Barbell Shrugged - 88- American Weightlifting w/ Catalyst Athletic's Greg and Aimee Everett

Episode Date: October 30, 2013

Snatch, Clean & Jerk.  When it comes to these lifts Greg is one of the most respected minds in the sport.  We traveled to Sunnyvale, CA to visit Greg's gym Catalyst Athletics to interview him and his wife Aimee.

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we interview Greg and Amy Everett of Catalyst Athletics. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe with Doug Larson and Chris Moore hanging out in Sunnyvale, California with Amy Everett. If you're not familiar with what she does,

she's a weightlifting coach and athlete at Catalyst Athletics. Can you give us a Oh, wait. Before we get into Amy's biography. You almost skipped it. Hold that thought. Make sure to go to barbellstroke.com. Sign up for the newsletter.

Doing cool stuff all the time. We're not going to talk about it here, but we'll email you. So sign up for that. All right. So Amy, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? How did you get into weightlifting? And what brought you to this point in your life right now, standing here with us? Right now, here today?

That's right. Well, when I was a young, I'm like almost 100 in weightlifting years. So really long time ago, I was playing volleyball and my then club volleyball coach sent me to this guy. You may know him. His name's Mike Bergner. Oh, do you know who he is? Yeah, I do. He's so famous. I know.

He's like Jay-Z famous now. Like really famous. But he, I know he, um, so I met him when I was just a little girl, 19, a long time ago. And I, you know, weightlifting wasn't how it is today with like all these coaches and, you know, the popularity of it that CrossFit has brought and stuff. And so he just looked at me and said, Hey, see that, what that guy's doing right there. That's what I want you to do. That's what you have to do. That's how I learned. And I like, I never in my entire life lifted a weight. I played three varsity sports

in high school all four years but we didn't never went to a weight room and so I was like wow this is kind of cool so I turned down volleyball and I started weightlifting turned down you weren't you weren't built for volleyball anyway well I have a really good vertical jump so it's like a wow look at this short little girl then whoosh out of nowhere here i go jumping in you have a good vertical jump now or you did then too i did then but i'm weightlifting no i i've always had hops oh word yeah and actually funny about that is i just was at my cousin's house last weekend and she had a picture from her wedding when I was only, I think 17 and I was catching the bouquet and my feet were like at everybody's waist and I was catching the bouquet

like far above everybody. My elbows were like in their face. Yeah. I have it on my phone. I sent it, I sent it to Greg. I was like, look. Um, so that's how I was able to play volleyball. Cause I am sure. We didn't even mention Greg yet. Greg, come on yeah we we came oh i see what you did so did you turn so on this level was this turning down a chance to play yeah i was gonna play volleyball for college wow and um i decided you know i don't really want to go to college you say you know, you know what? Maybe like, fuck this, you know? I was like, fuck this shit. Yes. I'm going to stay here with Coach Bergner, and I'm going to do this barbell shit.

And so I did. And I think like two months later, I qualified for junior nationals. You found your fucking passion, didn't you? I did. And then that's it. That's what I did. I lifted for a long time.

That's your heart. How do you now? I mean, am I allowed to ask that? I just celebrated the sixth reunion of my 30th birthday. It sounds like a lot of math. Yeah. So I lifted and then I took a break. I took five years off. I got knocked up.

I went to college and got a couple of master's degrees. Oh, snap. Yeah. And then I got knocked up. I went to college and got a couple of master's degrees and yeah. And then I, um, started lifting again and I came back much wiser and stronger and more mature. And what are the degrees in, uh, human behavior psychology? Oh shit. We're dealing with one of you types now. Yeah. you know, I'm a crazy person. If you follow her on Twitter, now, like, oh, it just makes sense. It doesn't make sense now?

Yeah. Yeah. That's why my Twitter handle is called Amy's Two Cents with a number two. A-I-M-E-E, number two, cents. I have something to say

about everything. I'm going to look you up right now. I'm going to follow you. Ah, yes. And I want to see what your two cents are. I'm like 990,000 people away from a million followers. I'm super close. Did I just leave you speechless? So few times. Not very often. No. So how'd you meet Greg? Coach Bergner.

I had actually met him like two or three times before I actually realized I was meeting him. I kind of sail through life not paying a whole lot of attention to people. Like, I'm always the one that's like, hi, nice to meet you. As they're saying, nice to see you again. Like, fuck, I just blew it. I studied how to do this better in psychology. Yeah. I'm really bad. So y'all have met several times and then, yes, I did. He had met you several times, but eventually you met him eventually. Well, he had started emailing me to help me at that time. I was trying to be like little weightlifter. And Coach Bergner says, you have to email Greg Everett.

And he'll help you with your diet and stuff. And so he started emailing me. I'm like, who is this Greg Everett guy? Who's this jerk? Yeah. And then I found out that I had met him a couple times. So I had to Google him and try to find his picture to see who he was. And you said, oh, he's handsome. He'd been coaching for a while.

At the time, he lived in Chico, and I lived in Southern California. And he just fell madly in love with me over the internet. He's in his office going, okay, that's not how that happened. He moved down to Bonzel to where coach Bergner is. And, um, he's, he came down there to learn from him, but also to be with me, of course. And that was like eight years ago. And then, you know, at the time I was still finishing up my master's degree in forensics and i was at the time i was gonna work for the fbi that was like my whole future to be a profiler did you watch a lot of csi no i never did but you know the funny thing i did my thesis on the csi

effect what's that well let me tell you what that. That's like when fools like y'all go. We're not going to talk about weightlifting here. When you watch NCIS or CSI or whatever, and you think, wow, look at all this stuff they do in an hour. It's so cool. And then you become a juror, and it really messes up the system now. Because people are like, well, what do you mean you don't have his fingerprints in an hour you know and it just it like messes up what murderers and shit and so that's why every case has dna evidence but i never watched it before and they pay for it every time yeah like like you plug in your fingerprint and and then like in two minutes you know you have

the whole history of the guy it's just kind of real life. If you haven't broken a law and been arrested before, your fingerprints aren't on file anyway. Have y'all got the new iPhone? Because it has a fingerprint scanner and now the FBI is going to have all of our fingerprints. Seriously. I was in the military so they already have my fingerprints. And he's been arrested.

You're probably already on all the lists. I'm on a lot of lists. You're on a lot of lists right now the NSA is like tired of you yeah they that's why the TSA always searches your bag they're not they're not even like tracking me anymore they're just like we'll just fuck with them as much as possible

like we're not gonna really pinpoint any specific thing not anymore you're probably in the same boat with your twitter account NSA is all over you're probably in the same boat with your Twitter account I can't say all over you yeah I'm a they probably sit there and laugh hysterically but they wait for me to tweet about something important like a bomb threat or something you know so but our show just got flagged Anyway, so I was going to school to be the FBI, and now I'm just a really educated fucking gym owner.

It's awesome. So at what point did you guys, were you part of the process of opening up Catalyst Athletics, or did Greg already have that kind of football rolling? No, what had happened was he had moved down to San Diego from Chico. I'm sorry, I'm getting over something. And at the time, he owned the gym with Rob Wolf, which was the fourth ever CrossFit affiliate in the history of the world,

the original CrossFit NorCal. And he moved down there. Well, he ended up selling out his share of the gym. So he kind of took the performance menu. Rob and Nikki kept the gym. And then we kind of, you know, he kind of developed Catalyst Athletics as like a training business and stuff. And then we just kind of took that further.

And at the time we were training out, you know, coaching people. Well, I had my real job and then I was coaching people out of coach Bergner's gym. And it just kind of, we just realized, you know, taking with him, writing the books and doing all the other stuff that we wanted to do, we needed our own space. So the performance menu stuff, it was just selling subscriptions to that online. Right. We did all of that in our, in our living room. Okay. Yeah. And you know, that was the business at that time. We did some training, but it was mainly like the online presence that we were trying to develop. So I didn't realize you guys were doing performance menu before catalyst. Yes, we were. The performance menu has been, been around longer, you know, cause he and Rob,

it started that long time ago. Um, and we just, it's kind of like, you know, cause he and Rob had started that long time ago. Um, and we just, it's kind of like, you know, with anything, you need your own space, you need your own office. Um, we, we were outgrowing our living room. We were shipping everything from our dining room. Um, there's no separation between work and everything else. Exactly. You know, we would be watching burn notice. And when a commercial came on, we'd like run into the office and answer emails. And so... Y'all gotta talk to Jason Kaliefman. Does he like Burn Notice?

No. Just watch the episode. Okay. So we decided we wanted to open our own jib so Greg could have like a lab, so to speak. Right. And I didn't want to live down there anymore. And we had been coming up here because he was born here his family still his dad still lives in the same house he was

lived in his whole life and so i was like i want to move up there and let's go and we move like a month later and open the gym so you guys have the performance menu you have you got tons of content online videos and articles and then you got books and dv and you guys have, you know, pictures of freaking awesome. It's not even funny. It's overflowing. Yeah. You guys, you guys got a lot going on. Like how involved are you in creating all that content? What do you, what do you, what side of that do you handle? Um, I handle, well, you know, Greg is like the mastermind behind everything. We, we finally have someone that's like in control of the performance menu, doing the editing and, and finding subscribers.

I mean, I'm sorry, contributors for us and stuff. I handle like all the business part of the gym and the business. And Greg really handles all of the online presence stuff. You know, he does the website from scratch. I don't know if any of you know this, but we don't have a web guy. Like Greg is the web guy. He built that website, which is like one of the most amazing sites. We get, you know, emails, endless emails wanting to know who our web guy is. It's great. He built, he coded that all himself.

He does all of that content himself. Um, you know, he self-taught or is that a thing? No, it's self-taught. He just learns and, you know, he just gets it. And I think that he's such a perfectionist that he won't allow anybody to come in and take over. Rob's always like, you guys need to hire people to take this stuff over. But, you know, he wants it done his way. It's just like the movie that's coming

that I think he'll talk about. He's doing it all himself. He did all the filming himself, all the editing himself, all in there on his Mac, just doing it, just it all by himself. Sounds like he's working too hard. He does. He works a lot. He's amazing. Damn. Which, you know, it's, I've been able, we I've hired an, I have, we have like an administrative assistant who also coaches here, but we've kind of turned her into like our administrative assistant who does a lot of the, you know,

tedious stuff that needs to get done or like the grunt work. I came here cause I'm really excited to coach and like work with athletes. Cool, cool, cool. You want to come over here? We got a stack and shit. Seriously. You know what? You want to go get my lunch? I do send her to get my lunch a lot but i always buy hers too but we've actually taught her now to do the layout of the performance menu so gregor i don't have to do it so we've tried to free up a lot of time which is good because then um you know we can step away from the gym and not worry that everything's going to crumble. I want to talk about weightlifting.

Okay. Enough of this business stuff. Yeah, business shit, man. Let's all retire. I want to retire so bad. So from business or from weightlifting? Both. I just want to stop doing anything.

What's your biggest accomplishment? Accomplishments. Accomplishments. As an athlete? Besides that righteous catching of the thing at the wedding when you were 17. That was probably the best thing I've ever done.

You know, I hate to talk about myself as an athlete because I'm very humble about it. Get your horn out and toot it. I don't feel like I have been as revolutionary in the sport as I could have been. And I don't feel, I feel that there's much other females in this country that are more deserving. I'm kind of like always a bridesmaid, never a bride. You know, I've, I've always been

like the alternate on the world team but but never on the world team or if I'm on the world team like I kind of have this like self-sabotaging thing about me you know like last year or in 2011 for worlds for Paris I was like oh I have a I have a terrible phobia of flying and so that you have to fly there the thought of yeah the boat man that's the way to go oh my god the thought of flying to paris was giving me major anxiety attacks and so i just like i i couldn't i had to just say i i can't go i'm not ready i'm i'm out of shape and i'm hurting which was really a big lie i just did well now it's not gonna be a lie it's just like i couldn't get on a fucking plane it's all the open now that's the one thing to tell your friends like

oh I could have totally went to like the Olympics man but like I don't dig airports homie. Oh god. You know it's really fucking shitty but it's the truth. Like. What's so terrifying about flying? I mean I don't like it either. It's like you're up in the air and you can like look

like plummet to your death. You have probably a drunk like pilot flying you. More than likely. You know, and it scares the shit out of me. Like literally my biggest phobia is having diarrhea on a plane because you know, you're going to have to get up and go to the bathroom every two seconds. Everyone's going to be like, she has diarrhea. An explosive shit all over that.

A pseudo toilet. A legit fear. It won't go away. And and then you're gonna leave and then it's all over there forever and then what if you're hitting turbulence and you can't get out of your plane and you're like squeezing your butt together like that's a huge problem for me you lose pressure in the cabin and all this diarrhea starts floating up in your face and you can't escape i mean is this mean, shit is just amazing. Look at them. We're so bad. The shit is bananas. Yeah. Okay, so you've been an alternate on the world team. Several times.

You know, I have lived at, This is great. I have lived at the training center. I've, you know, I've been ranked, when I'm competitive,

when I compete, I'm always ranked in the top 10 of the United States. I'm a national champion. What year was that? Oh, do it again. It's been a while, dude. I'm a national champion. Um, what year was that? Oh, it'd been a while. It was like 1972. A few years ago. Yeah. What were your best lifts? Um, my best snatch is 93 kilos and my best clean and jerk is one 11 kilos. Nice. I've and i've jerked 118 but together i've only done 111 in competition putting it together is tough yeah yeah that's the important bit in life

and on the platform you gotta put it together yeah how do you do that right i'm only as a coach what's you know your your proudest accomplishment i guess i think that building what we have here is amazing and one of my proudest accomplishments I think that I really wanted to take what I had from back home at Coach Berger's you know he's like a father to me he walked me down the wedding I mean the aisle in the wedding that pictures awesome that's from a long time ago. That's when he was like a young man. You've got a handsome jawline.

Great elbow position. It's a great rack. And it was a family and I really wanted to create that here. I wanted people to have a place to come where they felt at home and they felt like they were loved and that they had something bigger than themselves.

And that's what I wanted to accomplish here. And I think that we're, we're in that spot. We have a great team. Um, a lot of girls, we all have our periods at the same time now, which, you know, awesome. That's so fucking awesome you know we're all like bitchy and greg's like oh god kill me now um but but that's what i wanted to do how's that affect the the periodization plan i'm fucking leaving that's my periodization everyone's in here crying and shit i'm going, I'm going away. Sometimes you have to do that. It's really, really true. But I love, I mean, really, I do honestly love, no bullshitting, no jokes,

to see a big group of young aspiring women training together, treating it with respect, knowing it's not going to make them freaks, that it's actually going to empower them and make them more capable of getting out in the world and fucking kicking ass. That is a fucking great thing to see. And yeah, it is.

And I think that we are the only women's team in this country that all trains together. Coffee's Gym, East Coast Gold, these other women's teams that are amazing. They have amazing athletes, but they don't train together. They're recruited by the coaches, but we're the only team that trains together. Every single day we cry together.

It's essential. We cuss together. We sing Britney together. We talk about penises together. Every single day we cry together. We cuss together. We sing Britney together. We talk about penises together. Like it's the only, we're here and we're a family and we love each other. And I think it's amazing. It takes a sport bigger than just you. Because like when I come in and I'm having a really shitty day, I can look over at Kara and be like, oh my God, she's fucking killing it. And you live vicariously through your teammates. And I think that, as you asked, that's my proudest accomplishment

is to come into this gym and look at these people here and know that they want to be here and that they're a part of something and like this is their second home. Goddamn. That's awesome. Hey, here you go. I'm speechless again

It's fantastic I mean basically You started a cult here Am I so good at this? You're doing You're rocking it You're rocking it You need your own podcast

I don't even know Why you have so many Twitter followers I know right You should Vine You should Vine Do you do Vine? No I just started Instagram

Oh alright We're gonna go I'm gonna give you A Vine tutorial Before we leave okay Okay What is that? Can I Can I capture Like little videos? Yes Instagram. Oh, all right. We're going to go. I'm going to give you a vine tutorial before we leave. Okay. What is that? Can I,

can I capture like little videos? I'm not a selfie person. I'm not like one of the duck lip, like pushing the boob out selfies all day. No, we could, I wasn't a selfie guy until wine came around either. But now selfies, at least every other video,

I think it's kind of irritating. Like, people take selfies of them, especially when they're like all wet and they're like laying out by the pool. Oh, I like that. And they're taking a selfie of themselves. What are you talking about? It's like, at least put a fucking crab

in the picture. I want to follow the people you're following. Who are these people you're following? I don't know what you're talking about. Just don't judge them. Right, right, right. Well, I guess, okay. My Instagram feed is boring.

It sounds like you got an awesome one. If it's like super heavies next to the pool, men, hairy men, weightlifters doing that, I don't want to be a part of that. No, it's like the attention whores, right? They want everybody to be like, oh, you're so hot. Look at your boobs.

Oh, my God. I hate it when hot chicks put their boobs on anyone. Yeah, it's terrible. Have some respect, ladies. Have some self-decency and restraint. It's like at least if you're on the beach taking a picture of your wet tits, at least be laying next to a crab or something

so that you could be like, look at this crab. There's context to that picture, right? Exactly. So rather than it's like blatantly look at my tits, you're like, oh, look at the crab I just saw on the beach. I have nothing to disagree with. I don't know. I like to be comical and sensual at the same time. I do that play with my wife.

I look at a picture with hot tits. I go, wife, look at this crab. Can you believe that species is indigenous to that beach? I don't even realize that. And then seeing men looking at the pictures could have a reason to be looking at it. Like, wow, look at that surf. It's like so good today. The sunset is so jiggly.

Yeah. Oh my God. Alright, I think that's a good place to take a pause, take a break, and when we come back, we're going to have Greg get rid of it. Thank you all so much for having me. Thanks for joining us. We had a blast. Thank you. And we're back.

Yeah. We're hanging out at Catalyst Athletics here in Sunnyvale, California. It had a blast. Thanks, Amy. Thank you. And we're back. Yeah. We're hanging out at Catalyst Athletics here in Sunnyvale, California. It's a beautiful place. We kicked Amy off the microphone. We brought Greg in.

Old Greg Everett. You probably know him. If you don't, you should. You should go to catalystathletics.com. Check it out. Performance menu. And I'll let you promote

the rest of your stuff. How did you get into weightlifting, Greg? Oh, man. I learned the lifts when I was in high school. But the problem was, you know, my high school weight room was like a universal machine, two benches, and a power rack with the pins so bent that you couldn't get them out. Did you have an old school hip sled?

The old, what's that thing called? The 45 degree, like if you got in that thing and everybody would load up like four plates and it was so, had a like a wrenching mechanism in there. Those old high school gyms are so fucking terrible, man. We did have a cable stack machine attached to the wall. And get stuck in it. Like the, uh, the kid in a dodgeball. That's about all we had. So, you know, I had like, I had nowhere to go. I trained at, uh, you know, gold's gym and mountain view.

While I was in high school, you know, it was the, the, one of the five people who was there at six in the morning every day with the goofball with his belt, the Walkman tucked inside it, and all that kind of stuff. The CDs skipped now. When you went to the Discman, it was pretty tough.

There you are at five o'clock in the morning in your Zubaz and your Doc Martin shoes, and you're like, God, it's early in the morning to squat, but I'm going to squat. It was the same guy, though, who had the Walkman inside his belt whose little wife like this big would hand him his dumbbells for all his bench presses come on man like you're killing me here that's why you come at this time

of the day right so uh you know i i kind of got by with with uh what i could and training in gold's gym of course they did have a lot of power racks. I will say that. That was nice. But of course, no really a place to do the lifts. And then when I moved to Chico to go to my third and final college, I met Rob Wolf because my neighbor got me to do a website for the BJJ studio owner that Rob was sharing space with. So he had just moved from Seattle where he started the first CrossFit affiliate with Nick Nibbler and Dave Warner, which they're still up there. They each have their own places now.

And so finally now I had space where we had big open rubber area and bumpers and bars that spun. It was like, oh, now I can actually do something with this. So that kind of not just rekindled my interest in it, but it gave me an opportunity. And then, um, so let's see, after a couple of years there, um, I had met Mike Bergner. Um, I had met Amy. I'm sure she told you about how she ignored me

for the first few months. She said she thought you were so ugly when she first met you. Yeah. Who's this asshole? That hasn't changed. Okay. It's all wit and charm. It's all wit and charm, except she didn't pay attention to me, so she couldn't get any of that. Amy, come on. God. But now I got her, legally. She's mine. But so, you know, after a couple years, you know, I decided to move down to train with Mike Berger full time because I figured, hey, I'm not getting any younger.

I want this opportunity. I'm at a point in my life where I'm relatively young and unattached. So say, hey, why not? So I went down there. Self-taught until then? Yeah. So what year is that? Were you able to learn online at all?

There was nothing online at that point. No internet. The only, yeah, the only thing online at that point about weightlifting was pretty much Mike Berger's website, which at that time was like a Microsoft Word document. Oh. With like three pictures of the Rocky Mountains. Damn. That was it. So the site that Berger has now is the one that I built for him a number of years back. Wow.

So yeah, self-taught until that point and that was 2006. um i believe i think early 2006 and then we were down there i think i heard amy telling you we came up here in the end of 2008 and opened this place so it's a good couple years to actually like get into it yeah this place is fantastic that's about when i started following you guys yeah so probably i i didn't realize i was like following you guys pretty close to the beginning i guess early adopter yeah good job yeah thanks now i don't pay any attention to your website i don't i'm just kidding i haven't in months actually working on this this movie it's just uh my head so far up the ass of this movie i haven't even looked i haven't written an article in like six months probably so you guys have a documentary coming out on weightlifting i don't has there been a weightlifting documentary been done before not to my knowledge that um

someone made a movie that was about cheryl hayworth and so there there was a there was obviously a lot about weightlifting but it wasn't about weightlifting specifically it was more about kind of cheryl and it was about the you know, like body image and stuff like that. It's actually, it was a really good movie. It was really cool. I liked watching it, but it wasn't about the sport itself. And of course it's focused on one person. So you don't get, um, you don't get a lot of breadth in there. So this movie hopefully is going to be, you know, it's a little bit of history. Um, uh, but primarily it's about kind of the current state of the sport in this country, which, of course, as everyone knows, is struggling, to say the least. Although it has picked up.

I'm feeling really optimistic about it the last year or so. I'm like, fuck, man, we have now. now, because I was lucky enough to be sort of introduced to weightlifting maybe like 1999 when I got out of fucking football, or 2000, then joined the lab at the University of Memphis and got going with Dr. Schilling, Dr. Chu, and all those guys, getting exposed to Stone and Garhammers working and all that, and it was not good then. And this last year, I'm like, we have now really impressive up-and-coming lifters, like guys like Kendrick who are as strong as anybody. It's starting to click and come together.

Guys like Jared. It's the young guys that, man. It's exciting. And the young girls. We have a lot of junior lifters right now who are just balling. They're in a good place. We have Zygmunt Smallshirts out at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. He's a former Olympian.

He was a Polish national coach. Um, and now he's, he's been there since I think 2008. So now he's had that time to, to make the adjustment to the different environment and to the different athletes. Cause it's a totally different story, right? In a number of ways. And so now I think he's really gotten it dialed in and his lifters are just fucking doing Donovan. Yeah. You got Donovan, D'Angelo osorio choma amici uh jenny arthur uh you know jared fleming all these guys who are just doing a really good job i don't know i i like our chances in this next like five to ten years i really do i'm feeling really fucking good about it i will support my local weightlifter you guys have any big up big up and comers coming out of your gym right now?

We definitely have. We've got some up and comers. Our problem is that our weightlifters are all too old. You know what I mean? The weightlifting is one of those sports. What is too old? You. That's right. Too old.

And me and Doug. I've managed to train about three months of this year so far, and it's September. There you go. Perfect. Yeah, but what do you think too old is to really pursue it? To enjoy the sport and to do fairly well and to have fun, there isn't a too old. To become a world champion, a world-level competitor, basically anything after 14 years old is too old. God.

That's just the reality. I mean, you look at the best athletes in the world in any sport, they have that foundation. They were started young. That doesn't mean you're definitely, or you're necessarily starting in weightlifting at a high level at that age, but you, you are kind of being channeled in that direction, you know, you're being guided and being developed in the longterm. And so we have, most of our athletes are, you know, they're, they're leftovers from other sports. Like they were football players or they were wrestlers or volleyball players or whatever. And it's not even so much that they chose weightlifting like, Hey, I don't want to play the sport anymore. I want to be a weightlifter. It was more like,

I got too many concussions to play football anymore. Now, what am I going to do? Um, and so that's fine. It's, it's, you know, a lot of concussions is probably good for weightlifting. Cause then you don't know that you can't lift that weight, right? You just smart enough to like not get under the bar. Dumb strong kid. He's great. He's got a big forehead. I think he'll do fine. Yeah. But we've got, um, probably our, our, our front runner right now is a girl named Tamara Solari, who's our super heavyweight. She, let's see, she actually came in third at the Nationals in July. She's only cleaned 130? She just cleaned 130 yesterday.

Jeez. So, and that's, what, 286 in the Imperial measurement. So, yeah, she's kicking ass. What's her age? 27. So that's what I'm saying. If she was 20, I'd be talking. It sucks so much, man. Is she going to listen to this and get mad at you now?

She won't get mad. It's not my fault she's 27. It's not my fault. Ray doesn't care. The reality is that you work with what you've got, right? And in this country, like like i said we we get who comes to us i i can't go to a sixth grade pe class with my clipboard and be like all right i need you guys to line up we're gonna do a bunch of like leaps and bounds you know whatever i'm

gonna like you know feel your quad like that's creepy you know we can't do that um and and so we have we have to rely on you know, finding the sport on their own essentially, because there's not a whole lot of exposure. It's not like you could turn on ESPN and you're like, Oh, CrossFit games followed by weightlifting. It's like, no, if you see snatch and clean and jerk, it's CrossFit. And that's a good start. It's a really good start. It's made a huge impact, made a huge difference, but we need more exposure of the sport of

weightlifting itself. Do you think this is the path that CrossFit for whatever good and bad will provide the exposure to young kids and they will see oh that's pretty cool if I also compete in that I mean absolutely like got me a guy I have I was long since to beat up to ever consider racking a bar book at time I was fucking a senior in high school that window shut down but my son my son has whatever talent my wife and I ever started with. He's, he's already doing ring work. He's already trying to pick up my barbell when I'm doing deadlifts and stuff in the gym. It's cute as shit. Of course it's cute as shit, but I can now tell him, Hey, look,

I can make sure that he knows what it is like to have a good overhead position, a good rack position before he learns how to not be flexible in the arms. Before he starts benching fucking six days a week like I did when I was in high school, all that stuff. Well, I mean, that's what it's going to do is a lot of people have gotten overly excited about CrossFit's impact on weightlifting. They misunderstand it. Um, it's bringing more money into the sport indirectly because a lot of coaches and weight lifters can now coach and give seminars and, you know, write articles and do all these things that allow them to stay more connected to the sport and not have real jobs. Yeah. Um, you know, it's, I, I credit CrossFit with allowing me to have this business, you know,

that's, that's probably 90% of our audience. Um, so I'm very grateful for that, but really what it's going to do is the kids, like you said, who are growing up seeing their parents snatching clean and jerk, seeing their older brothers and sisters. And so it's not so fucking strange. You know what I mean? Like it's not this oddball sport anymore. It's this thing like, oh, yeah, my dad did that when I was a kid. I want Max to go to school, like an elementary school. Like, what, you assholes don't do front squats?

I thought everybody did front squats and pulls and stuff. What is this place? Right. That's the thing is every kid, every high school, every junior high, every elementary school, they got a track team. They got a basketball team, football, soccer, all these things. That's normal. And so weightlifting is never going to be football. That's just a pipe dream at best.

Yeah. But you can get it into more schools. Look at the Doherty brothers, Kevin and Paul Doherty. They're each high school PE teachers. They have huge weightlifting programs. That's where Donovan Ford came from. That's where Choma Michi came from. That's where D'Angelo Osorio came from. They find all these amazing lifters because they have this great program where they can funnel 300 kids a year through it. You know, if you have 300 kids and you can't find a couple good ones,

you're doing something horribly wrong. And so imagine that if not every high school in the country, but if 10 high schools in every state in this country had 300 kids a year going through it. Think of how many potential weight that you should have. In many respects In many respects, these kids have good economic and social support systems largely across this country. Of the millions of potential young athletes in China or Russia, I have to think that on a little bit smaller scale, we have a similar good chance with all the resources at our disposal in this nation. We're a big country compared to a lot of these European countries. Here's the thing.

With weightlifting, though, there are two quotes actually from the movie that are perfect. Jim Schmitz, uh, said, you know, speaking about China specifically, but a lot of these countries is weightlifting is a meal ticket. Okay. You know, the Chinese lifter, Armenian lifter, whatever, you can get a good job, get an education by being a weightlifter here. People give up those things to become a weight lifter. You got to put off school. You got to put off a career, um, because you're struggling get an education by being a weightlifter here, people give up those things to become a weightlifter. You got to put off school. You got to put off a career, um, because you're struggling to pay bills to train full time, to train twice a day, six days a week. Um, and you know, uh, now I forget what the other thing I was going to say was, I think it was Bob Takano. It's the, the reality is that, um, the U S is not really good at things that don't make money.

So we're really good at swimming. We're good at track and field. We're good at football. Basketball and shit. Because those are fucking huge money makers. Look at the endorsement deals these guys get. Not only do they get the salaries from the teams, but they're getting millions of dollars a year for wearing shoes. Our best weightlifters get a couple hundred bucks a month from the U.S.

God fucking shit. That's it. You know what I mean? Shameful, man. The best thing I can do for my lifters, we can't pay them. Sometimes we can help with travel a little bit. Um, you know, I I've gotten them a protein sponsorship from heavy athletics, nutrition. They've been great pure farmer sponsors and we get fish oil and stuff like that, but that's pretty much it folks. Yeah. I think I remember seeing, um, who was our other super heavyweight lady? Not, uh,'s pretty much it. Yeah, I think I remember seeing who was our other superhero lady, not, who went to London? Holly Mangold.

Holly, the other one, not Holly. Sarah Robles. Sarah, Sarah. Well, she was talking about how she was fucking living in poverty as she was completing her preparation to go to the fucking London games. Like, at least right before you think there'd be some resource to support her. Yeah. It's a lot of groveling

and begging and, you know, scraping, uh, change out of the couch, but, uh, it's, it's unfortunate. And then again, you know, CrossFit has done a good job. Um, and inadvertently I assume, but it has allowed so many coaches now and lifters to make some money at least. And so it allows them to, they still have to work they still have to earn money they still can't train as full-time professional lifters like they need to like the people they're competing against internationally but it's a step in the right direction and so we get more exposure we can actually get some sponsorship and some money and this is what frustrates me when you see people go oh i know what we gotta do to fix we just gotta get really

fucking strong like it was so fucking obvious and simple. I'll just get, look, look at those guys. How good they always got to get gooder than we are now. We never fucking thought of that. Come on, man. Is that, is that, is that the fine detail you're using in your thought process is to say the most obvious stupid shit that you think these professional coaches aren't, haven't considered a million times a day. Fuck. It's a little frustrating. It's a little frustrating to be second guessed by people who have no exposure to the actual sport. They have no experience. They've never coached away, never even talked to a fucking weightlifter. Yeah. And so there's a lot of assumptions and there's a lot of really big, key, important things that go conveniently overlooked. The

money situation is one of them. You know, China has a million weightlifters, a million. You don't have to be a good weightlifter. Yeah. But here's the thing. You can, you can do whatever you want and you can get these guys strong and you can break as many as you, you, you, uh, happen to break because you've got 10 more in line that are just as good. You have guys in there. Uh, you know, I've been told stories with people who've gone and visited some of the training centers. It's a routine thing on a tuesday morning you've got the guys going in there uh lifting more than the world record clean and jerk no one's even watching it's just a routine thing it happens and you'll never know that guy's name because they don't need them the the heart the heart i can't understand that the hard part in

this country is getting to the o, getting to the world championships. The hard part for those guys in those countries is getting on the team to get there, right? Because there's so many of them. They have the talent. They don't have the pro sports that we have here that are pulling the talent away. You get a kid who's not even that good of a football player. He can go get his college education paid for playing football. By being okay yeah yeah go to

d2 school get a good education you know like what are you gonna say like hey no no you should be a weightlifter can guarantee you a life of poverty and obscurity instead you know keep talking yeah and all the only Americans that weightlift are the ones that really love it. They're not trying to get out of anything. I mean, I've seen a lot of beauty in that, though, because I see a lot of guys who just have really laid it all at this altar for the sake of the sport. It's really, I don't want to say it's the smartest thing always, but, God damn it, you've got to appreciate what they're doing.

You've got to try to support them with the best of our ability. Yeah, that's definitely one of the most appealing things is that it's a small community, but you know that everyone in it is really dedicated it's not a lot of sports if there's money in it you can be in it for the wrong reasons you could fucking hate playing whatever sport it is but you're getting paid 10 million bucks a year you're gonna suck it up you know yeah not that i feel sorry for you get to fucking play ball and make millions of dollars like oh yeah i feel terrible but uh you know with weightlifting it's like you do it because you love it and you do it whether or not anybody's watching because you know you

enjoy the process you you take pride in it and you know i like being a part of that and knowing that everybody you interact with is going to be essentially you know on that same page you got the movie coming out it's called weightlifting american weightlifting american weightlifting documentary comes out what's the date? November 16th? November 16th, yeah. Okay. And how can people watch that?

They can, the easiest way, go to AmericanWeightliftingFilm.com. That'll have everything. So it'll be available on DVD. It'll be streaming, download, all that stuff. So it'll be very, very easy. Easily accessible. Market calendars. Yeah.

Is there anything in the movie that we should uh look forward to the whole movie yeah what is the problem i didn't i didn't like intentionally put any cheese there is there a twist you call it a twist at the end you call it amy old and you call his movie i was bruce willis the whole time there you go that's hear. Did you narrate it in a good Batman voice? I did not narrate it. Bob Takanu, 19-whatever, Vaudeville, man, greatness. I skipped the narration thing. There's like two seconds of titling in the beginning,

and the rest of it is all interviews. Sweet. Was this your first foray into such a... I mean, that's not a small undertaking, man. No, it took me four years. And it was, uh, it was a terrible mistake, but you know, that's what I was looking for. The hardest part for me about making a movie is that I had no fucking idea how to make a movie. And, uh, but

the fact was I had this idea, something I wanted to do and no one else was going to do it. So I figured, well, you know, why not? I'll just make it happen. So dove in the pool. You know, the reality is that, um, you know, it was made on a shoestring budget because it's fucking weightlifting in the U S like no one's coming in and giving me money. But that was the whole point, right? It stays with the whole theme of the sport is that we have no money where it's an independent sports, a small group of people. And, uh, And if we want things to happen, we got to make them happen. So I figured it should be a good example and no excuses. You know, maybe someone will see that and actually have some talent and skill and ability and resources and do something better that gets even more exposure. I'm going to, I'm going to purchase it. I'm going to stream it five times a day.

No, I, I just feel this. Being here is kind of a special thing, man, because I feel this. Amy's right. It's a warm feeling, this place. And every time I have these kind of conversations, it goes, fuck, man. More than anything I could ever do in my pathetic, very average lifting career in another obscure sport that no one really gives a shit about in powerlifting, I go, what makes me really happy is the idea of giving whatever I can give to some kid,

give him a shot at doing something like a national caliber meet one day or maybe making the Olympics. That is a fucking worthwhile thing to pursue. Yeah. It's really special. Yep. Yeah. It is cool standing in here.

I've been looking at pictures of this place off your website for, for years and it was kind of cool walking in almost surreal. It's the, It's the fourth wall that no one ever sees over there. That's very true. Amy's sitting in a field. She did not lift on that grass. Come on. That's not good footing. Yeah, that's right after she snatched that.

Right in the grass. Sat down, took a break, got a little water. Sweet. Photographer walked by. So it seems that most gyms don't really make any good money off their competitors specifically. It seems there's like a handful of competitors and that's like the real reason the gyms in operation.

And then there's a big group of people who are kind of like the regular fitness people that are actually producing enough money to make it where the competitors can actually train. Is that kind of how it is? Well, yeah. And it's, it's beyond that. It's not just the, the, the fitness people in the gym. It's, it's the entire other side of the business, the books and DVDs seminars, all that stuff is what finances the weightlifting team. So, um, yeah, the weightlifting coaching doesn't make me money. It costs me money. Right. You know, it costs me. We told that somebody one time and they got really mad. I think she thought I was lying to her. No, it's, you know, it's,

that's the reality. And it's not that we don't love all of our clients, but the simple fact is that we could not run a competitive weightlifting team without all those other streams of income. Right. You guys have a lot of stuff. You've got the performance menu. You've got books and DVDs. You're going to kind of go through all the stuff you guys have.

You've got a ton of things available. We actually promoted your book in a recent episode, maybe two episodes ago, top 10 books. And your Olympic weightlifting book was what? The first or second one we told people to read. Number one, number one. Yes.

Great resource. Number one, say it now. Yeah. I personally have the weightlifting bias. So there you go. I was like, that's your number one training book because if you're not weightlifting,

I don't think you're, you're training yourself. Human. Is that what you're suggesting? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. We, uh, we use one of your DVDs for staff training a while back as well. So go ahead and run through all your stuff. Cause we, we use everything. All right. Well, let's see if I can remember it all. So we, we do books, uh, published books. We have, uh, two of mine. Um, my first book, which is the, the big thick one on the big weightlifting complete guide for athletes and coaches. I did Olympic weightlifting for sports, which is like a –

the whole idea was to make it more like a simple, more accessible thing for people who are not interested in being competitive weightlifters. They don't want all the details. They want, hey, how do I get in here and learn how to snap clean jerk? That was for like the football coach. Exactly. Yeah. And then –

The meathead version. We've got a couple DVDs out that kind of go with those books, just instructional things. I published Bob Takano's book recently, which is all about, you know, kind of Soviet style programming. It's kind of, you know, Bud Charnega has translated all these Russian texts. He's a feisty man. Which has been a fantastic resource, but they're not super cohesive. Like it's tough to get good information out of

them because it's, it's basically a collection of articles and it's, um, you know, from the seventies primarily. And so Takano's book is like kind of the Americanized version of the Soviet system. So it's, it's very well laid out. It's pretty awesome. You have that one? I actually have it here. Can I borrow it? We talked about it on the Top Ten episode. It did come up. At the very end, we talked about it. Word. And we have Matt Foreman's book out, which is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum of Takano's. You know, it's more anecdotes and funny stories.

And Matt's a super funny guy. But, you know, definitely has training information in him. That's what I do. Blabber on the radio and blabber on fucking print. A little more philosophical. Yeah. I was looking at that book over there. It reminded me of your book. It's like, it's not like do this program. It's kind of like training philosophy and funny articles. You need that man. Cause like there's there, I always see the three things. There's like the science and you need to know, you need to know the physics of this. You need to understand how the mechanics are important and why you need

to know design and how you take that and manipulate it in some sort of strategic way to get an effect. And then there's this third part, which I call the folk knowledge, like the shit you learn during the grind, the relationships, the belief, the frustrations, the all. It closes that third critical gap. And if you don't have that, then the other things don't really make sense. You might as well be a professor who never trains or coaches or what have you. That's, that's the key element. And the humor and the frustration and the, and everything that comes with it is like the closing big thing for me. Yeah. What was the name of that book again? Bones of Iron. Bones of Iron. And that's,

that's actually a really good point. You know, we get so many emails and things from people who are like, Hey, I want to be a weightlifting coach. You know, what do I do? It's like, well, you gotta be a weightlifter. You have to go live that life for a while. You have to be in that environment because like you said, you could know, uh, you know what it says in all these books, you can read my book till you're blue in the face. But you know, if you haven't experienced that environment and that, uh, you know, that atmosphere, it doesn't really mean a whole lot so what about the performance menu what's what's that all about oh performance menu man we're coming up on year nine of that thing which is damn dude that that's like the best kept secret on the internet we've been publishing

that thing since i was born pretty much so uh it's it's a monthly um digital journal comes out in pdf now you can send it to your kindle You can do all kinds of jiggy shit with it. I love that you just said jiggy. Yeah, I was going to say that. I was like, so it's performancevenue.com and it's 30 bucks a year. It's dirt cheap for 12 issues a year or we have a premium subscription now

for a hundred bucks a year, which gives you access to all the back issues. So if you're paying attention, that's nine years of back issues. It's like 550 articles. It's a fucking gold mine, man. Yeah. Oh, that gives you 50% off in the Catalyst store, too.

Do we tell people? We got to hit that on the episode we do digital online resources and shit for the show. Because we didn't do that yet. No, we just did books. We'll do our favorite blogs. Favorite. Favorite blogs. Favorite blogs.

Yeah, we'll do our blogs one day and we'll do videos another day. That's going to be on the top of the list, too. Yeah, I've been getting hit with people like, you said books, but is there any websites? So we'll do websites one day. Top ten websites. You guys got anything else? Yes. Well, we've been doing seminars for years, but now we actually have a certification program,

which we just launched a few months ago. So we have a couple of different levels and it's a combination of seminars and testing and all that kind of stuff. So it's all based on my book and the seminars. Certifiably Jiggy, is that the course? That's level three. Keys to the spaceship. But yeah, so we've got a level one in Charleston, South Carolina coming up in April. That's going to be our only East coast one next year. And then we will have a couple more here. So I, I just don't have the time and energy anymore to travel. Like I used

to travel all over the place. The last, last big travel one I did was Copenhagen a couple of years ago. And I was just like, I'm fucking done. Um, you know, there, there's so many weightlifters and coaches out there doing seminars. I figured I don't need to fly my ass all over the place. Yeah. So I figured that if people really want to learn from me directly, then they can come here and, uh, you know, I can do a better job here. We have the space, we have the equipment. I have a full coaching staff of like six people.

And so, you know, people get a better experience here and I don't have to take years off my life traveling. That's like Amy said, this is your laboratory. I fucking love that way of specifically describing a gym. It's really what it is. It's like your space where a unique thing emerges from your interaction with a whole host of individual human beings. You can't reproduce this anywhere else. You can't. And, you know, if I feel like if you're going to be putting out educational material and

things like that, it has to be legitimate. You can't be the doctor on, you know, the TV news who hasn't touched a patient in 20 years and has given Dr. Oz. Yeah. Fuck you.

I hate you. Don't you keep the, whatever you guys CNN. Fuck you. You don't know weightlifting. I hear weightlifting is bad for backs and knees. Fuck you. Yeah.

What's bad, but different. Not in the way you're thinking. Fuck you. What's bad but different? Not in the way you're thinking. Shut up, doctor, on TV. So, you know, if you don't have a place like this, you're not actively coaching, then you probably shouldn't be talking. Yeah. I'll shut up. All right, guys. Let's wrap this up.

So again, one more time. What's the date the movie's coming out? November 16th. And AmericanWeightliftingFilm.com will, one more time. What's the date? The movie's coming out? November 16th. And AmericanWayLiftingFilm.com will have all the links. You'll be able to access it online. You guys are going to do a screening here? Yeah, there'll be a screening November 16th in Cupertino in the Bay Area. And that's almost sold out.

Yeah, that's probably going to be a lost cause by the time this airs. But yeah, it'll be available on DVD streaming. It'll be worldwide all on that same day so audience dude if you if you want to support this great gym and it's great sport fucking get this go buy it go support your local whale dirt fucking download stream show it to your friends yeah please help me redeem the last four years of my life yeah it will not be in vain and if people are in the san jose san francisco, they've got to come by Cal's Athletics? Yes, indeed.

We're, you know, five minutes from San Jose, 35 minutes from San Francisco. So it's easily accessible. Yeah, I know sometimes I get CrossFitters who are like, you know, I want to get better at weightlifting. What should I do? It's like, where do you live? You know, they'll say they live like a half hour away from like a great weightlifting gym or something. Just go there. Yeah.

There's nothing I'm going to tell you that's going to be better than just going to a good coach. Go there and start doing it. Just do it. Yeah. Yeah. Got to do it. You got to do it in person and live and, and you know,

it's all the stuff on the internet and books is great. It's a good start. But if you're not actually there doing it and living it, then you're kind of just fucking wasting your time. Don't fucking waste your time. God, you have a finite life. We can do it. Fucking jerking off on the internet and trying to learn about weightlifting. Get in a gym. That's my last little rant. All right. We're going to sign off here. This is a passionate episode. Make sure you go to barbellstruck.com, sign up for the newsletter.

Follow Amy on Twitter. Oh, hey, you know what? Do you need to be followed anywhere? No, I try to stay off Twitter as much as possible Facebook, but I don't, I can't take any more friends. I guess there's a 5,000 person limit. So I finally feel like I made it in life. I maxed out Facebook. I'm done. I can retire. Um, but yeah, catalyst athletics, uh, on Facebook, American Weightlifting on Facebook and Twitter. Barbell Shrugged, coupon code, American Weightlifting. Get five bucks off that download. So it'll be the first hundred people. What's the coupon code?

Barbell Shrugged. Barbell Shrugged is the coupon code. Easy to remember. Perfect. We will put that out there. Hey, and if you're listening on iTunes and you enjoy this, go give us five stars. Leave a comment.

Positive ones only. Thanks. Cheers. Thanks for coming on the show, Greg. You bet.