Barbell Shrugged - Adding Bodybuilding and Hypertrophy Training to Maximize Strength w/ Bryan Boorstein — Barbell Shrugged #425

Episode Date: November 13, 2019

Bryan Boorstein has trained at the top level, the CrossFit Games, while also working with some of the world’s premier athletes, including NFL players, and WWE superstar John Cena. Bryan has extensive experience and knowledge in all realms of health and fitness. He has coached physique and bodybuilding, as well as those just hoping to increase vitality and look good at the beach. His programming philosophy has adapted to accommodate the constantly-changing needs for each trainee.   In this episode of Barbell Shrugged, Anders Varner and Doug Larson discuss: The difficulty in pre-internet era of finding quality training information Understanding big movements instead of focusing on single joint training What is the proper body part split for hypertrophy Does a full body workout produce results From CrossFit to Evolved Training Systems   And more…   Bryan Boorstein on Instagram   Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram__ __________________________________ 20 REP BACK SQUAT PROGRAM __________________________________ Please Support Our Sponsors   US Air Force Special Operations - http://airforce.com/specialops   Savage Barbell Apparel - Save 25% on your first order using the code “SHRUGGED”   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   WHOOP - Save $30 on 12 or 18 month membership plan using code “SHRUGGED” at checkout  __________________________________ One Ton Challenge    Find your 1rm in the snatch, clean, jerk, squat, dead, bench.    Add them up to find your One Ton Total.    The goal is 2,000 pounds for men and 1,200 for women.    “What is the One Ton Challenge”   “How Strong is Strong Enough”   “How do I Start the One Ton Challenge”   ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs-boorstein -----------------------------------------------------------------------   ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

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Brian Borstein. You have to hit the record button for it to work. With the document. Are we now recording? Totally. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Weiner. Doug Larson.

Brian Borstein, founder of evolved training system we're at the 2019 mr olympia in las vegas the fit aid one-ton challenge we're actually we are here in vegas for that but we're actually in our radical airbnb right now because we just set everything up uh we've got 10 lifters coming tomorrow morning and man we got to turn the microphones on we had a sweet hike in the red rocks this morning and uh dude you guys woke up super early hit the road from from san diego drove all the way out here to las vegas come hang out with us watching the one ton challenge and um super stoked to have you on the show dude yo i'm amped bro um we have uh we have an awesome history we owned a gym together we started training together in like 2000, and we graduated in 2005.

So 2004, we started training together. I've probably had more, like, legitimate talks about strength and conditioning with you than everybody on the planet, maybe, except you. I have more awesome – Probably more than me. We haven't talked for a couple years. You guys have known each other for 15 years now? Yeah, something like that. So, yeah, let's – dude, let's wrap on strength.

It's like the thing that bonded us in college, and you're one of the main reasons that I was able to, like, actually take this thing that I loved and really start to see the science and stuff behind it. So, when did you first start to learn about strength training, and what was a little bit of the motives behind getting into the game? Oh, man, I was 15. It was 1997, and I was just a prepubescent white kid trying to make a basketball team.

In D.C. Bend it up like we talked about earlier and put it right in your mouth. That way you're similar volume to him. There you go. Yeah, man, I was just trying to make a basketball team and i was short and um i knew i needed to get stronger if i wanted to compete with these kids and um that was it man end of ninth grade i started training hard and uh the whole point was trying to make varsity in 10th grade which it worked so uh strength training for the win you know yeah was that anywhere near what you consider to be quality

strength training now do you have like a good Yeah. Was that anywhere near what you consider to be quality strength training now? Do you have, like, a good mentor, someone to guide you, or were you just, like, just totally winging it as a teenager? Dude, I somehow landed in a forum on the internet right when forums were starting, and I was somehow linked up, like, just so luckily with a bunch of guys that were promoting old-school strength training, like, three times a week, full body, just really smart down to earth training. And, you know, even now in science,

you're seeing the need to train muscle groups multiple times a day and, you know, debunking the bro split and all that stuff. So I was just so thankful that I found this group that was having me train three times a week, telling me to get strong on the big lifts, fuck all the isolation movements, squat, dead press row dip all those things and um that was what i did for the first like two years of wolf training so dude i think three times a week total body this pure strength stuff compound movements like for especially for someone who's new to the game is is a totally great way to do it's like super simple effective. Like you landed in a good spot.

Exactly. I was so thankful. And, you know, obviously ended up getting into the muscle mags later down the road. And even when we trained in college, Anders, we were always, you know, bro splitting the fuck out of life. But no, I mean, I take those lessons and those principles from my early days and apply them to programs and training now. And it was also what I went back to when we were

kind of closing the gym down and stuff. And I was just trying to figure out my life. And I went back to my roots and started training three times a week, full body. And I made progress again, you know, 15, 16 years later. So it's super productive for sure. Do you remember any of the people that were in that group that are still around? Dude, you know what's mad funny is there's a dude that I follow on Instagram named Paul Carter. He writes for T Nation. And he was one of the guys in this group that I found when I was first starting lifting in the late 90s.

And he used to clown on me so hard in the late 90s because I had so many questions. And he was like, dude, stop asking questions. Just train. And that was always his message. late 90s because because I had so many questions and he was like dude stop asking questions just train and that was always his message and um and uh I'm just man 20 years later to still kind of watch that dude putting out great content and know that he was somebody that was kind of helping me along in the beginning is super cool yeah when did you start to break into the body for life thing because that was like when when we started training together that was like the story you kept telling me you were like dude this program so legit that was the first

time i ever started doing the um like 50 walk and then the basically emom increased sprints for 20 minutes two minute warm-up two minute cool down four rounds of that thing in the middle like i've done that workout thousands of times in my life i feel like like if I'm in a hotel, it's like, oh, what am I going to do? There's a treadmill. Let's turn it on. Six, seven, eight, nine, six, seven, eight, nine. Right. That workout.

But when did you find Body for Life? That was later in high school. So the first couple of years were the three times a week full body. And then I started kind of prioritizing weightlifting and strength training a little bit more than basketball. Yeah. Even though basketball was like my passion forever, it was like i reached this point where i think i realized that i just wasn't gonna make it i'm only gonna be 5'10 right right right no matter how good my jumper is i'm still 5'10 so i took um i took a summer and um i started listening to a lot of the bill phillips

stuff yeah um i you know i made you watch the Body of Work video, which came out even before the Body of Life stuff. Did you watch that? Oh, yeah. When he runs out in the middle of traffic? Yeah. Dude, I actually found that video as a teenager, you know, maybe 16 years old or whatever I was, like, actually to be really inspiring. I thought it was amazing that people have these big transformations. I remember taking the VHS tape to my mom and being like,

you have to watch this. This is incredible. We didn't give a shit, of course. So many times. Yeah, we watched it over and over. So many times. It was super motivating, like you said, even seeing these people from different ages

because they had a winner in each age category. So I was able to kind of bond with some of the younger guys. And I went on the internet and i researched some of their stuff and what routines they were following when they did body of work and then a year later bill phillips came out with body for life and then that just became the routine so it wasn't like this guy did that and this guy did that but yeah i think so you did the competition i did yeah yeah yeah so um i did you've been business partners with two people that have done body for life now right like yeah yeah both were like in the top five in your categories.

Oh, I see. Placed as well. It must have been right when I turned 18. So I was old for my grades. So I turned 18 beginning of senior year. I must have done it senior year because I entered the 18 to 24 category or whatever. And yeah, I placed. I think I got something sent in the mail that said I was in the top 2% for my age group or something like that,

but I think there's only one winner, so it didn't really matter. I just got a cool little piece of paper. Are they just comparing before and after pictures, basically? Is that a big thing? So that was part of the score. I think that was 60% of the score, and then 40% was a writing, a write-up about how you changed and transformed physically and mentally and how those two kind of played off each other

and affected your general life overall. Right. Like how good of a testimony are you really going to be if we say you are top 10 so we can promote our stuff? Bill Phillips smashed the 90-day challenge. He created internet challenges before anybody was thinking internet challenges. He smashed.

Did you ever meet and hang out with Bill? No, I never did. Now that I moved to Colorado and he's in Golden, it's literally like 30 minutes from where I'm going to be. So I may at some point try and connect with him. You totally should, dude. He came on the show two, three years ago, something like that.

He was a true professional. We had many people come on the show but like you could tell he was just like he was just dialed in in a different way than most people like he he knew so much he had done so much research on each of us as individuals he never mixed any of it up like he had like people's backgrounds like you know like mike when he was back in the navy and like what he did and like you know his his whole progression since then, how he learned strength training. He never confused little details. He never was like, oh, yeah, Doug, you snatched at this competition. No, that's Mike. He had it all lined up.

He remembered it all. I was very impressed with the whole thing, not just what we did on the show, but just walking around, hanging out for a couple hours. He was just so dialed in. Consummate professional. Yeah. No, that's awesome. I'm going to definitely try and connect with him when I'm up there. That would be a cool kind of coming full circle.

Yeah, yeah. I love that you had to go and write that testimonial because, dude, one of my favorite parts of your strength progression and this lifetime of strength that you've had um dude you wrote a strength training for like teenagers when you were like 15 years old like the first the first book for teenage strength trainers that still you have to publish the ultimate guide to teenage weightlifting yeah yeah what was that program you still have that uh i actually do have a copy of it it's's a hard copy, obviously, because I didn't do computer things back then. It was written on a computer. I do have a copy.

It's in a three-ring binder. It's 65 pages long. That's a lot for a 15-year-old that doesn't know shit about strength training. You've only been doing it two years. It wasn't a program. The first 20 pages were supplements I recommend. At the time, it was um the first 20 pages were like supplements i recommend and at

the time it was like xenogyn it was like all the supplements that were big back then uh hmb i think creatine monohydrate like even fucking hmb has been basically disproven now like no one does hmb anymore but that was a thing back then i don't even hear about it no it's not even a thing it's like bcaaAA is completely debunked. They still sell pretty well, though. No, for sure, for sure. People don't read science. Anyway. We're at Mr. Olympia.

There's like 95 booths over there. All of them say BCAA. I walked by that bulk nutrition place today, and it had a list of their top-selling bulk items. Creatine was number one, BCAAs were number two, and then beta-alanine was number three. BCAAs were number two. And then beta alanine was number three. Wow. BCAAs are right there at the top.

I think in theory BCAAs make sense. Right. I agree with that. Yeah. They just don't seem to, the science doesn't seem to back it up. So does CBD. So does all these. Yeah.

You take the little pieces out. It doesn't flow like the whole product. Well, BCAAs are like in their own category because it's like you're consuming those amino acids all day long. Assuming you're eating pretty normal as like weightlifters and bodybuilders do, they typically eat plenty of protein and all that. And then now, unless you're like on super low calories, maybe there's an argument there. But I actually don't even know what the research shows. Like if you're eating 1,200 calories, BCAAs still help you maintain muscle mass while you're cutting.

I don't know what the research actually says there, but intuitively, if you're getting all of those amino acids through regular protein sources, then there's no need to just dump more in your system through this artificial means. Food doesn't digest immediately. So the amino acids you ate the day before and that beef and that steak are working their way through your body the next day. It's not like it's a momentary thing where you're digesting protein and then it's over and your your anabolic window is closed right yeah um dude the getting back to the book though i want to know like i feel like people end up writing books well at this stage in our lives and that was half your life ago but uh was when you sat down to start writing that was it like you were trying to solve problems or did you already see yourself as like oh everybody in my school should be talking to me about strength conditioning because i'm the only one that's

learning it to this degree it was the latter for sure i mean i i literally became the trainer for the basketball team my senior year the coach was basically like you handle this um so i designed the programs and stuff for our basketball team that year. And he did all the two-hour practices. And I just kind of tried to fit some strength training work around that. What was the program that you laid out or the ideas behind the program? It wasn't a program. It was like 12 or 15 different programs. I actually took inspiration from the John McCollum stuff.

Yeah. Oh, boy, 20-rep squats. Yeah. So he built his whole book that he wrote out on starting with the most novice program, which was a three times a week full body program with 20 rep squats. And then throughout the course of the book,

he went into more advanced cycles, bulk and chest cycles, or bulk and power cycles, then specific specialization cycles for different muscle groups and stuff like that. So when I wrote the ultimate guide to teenage weightlifting, I tried to start with like the most basic program. And fuck, dude, I was like 18 when I wrote this, I didn't really even have the experience I have now. Like it would obviously look way different if I rewrote this book, but it was like, start with the three times a week full body. Then you progress into like a five by five program. And then you do this other full body program. And

then like, you know, six programs later, you're doing like an upper lower split. And then you're doing like a specialization for like back or something like that. So, um, it made sense in theory, but, um, it was very, uh, but for an 18 year old to be writing 12 programs out, like mesocycles to becoming the ultimate guy, plus genius name for internet marketing right there. Totally. The ultimate guy to teenage weightlifting. Like, dude, I need that now at 36. It's because I always went to Barnes & Noble, and I would sit in the weightlifting section and just look at books and be like, why is there no book dedicated to teenagers?

Teenagers need fitness too, you know? Yeah. Well, once basketball was over, weightlifting stayed around. What was the next progression for you? Because I still hadn't even met you so we weren't even training together yet but getting into college and then uh like after after lifting weights specifically for sports and becoming better at basketball um kind of the mindset shift and the goal shift if you remember that transition, or was it just get huge and be ripped? Yeah, it was actually so when I got into college, the whole motivation for training shifted a lot from getting better at sports

to getting fucking yoked and hollering at girls. Equally valuable. You can do those things at the same time. Yeah, yeah, I actually, uh, really changed to a bro split routine during that time. And I don't know in retrospect whether it was because I thought that was like the right move for like my physical development or if it was really just the easy way out. Because when you're in college and you want to go drink and have fun and that's the priority it's a lot easier to go into the gym and do chest than it is to go into the gym and do whatever full body shit i was doing before um and when we're hungover i know you remember these days

when it's the best friday hungover arms day because you can do arms and flip-flops. That's right. Every Friday was preacher curls. So that was it, man. It was like chest, back, shoulders, arms, and sometimes legs. Sometimes legs. Not a lot of people did legs back then. Did you have friends who were like, do you do legs? Or did everybody you know did legs? I was in a pretty unique position where me and my friends had a strength coach,

and it was, like, the opposite. Like, we never did bodybuilder arms, single joint isolation stuff, but it was, like, kind of like now. It's, like, 5% or 10% of the total training program. We always squatted and then did RDLs and then did lunges and then all the other stuff. Or we always did cleans and then deadlifts and then whatever else. That's just how I trained forever. I didn't know any other way at the time.

I did a little bit of bodybuilder stuff, but it was just like dabbling in it. I actually did legs all through high school playing for hockey. And then when I got to college, I realized it was almost like to fit in, I had to stop doing legs. So few people did legs that they'd be like, wait, you do those? And then you realize, like, you're training by yourself. Or you were, like, a weird guy at a squat rack, which even in college you're, like, kind of insecure about, like, oh, I just want to, like, fit in and have training partners. And then nobody's squatting. So I ended up, like, moving away from doing legs because nobody ever did them.

Like there was just nobody around to hang out with you. Right. I went straight to college and was playing small college football, and so everyone was squatting. So we had a structured program we were supposed to do, and it was just like you're a football player, you squat. Oh, yeah. I imagine a football player not squatting.

He just gets trampled. Right, for sure. Dude, those training days were the best, though. College was so rad. I still feel like we, like, when you moved into our house, the apartment, we, like, instantly hit it off. I feel like we were the only ones that we knew that were, like, so dedicated to actually learning about strength conditioning.

Like, that piece of it just didn't exist everybody was just trying to go lift weights in a way because they were like told that it was good for them or there was like they knew they should so that they didn't put on their freshman 15 so like went to the gym but i had never met anybody up until that date that was just as interested, if not more interested, in learning why this shit worked and how to make it better. Once you got away from sports, was that the motivating factor to continuing this passion and staying in the gym? Yeah, for sure. You know that I struggled with what to do in school, yeah, for sure. I mean, you know that I like struggled with, with what to do in school and like ultimately. Me too. So I, I oscillated between, um, different

majors that were completely unrelated, um, psychology and business and then sports psychology and then something with sports and then recreation and then exercise science. And I went back and forth between all these majors and, um, eventually ended up doing the whole sports management, exercise science thing. And, um, that was just because it just, it just was my passion. Like there was, there was, I could try and fool myself into thinking that like, I wanted to sit in an office and hear people's problems and help them solve them. But ultimately, that's not really what I wanted to do. Like I wanted to work with athletes and I wanted to continue continually educate myself. And I'm really glad that I made the decision I did. Obviously, I wish in retrospect that I would have taken it further and done the whole meathead PhD thing.

But nothing but time. Yeah. I mean, it's a lot of it's a lot of money a little a little harder a little harder now at 37 but but um but that's always like my whole life has been my passion my driving passion and um I'm beyond thankful that that we're here 20 years later 15 years later whatever it is and we're both fucking doing it man we're in the industry we're making it happen so it's a cool story given that you are in the industry and we're making it happen. So it's a cool story. Given that you are in the industry and you've been doing it for decades now, you don't really need a PhD to do anything you would want to do at this point, I would imagine.

No, for sure. I think my reputation kind of speaks for itself at this point, the experience that I have. I envy the things that Galpin and Dr. Mike Isertel and Eric Helms and those guys, I envy the fact that they get to be hands-on doing research. Fuck, even Brett does a bunch of research, probably not as much as some of those other guys. Dude, that guy is... He's a great example, though, because he went back and got a PhD

when he was late 30s or early 40s or whatever the hell he was. He didn't do it right after college. He went back late. He's also not married with kids,s or whatever the hell he was. He didn't do it right after college. He went back late. He's also not married with kids, right? No, no, no. I don't think he wants to be married with kids right now. I feel like Brett just is. Oh, the glute lab?

It's a great place? He's just in a good spot. He lives in this magical wonderland where he's just around super hot chicks all day long. All the time. No need for kids in his life. But he somehow managed to be able to focus enough to get a PhD in biomechanics. So good for him, man.

But I think that's super rad. Like I, I would love an opportunity at some point to be able to be in a research lab and kind of live a little bit of that life. And, um, man, you get to be like a kid in a candy store,

like all the things that you always wanted to know about research, like, and, and science and training and everything. Like you can literally create studies that like give you an opportunity to find these results and that's fucking amazing yeah they have uh the the lab up at fullerton's rad like they've got a bunch of cool students up there i feel like the the interesting piece when they when they do all those research studies though um like i know

contraris is up till like six o'clock in the morning and then he sleeps for an hour and then i think he's like one of those genetic people that actually doesn't need sleep like when i see him posting online at the same time i'm waking up and i'm like dude what are you doing go to bed stop reading studies what do we got going on the house air conditioning yeah we got some air conditioning issues at Airbnb. Sounds like a fucking airplane that just about to crash. Dude, so we graduate college, though. When you are in college and you're bouncing around from major to major to major, and now all of a sudden, like, LA Fitness calls and is like,

dude, we got this job for you. Those jobs sucked. Oh, it was terrible. It was Bally's. Yeah, Bally for you. Those jobs sucked. Oh, it was terrible. It was Bally's. Yeah. Bally's. Bally's Fitness. Yeah, it was terrible.

I remember. There was never an option for us to do what we like to do right now 20 years ago or 18 years ago when we graduated college. That didn't exist. CrossFit gave us that opportunity. We would have been miserable had CrossFit not ever shown up because they actually gave everybody a way to teach strength conditioning that didn't do it the bally's way like that's a really what did you see when because i moved out to san diego we used to have like super epic like email battles about how bodybuilding was the right way to do things and how crossfit was the right

way to do things because i found crossfit like three or four years before you did. Um, when, when you started to, when we, when we were in the middle of like trying to figure out what, what was right and what was like the best way to actually go about training people. Do you remember any of those like conversations and how you started to come around to the crossfit side or like things that still held true to you um that you think you know shaped the way that you program for crossfit just like how was how was that picture forming in your head of like right versus wrong compared to everything that you had read in your entire life such a good question that's why we're here welcome to barbell struts your job good job dude yeah crushing it um okay so I'm sure you remember this,

but when you were struggling to get me to do CrossFit, it all started in the beginning. You started emailing me workouts, and I would go to 24-hour fitness and do them. This is a great story. You gave me Fran, Grace. Cindy was the big one. Cindy was the one we did before I moved out to San Diego.

I bet you couldn't do 20 rounds or something like that. You bet I couldn't do 18 rounds in 20 minutes. You crushed that. Yeah, strict pull-ups. I got 18 rounds exactly. Took my 20 and bounced. But no, like then, so I ignored everything CrossFit after that. I was like, this is stupid.

I think always my biggest problem with CrossFit was just, I was like, this is stupid. Um, I think always my biggest problem with CrossFit was just that I always assumed that it was only metabolic conditioning. I just, I was like, okay, maybe it makes sense if I want to do my cardio by doing CrossFit. Um, cause at the time I was, you know, lifting four or five days a week and I would run on a treadmill for 30 minutes, a couple of times a week as well. So I was like so like okay maybe i'll replace the treadmill work with crossfit so when you moved out here um and when you started making me go to the open gym east village east village now better public the only reason you got me to go was because you told me that it was open gym and i could still do my strength programming so i remember going there and we would still always choose like two strength lifts that

we did first it would be a deadlift and bench or like overhead press and squat or something like that and then we would do a conditioning workout at the end and that satisfied my need for strength training and muscular development like at the time i mean crossfit guys didn't look like they look now like you had me watching those old CrossFit videos. Yeah. And they were small. Like, they weren't super yoked. I mean, maybe the guys winning the games were in 2008, 2009,

but they weren't, like, the bodies that I emulated. James Fitzgerald was not a huge person. No, he's a small person. He was like a spieler back then. Yeah. I was actually surprised at how lean he was when we interviewed him in Miami. Who, James? Yeah. Oh, yeah?

I mean, I don't know. Did you have any thoughts on him when you met him? As far as his physique goes? For such a strong, in-shape human, I thought that there would just be a thick James Fitzgerald showing up. I would just assume he was a thick human being. And then when we were talking to him,

I just kept looking. I'm like, you've never had sugar before. There isn't. Like, you're just like a perfect, like, you only eat vegetables, perfect meats. He was definitely lean. Yeah. I feel like I had seen him so many times on video and photos before. He looked just like I thought he was going to look.

Yeah. He is super lean. I don't think that anyone would, I don't think even James would claim that he's strong. Like he's definitely more of a metabolic wizard than he is a strength athlete. Yeah. He's really good at obviously all the energy system stuff and all that. But because, so going back here,

because we could do the strength training stuff, I was kind of still getting in my fix of my like strength training, muscular development stuff that I needed. And then the CrossFit became the thing after that. And it was Vegas a couple months after we started CrossFit. We're back. Back in Vegas where it all comes full circle. Where you turned to me in a drunken stupor and asked if I would like to open a CrossFit gym with you.

Let's do it. And I think we kind of ignored it for like two weeks after that, or maybe we forgot that it was a question. And then we got back to San Diego, and we ended up – We had to write a business plan. We found a place and had to write a business plan in like two weeks. Yeah, that was wild times. Then we all of a sudden had debt.

We had to pay off. We had a business to run. Yeah, dude, well, that's the thing. You were like the main programmer. That was like your big role in the gym once we got in there. It was like you wrote all. I remember when we first opened, which was the dumbest idea we could have ever had, opening a business. But we were alternating months of programming.

Oh, my gosh. Don't worry, everybody. If you start a business, you can make it. We were alternating months of programming there was zero cohesion at all and we still figured it out for a good six years um dude your your soul i shouldn't say your soul role there was a lot of roles but the the big role was you were the programmer for not only the 300 plus athletes we had in the gym but like 75 something regional athletes like dude what is this like journey of understanding crossfit and getting back to playing and running sports teams

in a way like we had a lot of people that we were you were coaching like very hands-on and we were managing as a as a gym um dude what does that like process look like i mean you coached ryan fisher kenny leverage like games athletes and tons of regional people and now all of a sudden like i feel like the dream almost comes true where it's like sports management turns into like exercise fizz plus now we have athletes that are playing this new sport that like what is what's going on in your brain of trying to figure out how to play the game when there isn't a ton of information and then having to like actually write workouts and manage these people yeah totally such a big question uh man that must have all started in like 2012 to end of 2011 2012 when um carly asavito fuller yeah was my very first remote client and that chick went from never really having done crossfit before or olympic lifting to making it to regionals

that same year six months later and at the time that and she made it to nationals and weight lifting yeah and she made it to nationals i weightlifting. Yeah, and she made it to nationals in weightlifting. I had nothing to do with that. That was like two years later, but still. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I was her original coach and programmer and got her to regionals within six months. She even got a couple muscle-ups at regionals,

which placed her way ahead of other people. So that was a legit jumping-off point, and that coincided with Ryan Fisher being at our gym, being a fucking nutbag and training his face off point. And that coincided with Ryan Fisher being at our gym, being a fucking nut bag and training his face off endlessly. Um, and, uh, and so I don't exactly remember how I ended up coaching him if he came to me or if you suggested it or whatever the, the, the reasoning was, but I ended up coaching Ryan for 2012, 2013, 2014, where he made regionals each year. And we always fell, like, just short, right? It was, like, fucking 100 wall balls one year,

and he got no-repped on 25 of them or something. And, like, another year. He would lose his mind. He's too amped up. Another year it was bouncing deadlifts and, like. Trying to kill people. That one's the most famous. Always shit going on

so um i think through those two people they were both somewhat big in in the instagram world as well and i think that the the word just started to get out yeah and over the course of like the next two years our remote coaching roster went from those two all the way up into the 30s of like one-on-one clients and i would say like 18 to 20 of them were either at regionals or just on the cusp of regionals yeah um so it was it was a massive process like if if i were to be honest and look back and tell you that the workouts i created then are are similar to the way i would program for them in that situation now i'd be 100 wrong but um but it's all a

learning process for all of us dude I remember when he'd be like so how do you program for Fisher because he would never listen to anybody ever if you could imagine that he'd be like how are we going to program for him I don't know just try and kill him like see if he'll come back tomorrow and then you try and kill him and then he'd come back and smash another workout and squat 500 and run a marathon you're like i don't know what to do for this kid he's a freaking nature yeah so ultimately i think there were two guiding principles that i used in the beginning that were correct and probably made the programming successful even if it wasn't perfect and one was a belief that i still hold very strong to today is

that training should be structured and progressive and have metrics either week to week or bi-weekly or whatever the structure of the cycle is. And there should be things that are expected of performance at each interval. And if the adaptations are occurring properly, then the athletes should have no problem hitting the numbers that they're supposed to hit. And I use that information and put it back into the program and progress it from there the next cycle. So being able to have tangible metrics that you can use was something that I always used in the very beginning of programming. And all that comes from a little bit of like your world before then too, because if you were just following a strict CrossFit thing, it's constantly varied. There's very few metrics from 8 to 12 weeks out that we're testing.

It was just throw it on the wall and play wad roulette and let's get after it yeah i think constantly varied is maybe my biggest problem with crossfit in general um there definitely is crossfit programming out there now that's not constantly varied and yeah like the good ones the good ones right right but but back then that wasn't a thing so um so that was a guiding principle for sure, and I think that was part of the success of the athletes. And then the other one was ensuring as minimal overlap between – You got the thing on the wrong side. Now you won't get pulled down.

I just saw it. Minimal overlap between muscle groups. And I think that's another thing that CrossFit doesn't always or didn't used to always pay a lot of attention to is, you know, we're going to do a shit ton of push jerks and snatches on this day, and then we're going to come back tomorrow and do handstand push-ups and just a lot of overlap,

a lot of overlap in squat pattern movement as movements as well. And that, I think, is a huge inefficiency point in programming, and it's also a huge possible injury cause. So being able to kind of control those variables and at least hope that Ryan and the rest of my clients were not going off the board and doing things that they weren't supposed to do, I think, is at least part of what I believe would contribute to success. Yeah. We, I saw like a massive jump in just your skill level and coaching with the athletes when you went to OPT and like started to dive into his, like the energy system work, the way that he was programming strength, a lot of the cluster sets and stuff that he gets into. What was that experience like and

i guess how when you when you came back we had like an instant it was like the next day we had everything in the programming from brand new client to highest level games athlete that we had was everybody was on a brand new program Monday when you got home from that. It was super inspiring. I mean, James Fitzgerald and his group over at OPEX, they do an incredible job, and I learned so much from them. I remember the very first time going there, the first lecture that I went through was the programming lecture.

And it was just dope. It was so cool because what he was doing was taking a lot of the beliefs that I knew were right from my bodybuilding and strength training days and implementing them into a structure that properly coordinated the conditioning work to match the strength work, which was kind of always what I wanted to be doing. And I just wasn't exactly sure how to do it. Um, and then on top of that, to be able to coordinate the conditioning work into structure. So again, I'm just so about the structure thing. Um, but conditioning work with structure where we're working through energy systems and we're not doing it randomly. We're not like choosing a eight minute workout here and a 20 minute AMRAP there. And like a 30 second piece there. It's like, there's a working from the, the alactic

anaerobic side where everything is 15 to 20 seconds and we're going to work from that part of the spectrum all the way through the the super aerobic oxidative pathway where everything is 20 to 30 plus minutes and um kind of like one of the one of the things i took away from there was you know when you're peaking an athlete the ultimate goal is to get them to the lactic threshold area, which is going to be somewhere between three and five, six minutes of really hard work. And by starting at one spectrum on anaerobic and starting on the other spectrum on oxidative, and then kind of progressively working them toward the middle spectrum, which is the lactic threshold, I was able to get athletes prepared in a timely manner where if I had 10 weeks or 12 weeks or 14 weeks or whatever it is,

I can institute those methodologies and kind of incorporate it into their programming. I think physiologically that makes a lot of sense, but also psychologically. You're not just digging your dick into the dirt every day and met counting yourself into the ground in that model. You're able to do your strength work, do your cardio work, and then only really peak on the super lactic stuff,

doing heavy, heavy, hardcore MetCons pre-competition. And then you don't burn out as easy, I don't think. No, for sure. It's all just part of proper programming structure, like block periodization. Oh, my God. It's like we have different focuses throughout the year. No, you can't just kill yourself all the time

and expect to get results. Well, that was something that also changed, though. So Fitzgerald was talking about it at OPEX and doing a bunch of the energy system work. But then guys like Henshaw started showing up. And all of a sudden, there was this understanding of energy systems. And then you saw Froning was the only guy

that was rowing for an hour a day on intervals. everybody's like oh he's training so hard it was like he's kind of just like moving blood and breathing and then all of a sudden like everybody was on the rower or everybody was going for these long slow runs um and the whole game changed as far as how athletes prepared throughout the year like I feel like right about that time that you came out of OPEX we started to see this big I'm going to call it the awakening of like hot really good block periodization programming throughout a year structuring a year out for the CrossFit Games because people had been to it so many times now the success that we had or you had with the athletes how hard was it to get to the buy-in and like changing the way that they saw their programs

because for a long time we just tried to kill people was that something that was like very difficult in explaining like the learning curve to the athletes instead of just here's a workout. Three, two, one, go. It's like, hold on a second. We have four rounds here and we need to hit the same score in round one and round four. Like, I'm not going to do that because I'm going to blow it out in round one. There's like a whole coaching process and understanding of like communicating. How has that process gone for you and like

getting buy-in from your athletes yeah i mean it made my job way harder like yeah less sexy yeah for sure sit on the rower for 10 minutes take a little break 10 more minutes yeah um it definitely made it harder initially I had to literally have a conversation with every single athlete. And I remember in, uh, in the pursuit of efficiency, I remember writing out like a page long thing being like, this is what we're doing and just copying and pasting it and sending it to like each athlete. And I hope that you get 10 emails back. Everyone's like, I don't get it. I don't understand. So no one was doing it. So you want me to go hard as hell right now. Okay. So even after sending that out, I'd get you want me to go hard as hell right now. Okay. Even after sending that out, I'd get these reports from my athletes,

and I'd be like, you know, say the workout is AMRAP five minutes, rest three minutes for four sets or whatever, and you need to get the same score on each one. They would just have depreciating scores, like just miserably depreciating scores. So then I came up with this genius idea that your score was your slowest round or your worst round. And so suddenly athletes were like, oh, well, if that's my score, then now that changes the game because I need to win. Yeah.

So we use that same philosophy when we program the OCT. Yeah. And we did that miserable thing that I would never repeat, which was the triple Fran. Yeah, it was brutal. And your score was your slowest Fran. That was a highlight of Fisher's life. He did three back-to-back-to-back Frans on a four-minute interval. Last was 3.32 or

something. Yeah, he did sub-3.30s. It was on a four-minute interval, though, that we ran. Five-minute interval. Three Frans in 15 minutes, and the slowest one was 3.32 or something. Insane. It was like the highlight of the... he literally came outside and was like everyone talked to me that was so gangster like dude was

just like passing out in the middle of it was so freaky watching um yeah so i'm sorry to all the athletes if you did that workout um but it worked and it got people to slow down. And now when you look at CrossFit and what it's become, I think that that whole concept of pacing is just an expectation in the sport now. Like there's no high level athlete that doesn't understand pacing. Yeah. I find that Metcons now when I'm doing them, just because I'm not trying to like crush myself, I find it to be easier than the strength training. Like that used to be like the really hard thing like oh we're gonna do fran now i'm like how about i do it like 85 90 pace it out pretty well i'm gonna walk away from it instead of just being waxed and laying on the ground at the end of this thing like i find when you do that

you're able to you recover you want to come back the next day. And you start to get people that are just like getting better. It's really strange. Athletes show up when they get better. Well, and the other cool thing about pacing is that you're not redlining the entire time. So you actually can get better at doing movements, which is literally the goal, right? It's called practice. You need to get better at shit like you don't go out every single day and it's a game day like that's just that's just dumb yeah so you gotta shoot free

throws you gotta shoot free throws all day long that's what froning does like that motherfucker did a 20 minute emom of three squat cleans at 185 and that's 50 of his one rep max but people look at that and they're like oh three squat cleans on the minute at 185. I got this, bro. And then like 20 minutes later and they're on the ground like writhing being like, see, I did that. Froning did it too. Yeah, and it's totally different. He's just hanging out moving barbells with his friends.

When we were competing in weightlifting, I would treat practice like I was a baseball pitcher. Like I'm throwing my pens. I'm just over there. I throw a pitch and I'm trying to do it perfectly. And then they throw it back to me and I kind of shake it out for a second. Like, I'm throwing my pens. Like, I'm just over there. Like, I throw a pitch, and, like, I'm trying to do it perfectly, and then they throw it back to me, and I kind of shake it out for a second, and then I throw another one. Like, a pitcher's not trying to, like, throw to failure. It's a ridiculous concept.

Totally. If he's, like, below 90% or 95%, then the day is over. Like, okay, you did it. You're done. Now rest and come back and practice again the next day yeah that was that was a that was a high amount of the the training volume that i did when we're competing in weightlifting for like for the actual olympic movements for the snatches and cleans and jerks it was all very very technique based lots of sub

max reps and then i basically found that if i if my one rep maxes went up on front squats, then all of my Olympic lifts would follow. And so it was do perfect reps for all the technical speed power oriented movements and then just get as strong as possible using the big lifts. For sure. And even like to bridge to the bodybuilding world, like even the bodybuilding world and all the science now is pointing to two reps shy of failure being the sweet spot. So you don't need to go do bench presses to failure. And in fact, when you do that, you're not only causing yourself an excessive level of fatigue, but you're potentially doing reps that aren't perfect and you're creating bad motor patterns that then become a habit. Well, I think technical failure is a good idea for most people in most situations, as opposed to actual physical muscular failure.

Well, Pekulski talks about that all the time. He was one of the first people that sat down with us and was like, no, everybody, as soon as your form breaks down, now you're recruiting a bunch of muscles that you don't want as a part of the process. You're doing things completely wrong as soon as you get past that point. And that opened my eyes up a lot to just strength training of like oh i can just kind of move like 80 to 85 really really well and progressively over time you're just going to get stronger and better and be able to move more weight just because everything is moving properly instead of getting a bunch of janky movement patterns but still stronger.

That's one thing I like a lot about doing a high amount of sets and a low amount of reps per set. So instead of doing three sets of ten, you do ten sets of three. I think that's one of the reasons we're doing EMOMs and Metcons becomes really valuable is you can get the volume in, but you have these structures in place where you're not going to go to failure because of the way you design the workout. Yeah, for sure.

I'm a huge fan of three reps EMOM for 10 minutes at 65% or something like that. Yeah. You get the same reps with the same weight in the same time domain, but in a lot of ways, it's easier and more fun. You get the exact same volume done. You have faster bar velocity because you're not as fatigued. For sure. You get higher muscular tension because you're actually pushing fatigued and so you get higher higher muscular tension because you're actually pushing on the weight harder on on each and every single rep

and i feel like i feel like i get better results like that i'm not as beat up at all and it's more enjoyable yeah yeah i think there is for hypertrophy purposes there's probably more reason to go into like the higher rep ranges and kind of push that that threshold a little bit yeah has anybody really found like something very wrong with 10 by 10 german volume training of just getting fucking yoked like anything wrong with it i was like i don't know i'm talking about for like big fucking like you have to have like a ton of reps and a ton of volume for sure for sure yeah mass is correlated to volume yeah in a lot of ways yeah there's clearly need a variety of rep ranges you should not be doing a hundred snatches you should not be doing a hundred of

a lot of things but for like back squats there's there's some things you just have to do right like everything with training like it's they're all goal-dependent questions. The answer is always it depends. If you're talking specifically about hypertrophy, then you can go down a certain track. If you're talking specifically about perfecting

your weightlifting technique, you can go down another track. So it really depends on you as an individual what you're trying to accomplish. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the other problem with German volume training

is that the rest periods with German volume training is that a lot of things the rest periods are just way too short I mean like they tell you to take what is it 60% of your one rep max and do 10 reps with 60 seconds between each set and I literally like that doesn't take into account any sort of

individual muscle fiber type like I'm a fast twitch individual and my shit does not repeat sets of 10 with a one minute break in between so i don't know who's out there that's like so slow twitch that they can do 100 reps with 60 seconds between each set of 10 but that shit is not me no it's really hard yeah there's definitely things that you should not be doing german volume training that was more like the volume increased volume for size yeah um so dude you have all these um all these crossfit athletes regional athletes standing on the field at the games coaching one time which is pretty radical super cool um but the crossfit thing never goes away and you pretty much stepped away from coaching all of

those athletes coaching the gym doing programming programming for CrossFit-specific athletes. What is that kind of transition? Because you had an athlete at the CrossFit Games this year, which is really strange because you're not a CrossFit coach at all anymore. No, it's actually a really interesting story. Her name is Carlene Matthews. She's super rad.

We started working together a year ago because she had heard about a lot of the work that i was doing with kind of meshing together bodybuilding and strength training style programs with a crossfit feel if that's how you want to say it it's got some like hit and metcon style work um but obviously like we've been saying it's a lot of pacing and a lot of kind of energy systems and stuff like that so the last year we've literally been just doing that, like mostly bodybuilding strength training with two to three energy controlled Metcon type things each week. And then she just did the open, didn't really plan on making it or anything. Finished really high, I think second think second third something like that in her age group which

was 35 to 39 made it to the online qualifier finished that really high and made it to the games and that was super dope because we really didn't start doing any true crossfit stuff until after the online qualifier so in that period between online qualifier and games and then we started ramping up like handstand walks over objects and more muscle-ups and snatches and clean and jerks and all that stuff this chick is a competitor though like she just she's just in shape she just knows how to move she She's in shape. And, um, I think if anything, I helped her with kind of being confident in herself and her ability mentally, um, even more so, or at least as much as what I did with her training. Um, so she showed up to the games and this chick took second,

second at the CrossFit games and didn't really do CrossFit for the whole year. Um, so yeah, that's, that's the story with her, but the whole process of kind of creating this, this new structure of training and my evolved brand or what you call it, evolved training systems, um, all began around the time that we were kind of separating from the gym. And I had just finished the physique competition a year prior. It took me like a year to get over a lot of the hormonal issues that i experienced from improper programming and coaching leading into uh into the physique competition i would do that way differently um next time as well but as part of a necessity in my recovery coming out of that i went back to my roots of the three times a week full body training and did that for like six whole months until I got to a point where I felt motivated to

train again. Like honestly, for six months, it was just kind of show up to the gym and do the work because that's what I do. And I work in a gym, so I'm going to work out. Um, and then finally, when I started feeling better, I began putting programs together that were based in bodybuilding strength training with the structure and the metrics and the progressions and all those things that I truly enjoy with a little bit of bicep curls and a little bit of isolation work. The fun stuff. And then just like the stuff I was programming for Carlene in that year, just kind of like HIIT-style workouts where there's a time component, but the focus is always on quality and unbroken sets and proper movement more than it is on completing anything for time. You talk a lot about, or you were talking a lot about, having these metrics set up specific to things.

How do you do that in your own? Because personally, it's not that I'm not getting stronger, but I'm not really testing strength anymore. So I don't really know what my metric for improvement would be outside of like, I lifted heavy today. That's kind of the question that I ask myself. Like am I getting stronger? Well, four times this week I went to the gym and lifted heavy things.

So I'm definitely not going backwards. No, you're depositing a penny into the bucket of lifetime gains. Right? Right. Have you ever said that before? Is that a new thing or is that like a common thing? That was just like we should shut the show down right now. I totally stole that one.

You stole a t-shirt with that on it? I'll take it. No, I stole that one. Who is it? Jeff Alberts from 3DMJ. I don't know who that is. He's a rad dude. Anyway, so he's in his late 40s and he's been bodybuilding since he was like 15.

So I kind of look at him as somebody that I've been training 22 years years this dude's been training one and a half times as long as me which there aren't too many people out there that are still doing the thing yeah i've been training that long yeah um so so you totally deposited a penny into the bucket um so awesome but uh but the the way that we just titled the show by the way the way. I want a physical bucket at my house now that I can give my kids pennies, and every time they do something, they can deposit a penny into the bucket of lifetime games. They'll love it. You can use it, man. Use it. I'm taking it.

So I don't think by any means that there needs to be a one-rep max testing or a four-rep max or five-rep max or anything like that. The way that I try to structure programs now are I work them in 4-5 week mesocycles and I choose 1-2 movements per day that are repeating movements. So every Monday or Wednesday or Friday or whatever it is, I'm going to start with bent over rows and inclined dumbbell press or something like that, whatever the movements for the day are.

And I try to start each four to five week period at a, um, a few reps left in reserve. I like to try to shoot for about two to three reps left in reserve, um, on week one. And then I add five to 10 pounds depending on the movement every single week. So, and I try to match reps. So if in week two, I got nine, if I, week one, I got nine reps, then I had So, and I try to match reps. So if in week two, I got nine, if I, week one, I got nine reps, then I add 10 pounds. I try to get nine reps in week two, add another five to 10 pounds, get nine reps in week three. So what's happening is that each week, as I add five to 10 pounds and match reps, I'm getting one rep closer to failure. So then by the time I get to the fourth or fifth week, um, I've added a bunch of weight to the bar

and I'm now essentially at failure. At this point, my fatigue is now super high. Fatigue is going to mask my fitness. I know that my fatigue is high because if I come back the next week and I try to add five to 10 pounds to the bar, I'm no longer going to be able to match my reps. So at that point, I know I need to deload and flush the fatigue out so that I can manifest fitness. Take a week off or sometimes it's a week off. Sometimes it's a down week of lower intensity. Sometimes I'll take four days off and then do a full body workout. Whatever it is, I take a lower intensity week. And then the key is when you get back to week one again, you're now going to start with the week two weights. We're going to take a minute to talk about our friends over at the U.S. Air Force Special Operations.

We have been working with these guys for about three months now. And let me tell you something. I have never met a better group of individuals. They're so humble, it's almost impossible to get them to talk about the actual adventure that is their life. And it's Veterans Day on Monday. There's a reason that we celebrate Veterans Day because these people put their lives on the line for our freedom

and it's a very, very special group of people that are willing to go and do that. I have never really spent a ton of time around military people, specifically special ops people, and I have just been wildly impressed by the character, the demeanor, how polite. And on top of that, they're total badasses on the inside from jumping out of airplanes, underwater training.

We did an entire show with Lieutenant Colonel Kearns, uh, special operations over at the U S air force. And just these stories that he has about training and actually using this super high level of fitness, this mental toughness. If you've ever wanted to, or if you have ever thought about going into the special forces, please go see your recruiter or get over to airforce.com forward slash special ops. And you can learn all about the PJs. You can learn about all the opportunities for the air force. It's at airforce.com forward slash special ops or get over and see a recruiter.

And our friends over at Whoop. Love the Whoop. Put that thing on. Check out your HRV. Check out your sleep. It's very, very cool that you're able to see exact numbers for sleep, HRV, heart rate. I love checking out my heart rate. There's this thing that happens when your heart rate is in the 40s that just you feel so confident about

your life. I don't know why. When it just is down that low, you're like, I am so in shape. Bring it on, Matt Fraser. I'm not afraid of you. Get over to whoop.com. You can save $30 on a 12 or 18 month membership at whoop.com using the coupon code shrug. Coupon code shrugged, whoop.com, $30 off a 12 or 18 month membership. Back to the show. So then you work back up again from week one, week two, week three, week four, week five, and now you're week five or you're week four, that the peak week should then be five to 10 pounds higher than your prior peak week was and then fatigue is super high you deload you rinse wash and repeat do you feel like you're still able to progress at that at that speed like i feel like anything that i'm doing it's now is is on like a six month well you got a length of

time almost it feels the progressions are so slow because like if i'm starting at three reps shy of failure then me adding five to ten pounds isn't actually it's pushing me to two reps shy of failure it's it's not actually like i'm getting five to ten pounds stronger i'm lowering a rep closer to failure then i had five to ten pounds again i'm another rep closer to failure and like doug was saying it's technical failure it's not technical failure right right right on certain movements you can push more to muscular failure. Like, if I'm doing a leg extension or, like, something like that, you can push that.

But an RDL, a deadlift, a squat, stop, like, technical failure. Absolutely. At this point, like, no one needs to be risking injury going, like, RDLs to failure. Could you imagine, like, what actually would fail?

Don't do those in German volume training. No. Ten sets of ten. That would be a bad part. That those in German volume training. No. That's a 10. That would be a bad idea. Yeah. So, no, I'm not getting stronger at that rate. But when you look at it over the course of, like, this is a five-week mesocycle, and then I get back to week one, the following mesocycle,

and I'm using the week two weights. So now I'm hoping to get three reps shy of failure with the weights that I was two reps shy of failure. Gotcha. So it's a lot of, it's, it's semi-advanced in the sense that you have to have very good self-awareness of where your proximity is to failure. Yeah. But these are some of the things that I work with, with my clients on understanding where they are to failure. I'll watch videos and be like, okay, your bar speed is like this. So I would guess at this point you were about four reps shy of failure, three reps shy of failure, whatever it is.

Help them begin to understand failure. But it's also really important. And I've heard you talk about this too. In that if you've never worked to failure, how can you possibly understand how far you are from failure? Yeah, I think that there's like a really important piece of,

so man, this is something I think about a lot. You know, when i think about training now of like you know we we get out of the crossfit thing and crossfit has this really bad rap of like we're going too hard and you're messing up your hormones and like you're over training it's like well fuck you at least i'm playing at the edges every once in a while. Like your fucking boring-ass program where you just sit and, oh, we're going to do the same 70%. We'll be great when we're 60. Well, I don't have time to wait until I'm 60 to find out if I can be fucking good at something.

That's why I played CrossFit. I wanted to find out if I could be good at weightlifting. And now it's different. On the other side of that, I do think about lifting weights at 60. But, man, when you meet somebody or somebody wants to come work with you are you ever like dude just fucking hit the gas pedal let's go like you got to learn how to get after it that's that's your problem you're not struggling with oh your perfect form and all this stuff your problem is you're lifting weights like a pansy and you need to learn how to get after it so the answer is it

depends which which doug so eloquently said is the answer to most things um the clients that tend to come to me are the ones that have already pushed the gas pedal so hard that they probably need to back off a little and almost all of them have gotten better results by backing off a little bit yeah um i think that physiques especially as this has kind of become my my zone now is is helping people enhance their physique without being bored to shit in the gym um physiques are enhanced by tempering training intensities and volumes um and again your volume is is an important driver of hypertrophy, but tempering volumes and intensities

that are both rising simultaneously. So it's an inverse relationship, as we know, that if you have high intensities and you're killing yourself, you just can't do as much of it. And if you're trying to do a lot of it and do high intensities, you're going to die and you're not going to get results and your body's going to remain puffy because you're going to be holding on to all of this cortisol and the stress. And I think that those are very relevant things. And the clients that come to me are those that that are benefited by taking a step back and focusing more on their movement quality and less on just hitting the gas pedal yeah when you how much of the i guess two things that kind of

uh really exemplify what goes on in the crossfit from olympic lifting and then kind of like a high intensity interval training conditioning piece do you still have that stuff in there is it one day a week or like how often do you how often you get olympic lifting in and then like how do you add the conditioning pieces in is it just all energy system work in individual training it's whatever the client needs yeah um so there could be multiple olympic lifting and multiple do you still find value in the olympic lifts yes absolutely yeah um in the evolved uh original evolved program which is more of like the hybrid style i incorporate i i have olympic lifting in at least once a week it's usually in the form of cleans um but oftentimes it will appear twice where i'll

have it once in the form of cleans and once in the form of um of either a a muscle snatch or a power snatch i don't tend to program squat snatches in that program, though I do provide a template framework of how you might go about adding those in to accompany the program. I'm trying to write a program that is acceptable and doable and productive for people both in and out of the CrossFit space. Yeah, like just functional fitness gym. Functional fitness gym, yeah. So I just think a squat snatch and a split jerk are just kind of hard movements for somebody that isn't super familiar with them to be doing.

And I don't know that they necessarily enhance the end goal, which is to feel good, look good, and live your best life. Yeah. I wonder if I was writing a program for like just gen pop how much snatching would be in there it's like an interesting like running the one ton challenge program that's part of the testing that's that's something you have to we want people to get good at i love teaching snatches so it's very important to me that like just because it's fun like i would be so bored if we just taught deadlifts like Like, but mom and pop coming off the streets, coming into your gym, like, man, we really don't need to learn how to get to the high hang and finish.

I'm convinced that you can get all of the benefits of Olympic lifting by doing a high pull. Or like a broad jump. For most people. But yeah, a snatch high pull or a clean high pull you don't even need to do the turnover totally um you can get all of the hip activation and glute activation that you need from that so i'm a huge fan of programming high pulls into programs i think there's a lot of applicability to high pulls for aesthetics training as well in that you can do them in a manner that isn't so precise like as it would be for an Olympic lift,

but more of letting the traps hang long and snap up and pull and just repeat for sets of 10 to 15 and fucking light your shoulders and traps up. Yeah, dude, I'm lit up right now. I did 5 plus 1 the other day. Oh, yeah, I saw those pulls. I even called Doug and said, look, the dude got strong yesterday.

You added a penny. More than a penny. It was like a nickel, maybe six cents. I got bigger traps. I feel good. I was like, damn, the dude can still hang out. I even sent the video to Travis Mash. That means you know I was vying for a spot on Team USA of, hey,

I could snatch my body weight if you got an open spot. You got an open spot. You want someone to finish last? I'm your guy. Yeah, I'm totally with you on the technicalities of snatches. If you are not a person that's competing in weightlifting, you're competing in CrossFit, then the only reason to teach snatches is that you just think they're really cool and you just want to do it because you just think it's really fun.

Outside of that, all the physiological benefits that you could get from snatching can be pursued in a much safer fashion that and you could learn it much faster was it gonna take you two years learn how to snatch snatch well like at a minimum like you could learn how to you said broad jumps or box jumps or or trap bar deadlift or not trap bar jumps rather like there's plenty of ways to apply some type of external load and and to and to do some type of you know forceful acceleration or jumps or whatever it is that you could learn in a day or two that doesn't take two years like you would if you're snatching yeah yeah for sure um you mentioned earlier that you're you're kind of like using

bar speed uh kind of like that where their body breaks down technically um in these lifts but a lot of this really comes down to people being able to connect their brain and their body and that is really really challenging for a lot of athletes slash people coming to you saying like and you're saying i need two reps in reserve when they go what the hell is that and you're talking to them about bar speed but the learning process for them is to be able to actually connect failure muscular fatigue and technical breakdown and that's a way complex conversation for a lot of people that don't understand movement yeah i don't work with a whole ton of people that don't understand basic movement i mean i'm lucky and um i'm very appreciative that that most clients that come to

me are veterans of some form of of weight training already yeah um i would say the average person that comes to me has at least three years experience, if not more. So they're understanding RPE pretty well. They at least understand failure. Yeah. I think if I had a client come to me that was a newbie and was like, hey, I've been training for a year, but I'm not really sure what I'm doing.

Here's a video of me doing some deadlifts. And I looked at it and I was like, ooh. Go to a CrossFit gym. They'll teach you take the intro class. So I think that this person in this case also would not need to go to failure because they just don't understand failure. It's more of the person that like has really good form. And I look at their videos and I'm like, Oh yeah, you move really well, but you, like you said, you don't connect your, you don't, you don't really understand failure. You don't understand hard work. You need to hit the gas pedal more. These people I'm like, okay, you have good form. You're locked in. I'm not worried about you injuring yourself. We can go to technical failure on certain movements. Um,

and then that will produce incredible results for them, but it will build fatigue faster. So we'll monitor that. Um, when they get to a point where the fatigue is too high, we'll deload, we'll start back over. And, um, you know, after a couple of months working to failure, it just causes fatigue too fast. And, um, and we have to deload too often. So by taking back on the gas pedal a little bit, stopping just shy of failure, we can extend the gaining periods a little bit longer before we have to deload and kind of work back up again. Dude, it's really cool that you are, do you find yourself maybe not accepting clients or looking for a specific like training age for your clients so that you can further perfect the system that you're of the things that you're working on um has it gotten to the point where like you know

exactly who you want to be working with to be able to stimulate and or use this exact stimulus to create this exact result yeah for sure i mean i get such a variety of people that come in and um my optimal client is definitely somebody that when i have a conversation with them and i say talk to me about the last two or three workout programs that you did and what aspects of the program you enjoyed and felt were productive and what aspects you know were you kind of like oh this is boring or i didn't really get much from this or blah blah i want them to be able to tell me that and answer that question um so i'm not like an elitist and saying that i wouldn't work with someone that's more new um but i think i'm

lucky enough at this point to be able to be a little bit more selective. And if somebody is willing to pay the premium that it costs to have one-on-one coaching, then I want to be passionate about what I'm doing with them. And I want to be excited about training with them and being able to kind of give them some of the knowledge that I have and try and help teach them to become a better athlete. Yeah, we talk about it all the time. If somebody just came up to you, like we were down in Jamaica coaching cleans, and both Doug and I just kind of like started slowly backing away because it was like these kids don't know cleans at all.

Like we have to back your language down so much to this like, okay, just jump. Keep your arms loose. And you're like, man that that's not where i'm at in the coaching game right now i want all that stuff to be handled now especially when it comes to olympic lifts like i want i want to like work on like the very specific nuances of someone who's like trying to perfect something that's like 99 there and i'm just like i don't know like a half an inch just on your left side hold on no no right there okay perfect right there yeah okay try that try that how's that feel like that's that's what i want to do i want to really work through the details when i get someone

who's brand new and doesn't know anything i just someone needs to coach them that's great but like it's very emotionally frustrating for me to watch somebody just like destroy what is that supposed to look like i see them to do it and i'm like oh god um no the answer is just no i don't want to go on that journey with them unless they're like unless they're like a special person in my life and i'm happy to help but just like as as like a career like coaching people who know nothing and trying to like work for like three to five years to get them into the place that I want them to be is just not what I want to choose to do with my time. I also, just over time, have learned, dude, you just need reps. Just start jumping.

Just try and catch it after you jump. Just try. We'll figure it out. Nature will happen sooner or later. Your arms are just going gonna have to come through um yeah i feel like at this stage being able to like just find the clients that are specifically interested in the thing and i mean even on the business side like knowing exactly who your best client is really helps those people find you because the conversation that you're having online with or just through instagram

with the blog posts and stuff that you put up, it makes it almost easier for clients to find you when you put out really high-level information. The newbie looks at you like, well, that guy's smart, but I don't understand what the hell he's saying. And somebody that's actually dialed in to understanding the conversation makes it very easy for you to be the expert. My message is not geared at new people. I mean, when you read the stuff I put out there,

it's very much geared at people that like understand what mechanical tension is at least even if they don't understand the phrasing mechanical tension that they understand that you have to lift weights and you have to work hard and you have to get progressively stronger so yeah um yeah i'm lucky um dude you're here we got you out here because the one-ton challenge is is happening tomorrow otc too i'm gonna start calling it otc like ufc i thought about that the ufc was on the other We got you out here because the one-ton challenge is happening tomorrow. OTC 2. I'm going to start calling it OTC, like UFC. I thought about that. The UFC was on the other day.

I was like, why don't we just call it OTC 2? It's like UFC 900 right now. What number are they on? 250? God! What are they doing? 242? UFC 3647.

What are they going to do when they get to those numbers? It's one a month, right? They're probably twice a month at the moment. That's insane. Three times a month maybe? They're almost every weekend. As soon as we get off these microphones, we need to go to the training center over there too, by the way.

Oh, yeah, we totally can. Dude, Duncan's a fucking great dude. He'd have us over there. We could go hang out. Well, next time Galpin is with us in Vegas, he's going to call Forrest. Forrest wants to come on the show, Forrest Griffin. We've been trying to make that happen for a long time.

We just need to get Galpin and go over to UFC PI and hang out. Galpin's teaching all those guys how to lose weight. Yo, tell us about your one-ton challenge journey. We did this thing together, but any time I get to hear people's story about going through this and your specific thing, because we were there together, but the way you did it was way different than me um let's hear it dude yeah man when cena came into the gym that day and and told us that we were doing it it was like on it we were like kids in candy stores it was so cool

did he ask you too man so was that real what was it that we were coming we were coming back from a east coast trip you were i came back from an East Coast trip? You were. I came back from an East Coast trip, and I had to fly directly into L.A. You were in an airplane for like 24 straight hours. Yeah. I flew into L.A. from the East Coast just so that I could board another plane, which was a private plane with you and Sina. It was a nice plane.

And then fly right back to Tampa. So, yeah, we landed in Tampa at like 3 a.m. And we went home. We slept for a little while. Woke up. Sina's chef had a sweet breakfast steak prepared for us with gangster veggies and potatoes. And we knew we had three days to train with him, which was just so rad. So we had this whole strategy laid out.

We talked about it on the plane ride like what's your order gonna be how are you gonna do it blah blah and i think the order has actually become kind of like an important thing for people that are close to the 2 000 pound number for the freaks like no one gives a fuck but um but i remember thinking the order was like so crucial and i was set i was like i am to snatch before I squat. And you were like, no, we got to squat before we snatch. And I still don't know whether it was good or bad that we did that. But at the time, I PR'd my squat at 401. And that was not a pretty movement at all.

But it happened. So then we moved on to snatching. And when did I hit? 238? Something like that. It was in kilos. 232, 238, something like that. Yeah, it was 238. It was 108. Yeah, and I was 105, so you were 238. That was like

242. And then I think, oh, then I benched. Wait, what? 108 is like... 110 is 242, so it's like 4 or 5 pounds less. Oh, then I benched. Wait, what? 108 is like... 110 is 242, so it's like four or five pounds less. Yeah, 238.

Then I benched. I've always been so bad at benching. Speaking of which, just a sidebar, we have to go get that video fixed of the actual live snatch

on YouTube. They copyrighted us on music that was playing in the background. I went to go look for the video the other day and I was like, what the fuck?

This is like the highlight of my life. The slow motion snatches? We live streamed the snatch session and then YouTube just blocked it like three months ago because I was trying to find the video. I was just like, no way. This is brutal. YouTube doesn't know how

important this is to me. They didn't run it by us before they did it. No, you know what happened, dude? i fucked up on snatching on the first day because we back squatted first and i was pissed i think i only snatched 220 and i were 225 and i was super bummed about it so i went and benched hit like 280 or 285 and then the next day came back and started with snatches because I was so bummed about the prior snatch session. And that's when I hit 238 and followed that with a clean where I hit 140, 308. Yeah, that was a big one. And then deadlifted 516.

That was a big deadlift. Big deadlift. Really ugly also. Perfect. Just like you would program it today. Dude. I look at those lifts and I cringe sometimes. You've got to get it done.

You've got to get your name on the door. Yeah. And so I had all the lifts in except the jerk. And I had my torn labrum. I still have a torn labrum. But it was really bothering me then. I remember. Because I had jerked 300 a year prior maybe

two years prior and it was literally all i could manage to hit the bare minimum jerk that would get me to like 265 or something it was 264 yeah it was like 120 kilos i think i had to press out too but i did it and got to 2001 so it wasn't like like the best performance I could have made, but I fucking made the club and I'm on Cena's door. You're on the board. Yeah, dude. That moment when we were in the back of the car and he was like, you guys got to go do this. I was like, fuck yeah, we're going to go do this.

I didn't know that it was going to be this radical that we'd be at the Fit8 booth and fucking monster powerlifters coming to hang out tomorrow. Look what it's come into, man. It's so cool that you guys are able to kind of give the one-ton challenge to the world. It's wild. And FitAid, dude, they're just hooking it up. They just make this thing happen.

It's so rad. We just show up and sling drinks with them and watch people get super jacked. Dude, I feel like motivation is so high at the moment, too. Like, everyone is fucking stoked on it. Yeah, it's wild dude when you look at like instagram and it's like i gotta go write the post every day and like i gotta come up with like the really long thing there's nothing cooler than creating like the the thing that everyone's doing it for you it's like oh i just go to the hashtag and at least four people a day are training for it doing it amazing and you just like i just repurpose the content because like

look this is all the people in the world doing this thing and uh it's really wild that it's caught on and started to move it's really really i've never been a part of something that's that's kind of just like moved so easily into people's gyms it's got momentum it's crazy um if you were putting together uh like the training plan this isn't even in your wheelhouse but you got a full year how are you uh how are you using evolve to get people better at the one-ton challenge are they completely completely off um i just like your programming expertise yeah it doesn't even have to be the specific to yeah um so this is like instant on the spot problem solving for six lifts to pr totally amount of time set go so i think that the olympic lifts need a little bit bit more frequency than the other lifts because they're so technical and the loads don't need to be as high to ensure that you're practicing proper movement.

So we'll Olympic lift, probably hit each lift twice a week at most. Cause I think that the thing that the deadlift is that you don't want to be fatiguing all those muscles that you need to stay tight as you pull cleans and snatches off the ground. Um, so deadlifting would definitely have to be programmed in an extremely periodized manner. Um, the squat, we would definitely front squat and back squat, even though the front squat is not on the program. I think that that's crucial to help your cleans. Um, it also helps you, um, with quad drive in the back squat. And, um, I know I personally tend to become posterior dominant when I back squat. So a front squat would be a huge addition there to help with

the upright torso position. Um, benching, man, I am not a huge fan of the bench press personally. I'm not going to lie. I don't know. The bench press, I'm just like, oh, yeah. I mean, just get stronger. Just do it. You'll just push harder. There's just like so much.

There is a lot of technique to the bench press. And I think that the problem that people have with the bench press is that most people don't know how to brace properly like you can get your feet planted in you can arch your back and squeeze your butt and all those things but if you don't understand how to like row the bar into your body and use your lats to to press it back up that's a huge problem yeah um so being able to understand that the bench press is not just a chest shoulder and tricep exercise is is definitely important and again i think as far as programming goes you probably are better off avoiding failure and um working at weights like i think doug's approach

of 10 sets of three is a fantastic approach for bench press um to work on bar speed and positioning and stuff like that yeah travis does a lot of that type of stuff he wrote the program for the one-time challenge he does a lot of that type of stuff yeah so i think that that's pretty much where it all fits in i just programmed out an entire year in like three minutes there it is that's all you need there um dude one thing we didn't even get to talk about with evolve though like you're back in the globo gym doing all the globo things like your instagram stories when i see them i'm like dude is straight up back in the globo gym doing all the globo things like your instagram stories when i see them i'm like dude is straight up back to the meathead grind in the globo you're doing hack

squats you're doing like uh leg curls like all of it you're kind of going against a lot of the functional fitness stuff where where i guess in do you fall on the line of we need to be maximizing hypertrophy and doing isolation movements and these machines are awesome and yo let's go with some heavy ass weights and deadlifts and squat and not really bench but do heavy cleans uh where where do you fall on the volume and kind of those lines now? So I am in the name of block periodization. I am in a period of time

where I'm focusing more on hypertrophy. I'm in a block. I'm very much in a block of time where I'm concerned about getting fucking yoked. In a very educational, enlightened way, I'm trying to get super jacked. This block started in 1983. Trying to get yoked ever since.

Totally. So one rad aspect of my Globo Gym experience, like the main catalyst actually that brought me into the Globo Gym was I got tired of lifting free weights all the time for legs. I felt like the variety wasn't there. It was back squat. It was front squat. It was single leg movements and it was dead lifting varieties, which is awesome and great

for like the first 20 years of my training. That was perfect. Um, but I'm 20 plus years into this thing and I have really weak quads compared to my hamstrings and glutes. And every time I would back squat, I would either have to swallow my ego super fucking hard and squat perfectly, or go to low bar,

which would just further exacerbate my posterior dominance, and I just never was able to train quads properly. So going into the Globo gym, I have been hack squatting and leg pressing. And about three months ago, I was hack squatting three plates per side for a set of 10 that was close to technical failure. And just yesterday, I hit four and a half plates per side for nine reps. That was pretty close to technical failure so that's like a 50 increase in like three months of that movement um it's not my intention to

hack squat and globo in this way without putting back squats or deadlifts into my program forever um but i think that it's important for me to build quad strength and then take that back into back squats and see what a dedicated three month cycle of back squatting with renewed, um, kind of focus and execution will do for my overall gains in that movement. Um, and as far as deadlifts, I actually stopped deadlifting as well. And I am doing stiff legged deadlifts, which allow me to use slightly less load just get you sore as shit get you sore as shit so did i just tear my hamstring off the bone like locked knee like it's not it's not locked it's not locked i'm saying if you've ever done locked knee rdls where you get like that big stretch at the bottom like still still good technique to neutral spine all that but like if you get that big stretch and you do a lot of volume like that makes you systematically sore every time like the like the first bad effect like all that

stuff like doesn't go away you just get sore every time forever just crushed well hamstrings are notoriously fast twitch muscle fibers so we don't really need quite as much volume for them which would mean doing too much would create that misery. But stiff leg deadlifts have been awesome because it forces me not to use my back as much, which is strong. As you know, it's kind of like my best strength point. So I've been able to work up to 365 for sets of six to eight

on the stiff leg deadlift, which has been cool. And again, i'm excited to take some of that and uh apply that kind of more rigid torso position that i have into uh squatting and deadlifting movements going forward what are your big goals like when you what like what numbers or things movements do you think are like cool in the future like squatting 405 is a is a fucking cool accomplishment like 225 snatch is like the goal where are there things that you have in the future where you're like i'm kind of training towards this but i'm not really obsessing over it like just far out goals

so i've squatted 405 for three um that was low bar so i think it would be really cool with with this additional quad strength that i'm building to be able to high bar back squat 405 for three. I think it'd be even cooler to be able to do that with a pause at the bottom, but I don't know if that's ever going to happen. Yeah, that would be really cool. Eight seconds. See what happens down there. It's just one second. Buried in the bottom.

So I think 405 for three on a high bar would be super dope um i really really would love to get up to 405 for five on stiff like a deadlift that's kind of like my i think i care about that probably more than the other lifts that just the stiff like a deadlift just works for me it uh it provides a good stimulus without the excessive level of fatigue that i think the deadlift gives you. So, you know, you deadlift and you're kind of like, oh, like I kind of use my quads. I kind of use my traps. I kind of use my back. I kind of use my glutes, my hamstrings. But like, what am I really working?

Because you always feel when you're deadlifting that like your low back fatigues before anything else does. And so I think the stiff legged deadlift is rad where yes there's still like a significant hinging of the hip for the low back involvement but when i fail i feel like it's a failure of my ability to drive my heels hard through the ground and literally feel that like ripping in the hamstrings as i'm accelerating up and i'm able to kind of get a really cool muscle mind muscle connection with the hamstrings in that area do you feel like even when you feel like even when you say these numbers, and some people might think they're super heavy, some people may think they're not that heavy, but do you feel like you're lifting heavy weights anymore?

The weights may be heavy, but the way that you approach doing it, I still feel like I lift heavy all the time, but I never go into the gym assuming I'm going to lift heavy, if that makes sense. Like the mental side of it is always like, I'm just lifting weights and it's fun. And I'm trying to have this like connection to my body. And if I can do it really well, and it just happens to be heavier, awesome.

But I never go in mentally thinking like i have to lift 405 for three today no i think you have exactly the right idea and i think that it comes back to kind of looking at the way that progressive overload happens um brian minor is a rad thinker in the space he's either got a phd or an ms but um but he was talking on a podcast the other day about how people have the wrong interpretation of progressive overload that people go into the gym and they think that they need to add weight

so that they get stronger but that progressive overload is actually you're adding weight because you got stronger which is just a subtle nuance of the way you're thinking about it Hold on, run down and buy me again I wasn't expecting you dropping mics over there. No, no, no, for sure, for sure.

So if you go into the – I was like, oh, I really need to pay attention to the words here. So if you go into the gym and you're like, fuck, the plan says I need to add five pounds to the bar, so I guess I'm going to add five pounds and whatever. Just because. Just because. You're like, that's what the program says,

and I did it last week, so I should be stronger now or whatever. Yeah. That's the wrong way of thinking about progressive overload. The right way of thinking about progressive overload is I have earned the right to add weight because I've gotten stronger. So you don't add weight to – But you see the total difference. Yeah, yeah. I didn't know you were making a point so specific when you said that.

I was like, hold on. This is going to lead to more conversation. I try to think about it like that now where when I go to the gym, I don't necessarily go in, at least in the latter weeks of my cycles where I was talking about how I'm closer to failure and I've already kind of extended the fatigue spectrum. I don't go into the gym and already plan on adding five to 10 pounds. I go into the gym and I'm warming up and I'm feeling it out. And then if I do my first working set and I exceed my expectations, then that almost gives me permission the next week to be like, okay, I have adapted to the stimulus and now I have the right, I've earned the right to go add

weight next week. And that would be what I would do. So I would almost look at it in like a two or three week or like maybe a double progression model where like you hit nine reps and then the next week you go in and you're like, sweet, I got 10. Didn't really like plan to get 10. I just did 10. And then fuck, I did 11 the next week. So that's cool.

Well, now I should probably add five pounds because I've gotten stronger and you can take it back to eight reps double progress your way back up and you earn the right to add weight based on manifesting performance with quality i think it's also just a great way to frame it in the conversation that you have about strength too like earning the ability to move forward is much healthier in the way that you think about getting stronger than saying like, oh, my coach wrote add five pounds. And you're like, fuck, my body feels like shit. Last week sucked.

I remember doing that like specifically in the 5-3-1 program like way back in the day doing stuff like that where I'd be like, well, I got max reps. And last week it was like I got seven, so I guess I have to hit eight. And like number eight was always like the most heinous, rounded back, gross deadlift at way too much weight. And I'd be like, did I really get better? Like, I'm supposed to do one more rep, but I feel like I'm doing way more damage to my body than actually getting stronger. And when you think that, it's probably right.

So all the people that are out there listening, they're like, you know, just because you got that extra rep. If it doesn't look like the prior rep, then that totally shouldn't count. Yeah. Who are you learning from? I imagine, I mean, well, how about before we even ask who you're learning from? When you go into the gym, do you feel like you're experimenting on yourself to learn things or do you feel like you're uh with the idea of where it may be going but not really having like a plan specifically to a place um whereas if you were writing a program for like a client and they say this is the exact

goal that we're programming for um what's kind of going on in that like experimental phase of what you're learning about right now just in your own training and then how that kind of filters down to your athletes yeah absolutely it's a good question because i i am learning a lot um through my own training and through through listening to others um in the field a lot of the guys that I mentioned earlier, I learned from Dr. Mike Izzertal. He's the best. He's great. One of my favorite of all time, I think, is Mike Izzertal.

I listened to the one you had on here with him, and he was talking a lot about the reps and reserve concept and stuff that I've talked about, staying shy of failure and things like that. I've learned a lot from him for sure. He is a 100% hypertrophy-focused athlete and promoter. All of his programs are all about building hypertrophy.

So I take from that what I can. I just feel like I could talk about Mike Isertel forever. He's so awesome. Yeah. I mean, he's a great talker. He's also a good storyteller. He's a great talker. He's also a good storyteller. He's a great poser. His Instagram account is always 99% naked.

And he delivers quality information, which is rad. Him, I like the 3DMJ guys, Eric Helms, Jeff Alberts. I like a lot of Brett Contreras' stuff. I think he has a really unique perspective because he's in the scientific-based community, and yet he doesn't necessarily buy into all of the research the same way that some of these other guys do. He puts his own spin on things, which I like to believe is the way that I do things too.

I'm trying to mesh these worlds of physique, hypertrophy stuff, with strength training and with some conditioning and crossfit style stuff and some olympic lifting so i'm taking a little bit of everything and my mission is to try and figure out how to put it together in a way that maximizes the benefits of each and i'm still working on whether i think that the best way to do that is in select cycles of 8 to 16 weeks focusing on one specific area or whether i'm able to kind of take some of these things and put them together into one cycle or whether it's slightly more skewed toward physique and hypertrophy with some olympic lifting and

conditioning and then vice versa the other way so i'm experimenting with a lot of that stuff which has been fun um in my own training the whole process of working from the two to three or whatever three reps in reserve and then adding weight each week and working up close to failure has been a massive learning process because like we were saying to be able to understand your own

body's response and your self-awareness of your proximity to failure is extremely advanced it's not something that you would expect someone off the street to be able to do. So with 20 plus years of experience, I'm still figuring out my proximity to failure on different movements. Yeah. Well, that's a huge process.

Yeah. So it's been cool, man. I feel reinvigorated with my training and with my coaching. And I think that there was definitely a period in there when we were kind of leaving the exclusive CrossFit space and I was kind of creating this program and moving into it where I felt lost and uh and I didn't exactly know what I wanted to do with with my training and with my programming and with my clients and I think that I have a lot of clarity on that now yeah it's super rad the the whole thing I think leaving

that CrossFit space it was like we had so much knowledge but there was a sport to play there was a goal it was like did you win did you go to regionals did you go to the games like there was a yes okay that worked yes we went to the games yes we got to this level yes we had this many people each year qualify there was a legitimate goal at the end and you had to program specifically to that goal and then when you take that goal away it's like okay well fuck what's the next goal like what is the next thing that i want to be programming for and who is interested in that thing that's what's so rad about the one-time challenge what's so rad about evolved is like you have to you know all the things that you don't want to coach

and the conversations you don't want to have, but it's really hard to figure out what conversations you do want to have and how to move towards those, create a structure, create a system, and then be inspired enough to actually go out and figure out the answer to that problem through programming, training, the same fucking deadlifts that we've been doing our whole lives but structuring it in a manner that has to matter towards a goal that most people don't even know exists um i know a lot of people find you before or like after they've

just been run down and been through the the grinder of crossfit and coming back to being healthy how long does that process for you take to get somebody that's just, call it Carlene, who goes to the games this year. I know she's been very public about a lot of her like female issues that were just hormonally super jacked up. But how long does it take to kind of take somebody from totally wrecked, totally just beat down, doesn't know where to go in the future and say like, hey, I've been there. Let's try this stuff out to get you to a baseline. And then we can start talking about the longer goals. Yeah. I mean, none of that is even relevant unless they have their like lifestyle factors in order. The training two times a week or one time a week or no times a week isn't going to solve any

problems without like good sleep patterns and good nutrition and a relatively low stress life. The important things, right? So once all those things are in order and we're able to put them into at least a caloric maintenance for where they are and possibly more than likely a surplus. I think with most of the people I work with, within two to five months, we notice significant feelings of kind of more motivation in the gym, more mental clarity and focus throughout the day. Those are kind of the big things that I look for from them as far as feedback. And obviously seeing them get stronger is also a huge factor. You don't get stronger if you're unhealthy.

Strength is the thing. You just got to get people stronger. Get them to chill out. To a point. I feel like all the people that talk about strength being the price of admission and then assuming we're talking about CrossFit at the moment, you got to get to a certain level of strength, and after that the whole game is conditioning,

assuming you have that base level of strength. That's what CrossFit's become, for sure. It went in this, like, when we first started CrossFit, it was all conditioning, and that's the thing that I didn't like about it. And then it went through this, like, renaissance, where regionals was like a weightlifting competition. But we were rad. We were the

strongest gym. We were the strongest kids, because we did bodybuilding. We were the ones that gave a shit about being strong. The Mecca of Sw of swole everybody fucking we came in and went won olympic lifting competitions and strength competitions on the crossfit floor that was like the thing was like well as soon as you can do whatever you want but as soon as we start lifting weights you're fucked like we dominate you and there was a lot of things we weren't great at but we always won weightlifting competitions yeah so i i yeah man i agree i mean i think strength is a great proxy for making sure that things in your body are going mostly right um and i think there's a number of different proxies that

you can use but um just being able to have a good air about you and like just kind of feel free and light throughout the day, I think, is huge. Like I know everybody that's come to me in the way that I felt when I was struggling with hormone balance and testosterone and things like that. It was like it just felt like every day was a burden. Like I woke up and I kind of lacked excitement. I was just kind of like, eh, it's another day, I guess, you know, life, you just kind of do it. So, um, so waking up and having like vigor and vitality and excitement about, about your training and about life and about spending time with people. And, um, those things are super great proxies for, for your, your hormones, just being in good

balance and you being in a good mental state. Yeah. Are you – I know that you talk a lot about it just in your blogs, and I know you live this because you live in Pacific Beach and everything's right there, and the boardwalk is right there, and it's gorgeous every day, and there's like 24-year-olds running around partying, and they don't even know that they're supposed to have a job, and you get to walk all the time. That was a long way of saying you live in the most beautiful place in the world yep uh we constantly get to be outside or

when i live there um but the the movement pieces outside of the actual training i feel like that's something to me that i have learned is like even more important than how much time i'm spending in the gym lifting weights, which in my new life, because I'm a legit human being with a house and a yard now, I love cutting the grass because I get to go move so much. I love weeding. Weeding is like my new thing because I'm down there. I'm in the dirt.

I'm moving. I'm in a squat. I'm usually just not standing up to get to the next weed. thing you know i'm like hour and a half deep how many people are like actually getting out and doing like real movement and not focusing so much on just like training volume and but they're actually able to get out get 10 000 steps like the minimum and adding this stuff to their life and really buying into the lifestyle stuff that you talk about yeah dude totally um i think that that's so important like you completely nailed it and it's actually like the the physique program that i run through evolved i've literally

started marketing this thing as just a weightlifting program that gives you freedom to move outside the gym so i took a poll on my story the other day and i was like how many people prefer to do your your cardio in the gym via metcon or or other um and how many of you guys prefer to be get outside and play sports and ride bikes and go hiking and yard work and whatever else and it was overwhelming it was like 75 of people preferred to do it outside nobody wants to do the mech con yeah they just do it because they feel like they have to right so no one really wants to do it just because it hurts so this is how i i now program go cut the grass

it's important yeah and it's soothing It's soothing in many ways too. Cut the grass is the shit. That's how I live. New age Anders far around the suburbs. You've changed. Who is this guy? He's cut the grass every day. All that said,

Metconning's still rad. I still do it. I like Metconning. I don't want to do it every day. There's moments for it. But how I live my life and how I generally program for people that are strictly interested in physique or aesthetic purpose is to lift weights in the gym, spend the minimum amount of time actually in the gym that you need to to elicit the results that you want, and then get outside and either get your 10,000 steps a day

or go bike and, you know, get an hour of movement is kind of the way I talk about it. Like, if you're not tracking steps, that's fine. You need to move your ass for an hour a day. It can be 30 minutes of casual bike ride, a 15 minute walk and 15 minutes mowing the yard or doing house chores or whatever it is. Um, but we want to get like an hour of very low key movement. And so that's for the people that are just focusing on physique and if you're interested in performance then you probably should do some conditioning

work like it's probably pretty important that you actually get your heart rate up and feel like shit a little bit you don't have to go to the point that you're like a dead animal writhing on the floor but you should probably get a little bit uncomfortable I like the 1-2 Metcons a week that uncomfortable. Yeah. I like the one to two Metcons a week.

That's kind of where I live. Yeah. One is not enough. Two is too many. But if you can alternate in between those somehow, week to week, it's a pretty good day. Yeah, I do like one long trail run is like my cardio piece. Love that.

Love that. Jiu-jitsu twice a week, which there's plenty of conditioning when you do five-minute rounds, six five-minute rounds against someone else who's trying to wrestle and win. Trying to choke you. Yeah. But then strength training at least two or three days a week. And then a Metcon is usually thrown in there.

It's like a once-a-week fun. It's a good balance. It's like a fun run Metcon on the weekends, usually with my wife. That's awesome. Yeah. It's like a fun run, Metcon, on the weekends, usually with my wife. That's awesome. I've been hopping into, like I said, one to two a week of the CrossFit classes. It's great. I go like, this is going to sound terrible, but I quit workouts right about as soon as they get hard. And the teacher's like, do you want to finish?

And I'm like, oh, no. Oh, no. I don't know. No way. This is way over-programmed. People are doing this? Like, I'm not doing that many toes to bar. Are you kidding me?

I do about 80% of those. That's the beauty of the AMRAP. You can just kind of. They'll look over, and I'm just, like, sitting next to the kettlebell. Like, what's going on? Are you okay? The time's running out. It's cool.

Fantastic. If I kept going, I would be way injured. You kind of said that as a little bit of a joke like with the amrap thing but i actually totally agree with you like the older i get i do way more amraps now that way i can just kind of do as much volume as i as i feel like i know i'm gonna be i got shit to do i know i'm gonna be out of there in 20 or 30 minutes or whatever it is like you're in you're out no i agree 100 i i did say it jokingly but almost all of what i program for my my online programs are all amraps because i don't know the type of people that are there if i program four or five rounds of something it could take

someone 30 minutes and someone else four minutes like right amraps at least control yeah yeah and then it gives the people that that are more fit more training volumes than the people that are less fit. And they need more training volume because they're more fit. So it really is like the perfect programming. Do you still do a bunch of the EMOM work? You spent a lot of time doing a lot of EMOMs. EMOMs are the basis of the whole Evolve philosophy. Yeah. I program much less of them for physique programs, but they're definitely a huge component of what I do with the original daily program. And when I move my ass back from the Globo gym into the functional fitness, I'll be doing, uh, you got a big, you have a big move coming up to Boulder. I don't know when this is actually going to air. You'll probably be in

Boulder by the time this hits the show. Do you have anything that you're super excited about getting to Boulder to change training up? I am going to get with Theriot and get into mountain biking. Oh, dope. Dude, that sounds awesome. I'm super hyped. I didn't even know Theriot was out there. He's in Denver.

Dude, you never met Ryan Theriot. There is not a – he is the definition. I hope he listens to this. He'll be so happy that i described him like this he is the perfect person to invite to your bachelor party and not invite to the wedding because he is the most fun person like he is so good and i'm sure he's wildly different i haven't seen him in like three, three years, four years now. But, like, you always wanted him at the most fun party because he always just had the best way of, like, making every party that you went to so cool.

But, like, I really only hung out with him, like, twice a year. Like, he couldn't go to the wedding, but he was, like, the number one seed to go to the bachelor party. He went to both the bachelor parties. Yeah, for sure. He's, like to the wedding, but he was like the number one seed to go to the bachelor party. He went to both the bachelor parties. Yeah, for sure. He's like the most. I didn't know he lived out there. He's been in the mountain biking now.

I love that dude. He's super into mountain biking. He just told me the other day that I'm going to need to spend five grand on my mountain bike. So I was like, all right. Tight. I guess we'll put that off till the spring. So if you're listening, Evolved.com. It sounds like a better purchase than spending $5,000 on Wi-Fi like we were about to do.

Someone tried to charge us $5,000 for Wi-Fi today at Olympia. We were like, no chance. This is how they make all the money in Vegas. You heard that right, whoever's listening. Yeah, $5,000 for the Wi-Fi. And we didn't even own the Wi-Fi signal. It was going to have to be shared just to set one up so it could be a shared line. No matter how many people, that means multiple people are on that same Wi-Fi.

Dude, tell me about the Evolve programs and all the options that people have on your site. Totally, yeah. So I've alluded to a lot of it. And all the projects you're up to. There's other things outside of Evolve. Yeah, totally. Original Evolve daily program is a hybrid program,

kind of functional fitness plus bodybuilding. We've talked a lot about that. Then the Phys physique program has actually become my paramount program. Now, way more people have, have kind of come over to the physique side. Um, I think partially cause they really like the option of not having cardio programmed in and being able to kind of do it on their own, on, on their own time and with the modality that they like. So physique was so popular that I recently started in July, um, globo physique.

So, uh, we now have a, so we now have a physique option that originally is based in a, in a functional fitness gym, but there's now a, um, a kind of modified version of it that you can buy for, for the globo gym setting where I take into consideration,

you know, proximity of machines. And I don't try to have you like super setting fucking hack squats with dumbbell incline presses where you have to take up multiple pieces of equipment at the same time. So I have the Globo gym program. There's a RX plus accessory program. So anybody that's all up in on the CrossFit,

but wants to add a little bit of bodybuilding physique work into their training. We have a, an RX plus program. And then I have the awesome work that I'm doing with Laurie Christine King over at... LCK, branding. ParagonTrainingMethods.com

and Paragon Training Methods on the Edge. It is similar to Evolved in many ways. It is constantly varied, which has been a super cool aspect for some people because Evolved is all about the structure and the metrics that I keep talking about. And Paragon kind of gives a little bit of the constantly varied side that people love about CrossFit, where they come into the gym and every day is a little bit new and exciting.

And we will repeat things, you know, every eight weeks or 12 weeks just to make sure that people are progressing and getting stronger, which they are. So I guess that kind of blows up in the face of what I said about metrics and structure being necessary for progress. But Paragon is fucking awesome. That community is growing really well. We have a rad Facebook group, as does Evolved. And just continuing to do these experimentations. I'm looking into possibly starting a

three times a week full body program kind of take it back to the roots I've had a lot of people request less frequency than what I program with Evolved which is usually four program days plus a fifth optional day that people are nuts so they feel like they have to do the fifth optional day

so so yeah so a three times a, full body program might be coming. And, man, moving to Boulder. So if anyone's in Boulder and wants to meet up and get super yoked with me or do mountain biking, make sure you hit me up. Have you ever done mountain? I mean, you used to do mountain biking around San Diego,

but have you ever climbed to, or however you get to the top of a 14,000- foot mountain and come down? Have you ever done it out there? In Bethesda, I did it. They don't have mountains that big in Bethesda. It was a hill. It was a hill. I was at sea level. I've never, nobody would. It was really fast in my neighborhood.

It was trail riding down the Appalachian. So it wasn't like, it wasn't like in Bethesda, but I mean back in the Maryland area. Dude, you need to go up to like Whistler or something like that and just like ride it up and then you just come – sorry, not ride the bike. Ride the chairlift up and then ride the bike only downhill. You can do that all day long. I've done that before.

I can do it in Baylor, Breckenridge as well. It's so fun. You're right next to all those in Boulder. Yeah. So I'm super amped about that. But, yeah, check me out on at Brian Borstein on Instagram. I post as much meaningful content as I can to help kind of some more intermediate and advanced people, like we said, not super geared toward beginners. And everything else is evolvedtrainingsystems.com.

People get like a week free when they sign up? So there's a link. Or head over there there's a link in my instagram bio where you can see an entire week preview of all four of the different evolved programs dope doug larson very cool yeah you can follow me on instagram at douglasy larson uh you can follow me at anders varner because i'm anders varner at shrug collective because we're the shrug collective one-ton challenge.com we We're at Olympia 2019, the FitAid OneTone Challenge, OTC2. Barrett Danz is over there flexing his freaking bicep.

What did you total in number one? 23 and change. Strong. The dude had a 600-pound deadlift in front of like 3,000 people. Including C.T. Fletcher. Including C.T. Fletcher. He's pumped about that. You want to know what a really good goal is when you're Barrett Dan?

Just whatever Kenny Santucci does, just double it. How do you feel about that, Kenny Santucci? Way to make it to the 181-pound snatch. All those people around. Good thing he's so good looking and makes rounds all the edges for everyone. I wish he was here right now. I know. I love that guy.

OneTonChallenge.com. Snatch, clean jerk, squat that bench. Hit 2,000 pounds, 1,200 for you. Ladies, the was here right now. I know. I love that guy. OneTonChallenge.com. Snatch clean jerks. Squat that bench. Hit 2,000 pounds. 1,200 for you. Ladies, the lifelong pursuit of strength. I'm Anders Varner. We'll see you guys next week. That's a wrap, friends. 20 rep back squat plus movement-specific mobility. We're going to make you huge. You're going to grow

gigantic tree trunk legs, barrel core, and you're going to be tough as shit between your ears. It's going to be the greatest 12 weeks of your life. You're going to grow so much. You're going to truly learn what it means to work hard in the gym. Friday, movement specific mobility and 20 rep back squat program. All bundled up. Fantastic. So you can save a ton of coin. US Air Force. Coolest people ever. Special Ops. Airforce.com forward slash special

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