Barbell Shrugged - 79- How To Dominate FRAN: Complete Breakdown and Programming Analysis of CrossFit WOD Fran

Episode Date: September 4, 2013

 Everything you ever wanted to know about CrossFit's most popular benchmark WOD "Fran".  It's 21-15-9 of Thrusters and Pullups.  Our guest Max El-Hag programs for many regionals and games athletes, and in this episode dissects Fran to show you where your can make improvements to improve your next Fran time.

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we break down Fran with CrossFit coach Max Elhaj, who happens to train some of the fittest people in the world. Definitely some of the most fittest people. They're so fit. Cue the song. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. I wonder how many Sunday mornings we've all showed up and Mike's like, just cleaned up a little bit and then came up here and was talking. Ashley's like, not enough. Not enough time.

Hey guys, welcome to Barbell Shrugged. Hold no beard, Adam. Damn, I forgot. Cover it up. Here with my co-host Doug Larson. Chris Moore couldn't make it today, unfortunately. But we have an empty microphone to represent where Chris normally would sit. Since you shaved your beard, he won't talk to you.

That's right. He actually refuses to be on the podcast due to me being beardless. We have Max Elhajan today. Individualized programming extraordinaire. If you want someone to write you a program specifically for your needs, he's the type of guy that you want on your side. And we're going to go into a little bit of that, and we're also going to talk about, he's going to break down, he's going to talk a little bit of that. And we're also going to talk about he's going to break down.

He's going to talk a little bit about individualized program design, but also break down Fran for us. We had a staff meeting at Faction earlier today, and he held the staff training. And he showed all of our coaches how he would approach improving an athlete's Fran time. And we thought it was really insightful. and we thought you guys would enjoy hearing about it so we're gonna talk about all that after you go to barbellstroke.com and sign up for the newsletter like three episodes in a row how to remind Mike he gets distracted is there's a lot going on in that brain excited easily very excited about things that most people would never get excited about, I don't think.

Because of all the cool things we do, so you should sign up for the newsletter. There you go. So you've been on the podcast one time before on episode 63. Oh, yeah. That's right. So if you haven't seen the show, or the audience, if you're watching this right now and you haven't seen episode 63 and so you're not familiar with Max, can you at least go through some of your background, some of your history and kind of tell a little bit about

how you got into the CrossFit world and about some of your credentials, so to speak, that way people are familiar with why they should even pay attention to this episode and listen to what you have to say? Yeah, for sure. So like most people that you know get into competitive crossfit from the early uh or from an early start was an ex-athlete myself uh played football and wrestled pretty much my whole life went to you got that grin on your face ctp's cracking up me and max me and max are so confused ctp's i have no idea why he's dying.

He's cracking up behind the camera. I asked Mike. I gave him the okay to make sure the audio was good. And then Mike shoots me a thumbs up. That makes me think about Mike's thumbs up video. Okay. Derailed. Will you come look at this real quick, CTV?

Make sure we're recording. Yeah, we're good. Okay, good. All right. Try Max. Yeah, no right so the audience is aware we just recorded 20 minutes of a show this is the second time yeah we're trying to do this again because we just recorded 20 minutes of a show and then had to stop and start over because we were recording all the microphones it was a ctp's fault all right so so one more time max tell us about yourself yeah so why are you so smart

uh that's a weird question but uh all right so i was an athlete uh pretty much my whole life football wrestling went to college to play those sports i was actually a finance and accounting major got out of college um got into just um mostly, but I'd always researched endocrinology and strength conditioning and anatomy and physiology textbooks. And it's kind of just been my passion my whole life because I was an athlete. Dad was an athlete. Mom was in a nutrition company. So it was kind of like the thing I always did on the side and was always passionate about

but was never convinced I could make a living doing. Slowly got into the CrossFit world through MMA as conditioning for that, competed a little bit, did all the level one certification seminar stuff, USAW, CSCS, Poliquin education, private sector education, endocrinology courses at uh you know community college as prerequisites to get into programs that um i have been putting off deciding whether or not i was going to go and pursue um to try to figure out you know kind of what uh post-graduate education i do want to pursue um and then worked for OPT for two years, doing a lot of design work for my athletes and games athletes and helping with educational curriculum

and all that stuff, which I guess leads me to today. So you've had a big background in program design, making both coursework, so to speak, like designing educational products on how to write programs. And then also you've written, you know, literally thousands probably of programs for individual people focusing on exactly where they need to improve and get better. Yeah. So I guess my expertise, so to say, is is programming individual athletes. So I take an athlete, assess them and work directly with them with a one-on-one program so a lot of people before we get too far in yeah you're no longer with opt no no no yeah yeah i mean you want to make that clear yeah so i'm uh i'm just on my own right now uh kind of doing my own thing

doing my own coaching had great experience there learned a lot from james it's you know It was a political split and I'm just independent now. So my expertise in program design basically just I came from always working one-on-one with athletes. Pretty much from the time I got in CrossFit, always did my own program design or hired a coach to do my program design for me because I believe in having a coach when you are working towards something and should be working on your weaknesses versus somebody else's. And then OPT's business model is very prevalent

and heavy in one-on-one coaching. So obviously fell into that and continued on programming for people as an extension of personal training in the past and so so in CrossFit there's a lot of different ways that you can go about like getting into that world and improving your fitness and getting to a competitive level there's there's doing it on your own with no coaching just following a blog which is the free thing but it's

also kind of like the level one thing that's only gonna get you so far and then there's joining a gym and just doing the group fitness class the same thing that everybody else is doing and that's kind of like a little more expensive and it's a little bit better and then beyond that there's like i have these very specific goals i want to i want to specifically get better at at longer workouts or i want to specifically gain muscle mass or i want to specifically improve my olympic weightlifting so I can follow a skill specific or a goal specific program that's still general and that's usually a little more expensive but a little bit better and then kind of the gold standard is getting truly individualized coaching where you're you're you're getting an assessment

and your movement is being analyzed by a coach who knows who knows you knows your background knows your level experience and knows your mobility levels. And they're going to be able to write a program specifically for you that's going to make you a better athlete as fast as possible. And that's usually the most expensive, but also the best thing. And kind of that whole spectrum, level one being the easiest to come by, the easiest to find coaching for because there's thousands of blogs out there, and then level one coaching, that requires the most experience from the coach

and the most commitment from the athlete. So there's a whole spectrum there. And so primarily you have focused on the high end stuff. It requires the most experience and the most commitment and you're usually targeting people that have very specific goals and that are very very motivated yeah and that's kind of where your your expertise lies yeah for sure so i don't you

know most of my client base doesn't come to me and need me for motivation or getting them to work harder or work on the little things they're coming to me because they have a goal and this is one of their highest priorities in life to accomplish it and it's not necessarily I want to win the games. It could just be I want to change my fitness and make it a number one priority in my life and compete in the opens and be healthy and be safe and feel good and kind of be held accountable by someone that's going to specifically program and keep me safe in an environment and um i would argue that there might be one next step up of that uh is to do all of that in person um now that would be very expensive that's kind of your that's your uh dream scenario oh yeah my dream scenario is to have like five to ten very high level athletes that pay me a salary every year to work with them and do everything and work with nutritionists to measure and cook their food and test them

every day when they come in and really make sure that they're getting everything that they can out of their training. Obviously right now to be in the sport of fitness or CrossFit, it's generally not going to produce enough income for the athlete to be able to support anything like that. So. I've certainly been to gyms like that before. I used to live out in Arizona, which is very close to you, so you're probably familiar with,

since you live in Phoenix, Athletes Performances in Tempe. And those guys, those athletes are NFL players and Major League Baseball players for the most part. And so those guys have the means to have that kind of attention where they're getting personal training every single day. Most people can't spend for ease sake, we'll say a hundred dollars an hour, you know, five, six days a week, maybe twice a day.

And it's going to cost you thousands of dollars per month. Most people don't have that kind of a disposable income. Yeah. And I'd, I'd say that, you know, probably a lot of the audience really doesn't need that level of detail. A personal program, I think, could benefit any level of athlete. I wouldn't necessarily say it's necessary for all athletes. There should be a certain level of competence in terms of reading a program and picking your weights and knowing all the movements of the things that you want to accomplish. And all of those things should be taken care of before you decide to hire a coach now there's many

means to do it i know a ton of people that learned all the olympic lifts and all this all the movements of crossfit through youtube and on their own now if you can do that go ahead if not and you're struggling with the olympic lifts you might need to go find a coach who can tell you why are you struggling with mobility, shoulders, hips, ankles, is it speed, is it technique? But you should have all those things in place before you're paying someone to structure the training response that you're getting. Because in the beginning, most of your training response is just skill development.

So you should have somebody that's helping you develop your skills, and that's very hard to do remotely um so yeah that that's just kind of a an extension of kind of where the niche of remote program design can create uh success for both the athlete and the coach because if athletes come to me that aren't ready for remote design it sets me up for a really difficult situation to try to fit something in and And oftentimes I turn them away after the initial consultation and say, look, you need to go spend your money in these areas to get these taken care of and to come back with me with some requisite level of competence in certain things.

And then we can start. And just to clarify, remote coaching means that they're not coming into your gym. You're not dealing with these people one-on-one. They're calling you on the phone you live in arizona they live in in montana and they're asking you for advice and you're doing it all remotely yeah you know from hundreds of miles away in most cases so you're not there to actually correct their technique they need someone in town to correct their technique and then once all that's handled then you can write them a program

because they can actually do it yeah once you write it for them. Yeah, for sure. And you can work around little things or if somebody's not super proficient, you know, a remote coach should be able to say, look, you know, your hips are rising a little too fast. But the athlete needs to understand what that means, right? You tell a beginner who's never snatched before,

oh, your hips outrace your shoulders you get too far over the bar you jump forward it's like i could be speaking another language they have no idea what i'm saying um so generally the athlete that's coming in for remote program design is already has a requisite level of competence and a lot of things that they want to do and now they need structure and a plan and a and an ability to to go forward and target their weaknesses to make sure that they're prepared for whatever their game day is whether that be the opens or whether that be the regionals or whether that be the games or whether it be something completely different like they fight

two times a year or they go do endurance runs or uh they want to go on vacation and want to have a six pack. And that's a realistic goal, you know? But that's basically what a remote coach should be doing, or any coach should be targeting those things. Okay, so someone comes to you and they already have some CrossFit experience, their technique's already relatively solid, they don't have any major, major restrictions, and they want to take their game to the next level, so to speak. What does

that process look like? What do you, what happens in that initial phone call? Like how do you walk them through the process of getting started? Yeah. So I think in the previous podcast, they talked a little bit about the logistics of how remote coaching works. So, so if I say initial consultation, you don't know what that means. You can probably go back to the last one and watch it, but we always do an initial consultation. So I sit down, it's usually through Skype. I do have a couple of clients in the Phoenix area that I've, I've done them in person with, but, uh, I get a feel for the, for the client. First of all, we need to get to know each other.

I need to know where they're coming from, what their background is, what they want to do, what they want from me as a coach. And a lot of people want a lot of different things from coaches. You'd be surprised. Some people don't want to be bothered. Some people want the accountability. They want somebody to like pester them if they don't complete things. Some people just want the program. And so I get a feel for like the personal stuff. You're also trying to figure out if you're going to drive each other crazy. Is that in there somewhere? So I get a feel for the personal stuff. You're also trying to figure out if you're gonna drive each other crazy. Is that in there somewhere? Yeah, well I kind of know right off the bat

the people that are gonna be easy, or for the most part the people that are gonna be easy and the people that are gonna be a struggle. But I think the people that are a struggle are a good challenge for me intellectually to try to be able to help them achieve their goals even though we might have personal differences or any of that stuff. I was trying to throw him a curveball and he handled that pretty well. Yeah. So in that initial consultation, I get a feel first for the personal stuff and then I dig

down into the, you know, the well, schedule, lifestyle, nutrition, all the simple stuff. And then we start talking about where they are as an athlete. And most athletes at the level that I'm getting them have some indication of what's limiting them. And I kind of work on a limiting factor model. I say, well, you want to make the games. I say, okay, well, what's stopping you from doing that? Most people have some idea. Some people will just say, I'm not good enough or I'm not as good as Rich Froning. And I say, OK, well, define that for me. What does that mean? You don't snatch as much as him. You don't clean and jerk. You don't squat. You can't do Fran as fast. You

can't do like define it for me. And I start to get an indication of what their self-awareness is regarding training and kind of start to figure out when I put them through testing, where do I think their priorities are going to lie? Is it going to be in the longer stuff where they have to breathe a lot harder? Is it going to be in the strength-based stuff? Is it going to be in gymnastics? Is it going to be a lot of gymnastics and short or a lot of gymnastics and long with heavy stuff? And I start to get an indication of a big picture macro view of where they sit. And then from that, I create testing protocols to start to test those things

that I theorize will be their limiters. Now, I've gotten that wrong. In the first consultation, I'm like, okay, this guy's more powerful than enduring. He's gonna be better at upper body gymnastics, pulling than pushing. He's not going to be good at this. He might not be good at this test. And I've been completely wrong, but I test them. I watch them move. I ask them to do like simple things like Turkish get up, single arm overhead squats, things that will give me an indication of what their structure looks like and how long their limbs are and why

they might be good at certain things. And then I create testing, analyze my testing, create priorities, and then I write the program. So we start on day one, we have the consultation, testing, that whole process after the consult might take four to six weeks. So they're with me for six weeks before I've even written anything specifically for them

other than the testing that is individual towards what I'm looking for. Then we go towards sending the program comments back and forth, learning how to train, learning what we're going after, et cetera. Yeah. So, now you're doing this testing and assessment. How would you... Now we're going to kind of move towards like the Fran. Yep.

No. How are we going to, why would you test someone on Fran? I mean, I think there's some obvious reasons on why. Yeah. You might, I mean, we'll use it today because everybody wants to have a fast Fran time. Of course, it's the most popular CrossFit workout. And you kind of took our staff through like how you would assess Fran and then what you would do. You went into some very general training methodologies that you could use to improve it.

Yeah, for sure. So I'll just put this caveat right up front in the discussion. I don't generally use Fran that much in my initial assessments anymore. Relative to what's being tested in the past opens regionals and games for the past three years so you're not prepping people for fran yeah you're prepping them for the open regionals and games yeah so i try to replicate tests that reflect limiters in those tests versus fran um i use fran specifically for uh the staff and then also for this podcast because everyone knows it. It's become

like the new, what's your bench? It's like, oh, what's your brand? And it's a great test of power in a mixed modal setting. So I thought it'd be an interesting one to kind of dig into. But if I had tested someone on this, the biggest reason I would pick it is because there's enormous amount of data. There's enormous amount of data of elite females, elite males, then very non-elite females and males, and everything in between. People that move poorly, people that move well, people that are gymnasts, people that are strong power lifters. And you see every derivative of that. So you can always find cross comparisons and you can say, okay, your Fran time fits in here. This is what people that are accomplishing what you want to accomplish are doing it in. This is how far you are away.

So that'd be probably the number one limiter in this test is probably the ability to do fast pull-ups under somewhat fatigued setting. Because that's what's going to separate most people from doing a pretty person something like 21.15.9, I'm assuming that they have an ability to do that kind of work at a relatively high speed, so some power. If I anticipate they're going to do six plus minutes, then I'm probably not using that as a test. I might use something else for a shorter time frame. So for the moment, we're going to use Fran as an example. You get a new athlete and you want to just put him through a workout, in this case, Fran, just to see how he handles it, see how fast he goes, to see if he does it unbroken, if he doesn't do it unbroken, how he kind of attacks this workout.

And then from that, you can look to see where he has limitations, and then you can extrapolate knowledge from viewing that workout to write the rest of his program along with all the other assessments that you're going to do, because this is just one assessment of many. Yeah, yeah. So if I'm assessing an actual CrossFit athlete, I go into this level of depth with every test that I prescribe, and I prescribe up to eight weeks of this. This theoretically would be somebody comes to my door, and they say, I want to compete in an event that is only Fran in eight weeks,

and I'm going to do one or two training sessions a week of just this and everything else I just don't want to work on. I just want to move well and kind of walk, and that's all I care about. So I'm singularly assessing everything that can affect Fran. What goes into making a great CrossFitter is obviously very different than what goes into just making somebody really good at Fran. And it's probably obvious out there,

you can see videos of people that have 215 Frans that didn't qualify for regionals. So obviously it's not like a direct barometer of a great CrossFitter. It's just one test. Should I just kind of go into like how I break it down now? Yeah. So say you watch someone do Fran.

Okay. And then now you're going to break down the workout that you just witnessed and you're going to try to figure out what's limiting that athlete. That way you can go fix that problem and they can get better. Yeah, for sure. So I kind of break it into four categories. So we have transition times. I'll do as number one. I'll just talk about quick because transition times can't really be changed

through program design. The more acclimated you get to a sport and the more knowledgeable you become about a sport, the better you're going to be able to transition from thing to thing. And in triathlons, it happens all the time that people don't transition well and they don't do as well. In elite triathletes, you watch their transitions and announcers will always talk about how effective somebody was or how they weren't effective, and seconds can really matter at that level. The same thing is going to be true of CrossFit over time.

If there's six transitions in something like Fran and you're wasting three extra seconds in each of those transitions, you're talking about 18 seconds of wasted time in just the transitions. You're talking about the time it takes to get off the pull-up bar and pick up the barbell and back and forth. Yeah, and back and forth. If you drop the bar and it bounces too far away and then you jump to the pull up bar that's too high or you're using a box and jumping up all of that little wasted time is I call transition time. movement and from a program design perspective that can't be changed a coach can just point it out like if i see somebody's video and it's like they did 21 unbroken and 21 unbroken 15 15 9 9 and they were moving real fast but they took 15 seconds and from getting from the bar to the pull

up bar and back and forth i'm just gonna say well the only really way you can get faster at that is transitioning better get the bar closer to the pull-up bars lay it out in a structure that allows you to go from one to the other real fast um but i didn't i didn't think there was really much to spend time on that other than saying that transitions are super important but they're a function of an athlete getting better at a sport and getting becoming a veteran right uh ed a quote A quote unquote amateur athlete will waste a lot of time in that. You watch like Jason Kalipa, Rich Froning,

Annie Thorisdottir, you watch how efficiently they move from one thing to the next, there's very little wasted time and they're very cognizant of it without, you know, maybe they do talk about it, but without talking about that being a super important part of the sport, it is. I think the most noticeable place that I see that is where beginners will be doing double-unders,

and they'll be real tired, and they'll get done with their last double-under. They'll just throw their rope off to the side, and it'll end up in a big tangled pile. And then all the experienced people, they finish, they calmly lay their rope in a nice little U-shape on the ground so they can just step in between it, pick it up, and go again. Yeah, same with a kettlebell. People will drop a kettlebell, and it bounces off to the side and then i've seen people get off the pull-up bars and then they're looking for their kettlebell don't even know where it bounced it's like yeah it's like but you watch the guys have been training the longest we stop we set the kettlebell down

like you know i set the kettlebell down where i want to like i want i know where my feet are going to go again like and i want the kettlebell six inches six eight inches in front of where my feet are going to go again. And I want the kettlebell six inches, six, eight inches in front of where my feet are going to be, where I want to swing. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, yeah, that definitely is something that didn't cross my mind the first year I was doing CrossFit. I was too busy slobbering on myself.

Oh man, I was breathing so hard. I didn't care about anything else. But as you start to learn about pacing and control, you realize, man, I did the work pretty fast, but I was standing around in between. And then you start to think about that stuff and where you waste time. And those are the easiest things from a beginner perspective that you can improve your times on.

The program design and all that stuff, it comes with time, hard work, and smart work. The transition time, all you got to do is think. You got to think and plan and put everything in place and keep composed and within yourself, within the workouts. And that should start to cut times off of most things that are in a four-time setting with a bunch of movements. And so if that's someone's issue, you basically just say, hey, don't do that anymore. But you don't change their workouts because of it. Yeah. So I just make them aware of it.

Transition. Or you want a TBC pipe. Yeah, so I might say transition times are something you really need to work on, but it's not a priority when I'm structuring a long-term plan. I'm not saying, like, we're going to go 10 sets of pick up the bar and drop it and grab the pull-up bar and come back and keep that as fast as you can and rest as needed between them. I'm gonna start programming like that.

Everyone's gonna hate me. Did your mobility work? Have you transitioned? Yeah. Yeah, so it doesn't change the design necessarily, it just kind of, it's something that people need to be aware of, so as a coach, I just tell them that. And then moving on from the first thing,

the next three could be pull-ups, thrusters, or energy systems. And I'm going to keep energy systems relatively simple. I'll just say that it's energy production to working muscles. And an easy way as an athlete is if they're saying things like, man, I just couldn't breathe or my heart felt like it was going to explode. So I had to step back and calm down. There's a lot of science that goes into what energy systems really mean and how they all work together. But for the sake of the podcast, I'm not going to go into all the minute details of that. I'll just talk a little bit as we go along as to how you can find out in those workouts

if it's energy systems versus thrusters or pull-ups. Right. Cool? Yeah. Okay. So when talking about thrusters and pull-ups, you can say, you could start off by saying, did they do them unbroken versus did they not do them unbroken? And unbroken just means you completed the entire repetition scheme without stopping.

So if you do 10 reps and then you put it down and you do 11, you broke the set of 21 into two sets. If you do 21 in a row, it's called unbroken. And unbroken rep schemes, if you force them on people, can be very potent training tools and can be used in a design of themselves. But in an analysis perspective, you can look at if they do them unbroken, there's not that many things you can do to change those two movement patterns other than the efficiency of the actual movement so if it's like a pull-up and they're doing strict pull-ups then making them faster by doing kipping or if they're doing kipping pull-ups you can make them faster by doing butterflies which are skill adaptation things and like i talked about before those skill adaptation things should be coached

or it should be learned. They're not necessarily in the program design. I can't say, you know, one butterfly pull-up on the one second for 10 seconds to get people to do 10 in a row. I mean, I could write that if they don't know how to do butterfly pull-ups. It's just, you know, it's just words.

So that's technique and maybe mobility work that should be handled on an in-person basis, hopefully with a coach at their home gym in their town. Yeah, something like that. And again, it's not a mandatory skill that people should have that they have to be able to do butterfly pull-ups. Now, it could be a limiter in some workouts. If you're doing a total of 100 reps and you're doing kipping pull-ups and other people are doing butterfly,

the speed of those 100 is gonna be dramatically different, even if you're doing them all in the same schemes. Like you do 20 and come off and 20 and come off and 20 come off and the person next to you does that same repetition scheme they're probably going to be faster with the same rest times because the actual work is being done faster so that skill just needs to be developed either with or without a coach outside of the program design just like you would learn to do double unders. So if you're going into your group training program and the workout of the day is thrusters and burpees and box jumps, and you

walk in and you're like, oh, I know I need to work on double unders today. And you take your rope out and you start doing things. That's not your workout. That's just something you're doing for skill development to make yourself better as an athlete. The workout is something completely separate. So as a coach of design, I'm only focusing on the design. I'm not focusing specifically on the development of skills. I'm focusing a little bit on that when they become the major limitation. But it's never my number one priority for someone.

And if it is, I outsource the development of that skill. I find a coach that I trust that can do that and pay them, you know, or the athlete pays them however much their one-on-one sessions are to work that and develop that because those skills need to be developed. So someone really wants to fix their technique. They're not calling you. They need to do that with somebody else. If they want a program written for them, that's what you do. Yeah. So if they do want technique, they're probably living within a five mile radius of me because they got to see me in person. I wouldn't advise anyone to do technical work with any coach, no matter how well uh how much notoriety they have if the main goal of your program is technique development unless you have a knowledge base where you can

comprehend those things from a distance um because if something you know let's say olympic lifting and somebody says oh your hips rise too fast stay too far over the bar, you don't scoop well enough. If you don't know what that means, it's going to be really hard to kind of do that stuff on your own without oversight. You might be learning worse patterns over time. So I always just say four skills, work with someone in person. If you have somebody that you really trust that is working with you in person on program design best case scenario if you don't have that or if your gym doesn't offer that and you want that find a coach that you trust to design your program and then use your coach in person to help

guide you through that program and work on those skills with you yeah um that does sound pretty ideal yeah i mean that that yeah you're describing an ideal situation for sure. Cool. Yeah. So where was I in talking about the breakdown? So you went through a few things. You went through the four things that you could use to improve your fran time, if I heard you correctly. Okay, cool.

Transition time, squat time, or thruster time rather, pull-up time, and then energy system development. Okay. We skipped over energy systems. You talked a little bit about the pull-upsups and now we're getting into the thrusters. Okay, cool. The last thing before I move from... Well, I guess for chin-ups, it can be both strength and muscle endurance if people break them. It also could be energy systems that people need to come off to breathe or it could be

grip endurance so a lot of that you'll get from the comments and what people say when they finish the workout oh man in the set of 15 my I felt my forearm start to tighten up and then in the set of nine I was jumping up and doing singles it's just like I can barely even close my hands. So what a coach should hear from that is that muscle endurance in the grip or in the flexor chain is not adequate enough to supply energy in this mixed modal workout to allow the work to be done unbroken, which is very different from somebody that comes up and they're trying to do a pull up and they only get halfway up the halfway up and then fall off or they're kipping so violently that their hands rips and set 21 and

they're kind of swinging back and forth and losing their rhythm now we might talk about like lat or scapular strength and put them on a more structured strength program where they're doing eccentrics and jumping over the bar and lowering themselves down and then waiting those and then strict pull-ups and bent over rows and cuban presses and isolation work to work on that specifically um so you basically in the chin-ups you have speed of contraction which generally can be solved from going from strict to kipping to butterfly and making those butterfly more efficient you have strength which is generally in a crossfit gym without a lot of pulleys and you know odd implements you you really only have the pull-up bar and um the barbell or

dumbbells in a horizontal fashion for pulling to be able to work on that there's not an enormous amount of uh exercise selection that you can do to develop lat and scapular strength to assist in something like kipping pull-ups over we were talking the other day we were discussing the horizontal pulls talking about like sometimes you would prescribe a horizontal pull, but then they don't get that scapular retraction when they pull. They're doing the work of moving the weight, but in a poor manner, so you're not getting the result you're looking for. There's a technique on horizontal pulling where I talk about that in depth

if you want to see what that looks like. Perfect. Money. Problem solved. Yeah, we what that looks like. Perfect. Perfect. Problem solved. Yeah, we're so on point. Awesome. Yeah, so watch that video if somebody prescribes horizontal pulling

because I see and have a very hard time coaching the technique of horizontal pulling, especially because it's very common in everyday people now to have shoulders rolled forward and internal rotation in the arms. So when they get horizontal, it stays like that and makes it difficult to pull properly horizontal. I think it's tough for people too, because they can't see it.

They're like, they're like, what? And they're like turning around trying to see it. And it's like, no, no, no, just put your shoulder blades together. Yeah, just do this. And it's a much harder thing to grasp when people don't naturally have that awareness of what's happening in their upper back. So this is a few of the things that you're looking for when you're watching this workout as an assessment. You're looking to see if they fall off because they can't hold on because of their grip or if they're simply not strong enough to do any more pull-ups or if their hips fatigue and so they can't get any momentum on their kip or on and on and on. You're looking for that weakness is what you're saying? Yeah, for sure. So when I find that

limitation, the program design is different for each one of those individual things. So if somebody has, you know, they can do 45 unbroken kipping pull-ups, but in Fran, their grip explodes and they can't hang on to the bar, I might not be prescribing that many kipping chin-ups to be able to improve Fran. Now, if I'm just talking about improving Fran, I might be doing farmer's walks, a lot of touch-and-go deadlifts, a lot of unbroken kettlebell swing sets, or forcing a lot of work on a fist with some sort of load. Now, a kettlebell is generally never going to be as heavy as the body hanging upside down or hanging against gravity.

Body upside down, that'd be weird. The body hanging against gravity on the grip. So generally, a good rule of thumb is that if you're doing farmer's walks, they should be heavy. And that requires some stabilization and scapular strength in and of itself. So if people are weak, you just need to know as a coach, as you're kind of going through that priority list on improving pull-ups, what it is that you have to do

to go from one to the next to the next to the next to the next, but they're not all the same. And that's what I look for with the limitations. 13.20 Scott Cardani Yeah, we get people in our, we do that six month muscle gain and people, the priority there is definitely getting stronger and bigger. We've seen some guys put up some better Metcon numbers like, oh, I PR'd this. It's like, well, if your thrusters, or say your pull ups, you know, you've gotten twice as strong on your pull-ups in the last three months.

All of a sudden, even if you've gained some weight, you can fly over the bar now. Or it'll seem that way. Especially when it's a short workout like that. Yeah, for sure. So you'll definitely see some carryover in a lot of people when you develop the strength that if you're doing a test like this, you might improve even though somebody with a science background might say, well, you're targeting a strength adaptation and this is a metabolic adaptation that you're going after. It doesn't make sense, but it's only because the limiter in that workout originally was something strength-based. So you could develop that. So when you know what the limit is, it's much easier to target it versus,

Hey, I'm getting you stronger because that's my goal is to get you stronger. And it's just a consequence. That's nice that you got better at something else. Yeah. And there was actually a period of time for me personally where I couldn't do pull-ups for about four months. So I just did a lot of rows. And then when I came back, my pull-ups felt amazing.

And I was just like, they were even better. I was like, I should probably pull up less and row more. So people who think about like, you gotta do more pull-ups to get better, pull-ups, not always the case. Yeah, it's not always the case. I just say that it's a complicated issue in terms of like, are they opens athletes or regionals or games? And how many do you anticipate them having to do in a singular workout? And, you know, because a skill in any sport is important to have, but you always should be continuing to develop that skill in different ways. And horizontal pulling is great for just shoulder protection in this sport.

So it allows people to have healthy shoulders for a long period of time. Yep. All right, we're going to take a break real quick. When we come back, we're going to talk over the thruster section of Fran. Here we go. Three. Oh, we're recording all that. Three.

Is it recording? It's recording. All the mics? Oh, you ready? Yeah, are all the microphones recording? Yeah, that's important. All right, here we go. Three, two, one, whee!

And we're back. We have Max Elhaj hanging out. We're talking about program design, and right now we are specifically talking about how to improve somebody's fran time, this theoretical person who has been assessed, and we are now dissecting the workout, figuring out where their weaknesses lie,

and then some things we might be able to do to shore them up. But first, make sure to go to barbellstroke.com and sign up for the newsletter. This guy is learning. This guy is learning. But first, they've already done that. If you didn't do it the first time, do it again. Yeah.

And if you've already done that, just go to iTunes, give us five stars, leave a positive comment. And Chris Moore will give you a hug. That's right. Through his... A virtual hug. Virtual hug. I don't know. I'm trying to fill in for Chris Moore and he's not here.

He claims that people feel all tingly when they get their virtual hugs. So if you're feeling all tingly right now, that's what's happening. Chris is thinking about you. All right. So we finished pull-ups. Yep. And now we're moving on to the thrusters. Yeah.

So with thrusters, as with any weightlifting movement, there's a bunch of different things that can come into play and a bunch of different limitations. The most obvious one, and I think probably the first one that most people should deal with, is mobility. And if most coaches look at you do thrusters, they should be able to tell, even without biomechanical background, whether or not the movement is efficient. And the best way to do that is to find some of the most, the best people doing whatever it is that you want to do and watch how they do it. And, you know, Rich Froning squats straight up and down, even in his thrusters, which allows him to breathe and go up and down and sequence from the top of one rep down to the bottom. And most people that are good at thruster-based workouts have very efficient squat mechanics. Some things will come into play that

might not allow people to ever look like that relative to what their limb length looks like. So if you have really long femurs and really long legs and a short torso, you might never look like that when you do thrusters. And then you just got to work with what you have to work with and just work on efficiency of movement with tracking. Go play a different sport. Yeah. Yeah. Or that. Go play volleyball or something. Yeah.

Yeah. The less your body mechanics fit that of a prototypical squatter, the more mobility you need. So if you do have long legs, long arms, and a short torso, then you need even more ankle mobility, even more thoracic extension, even more shoulder flexion, range of motion to do those movements correctly. I have seen some longer-limbed guys surprise me. I was like, no way he can snatch. And then they've got long femurs and the shorter torso and then they like yank it overhead and squat

it out. I'm like, wow. They just have great mobility. Yeah. And in the bottom of the squat, their knees are like eight feet in front of their toes. You're like, oh my God. Yeah. And then they stand up and you're like, all right, whatever. Looks good. But on a general basis, make sure the movement looks right because that's always first limitation, right? Efficiency of movement should be number one, which, again, is skill adaptation and not a program design necessarily fault. Then you have speed of the actual movement. Speed of the actual movement generally will only be if somebody's doing the reps unbroken again, because there's no real way

to make the thrusters faster if they're doing them then unbroken than making each actual thruster faster um to improve speed of contraction squat cleans depth jumps uh bounding jump switch lunges reverse shot tosses pretty much any speed development program that you go on will have a carryover effect in many other patterns of motion. So you might do a hip extension speed cycle and all of a sudden find out that your squat went up because you're activating fast twitch fibers and the body's complex and it's not only activating in like one pattern of motion when you're training. Doing something like throwing a med ball. Yeah. A lot of people would never connect those two.

Yeah. But it could happen. Yeah, for sure. So if you're doing the thrusters on Broken and Fran, and then I'm assuming if you're still working on it, it's a pull-up issue. But if you get the pull-ups taken care of and then you're still wanting to improve it, the speed of contraction of the actual thruster reps can be done with speed squatting and thruster training specifically in that movement and cycle time from top of one rep down to the start of the next rep some people have pressing strength

issues with regards to thrusters so they're like man i felt strong in the legs but i just was failing to lock them out at the top of my rep so so I had to stop and drop it. So a simple thing for those people, just do standing press work and tricep accessory work to be able to improve something like Fran. So that person might be in the gym doing bench presses, tricep extensions, weighted dips, and standing presses one day actually to improve Fran because that is the weakest link in the chain to develop that specific workout. Um, you have blood flow in the quads. A lot of people will, or really in the low back or the butt, a lot of people will get it localized in different places.

And some of that I found really hard to train. Um, When you constrict something at a high speed, a lot of times you're going to create more tension in the muscle and make it harder for looking for, which is more capillarization, better slow twitch fibers. If it's low back, usually sometimes it's a mobility issue and they're getting hyper-extended at the bottom that I might say, hey, you got to target your hips and try to get rid of some of your pelvic tilt. That's probably it with regards to the actual thruster. Then you have a combination of all of those with energy systems. So when I say energy systems, the comments like, oh man, I was just so hot and I felt

blood in my head and was disoriented. You know, it wasn't necessarily breathing heavy. Simple things like breath holding. That could be if somebody has poor squat mechanics and it forces them to constrict really tight, even though it's only 95 or 65 pounds and they're not able to breathe. And your blood pressure keeps going up because you're doing more and more work and the central nervous system just kind of gets overloaded and makes you stop, drop the bar, breathe, calm down,

blood pressure goes down and then your brain's like, okay, you're good to go. So little things like that, it takes a coach to decipher like, well, is that really an energy system limitation or is it movement or is it the actual squat mechanics or what is it? But you got to play with protocols over time to be able to deal with that. But for the most part, it's not toughness training. It's not beating people up

with volume to get them used to that feeling because the brain in the face of that kind of healing, it might adapt a little bit that it gets better at dealing with that, but it's not going to let your blood pressure get to a point where you have an aneurysm generally. So there is, which is where the central governor model of training comes from. It's Tim. Should I go into that?

we don't need to go into that. I was about to stop you. Okay. We're going off on a tangent. Sorry. Yeah. Not necessary But we're going off on a tangent there. Okay, sorry. Yeah, yeah. Not necessary. Okay.

And then respiration. If somebody's breathing out of control, you just need to, again, you think about, well, what's creating the respiration? Is it thrusters? If it's thrusters, is it mobility because they're getting bent over and their butt's getting scooted back and their chest is facing the ground or they're holding their breath and not able to breathe and their cycle time starts to slow down so then it's not really an energy system thing it's training the energy systems properly with good squat mechanics in the thrusters now if everything is perfect and somebody's like, I have great mobility, I can do 50 unbroken pull-ups and 50 unbroken thrusters at whatever the Fran weight is, and they still can't do well on Fran, then I'm they can't tolerate the fatigue substrates that come with lactate or they can't endure the they don't have lactic endurance, basically. And if I'm doing if I'm training those, I'm basically doing powerful intervals with a lot of rest recovery to allow each one of those sets of work added up to equal more volume than I would

be doing if I were doing frant we give an example of that like a specific example yeah so let's say somebody can do 50 unbroken thrusters and 50 unbroken pull-ups I might say you do five sets of 20 unbroken thrusters and 20 unbroken pull-ups and rest six minutes. Somebody who's powerful enough to do 50 unbroken and 50 unbroken of those two movements is probably going to need a good amount of rest. You know, if somebody can only do 10 unbroken, they're doing intervals of five and five, five minutes of rest might be a little overboard. So you have to titrate the rest relative to the response you're trying to get out of all of that work. But on a general basis, you're taking an amount of work and making it more powerful than the overall workout would be.

So if somebody is doing 45 reps and 45 reps in three minutes, you want to pick a rep scheme that they're doing. Maybe it's 10 and 10 that they can do. Well, I should do 15 and rep scheme that they're doing, maybe it's 10 and 10, that they can do, well, I should do 15 and 15 because that'd be a third. So they should be doing 15 and 15 and faster than a minute. So that means that they're training more powerfully than they're going to be doing the actual workout, so you're actually training them to be more powerful. And slowly you start to titrate the rest down, deload them, build their volume up and then retest it.

And that's all theoretical. And some people that works really, really well. And some people you're like, man, that's weird. I would have thought you had done better based on the training volume. And then you have to just cross off the other potentials. Did you have a good night of sleep last night? Did you eat today like normal? Did you get in a fight? What was your training look leading up to this? And if you can cross all those things off the table, you need to go back to your

original plan and restructure it. How often do you have to do that? How often do you have to reassess and restructure? Yeah, so test, retest is athlete specific. The more beginner, the more the, I call it the organism, but that kind of takes the person out of it. So let's say the more the person is going to change. Reading too much. You're going to start doing biology textbooks. Chris would have tried to kill you. I feel like you need to have a real thick accent when you say the organism yeah it would fit my last name but uh yeah so so the more the person's going to change

on a regular basis so a limitation model should always change because as you're training weaknesses at some point limitations should change if you're doing the right things some people will you know let's say an ex-football player is 250 pounds super super powerful pretty tight and not that mobile not that great at gymnastics stuff but can do anything under a minute really really well if that guy wants to compete in the sport of CrossFit, his priorities of respiration and gymnastics volume and longer workouts are always going to be a priority. It doesn't mean you don't still train his strengths and do, you know, let's say. He's still going to squat. Yeah, he's still going to squat.

But it's just not like you have 375 pound power clean when you walk in the door. Yeah. Am I really? Don't worry about it. Yeah. And I'm like, you walk in the door. Yeah. Don't worry about it. Yeah. And I'm like, okay, that's great. Yeah. Cool. Do it once a week, once every two weeks.

Just make sure that it stays within the elite range. Maintain it and then work on everything else. Yeah. So, you know, but as you're training most people, especially beginners, they're rapidly changing. You're like, you put them on strength work and they put 20 pounds on in four weeks. And then they're like, oh, I don't do as well in longer stuff now. And I'm like, yeah, well, physics will tell you that. You're doing 20 pounds more work with everything that you do.

If you're doing a 20-minute workout that has 400 reps of something, you're doing a lot more work with your body so now you might need to start training some of the long stuff and make sure you don't lose all the gains you got in the strength and you know with crossfit it's very complicated because it's not just strength and endurance it's strength endurance mobility muscular endurance skill development and then under fatigue and with an infinite number of tests don't forget neon so you never know what's being tested so you have to come up with like patterns of things that you see in most people and in most beginners you know you have skills as something that need to be developed, which again, is not a

remote program design thing. And you should have a coach for, you have strength that is an issue, even in strength, really only up to an issue if your target is something that requires you to be strong. So if you say, I want to do well in the opens, do you want to make it to the regionals? No, not really. It's not really like something I'm ever going to be able to do. Okay, well, based on the last year's test, the heaviest things that we saw are really not that heavy. Now, you still, if you only snatch 95 pounds as a guy or 60 pounds as a girl, strength is definitely a major priority. But it's not like at some point you're going to develop a requisite level of strength

where you're like, okay, well, you're good enough. Like if you want to be a regional level athlete, your 185 pound snatches probably needs to go up a lot. But to be good at the opens, I'm not going to like prioritize only that unless there's other things that people want. Because some people want to say, I want to do well in the opens,

but I want my Olympic lifts to go up, or I want to do well in the opens, but I want to be able to bench 400 pounds. Then, like, okay, well, strength is always a limitation for that until we get that goal, and then relative to the opens, we have gymnastics, breathing, box jump capacity, all the things that we might see in the open come up so having written thousands of programs what are the most common patterns

you've seen for both men and women what's very common yeah so for men um actually i'll start with women for women it's uh upper body strength Generally, now as more elite females are coming to work with me, you're starting to see them with really good squat, deadlift, power clean, power snatch, clean, and power clean numbers. Where they're usually struggling is jerk. And if they have really good mechanics of the jerk and they worked with a good coach that's not an issue but push press press handstand push-ups muscle-ups chest-to-bar pull-ups toes-to-bar burpees and high volume actually is a surprising one a lot of people even at an elite level you you'll see they fall to the ground. They push their upper body up because it's a lot lighter than holding your midline and pushing your whole body up. And then they jump their hips and do a back extension and stand up.

That's what I do. I actually just go elbows, then hands. I just do the worm. I go down and then come back up touching my hands you're not the standard right yeah yeah so uh so yeah for females upper body relative strength um it's it's part of the sport that you have to equal the amount of work that a male's doing with their upper body and females are going to be behind the eight ball on that so it's obviously going to be a pattern that i see very frequently and you know how much strength work each female can tolerate is going to be different to who that person is and what their

joint structure is like and what their training background is like but that's usually a big one and then uh the short-term power um a lot of them whether it's what they did for their background or just the physiology of who they are uh they're pretty good in the longer stuff like the metcons under lighter loads with high respiration rates they're comfortable they feel fine they fine. They don't freak out. They don't lose their cool. Their pacing is relatively good. It's when you tell them, you have to go. This workout's three minutes long. You've got to beat the next person.

They finish, they're like, ooh, that was tough. And you're like, why couldn't you go faster? I don't get it. What happened? Yeah, and they just literally don't have the training background and the nervous system to allow them to do that. So, you know, for those people, a lot of times it's strength work that lets that. Those people, huh?

Those people. Those people. It's strength work that helps develop that. For the guys, what's the most common thing? Is there a common thing? Yeah, I'd say for the guys, you have them split up in two categories. You have the powerhouses and you have the enduros. And I'd say it's probably equivalent. Most people that are fitness freaks, let's say before even the sport of CrossFit or before CrossFit was on the radar for most people, you have the people at the Globo gym who are either running or doing triathlons or hiking

or mountain biking or doing the endurance-based activities. And then you have the meatheads, right? And that's kind of how it went for a long time. There were the people that went to that were both gym rats and some people who were like playing racquetball and running and biking and swimming and then you had the other people that were like lifting weights or you know ex-football players um the hybrid um has been starting to develop so i think you're what i see as the pattern is those people that are getting into the sport are coming from both backgrounds. Ironically, the current elite had done something that allowed their training to hybrid the two. They either, oh, I played water polo and then I lifted weights and power lifted, or I did gymnastics and power lifting and then triathlons.

And they started to train both of the systems independently and just happened when it came time to put them in the middle. They already did all their training correct leading up. They already had a lot of volume. Yeah, they had the volume of both sides already built up. So they just needed to put it together. They're like, oh, well, I can breathe. And I do have a lot of capillaries and my mitochondria works well and i'm strong and explosive and uh you know i have good

strength capacity so i could lift heavy stuff up over and over and over and over again like strong man or whatever the case is and that's where your elite is so it's very rare to to get that person to walk in my door but when they do i'm ecstatic because I'm like, okay, this is somebody that, you know, is going to flourish, uh, really fast. When you have somebody who's on the wings that needs to develop either pure power and strength because they are enduring or pure endurance, because they're really powerful. Those adaptations on a general basis, just take a little bit longer to develop. And you look at some of the strongest guys out there, like, oh, how long have you been training? Oh, 15 years.

It's like, oh, no wonder you squat 600 pounds. Do you find it's quicker to do one or the other if you have an endurance background? It's faster to get strong? Or if you have a strength background, is it faster to gain endurance? Which one in the ideal world would you rather be coming in? Yeah. I don't think there's one that adapts to the other faster because I don't necessarily think that all the people that are doing one or the other are built to do one or the other. So some people that spent their whole lives strength training right actually on

the inside may not be that innately powerful yeah they're talking about me i was not supposed to be a strength athlete yeah yeah those those uh that's the characteristic is a great thing to get in a in a crossfit setting because they did all of the hard work in the thing that they were weaker at already so you just got to keep it there as you develop the thing that they're going to be a fast responder to i actually just read a really good research article about genetic adaptation to aerobic training. And if genetics was one of the number or was the number one variable in dictating how well somebody responded to aerobic training, which I guess is kind of like common sense, but it's nice to hear, you know, science come out and say like, well, you know, obviously uh this is this is happening in a lab setting and we're seeing that like some people are just innately better at getting more

enduring and some people no matter what they do or how hard they work are going to have a ceiling that's lower than other people um so if you get somebody with a low innate ceiling that spent 10 years developing because maybe they didn't want to be skinny so they spent 20 years putting on mass and getting strong and then they come to your door and they're like I want to be good at CrossFit now and I'm like man your backgrounds and strength training it's gonna take a lot to like you know get you to be good at 5k runs and half marathon rows and all this stuff and in four months you're like wow you completely changed and the same thing happens on the flip side right

somebody like big bone structure you look at them you're like really man you did triathlons but they're kind of slender and then you do a little bit of strength training and they like put on 15 pounds of mass and you're like wow you don't even look like the same person anymore but it's because they developed the whatever it was that they were innately not supposed to do they developed it at a pretty high level um and then the other thing they're genetically just faster at responding to so i'd like to get that person if i don't get somebody in the middle i'd like to get somebody that's on a wing yeah that they're not really supposed to

be but they're not to be the opposite yeah he's got to show up their strengths real quick and yeah and they're good you know they're like go about fixing their weaknesses for the next five years yeah for sure and you know I tell some people after a couple months of training that you know we have and I think a coach's job is to help set athletes up for setting realistic and attainable goals for success and long-term development because if an athlete comes and says i want to make regionals and then a coach in his head is like there's no chance like you're not even close come on like the sport's growing you finish 400th and like

you're a beginner and these guys have been doing this for years and have coaches and lifestyles to support it and you say yes at the end of the year when they don't do it and their dreams collapse like it's partially on your conscious for not saying like no i'm not saying like you should be mean to them and be like you suck you'll never make it but setting them up to say like look well you finish 400th let's reach towards your potential but let's set objective measures that say okay well if you want to be good and let's say you're weaker let's have you improve your snatch by 30 pounds and improve the number of pull-ups you can do by 10 reps and improve this by this and this by this and this

by this and then do your best in the open and let's see where you fall when you use a you know a variable that you can't control as your barometer for success and they have this really high level goal that might not be attainable it's just really hard for the athlete to stay motivated and and want to work hard long term um i you know i i know i probably get yelled at by some people where they're like set your goals high and shoot for the stars and then if you fall and i'm like i don't know man like i don't know no matter how much training i do i'm not going to beat rich off the podium and i don't think that's an emotional issue or me you know being not realistic i just don't think that i have the genetics to do it and athletes should know that doesn't mean that I'm not going to train to be my best. It just means that when I structure my training

program and my goals and how I measure my success is going to be dictated based off all that. Yeah, I like to base my goals off of my own performance, not off of what someone else did. It's like, well, he did it that fast, so I guess I got to now. And then making goals, setting goals that are attainable, I think is very important as well. And it's really not an athlete's job to know what is attainable. Because they shouldn't be spending all their time looking at data and analyzing results of other people and all this stuff. Unless they have aspirations to be a coach at one point.

Or unless they're in charge be a coach at one point or unless they're in charge of their own training program. So if you're writing your own training program and you want to be the champ, you better be studying the people that are in contention to be the champ to know where you have to be in certain tests and where you're weak and where you're strong and where to deviate your time. If not, and you hire a coach, it's their job. And if you say, I want to win the games and I say,

I don't know if that's realistic, especially not in a short timeframe, maybe that's a longer term plan. And the athlete sincerely believes that they can do it and they don't trust the coach, then that relationship right off the bat shouldn't be started. And he should find a coach that's going to believe in his goal and his mission. and if you know it if down the road those two get in a fight because he didn't make it or that guy might make it and then call me up and be like hi i told you idiot and i'm like all right well i'm sorry i just made the wrong judgment call at the wrong time but it is what it is here let's i want to change subjects real quick. A common question that I get, and I got this over Twitter a few days ago, was since you're

very well read, I'm going to direct it to you, is what are some of your favorite resources for new CrossFit coaches? Give me a beginner, maybe an intermediate book or seminar, and then maybe some more advanced stuff since you've read and watched so many different books and so many different products so number one i'd say barbell shrug.com shameless plug i like your style well first of all i you know i know that the the governing body when they when they put out a lot of their CrossFit HQ, when they put out a lot of their education, it's for mass consumption.

So there's a lot of people that take it. But whenever you do anything, you should at least start at the source. So you should take the CrossFit Level 1 if you start to learn. You should learn from the people that created the system. You should learn about all the movements, what they believe. Now, it doesn't mean you have to take whatever they say as the word or as the absolute truth, but it's your starting point for disseminating information.

So you should always start at the source. And then, I'd honestly say that the internet is one of the best resources that you should use for any strength and conditioning. But you need to create an equal bias in whatever you go through and things that are going to be positive towards what you believe and then are going to refute that same idea. So if you read about strength training and let's say a prominent weightlifting coach starts talking about strength training and says, oh, if you want to get good at squatting and want to get strong, the only way to do it is clean and jerk and snatch and back squat and front squat with no wraps and blah, blah, blah. You should listen to an... I know some guys like that.

You should... Who are you talking about? I'm not going to name names names but go ahead and keep going uh you should read an equal amount of literature on the opposite end that says well if you want to get strong you should use knee wraps and uh conjugate method and chains and bands and variation and whatever so that you can see both sides of the spectrum and then start to play with them first with yourself as a guinea pig or with your athletes or with your coaches. And then where I would send you. I'm going to fill in for Chris Moore real quick and say that's just good life advice for anything.

Be it strength training or not. You should look at both sides. Cool. You're welcome, Chris. sides cool and then I'd say where I would send you for information is relative to what you really want to accomplish out of this now if you want to become the best athlete that you could possibly be I would say that you want to limit the amount of technical knowledge that you get. I don't really have any science or anything to support that, but I've seen that a lot of the best athletes that I've coached

really don't want to know what I'm doing or why I'm doing it. They won't want to know the negative downsides of having sugar when they have cookies, but they know they feel better when they do it, so they do it. They're way more instinctive and way less intellectual. I found that the most intellectual people about their own training over time limit themselves as athletes and then become wonderful coaches. I would totally agree with that. I overthink all the stuff that I do, but I can coach everyone better. I feel like I've gotten worse because I always have an excuse about why,

why I'm not, why I shouldn't do something. I'm like, well, that wouldn't really make sense for me to do that. Doug and I have talked about this many times. Like there's been times where we were training for anything. And it's like,

I wish I didn't know this because that guy over there in the corner who is just training his nuts off doesn't know shit. And he's going to do better than me because he's training his nuts off. And the whole time I'm like in between sets, like contemplating like training theory and shit. And I'm like, I'm like, should I put five more grams of sugar in my pre-workout shake? Because I feel kind of tired right now. Maybe, maybe I should stop. Maybe I shouldn kind of tired right now. Maybe I should stop. Maybe I shouldn't do this right now. I didn't really sleep very good last night.

And I got all these excuses. But 10 years ago, all I thought it was about was just effort and just grind it out. And if I was tired, it's because I was being a pussy. That's right. And I was in really good shape 10 years ago compared to now. Same story. I have a philosophy that a lot of that that we're talking about is the difference between belief and doubt. The smarter you get and the more knowledgeable that you get about things, the more you're doubting what you're doing. When you believe in what you do, you're just much more likely to succeed. Most people that you talk to and you're like,

what are you going to do in five years that actually make it? They believed that in five years they were going to do what they're doing. If you ask Rich, are you going to win the games next year? He believed it when he said it probably the year before he made it and won and then the next year. And champions just, they have this belief. And a champion doesn't necessarily need to be number one. It might just be like, oh, I wanted to make the games.

Champion at large. But I think a coach should instill belief in an athlete, but I think some of that is just innate. What people's background is and their self-confidence and all of that stuff or their driving force in life. When it's belief in an athletic setting, I think it allows them to succeed a lot faster and without, they don't think too much about like,

oh I got injured and maybe I was doing something wrong, I gotta look back. They just go forward, right? And then just keep moving. And I think that's a really important and missed aspect of athletes. And a lot of times I beg them, they ask me all these questions.

I'm like, please stop asking. Like, do you wanna be a coach? Do you wanna be an athlete? I wanna be an athlete. Then please stop asking. Now, it doesn't mean don't educate yourself. It means educate yourself up to a certain level so that you can be competent as an athlete. But don't educate yourself past that point because then you're going to start to try to coach yourself and coach yourself potentially in a wrong direction.

Right. Like you might feel, oh, I feel bad today and I'm going to just take it easy. But maybe an outside observing coach might say, yeah, he feels bad today, but he's supposed to feel bad today. So we're going to give him more volume for a couple of days and then deload him for a week or something. Like they know just enough to screw it all up. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

You guys sent him that article from Dan John called Coach Said So. You ever seen that before? No, no, I didn't. I'll look it up. There's a lot of value in that where just coach said so, just go do it. Don't overthink it just follow follow the directions of the coach and you're not you're not supposed to think about it your job is just to do yeah i've had a lot of

athletes they're like man i feel really bad today what's wrong like nothing yeah you're you're in the third week loaded up like you should feel not great because next week we're taking a big break yeah we're gonna unload and you're gonna feel amazing at the end of that but we're gonna dig a hole first yeah for sure um and then for coaches i'd say that um academia is a good place to start um you should read research you should read textbooks you should know a little bit about the endocrine system a little bit about the nervous system. If if you want to be a coach and some of the things that I talk about are like, wow, that's way over my head. I don't know what he's talking about. Go get a book in it or go on the Internet.

Wikipedia is an amazing resource and you should be able to disseminate information good and bad on the Internet again. And if you read Wikipedia and then you read 50 other resources and you're like oh man these are all like contrary then just do some more research find an expert find an endocrinologist find a friend who knows somebody who's endocrinology and just start to get a baseline uh education and all that you should have an at least a base level knowledge in all of the disciplines of crossfit so power lifting gymnastics weight lifting endurance training um anything else that i'd add maybe depth jumping and uh and any plyometric work but that's more for like a program designed to keep people safe in crossfit versus it is improving the vertical because i don't think you really can improve the vertical at a high level in crossfit because there's too much

volume um but that's just a personal thing that i've seen um at a high level now you could do it at a you know five workouts per week level and improve almost all characteristics of fitness but at the highest level i don't necessarily see the high end power coming out of athletes that much. And then private certifications, right? OPT has them, Barbell Shrugged has education, Czech Institute, Polycom Institute, Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, they're all out there. A lot of them are expensive. And as you start to take them and get into them, you're going to see a lot of the same knowledge. But until you're in them and you're learning from those people, then you don't know what's good information and what's bad

information. And then more at that point is better. The first courses I started taking, I sat in there and I probably retained about 10% of what was said the other 90% all I did was take notes about topics that I needed to research because I wasn't up to speed with other people that were doing what I wanted to do they were coaching and I wanted to coach and they knew more than me I thought I need to know all of that stuff because I can't be worse than them if I want to get to that level or better so I rent and read books and all of that stuff because I can't be worse than them if I want to get to that level or better so I've read and read books and all of those aspects and then slowly you're going to start to know like well where do I want to kind of niche together do I want to be a strength coach or do I

want to be a crossfit coach or an educator or gym owner or group training design person and advanced program design is a lot of science um it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have all the science to be great at program design but you should have a basis of all of it to be um solid and some people just hate that so if that's the case just don't go down that uh that path just think of something. And maybe you're a movement expert and you work on movement efficiency and mobility and soft tissue work and become a massage therapist. And you just kind of find your path within coaching. So I guess from a resource perspective, that's kind of how I target people. Athlete, coach, general fitness enthusiast, and read everything you can. I'd say probably stay away from courses other than if they're just like entry level and basic just to get a feel for it. But I wouldn't say

waste your money on really expensive courses if you're not really going to use it to give back or you don't have this like thing in the back of your head that says, maybe I'm going to do this at a high level or maybe I'm going to be a coach. If you're just enthusiastic about it, there's a ton of books, a ton of online resources, a ton of podcasts, and you'll get plenty of information from all of those to keep you enthusiastic

and fitness for as long as you want. Yeah, I'd keep on finding more books to read. Yeah. I've only been looking for books for 16 years. Yeah. But I'm a more books to read. Yeah. Yeah. I've only been looking for books for 15, 16 years. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm a slow reader. I got to sound it all out.

It's tough, man. That's right. Batteries dying. Batteries dying. We got a close up shot. Batteries dying. I will end this when I want to, CTP. You're going to end it no matter what when the battery dies. All right, guys. We're going. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. in a couple months or however long to have the website up. But if you want anything in the meantime, my email is mynamecoach at gmail.com. So M-A-X-E-L-H-A-G-C-O-A-C-H at gmail.com. Hit me up, questions, consultations, coaching, anything you need.

Cool, sounds good. If you're watching this episode right away, right when it comes out, then the six-month muscle gain challenge just opened up registration. So if you want to get on this- Like two days ago, right? Yeah, if this comes out on a Wednesday

and registration opened up on Monday. You're probably too late. You might be too late. It might be sold out at this point, but probably not. So if you want to check that out, go to muscle.barbellbellstrug.com and you can read all about the muscle gain challenge if you're watching this in the future uh depending on what time of year it is uh the program the program may be closed uh may be closed uh for a short period of time until we open up the next

one so either way go there and either if it's open you can sign up if it's not open then you can put your name on the waiting list and we'll let you know when the next program is coming up. If you get on the waiting list, don't you get some kind of preferential something? You get a little gift, a free gift from me to you. I know. I send you a very, very heartfelt video to educate you on how to gain muscle mass. So go to muscle.bobbershug.com, put your name and email in the box, and you can get a cool video. All right, guys, don't forget to follow us or like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter,

and make sure to sign up for that newsletter so we can inform you of all the stuff that we forget to talk about here. Oh, yeah, real quick, we will have Brian McKenzie on in a couple weeks. And if you're in the Memphis area on September 22, 2013, we will be doing our first live audience podcast. So look forward to that. You should be able to find that on the barbellshrug.com website under events. Thanks for coming out, Mike. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Hans.