-up bar, then you can still get the majority of the stuff done in this program that you need to get done to get good results. We try to make it where it's, for the most part,

as far as equipment goes, pretty basic. But there are some CrossFit CrossFit things thrown in there where you need a few extra pieces of equipment. Every once in a while, we'll put something like a like a like a prowler push or a sled push. But we always when we do that, we always offer some type of a substitution, like like a hill sprint or or something like that, where you don't need expensive equipment to be a part of the program. So even if you're not out of gym, you still should be able to do this as long as you have the bare bones minimum of equipment. Yeah, a lot of folks in this program are going to be in garage gyms. So they don't have the full facilities that a typical CrossFit

gym might have. And that's not a big deal., if you're in that environment where you are in your own garage gym and you're not being coached, this is a perfect time, uh, to take advantage of, to note what it feels like to be coached. Right. Another fear people have is that if they get too big, then their gymnastics is going to suffer and they're just going to be too heavy to do things like kipping pull-ups and muscle-ups and handstand pushups. Uh, and-ups. And that's a very realistic fear if you're getting bigger, but you're not getting stronger at the same time. The emphasis on the program is getting strong and big at the same time. If you're just eating a bunch of food and you're not doing mostly strength training, then you're going to get bigger without getting

strong enough to actually get better at those gymnastics movements as you get bigger. Most people find that when they get bigger, the gymnastics movements actually get easier because they get stronger, faster in relative terms. They get stronger compared to their body weight faster than they get bigger. So muscle ups become easier, pulse become easier. And that's counterintuitive in a lot of ways. But as long as you're getting stronger, it's not a problem at all. Yeah, I think that's why it's important to stick to the pound a week i think people who find gymnastics becoming

more difficult during the program are the people who may be getting a little too aggressive eating the dozen cupcakes and you know they're gaining two to three pounds uh right out the gate a week and then now their handstand push-ups or muscle-ups are hindering a little or hindered a little bit i think that's really important to stick with the 26 pounds in 26 weeks so that the weight you're putting on is muscle. That's tissue that's going to help you move weight and move yourself better. Right. Again, kind of the core person that does a program like this isn't the person that's 250 pounds and they're going to gain 26 pounds. And now they're 280 pounds and they got worse at pull ups because they could do one before.

Now they can't do any. It's a guy who's a guy or a girl who's underweight as a crossfitter so if you're a guy and you're 150 pounds and you go to 175 pounds but you're way stronger then you can probably do more pull-ups in that case because you're not a big guy yet compared to a 250 pound guy people that are smaller tend to do better on gymnastics just because lighter people have higher relative strength as as I said earlier. But as you get bigger, if you're already starting very small and you just end up being kind of a small, medium sized person and you're way stronger, then again, your gymnastics will probably do better. I think from what I've seen, if you're about five, if you're a guy and you're about five, nine, I don't see the the gymnastics becoming diminished until you break about 210 215 pounds of lean mass you start getting bigger than that at five nine then you're probably going

to start having a little bit of a regression but uh if you've made it this far in the webinar you're probably not that guy yeah i mean there's a reason that guys like guys like rich froning the easy example is 200 pounds and his gymnastics are fantastic because he's super diesel. He's very strong, and he's lean at that bigger size. If you're 200 pounds and you're sloppy fat, well, your gymnastics are going to be terrible. But if you're super lean, 200 pounds, and you're in your 5'9", then being that muscular, you're going to be very strong,

and then your gymnastics will probably be just fine. Yeah. All right, Doug. Now to get to the hard question. What do people, what do people not like about this program? Sweating, um, programs in the past, we actually didn't have very many recipes. Uh, we gave them nutrition concepts. We didn't just give them recipes and tell them how to make them. So, uh, we've gone in and with a brand new martyr, as you said earlier from bedrock eats and sweets here in Memphis, we put together some some recipes that have video support so not only are we giving you recipe we're giving you videos on how to make those recipes so that's been very very helpful

they also wanted a little more live interaction and lately we've been doing a lot of live interaction as in we're doing live webinars with the group so live q a sessions with the groups originally we were going to do this like once a month and now how often are we doing right now per group? Yeah. So we're doing once a month. I feel like we do them all the time. Um, man, it's just the last couple of days. We've done like two or three in the last few days. Uh, so you're still, we're doing those once a month. That way you can ask questions. Um, even if you're not a pro level member, if you're solo or RX, you can still once a month get in there and get some interaction with the coaches in a live setting. And then also we've had people that have needed to take a break from the program before and they they wanted to be able to freeze

their account like if they had if they came in with, you know, achy shoulders or achy knees or something, they needed to they hurt themselves and they needed to take a break. Then, uh, we, we fixed it where they can freeze their account and they can come back after a period of time and they're not spending money, uh, while they're hurt. Um, and that's a very, a very reasonable thing to do for someone that has hurt themselves in a program that they enjoy, pause it and then turn it back on when they're feeling better. And thing that we've noticed is people don't like the long warmups. Not every warmup is super long, but we have a lot of warmups in there that, that do take a long time. And we put those in there as an ideal scenario, as if somebody were training to be a weightlifter that

had a couple hours of train. If you need to shorten them up, we have advice on how to shorten those up if you need to. But a lot of times the warmups have been pretty long, but that is kind of like the ideal scenario. And if you need to cut that back a little bit, we do have options for that. Right. I kind of jumped the gun talking about freezing your account. Mike was talking about getting injured and kind of scaling like getting across a workout like i said earlier if it hurts you definitely don't have to do it you can scale and if you don't know what to do as far as scaling goes then the coach is there to help you out they're going to tell you how to scale and then again we have those progression videos to to help you find the exact amount of scaling to do

all right what if your box won't let you train on your own program and they of scaling to do. All right. What if your box won't let you train on your own program and they want you to do their programming because their programming is the best. I think you should get in a big argument, yell, throw things around. No, some people do.

Yeah. So, you know, I would, if that's not something that's common in your gym. So at faction shrink conditioning, we've always allowed people if they've hired an outside coach or something like that, there's been a lot of freedom for athletes to pursue things that work best for them. And because of that, we've had a lot of

really successful athletes come out of our box, a lot of successful weightlifters and crossfitters, because it's not always one size fits all. And so sometimes working with a specific program to fit your needs is better for you. So if it's not common in your gym, I would bring it up to the gym owner or the strength, the head strength coach or something like that. And just kind of ask them like, Hey, this is what I want to do. Yeah. Doing many different programs and getting many different perspectives is, is good for your long-term development as an athlete or as a coach. So, uh, even, even our places, as much knowledge as we have in this area, most of our athletes don't, don't do, I mean, not most, but a lot of our athletes don't, don't do our programs because they have before they got a lot of benefit of that. And then they want to try

someone else's new style. And then they, they got a perspective from that person. Then they went to a new person, got that perspective from that person, the more perspectives you get better for the most part. So it's okay to try many different programs over the course of your career. I would say there's been a handful. And that's not to say

it was like eight people. That's not to say to program hop. It's like try one, do it for a long time. No, do like the whole program for like a year. Yeah. Stick with a coach for a year

or something like that. Yeah. And if you do have some pushback from the coach in your gym, you know, whole program for like a year yeah stick with a coach for a year or something like that uh yeah and if you do have some pushback from the coach in your gym you know just tell them explain to them just the way that doug described it right there and hopefully they'll understand uh but there is a possibility they're just going to say no no matter what and uh you either have to you can't do the program or you're gonna have have to go somewhere else. If you really are wanting to do this program. Another crazy question we get is it's a muscle gain challenge, but we still get people that are like, can I lose weight on this program? And even though it's a crazy question, it's a crazy question, but you can, um, again,

the training is designed to get you strong, whether you get big or get smaller on the training really has more to do with how you decide to eat and your nutrition during the program. I use this example all the time. As a guy who's done some MMA fights in the past, I have to get to a certain body weight for my fights. And my training doesn't train that much. Whether I just finished a fight and I'm trying to get as big and strong as I can after a fight, I get up to 200 pounds. And then when I have another fight come up, my training stays the same. I eat a little differently and I go back down to, you know, 185 or whatever I make my cut from. So training can stay the same, eat a little differently and you can go up or down. It's really

up to you. So you can do this program if you just want to get stronger and just eat slightly differently. And again, your coach can help you out with how to make those little adjustments. Don't follow like the get big advice in the program. Just eat normal paleo the majority of the time. And yeah, you could totally get leaner during the program and get stronger. Yeah. If you just avoid the tweaks for getting bigger on the nutrition, you'll be good to go. So we're going to talk about some of the results that people have gotten in the past.

I'll kick it off with Kevin and I'm just going to read what he wrote. Snatched new PR at 155. That's a 10 pound increase from my old PR at 145. Cleaning jerk went from 175 to a solid 195. Front squat went from 205 to 255. I love the program guys. Keep it up. I'm already beating the majority of my goals. And so this is from somebody who5. I love the program guys. Keep it up. I'm already beating the majority of my goals. And so this is from somebody who hadn't quite finished the program. Uh, I'm guessing it's a couple of months in. Now the next person said, I would just like to thank Doug, Mike, CTP and Chris Moore today. I squatted 110 kilos has 247.5 pounds for five reps. When I started, I'd lifted 82.5 kilos, 185 for five. And it was a struggle. So he went from 185 for five reps when i started i lifted 82.5 kilos 185 for five and it was a struggle so he

went from 185 for five to 247 for five so i just want to thank you guys again for all the hard work and for offering this program and that was from james uh sean b he says just want to shout out to all the coaches on here today i hit 300 pounds for a three rep max back squat which is up from 250 pound five rep max when he started. 50 pounds in six and a half weeks. My old 1RM was 295 pounds. Can't wait to see the numbers at the end of this thing.

Again, thanks coaches and athletes for help and support. It's always cool when you take your old 1RM max out a little bit of weight and then you can do it for multiple reps. Absolutely. All right. From, from Renee, um,

after five PRS this week, this deserves a special post, um, starting with a five rep max front squat of 120 kilos, 246 pounds on Monday, followed by a three rep max high bar back squat of 150 kilos, uh, which was his one rep Mac one rep max starting at the beginning of the program, excuse me, was 140 kilos. So he went up 10 kilos, which was his one rep max. One rep max starting at the beginning of the

program, excuse me, was 140 kilos. So he went up 10 kilos, 22 pounds. He maxed out on snatch, clean and jerk and front squat today. Snatch PR by almost 10 kilos, clean and jerk PR by almost 15 kilos, front squat PR by seven and a half kilos. If you're not familiar with kilos, that's about a 22 pound ish snatch PR, a 33 pound clean and jerk PR, and a 16 and a half pound front squat PR. So big thanks to Doug, Mike, and Chris. All right. So here's a summary of what you get with the program. Again, there's three different levels with this program. There's a solo program, RX and pro. It's kind of like level one, level two, level three for the solo program. Just like the name implies it is solo.

It's all by yourself. So there's no coaching either in a group setting or in a one-on-one setting at all. With that, you get your four week mesocycles and we, we sell those, those, a goal specific mesocycle for about 47 bucks per month. When we do individual programming for people that just have a specific goal, but don't have like, we're not writing one-on-one programming. We're just saying, if you want to get bigger or get stronger, here's kind of a template that you could follow. So we basically decided that each one of these four week blocks was worth roughly $47 per month. Also the bedrock eats and sweets videos come out to about $36 worth of value per month. You're getting the, the, the downloadable PDFs that also have links to the videos explaining out to about $36 worth of value per month. You're getting the downloadable PDFs that

also have links to the videos explaining how to make each one of those recipes. We also have tons of other bonus videos that we normally sell and you have to be a part of our membership site in order to get access to, and that's about a $17 per month value. We have the monthly habits. You're getting about two habits per month. You get at least a $9 value there. Also the live Q and A's that you get with the coaches. Sometimes me and Mike are there in addition to the coaches, and that's about a $50 value per month where you can actually interact for an hour with the coach. So it's not a one-on-one phone call, but you still get to get all of your questions answered at least once per month. And we do that with GoToWebinar software. Also, as I said before,

you get the maximum mobility product, which basically is a bonus $127 value. You get the Faction Foods Nutrition Course product, which is $197 value. That stuff will kill you. Paul's seminar, that is $97 value. And then total, when all these things are added up, um, for the monthly services, you're looking at about $159 per month in value given to you as part of the solo program. And then also you get about $421 worth of bonuses. Uh, that's not what you pay. That's what, that's what the value you're getting on a monthly basis for the RX program is basically solo plus group coaching. So with that, you get all the stuff you get with a solo program. And then you also get group coaching in the Facebook group. And that's about a thirty two dollar value per month. You get the waterfi performance tracking software and that's about a thirty five dollar value per month. And then again, you get that as an app on your phone as well. And then if you take the solo program, plus all the stuff you get in addition

to that with the RX program, you're looking at about $226 per month worth of value in the RX program. And then again, you get those same bonuses, which is $421 worth of value with the RX level two. For the pro, that's basically the level three. It's the highest level membership for this program. You get everything that you get with the solo program, everything you get with the RX program, plus you get some individual coaching as well. So in addition to everything you get with the first two levels of the membership,

you also get weekly nutrition reviews. That's about a $60 value where you can put in all of your meals for the week, submit it. The coach will do a five or 10 minute screencast telling you exactly what you should be or what adjustments you should be making, what you should eat instead of this, where you should eat less of something, et cetera, et cetera. They'll tell you exactly what to do. And then also you get a monthly Skype calls with the coach. That's a $50 value per month. And then one of the coaches can be there face to face, just like this sweet picture on the screen here, face to face to answer your questions. And you

can develop that relationship with your coach. And over time, they'll learn more and more about you and they give you more and more specific feedback to your specific situation. So per month, you're looking at about $336 worth of value. And again, you get those same bonuses, $421 as a free add on. So how much is a membership? We have variable pricing for all of our programs, which basically means that the earlier you sign up, the cheaper it is. So if you sign up right away, you get a discount. And if you wait until the last day, then you're going to be paying full price. So full price, if you sign up, the cheaper it is. So if you sign up right away, you get a discount. And if you wait until the last day, then you're going to be paying full price. So full price, if you sign up at the very end of registration between July 22nd and July 25th, you're going to be paying $127 for

your solo membership, $147 for RX and $197 for Pro. Those are the costs of the program but if you sign up earlier and then your membership will be a little bit cheaper in fact you'll save 20 per month if you sign up between july 19th and july 21st so the solo cost goes down to 107 per month rx is 127 per month and the pro membership goes down to 177 per month and then if membership goes down to $177 per month. And then if you do the early bird sign up and you sign up between July 14th and July 18th, you get $40 off per month, which is going to add up quickly. So the solo membership goes down to $87. RX goes down to $107 and the pro membership goes down to just $157

so you want to sign up as soon as possible to save the most amount of money registration for this program opens Monday July 14th maybe you were one of the lucky ones that made it onto the VIP launch list and so you are getting access to this program Sunday

July 13th but that is just for the VIP members. For everyone else, it opens Monday, July 14th, and then we close whenever we're full or the last day that you can register is Friday, July 25th, and then there's about a week and a half of prep emails that go out and prep materials that you have to focus on until day one of the program

begins on Monday, August 4th. So again, space is limited. You might still allow sign up as soon as you possibly can. We have thousands of people, thousands, not dozens, not hundreds. We have thousands, multiple thousands. I don't think we're at 10 or not 10,000 yet for these programs. We're damn close. So we have a lot of people on, on specifically the waiting list for these programs. That's not just like our email list. That's like the people that said, I want more information about that program specifically. So we have thousands of people on these waiting lists. So we don't know how fast we're going to fill up, but we're going to fill it pretty damn fast. So if you're interested in investing in the program, click on the option that interests you

the most below, and we will see you in the program. Happy to have you. Thanks for watching. We'll see you another day. See you guys in the program. Thank you.