Barbell Shrugged - 63- Is Your Current CrossFit Programming Addressing Your Strengths and Weaknesses?

Episode Date: May 29, 2013

To learn why you need to consider individualized programming in the increasingly more competitive world of CrossFit we interviewed Max El-Hag from Optimum Performance Training.  Max shares how individualized programming will change the way you perform as an athlete.  You'll learn the most important aspects of programming design and how it impacts your fitness.

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

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down here in West Palm Beach, Florida for the Southeast CrossFit Games Regional. And we're sitting down with Max Elhaj from OPT. That's Optimal Performance Training based out of Arizona from Scottsdale. And we're going to be discussing a little bit about program design and what they do at OPT. First, I want to get you guys to go over to barbellshrug.com, sign up for the newsletter so we can inform you of all the stuff we're doing. We've got some training camps coming up and we've got some seminars that you might be interested in. So we'll send you some information about that. Make sure to make it over to the Facebook page as well and follow us on Twitter at Barbell Shrugged. You can ask us some questions there that we'll answer on the Daily BS, which you can find at barbellshrugged.com as well in addition to this podcast. So we're sitting here with Max.

He's a coach at OPT. You handle remote coaching clients, so people go to the website and they can hire you. And primarily you work with CrossFitters, is that correct? Yeah, I'd say of my 40 athletes, probably 35 now are either CrossFit athletes or people that want to use CrossFit as a fitness conditioning program for longevity. So some of them are non-competing CrossFitters, but for the most part, they're CrossFit athletes. A little bit of MMA, a little bit of ultra-endurance running,

and that's pretty much it in terms of, and some just body composition clients as well. Okay, and you're originally from this part of the country here in Florida. Well, I'm originally from New York and went to college in Pennsylvania, moved to Florida for a couple years, which is where I had my entrance in CrossFit and then moved from Delray Beach, Florida into Scottsdale, Arizona. How long did you coach CrossFit before you joined OPT? So I found CrossFit in 2009, I think late 2009.

I was doing some MMA fighting amateur stuff because I wrestled in college. And it was just kind of like the next thing. I was like, man, I'm bored with my training. I was told you were an uber legit wrestler. I was back in the day. I was all right. I'm just washed up now. So I actually walked into a crossfit gym uh my uh

fighting coach at the time uh told the gym owner dave hockberg from crossfit delray beach basically to beat the shit out of me uh with training so i did fight gone bad with like 95 pounds it was probably the worst experience of my life so dave's right behind us yeah Dave is here uh laughing about the whole situation because he remembers uh and I was so pissed off uh because he told me a goal target I missed it by like three points or something like that he said that he gave you what 95 pounds on the bar yeah 95 pounds I think and he scored 298 yeah something like that it's legit that's a good score. Yeah, so I... Especially for a big guy. Yeah, so I decided to, at some point in the near future after that, I decided that I didn't want to fight anymore, that I wanted to compete in CrossFit. So I worked out to be on a team in 2010.

I went to the regionals as an individual in 2011 and then just decided that I didn't want to compete anymore. I wanted to the regionals as an individual in 2011 and then just decided that I didn't want to compete anymore. I wanted to focus on coaching specifically. And through that time, I had gotten my CSCS. I had taken Poliquin level one and level two and biostig and functional diagnostic nutrition course. And I'm just kind of a book rat. And I love the culture. I loved performance and kind of this new wave of fitness that was kind of changing the paradigm of what truly was fitness for most people. And I hired it through that time. James was my coach. And I think we just had a lot of good dialogues and he recommended a lot of good books that I just wanted to get like an understanding of like, hey, well, if we're doing, you know, intervals at six times

rest of work and I fall off by X percent, what are we really targeting? And we just had really good conversations about power output and that type of stuff. And I think he was just like, look, you're, you know, you're going to challenge me. You want to do this full time. And he called Dave and it was either that or a master's program at FAU that I'd been accepted to. And I was like, so I moved out to Scottsdale, and currently I'm taking some undergrad pre-UX to get into a Ph.D. neuroscience program and coaching full-time and doing research, basically. Sounds like a sweet gig to make money while you're in school. Oh, yeah. No kidding.

Yeah. Hopefully my quality stays up through school if I actually get into the program. So Max's athletes, if the programming starts getting shitty, you know why. Yeah. I just exposed myself. You pretty much max out on people right now, right? Yeah, right now, I have

40 athletes and I froze it. Especially, I froze initially through the opens because, you know, the amount of, I mean, remote program design is tough enough on itself. But the actual coaching of emotions and dealing with anxiety and panicking about where you line up and your name's up there for everyone to see about how you do. And the email communication probably triples through the open. So I was like, at that point, I i was like i don't really want to take on more clients through that and you know my my income was high enough that i was happy and after the

opens i was like you know what i don't think i want to lower my quality at any time you know if i want to go on vacation be like i just didn't want to be like inundated with clients for more money and i really get emotionally invested in how my clients perform relative to what they want so i was just like i'm just going to keep the freeze on for now. I mean, during the Open, during regionals, during the competition season, you know, the clients you do have probably require a lot more time. I know that's the case. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And taking on new clients is also time-consuming. So doing it at the same time can be tough. Yeah, it was just the right decision. And I decided to stick to stick with it because you know my retention rate is relatively long and i have a long-term approach to development of any athlete you know there's a few cases of people that are like look i want to make a run at this year's regionals um and unless they're one of those people i think that you need a very long amount of time to actually create the appropriate physiological change to get what you're trying to get out of training. And, you know, some people are trying to develop an aerobic system and they're like, oh, yeah, I'm going to get good in six months.

I'm like, well, that's just unrealistic. So I can't coach you to do that. I can coach your, you know, your skill adaptation and certain things that you're missing in CrossFit, which will basically make it perceive that you have more power, right? If you can't snatch and you do 30 for time and you just get zero, and then you do 30 for time down the road because you're better at snatching and you finish in X amount of time and you measure your power, like theoretically that's an exponential increase in power. But in reality, it's kind of not in terms of the program design that created that.

So I just take a much longer term approach. So I knew if I took more people on now, I'd be stuck with them through the opens next year where there would be a ton of extra work for me pretty much and lower quality. So what's that process look like? If I'm a brand new client for you, how does individualized programming work kind of from start to finish? All right. So there's initial consultation period, which I think is one of the most important things where we just basically sit down for an hour through Skype. And we just talk about training background, where you came from, what you're naturally good at, what you're not naturally good at, where your goals are, where you sat relative to your goals, how long you want to commit to this, what your lifestyle is like, what your job is like, what your nutrition is like, what your macros are like. And from that, I basically get an understanding of what I need to test. So, you know, if somebody just simply is, hey, I want to be at the regionals.

And I'm like, okay, well, what are you good at? I love really light Metcons. I can't deadlift 315. I can't power clean 225. I get an indication that, like, this person's not powerful enough for the sport. Strength development's not good enough. I just kind of get basically an insight into whether or not it's it's is it speed strength is it absolute strength is it pulling strength is it mechanical strength

and i just uh from there create some sort of a testing period um and depending on the athlete that could be like two to eight weeks um to really get an indication of where they sit in all their data points that i'm trying to go after. And then on the back end, what they're not seeing is basically I create a skeleton and a long-term plan of an overarching, basically, design of what I would want to do. And then I send them anywhere from two to six weeks of design at a time six weeks is usually as long as i go and they're beginner-based clients or people that don't have specific goals because it's really hard to moderate or like put a deload within a cycle if you do it six weeks long and you're like oh shit this guy's getting overreached i need to back them off um so they create their blogs they upload all their results and videos and all that stuff that i take a look at on a daily basis and um on the back end i basically take all their results and videos and all that stuff that I take a look at on a daily basis.

And on the back end, I basically take all the results, put it into my Excel and basically keep track of where they are from day to day and cycle to cycle. So I've priority retests and tests of what we originally started with. And over time, you know, that changes your skeleton changes. Things happen. You know, shit happens with people's lives. And that's pretty much how it works. We consult every four to six weeks via Skype for 30 minutes. Usually there's some sort of like texting or email back and forth that happens on a pretty regular basis. The longer my athletes are with me or the more coaches they are. So a lot of people that work with me are coaches that want help on coaching other people. So the more they are that way, the less there is day-to-day communication.

And the more they want like, Hey, I have this athlete that does this. Uh, what can I do to get him better? Why are we in this training phase? Or what are you trying to go after with this? Or how did I perform on this relative to what I should do? So I guess my role as a coach has kind of turned into like mentor mentee in a lot of cases. And then I have a few probably like 10 pure athletes, like they're just robots, they just do what they're told, they email me when they need what they want. And so I have a good variety of what I do remotely, but that's pretty much the process. So you're constantly getting feedback from your athletes. And that's why you do two between two and six weeks out because you can't do much further than that because you get feedback. And then even if you did program eight or 12 weeks

out, it's just going to change anyway. So it's a waste of time. Yeah. So I have a skeleton, uh, or like, you know, let's say I want to go into a 12 week strength phase. I might go in and say like, okay, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdayursdays fridays this is what i'm doing wednesday saturday sunday off and write two weeks of the design so that i can know when to go back into it when i go back into it i can progress it through the 12 weeks but i'm getting feedback along the way so that if something changed or if i prescribed the percentage that wasn't correctly i can get it early enough that it's not like oh well they went through this progression for 12 weeks and they fucked it up on week one right and now i got to rewrite the progression um so generally the training phases get longer either with uh more intermediate athletes or more

simple training phases like if somebody's trying to you know improve their base running uh just skill of running. I could probably design that out a little longer than I could if they're trying to, like, improve the mechanics of their snatch and pressing strength and burpee speed and speed of contraction and power clean. Like, there's just so many variables within a CrossFit athlete that you just kind of have to be really on top of it. So I try not to go too long in my training phases with them. I want to go back to something you said early on. Um, what books did James suggest

to you that you felt were like the most helpful? Oh man. I'm always on the lookout for books and I get disappointed pretty frequently. Yeah. So I, I mean, I could just give some feedback. I'm a huge nerd. I probably read like a book a week. Um, so then if they're not like textbook based books that take me a long time to kind of digest and read through um i think the original ones that i really really got a lot out of were basically west side book of methods which is just louis simmons like breakdown of conjugate method poliquin principles which shedded a lot of insight into the different strength qualities how to train them rest recovery tempo speed of contraction how all that stuff changes um lore of running which is just a

dense physiological book um it can be applied very well to mixed modal uh testing which i would say is crossfit but different than the sport of CrossFit, just a CrossFit workout, um, healthy, intelligent training, Lyddiard's endurance book. Um, and those are really the two, uh, eight weeks out is Joel Jameson's, uh, or ultimate MMA conditioning is great. Um, which I got after I had already been with James. Um, but those four, I think laid the foundation for me getting a real understanding of both ends of the power spectrum and then basically learning how to blend and hybrid them to come into the middle and really be effective in my design for CrossFitters or MMA athletes or really anyone

that needs to be good in that, I don't know, minute to 20 minute time frame, let's say. That's a good book for anyone, even if they're not an MMA fighter. Oh, yeah. The principles go across all sports more or less. 20 minute time frame let's say that's a good book for anyone even if they're not an mma fighter oh yeah like the principles go across all sports more or less yeah and i i talk to joel relatively frequently and he's a smart dude um and generally like really smart guys when they write books the the book is really dumbed down so you can't really get an understanding of like what's going on if you that's what you think other people reading it are like scratching their heads you know what i mean well probably he's writing it

for an athlete yeah yeah if you're a coach and you're trying to read it well depends on how knowledgeable you are as a coach but they don't think it's dumbed down and it's really complicated but it really is dumbed down that's as simple as they can make it but i think his is it can really touch both ends of the spectrum like a new coach or a purely athlete or somebody who's like, you know, 30 years in the training business with a Ph.D. in anatomy and physiology or something. I think anyone can take away from that book. I think he did an awesome job. I'm plugging his book, but it was solid. But you like it.

Yeah. So I'd say those four are a good foundation. And I'll throw super training in there just because it's a great book but it's really that is not a dumb down yeah so if you're gonna if you're gonna read that book you you have to know a lot about just anatomy biomechanics uh just pick that up only if you really want to get into it you ever see mel siff speak before he died no i haven't he was awesome yeah super animated on stage nice yeah cool guy yeah um you uh you also help with the course designs is that correct yeah well so the design of the course was pretty much completed prior to me getting to opt so i just uh so i've

sat in all of them i had taken almost all of them except for life coaching prior to being at OPT as a coach. And so I sat in them and basically gave him my feedback about what needed to be changed, what our customers or our clients or our coaches weren't getting out of the courses that they needed to get out of, and then basically doing continual research on things that I thought needed to be upgraded over time because we all know like fitness changes overnight and the data is just exponentially increasing and it's so easily accessible so I just you know don't think that you should have a course that stays stagnant over the years so upgrading of course content would probably be what I would say I do for the courses. And then I developed my

own course, which is a program design application course, which was basically created because I thought most people that were taking our courses weren't getting everything they needed to be effective at even learning how to program. So the program design level one course is like, you know, teaching people the alphabet writing programs is like poetry and i thought there needed to be some sort of middle ground where it was like hey this is how you create sentences and this is how you use like you know so i was trying to create a bridge uh because i always found myself answering questions and when i graded the practicals i was like man these are like not where i would expect them to be for people who have been doing this for a long period of time um so it was just kind of my uh best attempt at

creating that bridge so that that's a almost completed development and i'm running my first one in the end of june um so that's pretty much my role in the courses if someone wanted to take a program design course what would that look like i i went there, I was at OPT about a month ago, and I took the life coaching, because I've always wanted to take something like that before, and Mike McGoldrick suggested, he's like, hey, they're having a life coaching course the same time I'm there, so I roomed with him and went and did that, and my expectations were high, but it definitely exceeded my expectations nice um i have not done uh any program design or anything like that with opt what would i expect if i want to do that uh so the assessment and program design courses and nutrition um can all

be taken online um but the basically the structure of it is assessment is a prerequisite to program design and assessment is basically a movement screen screen to teach people how to come in the door and basically assess dysfunction of movement it's a derivative of Gary Gray and just basically simple like right to left imbalance and structural like hey look at this look at internal rotation of this and it's not super in-depth all of our coaches don't always use it you know people do fms or people create their own you know some people like people come in the door put a pvc pipe in your head and hand and do an overhead squat or everyone has their own but it's just a baseline for coaches to say like okay uh how does this person move how do they move and where do they move effectively and where should

they never be um then there's a body composition analysis, which teaches people calipers and gives insight into what fat distribution in certain points of the body can mean hormonally. Then there's a work capacity section that basically gets a baseline of wherever your athlete is. And that in and of itself could be a course uh you know it's one quarter of a two-day course so it's like a very crammed um it's a topic that gets really crammed um and that's where all the questions come out of like oh well i got this and i got that and i got that um and that's basically the foundation for getting into program design. And program design is a three-day course.

Or, again, it's online where you can get videos and handouts and all that stuff. There's weight training, alactic training, lactic training, periodization, and progression, basically. And each three days basically goes through the same structure of the three different energy systems the aerobic system there's three days dedicated to each section there's one day dedicated to each section and then there's probably like some residual time that's you know question and answer periodization skeleton and templating of years and a lot of it now especially because our market is largely crossfit is how to apply these principles to improve crossfit athletes mixed modally um i've forgotten the assessment there's also a physical assessment um which is like requisite

levels that you should have in each of the movement patterns so like there's upper body pull um where there's like a scapular strength a strict a number of strict pull-ups a weighted pull-up um and it goes up to level five in each movement so there's core upper body push uh squat single leg squat bending um and that's the fourth component of the assessment course so that's pretty much the structure you can either take it in person um and do the homework can either take it in person and do the homework, or you can take it online and do the homework. That's very cool. Yeah.

We were talking to Dave a little bit before this, and we were all kind of, you know, there was about four or five of us standing around talking about how on the mobility side of things, you know, when we all got into CrossFit originally, how we were probably screwing people up. I mean, like, we couldn't understand why people weren't, like, weren't able to overhead squat. And we're like, why can't they overhead squat? Yeah, yeah.

We just didn't have the knowledge at the time that, you know, maybe their shoulders or their ankles are jacked up. Yeah, yeah. And how, like, you know, it's okay to, like, it's okay to, like, not be, you know, when you start coaching, no one's going to be very good at what they're doing. Yeah. Like, your eye is not going to be trained yet, and that only comes with experience, and that's okay, but, you know, you've got to keep learning somehow.

Yeah, I think the biggest sin is just complacence as a coach. And I try to learn from everyone. And I don't really, I'm sure I actually have an ego, but I try not to have an ego when it comes to education because I really do think you can learn from everybody. And I pay for consultations with people that, you know, some people might be like, hey, why the hell would you pay money to talk to that guy?

And then I'll, on the flip side, I'll debate or argue with anyone just for the sake of high, you know, learning and upgrading my own craft. So, um, so yeah, I, I still fuck up all the time. It's, you know, it's the human component of anything. None of us are perfect. And anytime you think you're perfect, I'm sure something will come out where you realize you're an idiot. So you get showed differently.

Yeah. So I, I would, you know, obviously I think our courses are great. I promote them all the time, and it's my job to promote them. But I think that people should get knowledge everywhere. So if it's not OPT, it should be Paul Cech, or it should be books, or it should be Poliquin, or it should be CrossFit continuing education, or it should just be traveling the country and meeting with people. Because there's an endless supply of knowledge, and you don't have enough brain power to

get it all so don't forget the barbell shrug shop there's seminars where you can learn things yep I forgot that one so briefly talk about the the essence of the athlete and the different animals like we briefly spoke of before the show started yeah for sure so i know it's been you know like any message you know when it comes from the prophet's mouth as it gets dispersed through a community of all those people who listen to it it gets butchered and destroyed but basically it started as a telephone game yeah yeah for sure so the message starts out pure and then by the time it gets there it's like that looks sounds nothing like what we originally talked about jaguars and buffaloes yeah that's important to know as a coach when

an athlete comes and says well this other coach told me this thing you're like well he probably said this other thing and then you heard this and then now when you told it to me you forgot the majority of it and now i think the guy's an idiot because you didn't remember what he actually said yeah i've had athletes that come to me and go well doug told me different i'm like no he didn't he did not say that i was like we may differ on some things but he did not say that yeah that's what you heard him say because that's what you already believed so sorry no no no worries uh so jaguar and buffalo were basically just um away uh and james is into like shamanistic rituals and basically creating animal spirits of people. Everyone that doesn't know James thinks he's weird as shit right now.

So James is a very, very smart guy. But he's weird, and he'll tell you that he's weird, just like all of us will tell you that we're probably all weird if we're honest with ourselves. Agreed. But Jaguar and Buffalo were basically just animal representations of the two ends of the power spectrum. So a Jaguar was this insanely powerful person who really operated well in the short time frames, really powerful, really strong, not so enduring, not a lot of slow twitch tissue. And then the Buffalo was sprinters and weightlifters. Exactly. And the, and the buffalo was just basically a slow,

enduring animal that could just grind and trudge over time. That has developed into like 5,000 things. There's like a cheetah, which can be like somebody who's really fast and explosive under no loading, but then you put them under loading and their force development drops. Like typically sprinters and jumpers are like that. Like they seem really really powerful but then you put a weight in their hand you're like why are they slow with weight whereas a weightlifter is more of a jaguar with a pure sprint or an unloaded event their speed and force development might not be as high but when you put them under load you're

like holy shit that guy can move um and then in CrossFit, it's not so simple. You can't just be like, oh, that guy snatches 300 pounds. He's a jaguar. He should be doing this. And that's what it turned into, right? It turned into how strong are you, and that's what derives your essence. And that's so far from the truth because, you know, you can be more of a buffalo or more of an aerobic uh athlete and really strong because a

lot of things go into strength qualities like where do your tendons insert what's your muscle physiology like what's your training background how much tonic uh stiffness do you have in your muscles all of that's going to play a part it's not just how your nervous system is wired you may disagree but when i watch when i watch uh say rich froning versus dan bailey i see a buffalo versus a jaguar exactly and you got rich froning who probably more of a buffalo like slow consistent he's just strong as fuck yeah and then you have dan bailey who's also strong as fuck but that dude's fast yeah and i think over time well first of all just as a simple basis i don't believe those two people should be training anything alike because you're not trying to create the same adaptation.

So one of them is way too powerful for the sport or explosive for the sport and not as enduring. And what he gets done is still out of control. So I'm not saying that Dan Bailey is not the sixth, fifth, fittest person on the planet or he's not good in the long time domain. He's insane. He's great. Yes. But he's much less enduring than somebody like Rich in terms of like how many contractions can he do in a certain time period and how well can he endure a long weekend or four days of events, right? A lot of that has to do with how well developed your aerobic system is and also probably how efficiently you move and a lot of other variables but i do agree i think that um over time you're going to see almost all crossfitters are much less explosive and powerful and they're much more strong but enduring and i

think you just a simple measurement is you could take front squat to clean numbers um to see like well how big is somebody's front squat relative to their clean? All things being equal about efficiency of movement of the clean. And the higher you can get in terms of what your clean is relative to your front squat as one simple measure, the more explosive and fast you are. Yeah. We actually talked about that on a last podcast when talking to a weightlifting coach. Okay. Talking about like efficiency of your clean. Yeah. you know your front squat yeah yeah for sure yeah

yeah and it's not it's not a direct correlate because positional of front squatting how efficient you change from like second pole to your retreat all of that comes into play but that's just a simple variable maybe like deadlift to power cleans another one or press to split jerk you can just over time as a coach you develop an eye to understand that like even though this guy moves a lot of weight he's really not that explosive right relative to how strong he is that's my excuse i tell people i'm like i'm a jaguar yeah anything over like 30 seconds i use that pretty frequently so if you take Rich and Dan, how would you have them train differently? I have no idea how they train specifically relative to each other right now,

but in a theoretical world, how would they be training if one was a buffalo and one was a jaguar? Yeah, well, I'm not going to use Rich and Dan because Rich won the games, so you can't really make a case that he's doing anything wrong. And Dan finished sixth so it could just be that the five people above him have more genetic potential or that he had a bad weekend or the workouts were skewed but if i had two people on the spectrum a jaguar and a buffalo and i was trying to basically get them away from their essence or get them farther away from each

end of the spectrum the least powerful person would do a lot more strength training, power development, rest recovery stuff. And the more powerful person would be doing much more long, slow distance, trying to convert his fast twitch fibers to uptake oxygen a little bit better, getting better at tolerating volume. And, you know, when you're dealing with CrossFit, you also have to come to a point that you have to give them fatigue-based training to get them used to metcon so generally just a basic principle that i teach people is if you have a 12 year a 12 month cycle and you're doing a year's worth of training you can do a lot of your interval training and conversion and base development

stuff for eight months of the year and And then four months has to be specific. And if it's specific to the opens and what we've seen, a lot of what's in the opens is really lightweights, really simple movements, really high turnover of contraction, a lot of demand for blood flow, a lot of demand for oxygen. And you're training those things and trying to create scenarios where there's bottleneck gymnastics and all this stuff that HQ is deeming tests of fitness. So for four months of the year, you throw the Buffalo and

Jaguar shit out the window, right? Cause you have to train for the sport, but in the off season, as you're trying to develop, that's just a simplistic version of what I would do. Cool. And so a lot of people, when they're first starting CrossFitter or CrossFitters five years ago, they would just do that four month period, but all year long yeah they would just crossfit all the time and that's not what most high level guys are doing anymore yeah well the thing with high level guys is that even if they're doing a four-time stuff there's either an inherent insane level of capacity that nothing is truly ever all out or they have the tolerance of volume built up from something else whether it was an aerobic sport or wrestling or water polo

or whatever it was to create a mechanical an endocrine nervous system base to be able to tolerate that intense volume often and usually when you first get into something, there's a skill adaptation period. So, you know, you, you do chest of our pull-ups and thrusters for time. When you're two months into CrossFit, you can't really put that much power out because you're just learning how to do thrusters. They're relatively light. You're learning a new skill in chest of bars. You might not have finishing strength in your rhomboids. Your hands might tear like, so generally you're not putting out enough power for it to really be truly high intense. So I consider almost all of that, which could last from four months to five years in some people's cases if they have no training background.

I just call it skill adaptation to CrossFit. And there's really no energy system that it is. They're just learning how to do the sport, how to do the movements and all that stuff. A lot of people are just going to get good practicing the sport. Yeah, I agree. And I don't think in any sport, people just play the sport to get better at the sport. Like in basketball, if you can't shoot a jump shot, you're not playing pickup games five on five. You grab a bunch of balls and you go out to the court and you shoot hoops. Weightlifters, if they're, you know, having trouble with the snatch and positioning at the bottom, they might do drills and snatch balances and overhead squats and sit in the bottom and PVC drills. And I think in any

sport, there's an inherent need to learn and develop all the skills necessary. And some people can get lucky that the design of the metcons just lined up really well over the course of that period that they learned all the skills appropriately and some people don't do it so well or don't learn the skills well enough and when the intensity spills over above what their body's able to tolerate you start to see issues and you can maybe see mechanical like tears like you know if they were doing kipping pull-ups, but they didn't have enough, you know, requisite mobility or strength in the lats to be able to tolerate the speed of contraction under fatigue. Um, or it could be endocrine wise. Cause they're doing too many, they're doing too many high intensity sessions per week than they can recover from with all the

fish oil and post-workout in the world just can't offset. And you see that in everything. It's not a bash to CrossFit. Like, you know, weightlifters will tell you they go into CNS fatigue. Wrestlers will tell you that they have low testosterone in the offseason. Fighters just have low testosterone. People in the military have low testosterone. But in CrossFit, a lot of it can be controlled and moderated with proper deloading, offseason time, submaximal work, purely skill development sessions.

So a lot of people start with me and they're like, man, this sucks. Like I'm practicing double unders and snatches and doing external rotation work and power raises and Cuban presses two days a week. I'm like, yeah, well, you know, you've only been training for two years. Like you can't hit it hard six days a week or and, you know, in five years you might be able to and you probably will. But when you look at the elite now, they've been in it for five or six years. Right. So they started with like, oh, you know, one workout every 10 days because you're so fucking sore you can't walk. And now they're doing 20 a week. So we just basically take all the principles of strength and conditioning, try to apply it to something we love in CrossFit and, you know, and just do our best at coaching that.

As a remote coach, how do you guys handle technique? Oh, man, I outsource. So I am getting to the point now where I'm going to start having prerequisite levels of things you need to do to work with me because it's almost impossible um i will cue my better athletes of things that need to improve to go from like 95 efficiency to 100 or maybe 90 to 95 because no crossfitter should be 100 proficient in anything really um unless they're that proficient in everything right um i usually just say like look you run like shit go find a post coach or you suck at olympic lifting go to a everett seminar go find somebody to do one-on-ones and i think the most efficient uh return on your investment is one-on-one work so i say look if

you can't if you suck at gymnastics go find a gymnastics gym find a 25 year old coach who's interning there and paying 60 bucks an hour to just work with you because most of the shit you need to do for crossfit is not that high level um as a not for gymnastics yeah yeah um snatching clean and jerk mo even most just good lifters who have a little bit of understanding of the actual lifts and uh mobility that's needed can probably help you. And I do that on a, you know, person to person basis. So like, if somebody can't scoop in a clean, I might just have a whole cycle where they do block work from the high hang, and I might have them doing three position pulls. But the technique that is developed from a good program design

around that is like a very small fraction of what would just be developed if you gave them a one on one workout. So sometimes I tell them, look, if you want to work with me, you got to fly out here, spend a couple of days. You're going to pony up a big amount of money to work hour to hour with me. But it's necessary or find a coach and send me who they are. I'll take a look. And I know a bunch of people around in a bunch of different areas now that I trust. So that's usually what I do. But, you know, like with any form of coaching, there is downfalls and technical development is definitely something that's tough with remote design. What about nutrition? You guys help with that too? Yeah. So we do outsource some of the nutrition stuff. And then I do a lot of my own nutrition with my clients.

I've done functional diagnostic nutrition and consulted with Rob Wolf a couple times and taken nutrition courses at OPT and spoke with Matt Lalonde a bunch of times. And I have enough of an understanding of what needs to go down. But I think that nutrition is a much smaller piece of the puzzle than a lot of the community believes. And I might get ridiculed for that. is a is a much smaller piece of the puzzle than a lot of the community believes and i might get ready ridiculed for that um i think most of the problem with crossfit athletes is that they just purely under fuel they just under eat under under eat macros under eat nutrients or maybe they get enough nutrients because they eat so many vegetables but they just don't eat

enough for the training volume so i just look at macros and I'm a simple like if you're getting the right amount of shit and you feel good and your bowels move good and your sex drive is good. I don't give a shit as long as your performance is going up. When we have problems, I say go to a doctor, get blood work. Let's work with a real nutritional specialist if you're having trouble digesting grains, if gluten is that big of an issue, let's see if you're really celiac or maybe your gut is just so poor that it can't even tolerate that. And you're so not resilient to begin with. And I think that's an issue. Um, if you're not, if you're so non resilient to certain things, I think of you as not resilient to training as well. So I might lower your training volume and try to lower your stress and get you to sleep better and look at,

you know, maybe you have parasites in your gut. Or I just think that people get way too caught up in nutrition. So what I look at is are you getting enough? And then I do everything else on a case-by-case basis. I think that's been a big issue lately is what I've seen is everyone is so paleo that they don't get enough. It's fine if you're doing a 45-minute workout three, four, five days a week. But if you're training multiple sessions a day and you're not getting enough carbohydrates, and you're not going to get enough carbohydrates from probably fruits and vegetables,

you're going to have to fuel up maybe rice and potatoes if you're trying to keep it cleaner. Yeah. So, I mean, my biggest problem is that paleo, I think of as just a food quality diet. Right. People have associated paleo with some low-carb ketogenic version of clean eating. And I think that's a huge problem, especially in a sport that demands an enormous amount of glycolysis. So it just makes no sense. So I do think people should eat good quality food. I think they should eat organic if they have the money for it.

I think they should try to get most of their carbohydrates from gluten-free sources. That being said, I think that doing that too much promotes so much imbalance in lifestyle that you're focused on so much of the wrong shit and creating anxiety about so much of the wrong shit where I'm much more focused on training if you're a performance athlete. So I generally tell people to eat a ton of gluten-free grains, moderate amount of fruit, and good quality proteins and fats, but I'm much more lax with both myself and all my athletes in terms of what you're eating. If people like want to go out and binge one day a week, I'm okay with that. As long as you can tolerate it and doesn't have long-term consequences on any of your biomarkers and health, body fat distribution, if it's an issue, or I care about that in terms of my structure,

or performance. How often do you guys test that stuff, blood markers or body fat? Body fat as often as I see them or if I know someone in the area that can either, or if they have like a bod pod or a DEXA scan. A lot of people are in newer colleges that will do that kind of frequently. That's where I always did DEXAs. Yeah, for relatively cheap. Because it was free. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Don't tell everyone that.

At home, I think it's $100. Yeah, I thought it was more than that. It's $100, $150 at home. Yeah, $150. U of M. Yeah, yeah, so that's definitely not too bad to do, like, every three or four months. If it's calipers. It's like the most accurate way, by the way.

Yeah, yeah. If you can get Dex, that's the gold standard yeah for sure um and uh caliper work i'll do whenever i see them in person um for crossfit ironically i don't think it's that important because i think most people need to get fatter to be good at the sport and i think if you look at any aerobic sport their body fat distribution is higher than an anaerobic sport. And CrossFit is an energy production sport. You need to be strong and you need to have good skills. But I think you're going to start to see that a lot of mostly female competitors will start to put on some body fat.

You think just hormonally they'll be better if they have a little bit more body fat? Yeah, hormonally. And, yeah, I mean, even the carbohydrate need to fuel the sport, I think, is just going to put on body fat. And I think the amount of stress from that amount of training might lower some of the anabolics and just make people higher in body fat. I mean, the leanest people in the world are bodybuilders. And they generally do weight training, low-carbohydrate dieting, and very easy aerobic training. Very easy. If any at all in some cases. Yeah. And there's a whole movement now of bodybuilders that believe that

aerobic training is the killer of leanness. That's always been a big debate. Yeah. Yeah. So for sure. I just think that most people are way too focused on their body image and they're losing out on performance. And I'm cool with that as long as they know that if body composition is on the list of priorities, it might're probably not getting enough glycogen resynthesis. Yeah. Yeah. And you got to kind of ride that line. I mean, you don't want to like eat so many carbs after you train that you're putting on just shit loads of fat. But like, you know,

you want to, you know, if you keep getting leaner or something or you're not putting on any, going through phases where you're not putting on a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. You're probably not performing at your best each training session. And the genetically elite,

the people at the top, you can't use as metrics for yourself. I mean, those people would walk around maybe at 3% body fat if they didn't do CrossFit. So when they're at 7 and they look shredded and awesome, it could actually be fat for them. And so much of image is how much water is held between the fat and the muscle and between the skin and the fat and how tight your skin is. And it's not always what you think. The better you get with calipers, sometimes you'll see people and you're like, man, you look so lean, like full six-pack, striations everywhere, vascular.

And you'll see 26 millimeters on their umbilical site. And you're like, holy shit, I would never have guessed that. I wish that was me. I think we all wish that was us. Mine's pretty realistic. Like, oh, fat is fat. I'm like, I'm a little soft here. And yes, Cal, for sure.

I don't think you have any folds that are 26 millimeters, but yeah. Maybe half that. All right, let's take a break real quick. When we come back, maybe we'll talk a little bit about biosignature. Cool, man. Yeah. Sounds good. I guess. Hey, guys. This is Rich rich froning and you're listening to barbell shrugs for the video version go to fitter.tv and we're back talking with max from opt uh and when we left i uh said that i want to talk a little bit about biosignature and how you guys use that and how you program and maybe nutrition too.

Yes. So James is – Get a little closer. Oh, sorry. James' foundation in strength and conditioning after academic education was as an intern with Charles Poliquin as he was aggregating data for his courses or what now is his courses, biosignature, PICP, level one, level two, level three. So the biosignature course is basically a course on how your body fat distribution

is affected by endocrine patterns. And they have a software that basically takes all of your, I think it's a 10 point, takes all of the 10 points of data, puts it into a software, and basically tells you what supplement protocol you need to follow to fix the hormonal problem that you have. And a simple one would be love handles have been correlated to poor insulin function. Belly fat has been correlated to stress. Your intake. Yeah. It's cortisol for belly fat. been correlated to stress. Your intake. It's cortisol for belly fat.

High pec relative to tricep could be aromatase conversion and testosterone problems. And there's a ton of them. And there's all these variants of supplement protocols that you can take to supposedly correct them.

So is there controversy with that thought process? Yeah, so I think that just empirically and then the data that we found, because we do a lot of blood work, we have doctors on site, we do just a lot of research on, and I think on our membership site, there's actually a body composition references section in the forum. I actually know there is because I created it. And there's a ton of just scientific articles about contradictory things to the original premises of these things. I do think that he does have a lot of truth in it. I just think that a

lot of times they're half truths. So you can pretty much just correlated skinfold measurements with blood work. Yeah. Yeah. So he correlated body fat distribution patterns with blood work. He had a lot of, yeah, I guess a lot of people he was looking at and he was also had a lot of freedom. Yeah., which was unusual for a coach. Yeah, so I don't think the data has ever been published, so I've never seen it. Or if it is published, I haven't seen it. I think I heard on one of the original podcasts of Rob Wolf way back in the day, he attended and he asked for it and was ridiculed or something. I don't know if that's a truth.

But anyways, so our original sites are close to where those sites are. And we talk about how endocrine patterns in our assessment course, how endocrine patterns could indicate some of these things. We've seen that the numbers he uses for health parameters are way too low, which in my eyes would make sense for a business because if you're selling a supplement protocol that the end goal is a leanness level that most people can't get to, then you're always bought into continual purchase of that. Chasing the dragon. Yeah, yeah, for sure. If you can make high cholesterol 160,

you sell way more drugs. Yeah, yeah, for sure. There you go. Instead of 200. For anyone who didn't know that. Yeah, so there have been disagreements. We have research to support it. So it's not like we're just coming out and saying, like, oh, this is bullshit. So are you guys publishing your research?

Well, it's not our research. It's just research that has been done that we found on you know journal publication sites um and then also we have empirical blood work on a ton of well i don't want to say a ton because people might ask me to quantify that but maybe somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 people that would uh well 20 of my own athletes and james probably has a ton more um and if you want specific numbers, you can email him. If he's willing to show it, I don't think you can share medical data anyway. And our doctors have all the medical records, and we just basically have to get permission from our clients to share and have this back-and-forth relationship about what's going on with the endocrine pattern.

So I don't even know if it's possible to publish data on that unless you're a medical facility. Rules are always fucking up research, I swear. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I have probably about 20 of my own athletes that would have something that goes counter to what he said, either a high pec level with high testosterone and, you know, low sex hormone binding globulin and things that you wouldn't see in somebody who's converting their testosterone into, um, some hybrid version of estrogen or, um, you know, people with high belly fat scores that have good adrenal curves and good DHEA to total cortisol sum and people with low

calf numbers who have high liver enzymes or whatever the case is I have a bunch of just small things like that where I'm like oh this doesn't line up and then just simple things like ethnicity plays a big role he did talk a little bit about that in his in the course that I went to so I'll just I'll give him credit for saying that each area of the country or of the world should have its own bio signature. Um, but the software doesn't do that. So if somebody's, um, I think Latino and, um, African-American females naturally store a higher percentage of body fat in the lower half naturally. Um, and I think on the site,

there's two or three references to that specifically. Um, and the bio-sig might for them say that they have elevated estrogens or poor estrogen conversion or some sort of estrogen issue and they're healthy and fine. Um, so just little things like that. Um, everyone is so confused right now. You guys went down the rabbit hole. I'm sorry, man. We did go down the rabbit hole. Yeah, the problem with that one is if you're not already somewhat familiar with what Paul Aquin was doing with biosignature and all that kind of stuff, then you have – well, I'm talking to the audience.

You may not know what he was talking about. All right, audience, I'm sorry for going down that. It's all Max's fault. Not mine for introducing it. Not mine. It's all Max's fault, not mine for introducing it. Not mine. It's a super interesting topic, but a lot of people are probably like, what is he talking about? 5% whiteness?

I don't even know what the hell he's talking about. Body fat doesn't always mean things are going on with your hormones. Simplified. One sentence, I could have just done that. It took five minutes to get that, but you know what I mean. Let's bring this back to crossfit crossfit stuff instead of hormones uh so you guys talk a lot about testing versus training a lot of crossfitters when they're first starting off they just test every day and they beat themselves into the fucking ground so talk a little about testing versus training yeah so it was kind of like the whole sport thing that we got into earlier to get

better at a sport you don't play the sport you practice you don't just play an NFL football game every day yeah and we spoke a little bit about or I spoke a little bit about how you would go about training different athletes and doing rest recovery stuff and how that could improve met cons when you get back into your specific training phase but generally you shouldn't be doing all of your training volume under a fatigued state where your mechanics break down where you can't recover where you can't repeat efforts and if you're doing like let's just say a simple thing you want to get better at thrusters so you do fran 21 15 9 it's 45 total thrusters totally 45 total thrusters totally, and you get it done in four minutes. Let's say the last 15 were horrendous in terms of how well they were executed because you were so tired. and pull-ups and then rested 15 minutes and did that five times, you'd get way more total volume

of thrusters in a way less fatigued state. And the mechanics of each thruster would probably have been better. So one would be testing and one would be training. To measure progress on that, you have to go through a training cycle where you train the movement and then retest it to make sure that whatever you're trying to go after has improved. But again, that's a lengthy process and people get into coaching. And I don't want to say it's this community because fitness is very fad based anyway, but people want results now and the body doesn't work like that. And if it does work like that, then whatever you were doing previously was really bad or you

were just deconditioned um so that would just kind of be a simple like one-off of what testing versus training was but i'd say that um testing is just not all out it might be 95 instead of 100 and we get like you know shit flicked at at us behind our backs for saying things like that and doing energy system training at 97%. And unless you're doing it cyclically where you're like running or rowing or on a watt bike or on an airdyne, you really can't quantify metrics of what that means. But I just tell people like go really fucking hard. And when you feel like you know that you're spilling over into an area that you can't sustain,

just back off a little, just a little. Yeah. So that would be 97, right? So it's just not going all out. It's not trying to be at a regional. And generally the only time I ever tell somebody to go out all out is in one or two workouts of a regional. The one that they know is going to be their biggest limitation or is going to separate

them because your body doesn't have the capacity to go all out six times or seven times in a weekend, which is why in like a 400 meter running event, the semifinals and the quarterfinals and all of that are never as fast as the finals. And the people that really do have to spill over in the semifinals blow up in the finals because your body only has a limited capacity to really tap into its true potential so my personal philosophy especially in the sport of crossfit is that almost never should anyone be going all out and the only time you should is if you're trying to close the gap in a competitive environment it's like bj fenn bj pan excuse me says he he always tries to fight at 80 yeah and then he only has to redline if absolutely necessary at the very end yeah and that's where

interval training comes in you're talking about breaking it up and yeah and all that and there's there's ways to learn how to prescribe it and how to pick the appropriate intensity for different people um and how to pick the movements within an actual Metcon to get a certain response. And that goes back to the Jaguar-Buffalo thing. So people who are innately more powerful, if you say, hey, go 90%, they have no comprehension of what 90% is. So you're like, hey, let's row 500 meters at 90% and then rest three minutes and let's do it four times.

Generally in those jaguars if the training background is relatively consistent versus a buffalo you'll see a very fast time and then very aggressive decreases in power from set to set in the endurance athlete or the more buffalo type person the person who's well more well versed in submaximal work their drop off in percentage will be much less. And I'd much rather have that person in a CrossFit setting. But if I am prescribing energy system work, the person who's at the top, if they're doing aerobic training might get 95% effort, right? Where like, they don't really even know how to go all out. Like,

it's just not in their nature. The powerful person might get the same exact workout. And I'm trying to get the same response. They might get 70% effort because they don't have a conception in their brain of what appropriate work output is because they were maybe their backgrounds in fighting or wrestling or football where you actually almost do always go all out. So they don't have the necessary physiology to understand well how am i getting my energy um and is this sustainable and some of it is ego driven as well right alpha males are like oh 90 i'm gonna crush this and they'll be two seconds away from their pr and i'm like

i think you're gonna recover in three minutes there's some guys i can talk to and before i even see him train yeah you can tell they're going to blow up. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it's common in CrossFit, right? And if you look at the difference between, like, an okay CrossFitter and then, like, a regional-level CrossFitter, generally it's the power output in the latter half of the workout. It's never, like, it's never the person who's in the lead after three minutes in a six-minute workout.

It's about who decreases in power output the most in that last half for the most part. And generally, you know, a powerful person is going to fatigue anyway. So you might have to start them at a higher work rate than the more enduring person. And a lot goes into coaching that and learning that and learning what

movements redline people. And it takes, it takes a long time to, to learn, to learn a one athlete, how to coach them in CrossFit. Cause there's so many variants. It takes a couple of months just to figure out what they need. Yeah, for sure. Um, you have a few athletes here at the Southeast regional.

Yeah. Just, uh, Travis, um,, who's in second place right now. Okay. I had one member who was on a team that had some, I don't know whether it was team drama or what happened, but he ended up getting pulled off his team. Okay. I thought that, was it your fault? No, I'm just kidding. Maybe.

I remember talking to a guy. I ran into him on the street, in fact. He was telling me that you coached him and he was on a team. I thought maybe you were coaching the whole team. No, no. No, I'm not. So, yeah, Travis is in second. How would you categorize him?

Buffalo? Yeah, he's a powerful Buffalo. So he still does have some innate power. He cleans 355 or something like that. So he does have some innate speed, probably more than I'd want relative to his strength right now. But I think when we started, he had a 630 Helen, like an 18-minute 5K. I have a bunch of longer workouts. He's a fast guy. Yeah. Um, and some of speed in terms of running is like, you know, just efficiency of movement where your

insertion points are in your Achilles. And like a lot of that comes into play too, with just specifically running. But if you can do that, um, you got an insane motor. So when I first got him, there were some things where I'm like, you are already elite. And some things where I was like, wow, this is really far off. I don't understand this. Some of it was mobility related. Some of it was training related, how he was training specifically. Some of it was coming off of an injury.

And he just happened to like blossom and have all the stars align at the right time. And coaching never takes somebody to the next level it can basically take you from the level you're on and maybe eclipse you into the next level unless somebody's with you for like five or six years or you were on something that was really maladaptive generally it's not the coach it's what's inside the athlete and the coach is just like an appropriate guide so I don't want anyone to think that I got Travis here I just basically gave somebody who had the tools already inside of him and let him expose it at the right time and I think that's what any

coach would do and anyone who promotes themselves as like the best at anything I would just be wary of like I don't I don't think i can do what happened with travis with most people because most people aren't what travis is i just know that i can give people a really good opportunity to get to their potential um so yeah i kind of went off on a tangent there but how many athletes do you have going uh to different regions how many regional athletes do you have uh 10 of my 40, I think, are at regionals through either team or individual. And I think I have probably about four who have the capacity to have a chance to make it. And a lot of this sport, whether people like it or not, is subject to what comes out as the workouts.

One of them specifically is 6'5", 245. Power output of what he's doing is not going to be taken into consideration. So he's moving his deadlifts farther in the 315. So it's just inherently going to take longer per rep. And he's moving his entire body of 245 pounds up 30 inches on each rep. So he's just doing more power. He's running a longer race. Yeah, for sure. So you have to offset people like that who don't have the necessary body with more capacity. I think over time you're going to start to see everyone kind of weed

into a specific like, you know. 5'9", 190 pounds. Yep, it's going to be like a bunch of little. That's the prototype. Yeah, a bunch of Rich Froning, Dan Bailey, Miko Salos. And you're starting to see it more and more. You don't see as many fringe athletes. There was a guy who put, I think he's been doing it for the last few years.

He's got a blog where he keeps all the competition statistics. So he takes the numbers from the Open, Regional, and the games. And then he just does a statistical analysis and he publishes that. And it's pretty cool. Yeah. I keep on referring to this website, and I publishes that, and it's pretty cool. Yeah. I keep on referring to this website, and I can never remember the name of the blog. Do you know, Matt, because you're a nerd? He's that guy.

Huh? CFG Analysis. CFG Analysis. Yeah, I think I've been on that site. Yeah, I've actually gone to that site to see how we should be programming before. I'm like, well, this guy's kind of done some analysis. Maybe I can get a better idea how we need to prepare because you really don't know what to expect but he's like well in 09 they did this and 10 11 i was like well it's a pretty it's a

pretty common trend for the open to be this way and the regionals to be this way yeah and uh he did one uh last year or the year before where he was looking at like the the size of the average athlete yeah you know and it came out you know it was a really cool graph to look at because yeah the best guys were like 5 990 pounds yeah and it's just a function of of design um if you put like if if you put really heavy gymnastics bias on a design i I'm sure the little guys are going to skew in favor. If you put a lot of heavy, not weightlifting, but powerlifting movements into something,

you're probably going to see more bigger guys just because they're just naturally stronger. I saw a guy with seven lats yesterday. Seven. Lats on lats on lats. It was crazy. I wish I had eight lats. Don't we all.

And then just one thing that you commented on in terms of how to program for people. I take and James takes a well-balanced approach to developing any athlete. And any year, because the program is random, it could be against us, right? Like in a year that if you're, you know, if the workouts are Olympic lifting heavy and you get six workouts that have Olympic lifting out of nine or whatever, the person with a lot of Olympic lifting volume is going to do well. Or if there's a workout like last year, I think five of the six workouts had hip flexion in it, right? So if you're just a naturally better puller off the floor and you have good hip speed and you're not a great squatter, you might get away with it.

You might get away with getting through a regional without having enough exposure to improving that. So I always have athletes every year who are like, man, I wish I had done this. I wish I had done that. And then other athletes who it lined up well, but I always take a well-balanced approach and never try to guess. Because I know that the first time somebody thinks they have it pegged out, the governing body is going to change it up. And I'm not in the business of trying to guess what other people do. I'm trying to ensure that everyone I have is continually improving at what I'm working on.

And then when the shit comes out, people just got to perform and we just got to hope. And, you know, there's some simple things like if you're really fucking big all year long, you're going to be doing a lot of gymnastics work. You need to get acclimated to box jumps and double unders and burpees. And again, it's non fatigued for the most part. And if you're really small, like 150 pounds and under, even if you're more of a jaguar, you're going to be doing a lot more strength work because you need to be almost at your genetic peak to just be strong enough.

You guys have a rough job. You guys are programming for something that you don't really know what you're programming for. You don't know what they're going to have to test that and so it's hard for you to know exactly how to program yeah and then i'd imagine after the fact yeah and people come in they say well this was the workout this was the workout you should have done this yeah and you're like well yeah that's easy to know now because you know what the workouts were and two months ago we didn't know that so i gave a speech easy to judge at our event it's very very frustrating yeah every

year every year around the about a month leading up to the regionals i'm like fuck this yeah like i people here i'm not everyone hears me but sometimes i'm like i'm like i hate this sport yeah because because it's like it's at that it's at that moment i think i was we were hanging out in arizona at dinner and i was saying that. I was like, this is stupid. And then it's like, you know, as soon as it's over, it's like, all right, let's get back to progress. Yeah, I gave a speech at our event, which is the Optathlon, and it's not like a huge event. It's just something that we think is a well-balanced test of fitness and a get-together of our community, and people speak about progress. And I made the case that it's impossible in the sport of CrossFit

to truly measure progress. Um, it's possible within workouts, obviously it's very easy because, you know, we put the stopwatch on everything or we always take metrics. So it's easy to say like, okay, I'm getting better. Um, but people are using their place in the open or they're using, you know know specific workouts from the regionals and when there's an infinite number of things to go after and an infinite amount of weight increases like so if somebody just can't clean 225 in one year and it only goes up to 155 cleans in a certain year and they finish 15th in a regional and then they don't get stronger from year to year but they improve all their other metrics and then the first workout is 225 pound cleans yeah and they just haven't

gotten better at that one thing they dnf they take last in the regional and then they say they think they got worse it's almost like judging if you got smarter if you went on two different episodes of jeopardy yeah exactly i don't know i did really good at one really not so good at the other and they're just totally different shows yeah so i have how i measure progress is to through that initial consult find an appropriate depth of assessing them and make sure that i'm testing and retesting and saying like look this is what we needed to get better and this is what's better now so we've gotten better at everything we've retested and then i use obviously the opens and the regionals and the games workouts as some standard metrics because we know they've been used before and we know there's an enormous amount of

data to say where do you need to be at this to be where you want to be same thing goes for benchmarks except the benchmark has to be picked appropriately that it actually can be represented in the opens or the regionals and logistically and you know if you think that they're not going to run in the opens or the regionals and logistically and you know if you think that they're not going to run in the regionals or the opens which you probably should be thinking at this point if you coach the sport because they don't want to deal with the logistical nightmare of running at a venue or having different distances places and blah blah blah the bulk of your training doesn't have to include running but if you think running is a component of fitness and you want it in your program you're taking up training time for running so there's always like this back and forth i have

with people to get an indication of like when you say you want to be good at crossfit do you know what that really means because if you want to be good in the opens but you really want to get stronger they're two basically counterproductive adaptations on the system like why would you spend so much time getting stronger if you want to be good at box jumps and 115 pound deadlifts and push presses you just need to be strong enough to move that weight um and i would make the case against anyone that the stronger you get doesn't mean that you get more efficient at moving lighter weights for multiple reps a point of diminishing returns yeah and there's a small subset of people who's usually genetically elite in CrossFit that will get the adaptations together.

So they will increase absolute strength and strength capacity and muscle endurance all at the same time. If you see that in an athlete, get them a really good coach because that's what you want you don't want somebody who gets really really explosive and then does worse on a capacity-based test with the same movement and you see that with people you know just something simple some people have 300 pound snatches and they only got 10 snatches in the burpee snatch workout so what's going on there like i'd rather have that person snatch 230 and get 25 reps in the open workout if their goal is to be a crossfitter um so yeah so most coaches out there aren't doing individualized programming that most of the most coaches in the world are programming for an entire gym yep an entire base of people who aren't competitive athletes who are just want to get more fit yeah

i don't know how much you deal with that but do you do you see a lot of a lot of errors with kind of more normal gym programming or can you comment on that at all yeah well i mean i think there's a um just specific to opt we have a blog right so people are under the assumption that opt athletes are blog followers excuse me okay yeah actually talk about function being will and how that all works. Okay, so function being will, she, are basically just subsets of group training programs. And when I say group, I don't mean performed as a group. I mean a group of people can all get something out of the same workout.

Function is basically a workout to improve fitness at a non-competitive level. And we define fitness basically how CrossFit would define it is, you know, work capacity across broad time and orbital domains and equivalent amount of capacity in all the three main energy systems. I just don't necessarily think that the CrossFit Games or the CrossFit Opens test those. So we train specifically for that. I include running and swimming because I think those are functional skills that need to be in there. And it's not going to produce CrossFitters.

Do you write that programming? Yeah. Okay. How are those secrets out? I know. Everybody knows. Being is a – So function is level one. Yeah. being is just like the next level up i wouldn't

say you're going to really produce regional level athletes out of that and if you do get into the level especially now that you're a regional level athlete i'd say that you really should be on your own program um but it's it's the next level up? It's not going to increase too much in volume. It's probably that like 100th to 500th place in a regional type athlete. It's getting exposure to everything. It's testing short, medium, long, and equal amount of volume to aerobic training and lactic training and strength work, skill work in there. Will is basically a Games caliper athlete design and it's it's all based off of that the data that people put in so there's really only three people whose data is

aggregated into the assessment of each cycle would you go so far to say that if you are doing will and you're good enough to do well then really probably you should be if you can afford it doing individualized program so the only reason there is even a will is because we have a lot of people in our community who are really good that don't have the finances for it. But if this is a priority in your life and you have the potential, get a coach. I don't care who it is. Trust them and get a coach. Individual design.

She is basically a program that me and James felt was necessary because so many women want to get fitter as defined by the crossfit regionals opens games and it's purely a function of upper body relative strength uh you know if they're doing chest to bar fran it's not their aerobic system or their breathing or their squat strength it's just they can't finish the pull-ups like they either don't have the finishing strength or they don't have the volume acclimation necessary to get over the rings. Solid without today. Muscle-ups.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. There was a huge separation on nothing more than chest-to-bar pull-ups. Yeah, so some of that could be rhomboid strength. It could just be the volume or the number that they're doing. 100 chest-to-bar pull-ups for a lady. Yeah, it's a lot. So I think that there's a mistake in program design that women are doing equal volume of gymnastics work as men.

And I think, like, people that... You think they need to be doing more? No, less. In testing, in the games and in the regionals and in the opens. And anyone that would say that with sexist can just look at gymnastics as a sport. They don't do the same things. Women aren't on the ring.

So there's an obvious disparity in what females genetically should be doing. So the research shows they've got about 50% upper body and 70% lower body compared to men. Yeah. And yet it's across the board. Yeah. And CrossFit. So I think that, and I think you're naturally seeing a much more anabolic female at the games than is truly representative of fitness like you're seeing girls with larger traps and larger

development and huge lats and excessively lean and generally if you probably looked at their you know test the estrogen levels and all of the things that create an anabolic profile they're much more anabolic than somebody who is just like fit, where if you were just to like not take in upper body tests and do a bunch of them. But that's a programming issue. And if you need to be good at the sport and in training, you need a ton of upper body strength work if you don't have it.

So that's why she was developed. But again, everyone, in my opinion, if they want optimal performance, should be on their own program. The group training model is great because it creates community, community amongst people, competition. It has its own subset of benefits that training doesn't have but athletes or people who are only caring about performance who actually want maximal potential out of themselves i think should be on their own design because if you put a workout on paper like let's say it's fran you're getting an infinite number of different responses relative to what their training background is how strong their front squat is how well they can do pull-ups, how fast they can contract.

All of those things are going to get a different physiological response. And you can look at oxygen intake and outtake. And they're starting to do testing on this. We do a little bit of lactate testing to see how much is in the blood and how much is pulled out in a certain time frame and all that. So when you're in a group training model, you never know the stimulus that you're giving to a specific athlete. The same thing can be said for percentage-based strength work.

Like if I give 80% to somebody, 80% to one person might be a three rep max, 80% to another person might be a 20 rep max. In CrossFit, you're generally seeing that like really low neuromuscular efficiency type person who can do like 50 reps at 90% of their one rep max which is what you look for but that's why we just don't believe in group training as a performance tool group training is phenomenal in so many aspects it's gotten people off their lazy asses. It brings in competition to people's lives that they don't have it. It's just for performance, for optimal performance,

you should be working on what you need to work on. And it's not a group training model. So maybe that means if you want the camaraderie, you do four days a week of your own stuff and one day off and then one day of group training and then another day off or whatever it is some people have hybrid designs even that work with me because they're like look the communion and the and the camaraderie with other people is something i really value in my life so i'm like okay good you'll get it but if

you tell me your number one goal is making the games and you don't have a coach or you're not continually researching to make yourself a better athlete or you're already the champ then i think something's wrong um and i think some people should have lots of different coaches they should have a program design coach a nutrition coach a weightlifting coach gymnastics coach um even just people that they consult with to say, like, hey, does my coach know what he's talking about or, like, whatever the case is. I've compared CrossFit to MMA in the past. It's like, you know, how many MMA fighters have just an MMA coach? They've got a boxing coach, you know, kickboxing coach, wrestling, jiu-jitsu. Yep.

And it's not even – And strength and conditioning. And strength and conditioning, obviously. Yep. But, yeah, I mean, that's five different coaches, and they're all doing the same thing. They're getting in there just to fight. I think it'll go there over time, I think.

I don't think there's enough money, and I don't think the fields are deep enough that mandate that. So many of the top people are saying, like, oh, well, I do this, and it obviously works. But when there's a bunch of genetically elite people that are equivalent of rich and equivalent of annie or even better that people are d1 athlete conversions or fringe professional athletes and they really start to achieve their genetic potential you're gonna see some crazy shit and you're not gonna see just regular joes walk in

and you're like oh yeah i'm just gonna work hard and like come on that'd be like somebody walking in there gonna be like i'm gonna fight gsp in a year like if you did that in mma gym people would laugh at you in crossfit it's the sport is still new enough that people don't realize what they're saying and how much work is going to need to go into that i think over time it's it's going to happen um and people will realize that they need good coaches and they need a depth of knowledge and they need to really take care of their bodies and their recovery and fuel appropriately and maybe have a medical staff or personal physical therapist. And I think over time it's just going to happen. Actually, speaking of that, how do you

guys deal with injuries? You spoke of physical therapy. You speaking of that how do you guys deal with injuries you spoke of physical therapy outsource that yeah yeah it's not in my scope of practice right like i do a bunch of research to get better at understanding what could be going on and obviously this sport is a lot about volume you need to be training if you want to be good at it so there's always a period of i think think, when somebody gets injured, there's got to always be a period of deloading. People shouldn't be using up their hormones on not recovering when there's a trauma injury or some sort of an injury. Once that period's over and it's different for everyone and also different for what the injury is. What kind of modifications do you make for something like achy shoulders or achy knees, things that are common in CrossFit? Well, sometimes achy shoulders and achy knees could be a result of the volume being too high,

them being too weak in the movements that they're doing at high velocity too often. Like if you have weak and achy shoulders, I'm going to look at like, do you do horizontal pull work? Do you do structural balance work on the rear delts and the rhomboids and trap three raises and external rotations? Do you do an equal amount of strict pulling to kipping pulling? So I'm going to look at those things first. And then I'm going to think of that as a marker of just systemic inflammation and just too much training that they can recover from. Um, and so usually the first thing I do is drop volume, um, and then avoid the area of injury, right? So if they have short shoulders, I might write two or three training cycles where they just don't do upper body work. If it's not structural

balance and it's all under non-speed, it might be concentric tempo lifting, even like three Oh, three Oh lifting, um, which obviously is not good for performance. Like no one would ever say to do that. But I consider it like a hybrid rehabilitation. But again, it's not my scope of practice. So if it persists through that, I say, look, go get an MRI. Like it would just be stupid of you to have sore shoulders all the time and be trying to bury deep snatches. Like what happens if you tear your lab labor when you're out for eight months i'd rather you go get it checked out and then be like look you got some real bad scarring in there you know we might just want to take some you know take three or four months off get you healed up do some horizontal pull work keep your capacity up in all the stuff

that you can keep your capacity up in and then get back to training but i consider that common sense uh amongst it's not that common no no it's just it's sense it's sense it's not common that's right uncommon sense most people's biggest barrier to getting strong is the fact that they get strong and then they get hurt and then they back off for a little while and they get strong and they get hurt again and that's the cycle ignoring mobility you know shoulders are jacked up yeah snatching anyway yeah getting in terrible positions and can't understand why yeah for sure and you look at the i mean it's it's so it's so easy to just look at the elite and watch how they move and every year you're seeing more and more of the original crossfit badasses or fire breathers who used to move like shit where people would be like, oh, well, they get it done.

Gone. Right. Either they got hurt or other people just got better than them. And if you look at Annie and Rich move, they're really efficient at everything they do. Even something simple like double unders, like how close their feet are together, where their arms move, how much movement is in their arms, how much vertical height they get off the floor. So efficiency of everything is really important in the sport. We were talking about that yesterday. I was just watching the girls do the pull-ups.

Yeah. And, you know, I was like, well, I was telling Doug, I was like, I don't know if it's that my eye's gotten better or if, like, you know, over the years of coaching or if like uh you know half the field it's like every year i go to regionals i see more and more of the field moving efficiently yeah you know last year's like there's the only difference between the top three women and and you know the bottom you know 40 or whatever was like the movement it wasn't always motor it wasn't always like that they couldn't go It was like, but I was seeing like pull-ups where they were like

really broken, you know, between their, their back and their hips, they were real broken. I was like, and the last ones off were, they look terrible. Yeah. I try to compare it to like, uh, swimming or running. You never go to an elite level competition of running and watch somebody run where like they're flailing their arms out to the side and it like in swimming you don't see people who are like reaching up and breathing like this and lifting to the side like you see everyone is efficient in everything they do so in a sport that energy production and force production needs to be limited so you can keep working every little piece of energy you're

wasting on shitty movement is a decrease in capacity and some people like i'm just going to be honest some people can't become 100 proficient like some people are never going to sit in the bottom of an overhead squat perfectly vertical with their hands over your head but that is a liability for you if you're in this sport um b is probably means you're never going to be elite in this sport and see something you need to work on like everyone who i watch move will have skill or mobility drills in certain areas to continue to improve and Travis is actually a perfect example of that and I actually had him take before and after pictures just because it was how I reassessed and tested him and when we first started he was horrendous at going overhead I think he had like

165 pound press a 265 jerk or something like that and in in a six to eight month period, I think he's well over 300 in the jerk. He's got a 205 press. And he didn't get that much stronger. No. It's more about efficiency. I've never seen anybody increase their press that much. Who's not, uh,

yeah. What was the biggest fix there? What, what was the change that was made? Well, he was just tight. He's tight in his entire anterior chain, like pec minor lats hips. Um, so like pec, minor, lats, hips.

Honestly, I went on MobilityWOD, and I found 15 to 20 things, and I sent him all the videos. Good plug to MobilityWOD, by the way. Really is a great site. Mike said it best. K-Star made stretching cool, which is a pretty big feat, really. Yeah, for sure. Because stretching is not that cool. But he made it cool. K-Star made stretching cool. Yeah. Which is a pretty big feat, really. Yeah, for sure. Because stretching's not that cool.

Yeah. But he made it cool. Now it's cool. Yeah, for sure. And then within the design, like when I first took him over, like something I've always felt that improved people's squat mechanics, like goblet squats and workouts, rear foot elevated, barbell split squats, dumbbell split squats, things that challenge that anterior chain and still make you work.

So he did a bunch of that, wall-facing handstands, just a lot of stuff in the design that was supplemental to stuff he was working on, and then also just staying away from the shit that could help contribute to it. So he shouldn't be doing 200 kipping pull-ups a week in a period where he's trying to loosen his lats to be more efficient overhead. So it was also the program design in conjunction with what we were working on.

And then as we got close to, I think the OC throwdown was his halfway point in the skeleton that we peaked him to test out fueling and peaking and try to create a peaking structure for him specifically um and uh shit i just lost my train of thought how do you program immobility with with the rest of the the work of the workouts before workouts after workouts off days or yeah how does that work for you guys yeah most of the time i do it's off days or how does that work for you guys? Yeah. Most of the time I do it on off days or, uh, in a separate PM session post-training. I don't really for an athlete, not somebody who's just like, Hey, I want to get fitter. I don't generally cram the sessions. I don't say like,

well do mobility for 45 minutes, do strength for 45 minutes. I'm much more of a, I want volume in your training. So I want AMs and pms a lot because I want you working even if your heart rate's 10 beats an average or 10 beats a minute above average so you go in and you're like hey I'm on the airdyne for five minutes I get off and I do mobility work for 10 minutes and then I get on the rower for five and I do mobility for 10 I like the blood flow and circulation um I like that for working on volume with mobility. Yeah, for sure. So I try never to do it just purely as static stretching or static mobility.

And then specific things like if somebody's not great overhead and they need to open up for a snatch specifically, I might have them do mobility as a prereq into that session. But I don't say like every day before you work out you're doing bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb um and different people are different right some people don't have the mental capacity to just sit there and stretch for 45 minutes so i'd kind of take that on a feel-by-feel basis i know i don't yeah i don't either another thing that i'm not sure if this is true or not but it seems like you guys are kind of the ones that made air dining popular in the CrossFit world. It was part of strength conditioning, and CrossFitters weren't really taking it on.

And then, again, this is maybe just what I think, but I feel like you guys brought that in. Well, yeah. Ironically, the air dine was my least favorite thing on the planet growing up because I wrestled my whole life and they were always in wrestling rooms and grandpa's had them yeah we did we did rower yeah airdyne and very like like six inch high box jumps in the mornings before class and then went to wrestling practice in the afternoons yeah yeah for sure i only use them for warm-ups for baseball yeah get on the airdyne for five minutes yeah okay now i'm gonna go squat yeah there you go yeah um so when i was programming with james it was just when he was so he's always had them at his facility but it's when he started making popular on the blogs and popular in his private clients designs and all that stuff

um i think the the thing about the airdyne that's really good is um a it's just a non-impact way to increase volume right people like oh i'm gonna go out for a 20 minute run and i'm like well you're squatting two days a week you're pulling all the time you're 210 pounds just not smart maybe swimming's a good alternative but sure with swimming you got to worry about the shoulders and the amount of volume there with how much mass is on crossfit or so um it's low impact volume it incorporates the upper body and some rotational torque and then anyone who's used it knows you can do pretty much about any energy system work on it you can do really high power high lactate high fatigue stuff in the legs moderate effort

aerobic stuff so long as the muscle endurance of the legs doesn't limit your power as you're doing it or you could just do long easy stuff jump on like i was talking about before a combo of uh i call it would call it zone one or yeah eccentric cardiac hypertrophy or whatever you call it's just volume i call it um and mobility combined um yeah should we talk about lactic mat battery training we always make fun of barrett for using funny-ass terms that nobody else understands. Oh, man, that's great. You talk about zone one, and I was like, oh, wait, technology. We've got to talk about that shit.

So actually, here, talk about some of your favorite intervals on the Airdyne. Oh, man. James actually did a post on this. It might have been on the membership site so i mean just some simple ones that i really love one minute all out and you can do anywhere from like four to ten minutes rest um and some people still won't recover some people still won't recover in 10 minutes as a jaguar i know i won't i won't recover oh, for sure. And you can do 30-30 intervals, like 30 seconds at a percentage. Again, it's variable for the person.

But let's say it's somewhere between 70 and 90, depending on who it is. And then 30 seconds really easy. And you do that for anywhere from 10 to 30 intervals. And I think actually. McWhorter does 30-30 at 30. Yeah, there's a video of Rich Froning's training before the 2012 games, I think, where he's doing 30-30s. And then it became popular amongst CrossFitters who didn't know about OPT

or were people who were like, oh, man, I hate the airdyne, just became in love with the airdyne. 10-minute airdyne for max calories I think is a big Jim Jones one. Right. Is horrendous. That's nasty. Yeah. Try to get a 300.

Yeah. And then let me know if you do. Yeah. And video it. Didn't somebody get over 100 in one minute? Yeah. And I think he did 400 in 10 minutes. Wow.

But, yeah. It's like elite cyclist shit. Yeah. Rob McDonald is the Jim Jones guy that does that. For anyone out there right now, go try to hit a 40 calorie per minute pace and see what that feels like and then think about doing that for 10 minutes. Just do one minute at 40 calories.

Just try it. And then just something to talk about. I had somebody who was doing the calories from a heart rate monitor. The calorie has to be on a new Airdyne or a newer Airdyne that does it digitally. It will vary from Airdyne to airdyne or a newer airdyne that does it digitally. It will vary from airdyne to airdyne.

I know this. It definitely will. Because we score all of ours on Craigslist. And then if you're trying to compare workouts, it's not the same airdyne. No. But 300 on any airdyne is hard. Even on the Schwinn Combat Evolution, which is a smaller wheel, it's still hard. If you do it, I'll still be impressed.

I do like rowers and airdynnes because they're so easy to quantify yeah one of my favorite things to do is say you know find your max rpms that you can get up to and then just stay above 90 for as long as you can yeah for sure or something like that like it works easy on the rower too yeah yeah that way you know exactly when you're really starting to slack off yeah and it's also maybe slack's not the best word. You can only go so hard for so long. So everyone – Why are you getting so soft? Yeah, so, I mean, with CrossFit, there's so many different variables that can improve even just a specific workout of power. And, like, on a rower, once you get a sort of efficient stroke,

there's not that many things that are improving your score other than just capacity with something like you know squat cleans and ring dips for some people it could just be like muscular endurance of the triceps and their power goes up in that specific workout or some people it's actually breathing and blood flow some people it's efficiency of the squat clean for some people it's uh you know transition time or whatever the case is there's all these different variables and as a crossfit coach you have to figure out what those variables are but i always love cyclical retests throughout because they don't lie you

can become a better crossfitter and not improve cyclical tests um but you can't get improved capacity or improved fitness and not really improve those generally. So you're taking something that has lower technique than most things and you're using those things to test capacity specifically. Is that what you're saying? It's not limited by maybe mobility or technique. Yeah, or just, I mean, everything to some extent is a derivative of how much exposure you have to it. So people who run competitively, like even short distance runners, like 100 meter runners,

still run like 20 minutes in the warm up, bounding drills. Then they run sprints and then they run easy stuff. Like you're still getting a ton of volume and exposure to a specific variable. There's just less variables that go in when it's something like running, swimming, rowing, airdyne, watt bike, than there is when there's squats, snatches, thrusters, muscle-up, toes-to-bar, double-unders. Yeah, for sure. And the skill itself is generally easier for people to pick up, and mobility doesn't come into play and all that. What do you think about rowing and, and watt bikes and things like that being in CrossFit competitions and

something that's supposed to be functional movements and no, not machine based. Is that something that you guys think is, is kind of weird or? Yeah. Well, the whole functional movement thing, like this is sport now.

I don't really like, I don't care if it's functional or not functional. Like I don't think a snatch 30 squat snatches for time at one 35. Like when people are like, Oh, you never know when you're going to have to like find a boulder and squat underneath it over your head. Like it's not functional.

It's a sport. So when it's, when the sport developed, I was like, look, let's make this legit, like a legitimate, valid sport where there's rules, standards, regulations, committees, and the functionality and the definitions of fitness and all the things that define CrossFit as a movement.

I don't think necessarily need to bleed into the sport. And the sport, I think, can be separated from the fitness movement. And I think at some point it's going to have to happen because there's way too much of a liability on the gym owners of having all the mass that is CrossFit try to be competitive. Because when you try to bridge that performance gap, there's, in my opinion, and a lot of people people's opinion there's always a decrease in health and there's a ton of strength and conditioning people that will tell you like oh well good health ends where good performance begins um and it's not like it's an opt thing um i just think that there is some sort of there's some sort of balance it's not a direct correlation but there is definitely some sort of balance with performance in 2007 a direct correlation, but there is definitely some sort of balance with performance and health. In 2007, the CrossFit Games probably were a pretty good marker of maybe how healthy you were.

Yeah, and performance. Yeah, for sure. But in 2013, there's no way that you can do that volume and be operating at optimal health. And I do have some specific people, and I was one of them. I was, I think I finished 19th in the Southeast Regional in 2011, who show poor health markers. With six months of deloading and stepping away,

improved health markers. And now it's not training specifically. It's not CrossFit specifically. It's chasing performance. It happened in wrestling. It happens in in football which is why there's like you know a ton of people out there now who are trying to protect people's brains because they know about the long-term effects and we're just trying to be on the cutting edge of that and say like look you know there can be effects mechanically and hormonally as a result of chasing this if you're not chasing it to get a medal or to make money or to get a sponsorship, why

risk it? Like be healthy and keep chasing performance, but make sure you're checking those other variables. You should have medical testing and body fat and just even like, hey, are you waking up in the morning? Happy, healthy, horny, like simple things. Is your energy levels high? How many hours of sleep are you getting per week?

A lot of it is just cultural. It's not CrossFit. Alpha people are just living life too aggressively. And if you're aware of that and you're okay with it, I'm fine. But most people think that it's healthy. It's not healthy to sleep four hours a day, train twice a day, eat no carbs and walk around at 5% body fat. It's not healthy. And that might be a personal opinion. I'd get in a dispute with people if people want to disagree with me.

It's just my philosophy. And I think as an open source community, there should be people on both ends of that spectrum who can have it to meet and just walk away from it like well i disagree with you and that's what i'm gonna do and you do what you do and i'm glad i heard what you had to say so someone calls you and says hey i only slept four hours last night do you alter their programming as a result um well when i in my initial consult if people don't sleep enough or don't eat enough, they don't get training until they log a requisite level that I set. And could they lie to me? Yeah, for sure.

What would that requisite be? Eight hours of sleep a day, and then based on whatever their body weight is and what their goals are and what their training is going to look like, just macros that they're hitting on a daily basis. had some just off the top of my head means they're eating enough yeah yeah sorry sorry uh so i had some somebody who wanted to gain weight for the sport wanted to get bigger wanted to get stronger we 150 pound male uh was eating 1800 calories a day on average wanting to put on 20 pounds of lean mass I'm like that's not gonna cut it and I was double maybe triple I said go to 4500 to start and we tracked

like neck measurement bicep unflexed flex chest lat and we just tracked a bunch of measurements and tracked his um strength numbers and his weight. And he stayed on a relatively low level of training volume until he was higher. And then when he's higher, if you're adding in the training volume and you start to see the food down, I start to think of like, okay, well, your body and your system is just so stressed that the hunger hormones and all of that stuff just isn't working properly. So I'll just back off from training, make sure they're sleeping more, just little things like that.

If people start with me and they're like, hey, I want to make the games, I sleep four hours a day, I'm like, well, I'm not going to coach you. If you get eight hours, if you think you can commit to getting that much, I'll work with you and I'll wait through the time that it takes to slowly get to that level. But if you think it's never a possibility, I won't coach you. I'm sure there's a ton of people out there that would, it's just not on me. So that's just another thing that I feel. So really at the moment, you have enough people where you kind of can pick and choose the clients that you feel are the best fit for you as a coach.

Yeah, for sure. And I mean, I think that some of it is selfish. Like, I want to set myself up for success. I don't want to take people on there like, oh, I worked with Max and he didn't help me. And like, there's a lot of variables. When they did 20% of what you suggested. Yeah, or they're adding work in. So I try to source from the initial consultation that like, okay, well, this is going to work. And then there's also an intake form where I can kind of just perceive what's going on.

You know, like people who write like paragraph after paragraph, a paragraph after thing that they've done and what they're doing and what they did before. And I'm like, wow, this person is really anxious about training. And like, where is it really coming from? And are they going to listen to what I say or why are they jumping? Are they going to jump from me to how's that going to reflect on me? So I mean, there's definitely a selfish component of taking on clients that I know I can help and also that I want to help. Like I don't want to help certain subsets of people that I don't think are going to contribute back to my community in a positive way. Like even people who are great athletes,

who just have really horrible attitudes or who don't think you should pay for coaching just because they're good, um, because they're entitled about their performance, just not something I want to deal with. There's a ton of people that will, because it's great marketing. If I had 50 games athletes, I'd probably make a ton more money. Um, but it's just not who i am as a human being and i'm making enough now that i can kind of pick and choose what i want to do in the industry how many coaches are at opt offering remote coaching uh oh man i think four i should know this he doesn't know the answer it sounds like a lot yeah yeah i think it's four so even if you're frozen they can't hire hire you, they could probably get some of this. Yeah, so there's James, obviously, who's the most expensive,

and then there's me who's on my tier of pricing, and then there's a bunch of, I don't want to call them subordinate coaches because I think every coach has something to offer, but just a lower price structure than me. Um, and if you go on our website or email Chris or Natalie, Chris, K R I S at OPT experience, and you want information about that, or you could just email me directly max at OPT experience. If you just have questions about how it works or anything. Yeah. Cool. I think we'll wrap it up with that. Okay. Anything else you want to promote? No, man. I appreciate the time, guys.

Cool. Thanks for joining us. So then go to optexperience.com, check out the Big Dog blog with the function being Will, which is your programming, right? Yep. So optexperience.com backslash blog or the website's being redone, but there's a little Big Dogs tab, which will take you to the blog. The CCP site is coaching certification program, which will give you a breakdown of all the courses that we offer that you can look at. And then there's an upcoming events tab that you can see like camps that we do or upcoming courses that are in person or whatever. And then I think optccp.com will be the actual online courses if you don't have the money to travel. But in any case, if you have the chance to actually hear the word from the horse's mouth, I'd always suggest in person because you can ask questions.

When you do things, unless you're very self-motivated, when you do things online, you're going to be multitasking and not taking notes and kind of get bored. Scientific information is not always the most fun thing, but when it's in a personal setting, you're going back and forth. It's much easier to digest. You can stop, you get breaks, you get it all crammed in a certain amount of time. You go away with the notes. Um, so I'd suggest in person, if you can a afford it and be the timeline set up,

if you really want to get the courses, um, done as soon as possible. The online ones are still pretty good. Very cool. Got anything, Doug? Yeah, if you want to get individualized coaching, obviously Mike's tapped out at the moment, and Max offers it, but he's tapped out at the moment too. So these guys are tapped out, but there's other guys available at OPT Experience.

If you can afford that, it's a fantastic option. If you're a person that's not trying to go to regionals or go to the games, but you just want some more general blog programming, but you might not have a coach right now, and you want to have at least some community, and you're not part of a regular CrossFit gym, we do have our six-month muscle game program where Mike writes all the programming for a full six-month period. And it's very strength-heavy, strength-training heavy, and specifically weightlifting heavy where you can improve your lifts and put on some muscle mass. And then we have a Facebook group where all the guys in that program are interacting on a daily basis with me, Mike, and Chris Moore.

And we're doing one right now, and it's been super successful. The guys are making great progress, and they're getting a lot of value out of that Facebook group where they can interact with us as well as the other people in the program. So if that's something you're interested in, you can go to barbershug.com, click on the shop, and then you can click on online coaching, and you can sign up to be on the waiting list for the next program. And I think you should go to barbershug.com and just sign up for the newsletter. And if you live in the Atlanta area, next month, July 6th and 7th,

we'll be at Brandon Phillips Gym, CrossFit Bound, doing a training camp. It'll be Doug, Chris Moore, and myself kind of doing workshops on our specialties and what we do well. And then we'll be back here in Florida at CrossFit Siege August 10 and 11, I think. 10, 11, or 12 and 13, whatever that second weekend is. Something like that. You can register for those at barbellshrug.com. Click on seminars and just kind of see what's offered there.

See you next time. Thanks, Max. Thanks, Max.