Barbell Shrugged - Assessments and Movement Screens: How to Stop Getting Jacked Up w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash - Barbell Shrugged #571

Episode Date: April 26, 2021

In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged: Why Screen Your Athletes Why every exercise is a movement screen  What is the bet mobility screen How movement screens make you a better coach When to retest athletes and see improvement Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram   Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   ————————————————   Diesel Dad Training Programs: http://barbellshrugged.com/dieseldad   Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa   Please Support Our Sponsors   U.S. Air Force. Find out if you do at airforce.com.   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   BiOptimizers Probitotics - Save 10% at bioptimizers.com/shrugged

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, we are talking assessments and movement screens and how you could stop getting jacked up in this episode. We're talking about why you need to screen your athletes or if you are an athlete yourself, why you need to be screening yourself, why every exercise is a movement screen, what the basics are for screening movement,

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Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Warner. Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash. Today on Barbell Shrugged, we are talking about movement screens and assessments and the things that you should know before you enter into a workout program, whether you're working with a coach, whether you're joining an online program, and some ways that you can start to assess yourself to avoid injuries, work on any imbalances, asymmetries, and ways to ensure that you are actually going to be meeting your goals versus continuing to head down the wrong path.

But, friends, we've got to talk. Mash, did you see the video that Doug sent us of that guy bench pressing? Yeah. Why did you send me that? That's haunted me in my sleep oh it was so bad but so good but so bad i know i told doug brought it up as soon as i hopped on this call and i was like no no no no we got to talk about this torn pec bicep all it was both of them right i know it was just i think it's just the right side i thought it was just i thought

it was just pec yeah right his right pec right Peck I think was Watour. He was benching five wheels, inclined benching five wheels, and on a slow eccentric, you just see his Peck go from flat and stretched out to just rips off the bone and just balls up on his chest. The guy's like 320 pounds lean. He's an enormous bodybuilder. So you can see the muscle just go – and a bowling ball just forms on his chest. Dude, if you –

Then he just bailed because he's got 500 pounds over his head. The number of like insertion points and connections that your pec has in all – if you tear a pec and it looks that gross, like you can tear your peck in a lot of places and it doesn't look that gross. Yeah. Like it can have like a little tear. There's so many like spots on a big muscle that connects. When it explodes like that, I just want also to know I haven't watched it

because I'm a soft human being and I don't like watching gross stuff that will ruin my day. I'll never bench press again. Matt, what's the grossest injury you've seen from that? I'm sure you've seen pecs and triceps just rip off the bone. I saw a girl's forearms on both sides snapping too. Dang. She had 400 pounds. I can't remember. Julie...

I can't remember her last name. She was benching 400 and she was almost locking out. And then both ulna and radius snapped into her. It sounded like... Twigs.

Yeah. Thick twigs. And I hadn't even gone that weekend. It was at the WPO. I remember thinking, I wish I were not here right now. Oh, my God. Do you know in movies, the sound effect they use for breaking bones is they take crisp pieces of celery and go. That's what it sounded like.

It was so loud. Think about it. I heard it so clearly in a room filled with loud music, people going crazy at the Arnold classic. And I still heard it like so clearly. I almost threw up just because it looked, and then her arms are, when she gets up,

the bar go on to her her fell i guess it did spotters get it it was so fast i mean no i mean they on this other guy actually did pretty well yeah they didn't drop it on him at all like i'm surprised you know like the middle spotter didn't didn't fucking tear a bicep when he caught 500 pounds i mean that side spotters too, but man. I've never seen a Pac-12. Was it 500? I know it was like, it had five plates on there. It had five plates.

Five pounds. It was five plates. I can't tell if there's any change on it. But either way, 495 is basically 500. Who cares at that point? Sure. Yes. Oh, God. watch this again. Yeah.

Oh. I mean – Who was that? Was it Zach that dislocated both of his hands? His wrists? Zach Critch. Yeah, it's all recorded. He was at the Olympic Training Center and he was he was doing you know on cleans with you know everybody knows this probably because

was on the platform right behind him and told that story on Rogan which is why that's right that's right made me think about it who knew Frazier was in the background yeah I didn't know that he's never mentioned it to me and anytime i've ever talked to him uh but yeah but there's a video since he was at the olympic training center he's recording all the sessions so if you look at zach critch comeback video on youtube you can see the injury happened you can see he catches a clean he's in the bottom of a full squat with his elbows up and then he gets too heel heavy and he falls back while in a full squat his elbows hit the ground and the bar snaps both his wrists at the same time did he have straps on or yeah i think he did have straps on

i i did a squat clean one time with straps on and my elbows almost hit my knees and i went well that will never happen again yeah i i've done a clean with straps on one time and realized how insanely dangerous that would be. It's not a good idea normally. I mean, there's two people. Max Ada, I think he broke his wrist the same way. He had straps on, fell backwards. Where are you going?

You can't get rid of the bar now. Boom. Can you imagine? Like in Zach's case he broke his wrist but he was casted above the elbow on both arms god so you can't do anything you're just you're the robot man you could you know i mean like you can't move your arms the way you need to move your arms to do all the basic things you need to do like like feed yourself like lock your elbow at 90 degrees and try and feed yourself can't do it i'm worried you can't reach your face without like you can't wipe your butt that's right like in like more

information people want to know about about this situation but like if if he didn't have like a wife or a girlfriend or whatever it was at the time to like help him out or like some close family member or whoever then what do you do? Yeah. You can't like – Nobody in the training center is going to hook him up. Matt Frazier has got things to do. Dude, Travis, what used to go on at the training center? Like did you listen to Matt Frazier on Rogan? No, I didn't.

He needs some bullets here. For the most part, what he did was he was like, look, I'm going to be real. It's going to be rough to go on Rogan and talk to you about all this, but I had some really good help. I met Anders and Doug at Wadapalooza and I got some really good practice being on podcasts, uh, with Bart all shrugged and he gave all credit.

He gave all credit for his success to Anders and Doug and Kenny Santucci at Wadapalooza. When we interviewed him, that's not true at all. Oh, dang. No, that was funny. He was – Frazier's a cool dude. Frazier's like – my whole vibe on Frazier was like, he's just your bro.

Like the dude really just likes suffering in a gym and hanging out. Yeah. Like he's probably not going to talk to you about the science of, uh, all the, he even admits it kind of in the show. He's like, I don't really know all this stuff.

So I worked with the best coaches in the world. And if I want, I wanted to learn how to get good at running a long ways. I hired a triathlete coach when I wanted to get better at swimming. He taught me how, when I wanted to learn about supplements and nutrition, I went to scientists that know about supplements and nutrition. Yeah, it's like I don't really know much of what I did.

I'm good at lifting weights and suffering. But the interesting part and what I'd love to know from you since you spent time there is like, dude, what was the training center like back in the day? Because the way he makes it sound is like it's so it was so underfunded and when he broke his back and they put him on a plane like three days later to go lift weights his coach was basically like you don't have a choice you have to go lift because his job yeah like weightlifting is was so underfunded that the coach was like just really afraid that if he didn't put a lifter

on the platform he was going to get fired yeah i mean that's definitely the way it was i wonder what year he was there you know when i was there we were really you can figure it out he was probably what 17 when he got there and he's that was a decade ago maybe maybe 15 years ago yeah there was a time period and that one being it, where they had made some really bad investments. So when I was there in the 90s, it was like I was there from 98 to 2000. We had really good funding. Someone endowed several million to us, so things were really good.

But evidently, sometime sometime after that they had made some investments that they thought were safe and then lost all of that and so there was a period like that where it was terrible and they had no funding you know no stipends and so that evidently that was it because when i was there life was great you know people were getting paid pretty well and we had uh gosh in my room we had Wes Barnett, Olympian Shane Hammond, Olympian Tom Goff, Olympian Tim McCrae, Olympian Pete Kelly, Olympian, and we were stacked. So, Terranaut, gold medalist, I mean, we were a stacked crew.

But it's only until now has there um you know has there been like a better team but i think now america is the best it's ever been as we speak yeah that's phil yeah what's the whole team for team usa or at least the majority of them well now you know back then you know you could they took a team of uh pretty sure eight sure, eight boys and eight girls. It was a big one to the Atlanta Olympics. But now the max you can take is four boys, four girls. So that makes it a lot tougher. Are you going to Tokyo?

We'll see. You know, I have one girl who's got a really good chance. And so we'll all know. There's only a few people who know 100%, but we'll find out in April. I'm going to the Dominican, by the way, if you guys want to come see me. Where are you going?

Punta Cana? That's where I got married. We're going to... What's the main part? Dominican. Probably Punta Cana. That's where people go. What's the...

Anyway, we're going to... That's where people go. What's the – anyway. That's where all the resorts are. I'm sure there's multiple spots where all the resorts are. So we'll go there for the Pan Ams that were supposed to happen last year, and then the people in Europe will have the Europeans. And so that's where – my girl from Denmark, Sandra, she's a strong piglet. Yeah. She's got a really good chance. So just like does pretty well she'll be in

olympics and so i saw they just announced that uh the olympics are happening but fans aren't allowed to go yeah if the olympics weren't bankrupting countries to begin with let's get rid of all ticket sales it's crazy what in the world are they going to do? They must be giving, you know, Japan some money. Billions and billions and billions of dollars. It's sad, too, for the athletes. You know, some of them, this will be their one and only Olympics, and then there's no people there. So all your whole life you dream about, you know,

lifting in front of thousands of people. If you're American, it's the only time all the people show up and are allowed to get rowdy before you lift the weight. Yeah, nobody. It's like a day of training. What's Wes Kidd going to do? That's his whole thing. That was actually one of the weird things about the UFC

when they finally came back after coronavirus and they were competing in empty stadiums. Like somebody would win a world title and then go, I'm retiring. This is my last thing I'm out. And there's just silent. No one's cheering. There's no like standing ovation for his great career in the UFC.

He's like, I'll see you later, everyone. They just, they just shake his hand and then he walks out. It's like, man, that was sad as fuck.

That was not how this guy pictured it. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Shit kicked out of him his whole life I'm gonna retire in front of nobody was there nobody to cheer you on

so you just go home and look at Instagram I wonder what they're saying sad they're in Vegas this week right what's the big fight this week Doug um Brian Ortega Brian Ortega.

Brian Ortega's fighting, but I'm not even up on who he's fighting. Andy totally would know because Andy trains him. Andy's there. Brian Ortega trained. That's the only reason I really even know about it.

Galpin's there. Yeah. All right, bros. Let's talk about some movement screens and assessments. I wanted to talk about this because what I think is one of the pieces of joining a fitness program or even if you're in some sort of fitness program

that over time, you're basically guaranteed at some point run into some sort of issue in which you've got some nicks and dings. Maybe you've got some issues that have been lingering. And one of the easiest ways to understand what's going on is to do some sort of either self-screen, some sort of movement assessment on yourself or finding a coach. I also think that if you are a coach, this is the easiest way in order to learn how to communicate with clients, sell things to clients to build a business, and separate yourself from the bajillion coaches that are out there that are just chucking exercises at people without really understanding why or how or what they are

doing. And in the movement assessments, they don't have to be over the top aggressive, but it's really like a starting point to figuring out where you're at, where you're going, what type of activities are happening in your life, when you get into the lifestyle side of things, and really just developing a relationship with your clients. And if you are training by yourself, kind of objectively viewing your own movement patterns and how you move to ensure that you're headed down the right way. Did you guys, Doug, at Faction, did you guys have like a movement screen process and assessment that you guys ran before people joined your on-ramp

classes? Yeah, it was definitely a part of it. In fact, the product that we still sell to this day called Maximum Mobility actually has a big chunk of the movement screens that I did back then, you know, and I did with everybody. It's actually, you know, we did two weeks free and then we did a single payment for one more month of training for fundamentals. And then, you know, we talked about memberships after that. So by the time clients got done with their free two weeks in their, in their on-ramp program, they had, they had six weeks with us and I, and I had done some very individualized one-on-one mobility screens and, uh, and assessment with them. Yeah.

So by, by the time we actually started talking about memberships, it was, there was already a great relationship there and they could already tell that okay i'm not just like a cog in the wheel like they're they have they have there's nuance for me as an individual uh so basically we um you know we did it we did it many different ways over the years we kind of started doing like uh functional movement screens in in the beginning you know like. And, and I had already done a bunch of that because I was a fitness coordinator for a different gym before I actually ran my own gym. And so I'd done a lot of functional movement screens and, and there's totally pros and cons to using that system. You know, it's a, it's a very, if you're, if you're like the military and

you have like a thousand people that you need to assess for movement quality and you're just, you're just churning and burning, trying to get through a lot of people of people then it's a it's a fairly comprehensive way to get a kind of a good idea of what's going on if you're a if you're a physical therapist and you're working with uh brian ortega you know famous mma fighter well then you can you can move beyond this um you know simplified um you know pre-existing set of assessments, because you're going to know other things that are other options. It's kind of like saying like you squat, bench and deadlift. Well, if you don't know anything and you're trying to get people, you know, just a good training effect really quickly, go squat, bench, deadlift. But if you are a full-time athlete,

well, you can develop a much more comprehensive and more nuanced training program. Yeah. So basically what we did was we kind of started with a functional movement screen, which, which handles mostly kind of global movement patterns. You know, one of the first things you do and probably one of the first things that Travis does with his athletes is says here,

do an overhead squat and maybe a close grip overhead squat. And let me just see how you move. If you can do a close grip overhead squat, then you got a lot of things going right in your world. You know, you got, you got great shoulder flexion, got great thoracic extension. You got good hip mobility, got good ankle mobility. And if you have all those things, then weightlifting becomes much easier than if you have some big restrictions somewhere.

But you can, so you can kind of assess all those things in one go with something like an overhead squat. Whereas if I came in and I did like a shoulder flexion test and then i did a hip internal extra rotation test and i did ankle mobility tests blah blah blah then i have to do many things to figure out if if you're going to be able to do an overhead squat when i could just ask you to do an overhead squat and see how right how you how you look if there's a problem then we would start going down the the different checkpoints like if if you were squatting down and your and your butt was staying really high and you're bending over really far, you'd be like, okay, well, is this, is this an ankle problem? Let's try this other test. Like here, squat with your ankles elevated and see if

you can go all the way down. If you all of a sudden you can go all the way down, like, okay, maybe it is an ankle mobility problem. Let's specifically measure ankle mobility and see, you know, how, how many inches over your toes your knees can get in the bottom of it, like a feet-together-knees-together squat where you squat all the way down. Can you squat all the way down in that position? That's an assessment in and of itself. So we had many different assessments that we used. And again, in maximum mobility, you can get a comprehensive look at that whole thing.

Yeah. Mash, how do you assess athletes that come to you because you're not uh most of the people that are coming to you are not really uh they're already pretty wired up with a with a good weightlifting background to them right well i mean i definitely still start with like the close grip overhead squat um and i love that you start with like the hardest possible thing well I mean the people coming to me yeah difficult but safe yeah yeah totally fast and easy yeah you give them just a bar or just a pvc pipe you know whichever and then you look and see it's easy because you can see you

know obviously if the if everything from the hips down is looking good, but the bar is drifting forwards, then it's something shoulder, scapula. So then, like Doug said, you would go to a scapula thoracic extension assessment, which we do. We do a wall sit, and then we turn our thumbs facing the wall, arms straight, and then just do, you know, then you tell them to do shoulder flexion. You know, bring the arms straight above your head. And if you can touch the wall, good. But obviously in the overhead squat, if they couldn't, something's wrong. And then you look, is it right, left? Is it, you know, is it bilateral or is it unilateral?

So, yeah, we just go from there. And we have a little intake form that we've developed where we do check the ankles. We do look at hip extension. We do the Faber test, which I know Doug knows, and we do internal rotation. I don't know that. What is that?

I'm sure I've done it. I just didn't know it had a name. Oh, Faber test is you're laying on your back, and it's called favor because you do flexion, so you bring your leg up. Then you do abduction, so then you put the lower leg onto the opposite leg. And then you're doing like a – what's it called? I don't know what that stretch is called. Oh, the butterfly stretch, you know, when you're doing like a – what's it called? I don't know what that stretch is called. Oh, the butterfly stretch.

You know when you're sitting? Anyway, but it's only one leg. You put that leg on top of the leg that's still straight, and you see if the knee can drift below the knee of the other leg. And if it can't, or if it creates pain, a lot of PTs use it to reenact pain. So if it's the SI joint, is it the hip capsule? But we're looking to see, especially the sartorius, they will measure the length of the sartorius.

So it's a good one. And believe it or not, for all the weightlifters out there, that seems to be the one bit of mobility that is giving weightlifters, you know, a lot of trouble. And I've only recently identified that. So if you're getting, you know, weightlifters listening, if you're getting like some low back issues, I bet if you do the favor test, you'll probably fail it. And then, you know,

Squat University has got some really good movements on how to, you know, increase that mobility. It's a lot of what people have bad. Weightlifters have bad internal hip mobility, which is crazy. But, you know, it's very common. Yeah. To add clarity on that, on that favor test, as you said, is flexion, abduction, and external rotation, which turns into this word favor.

So if you lie on your back, you put one ankle on your opposite knee and then just let your, let your knee just fall down. And so if you can get your shin to be without rotating your body or your hips, if you can get your shin basically flat parallel to the ground, then you probably have enough mostly, in this case, external rotation. You're not maxing out abduction or flexion in this case. Really, it's mostly external rotation you're maxing out in that case. Right.

And so the thing you would want to do is make sure you put put your hand though on the opposite asis because what'll happen you know they'll just turn their hips to get the range of motion so you make sure that their hips stay on the ground completely and then you can actually even give a little bit of you know pass it can be a passive stretch to get and if passively it goes you know equal to the opposite knee then you're okay but a lot of weightlifters are going to fail that one for whatever reason um did you doug did you used to get people like on a table or on the floor and actually measure kind of like where they were at the only reason i bring this up is because i obviously i mean not obviously but i i actually never did much of that i'd love to

you you getting people on tables were they comfortable doing that in beginning assessments yeah um so we we quantified much of it but not but definitely not all of it like we didn't quantify the the overhead squat that we just mentioned as an example the favorite test you know again it wasn't like a you know 35 degrees of external rotation measured using a goniometer it was more like like i just said like get your get your leg parallel to the ground if it's not parallel to the ground then then you didn't pass yeah that test or whatever um and of course there's there's degrees of not passing there's like okay well you're not even close and there's like you're pretty close know, here's a few stretches or whatever. But yeah, for shoulder internal and external rotation and sometimes flexion,

we would do like actual goniometer measurements and say you're at 170 degrees. You know, 180 is optimal. And, you know, here's the difference side to side. You know, 165 on this side, you're 175 on the other side. And so there's a little bit of asymmetry there. And explaining to them that after pre-existing injury movement asymmetry is the number two predictor of injury and so if you have a mobility uh asymmetry side to side which you're inevitably going to nobody's completely symmetrical and that's and that's normal to some extent but

if you can clear that up when you're doing bilateral movements you know say you're doing you know you're just doing cleans and and squad jerks or whatever it is like you're doing bilateral movements, you know, say you're doing, you know, you're just doing cleans and squat jerks or whatever it is like you're doing bilateral stuff in that case. Um, you ideally should have adequate mobility on, on each side. Um, we would measure like, um, you know, thoracic or just spinal rotation, you know, sit somebody on a bench and, and put a, uh, just like they're doing like a, like a bodybuilder style front squat, just put a PVC pipe across the front of their shoulders and have their arms cross over and hold the pipe and then stand above them with the goniometer and just have them rotate as far as they can and see how how um how far they can go with pure thoracic and or just spinal in general rotation yeah and we had standards for

all that stuff you know we say like 60 degrees rotation would be normal you know more more would be better of course less than that and you know you got you got some problems to work through uh you know we did so that's kind of like more on the movement mobility side of things and we did we did more than i've mentioned so far but as far as like total assessment though um you know we would do a little bit of of stability assessment stuff we like might time time you like in a front plank or and then time you on side planks and you know in the side plate case we would want to see if you were roughly symmetrical can you can you hold a side plank on your left side for 60 seconds and on your right side for only 37 seconds yeah

then that's that's an that's a stability asymmetry side to side so we would test things like that as well and then the assessment kind of the assessing rather kind of never stops like when you're watching somebody train and you're looking at their technique you're assessing their technique and then you're going to come back and say okay well this wasn't quite right you know let's try this other variation or you think you can do it like this and if they can't then you can start to come back and say, okay, well, this wasn't quite right. You know, let's, let's try this other variation or you think you can do it like this. And if they can't, then you can start to go down the rabbit hole of, okay, is it a mobility, a stability, motor control issue?

What's going on here? And you can start testing and retesting. Yeah. The reason I was like actually curious, uh, if you guys got people on tables and pulled out the tools to actually be able to measure, um, mainly just cause I actually never did that until I owned a company with a physical therapist that kind of like walked me through all of those tests. As people can probably imagine, all of the things that I did in assessments were always like just basic movement screens in movement capacity almost.

And I would find ways to find those imbalances just through like a base in which I could really just understand where they were at in their training career. Can we quickly find out how you look side to side? Can we do like a single leg deadlift without any weight? Can you be aware of where your back leg is in space? If you bend over standing on one leg, what does that look like? Can we actually create a straight line with your body?

And then go to the other side. For a lot of things like balance and figuring out where the imbalances were side to side were the biggest pieces. Because I think if you're a coach, one of the most important pieces of the assessment process, yes, it's great if you have like a list of numbers, some quantitative stuff that you can work on. But I think a lot of that only really matters if you're going to go back to it in three, six, nine, 12 months, if you have a client and you're like, well, you were at six degrees with this. And then three months later, we're doing a little bit better. We continually are making progress. And that's a really important piece. If that's how you build trust with your clients. The clients that I ended up having the longest and was able to build like the most trust with like multiple year long personal training clients or like high paying clients. I found that most of them didn't really want that they just they wanted to know that they were

getting better at working out or seeing weight on the bar get better and training the things that i knew that they were bad at was the the way that they were they knew they were improving um when i say that it's like you can very easily find out someone, how coordinated somebody is by in a warm-up, like having them skip and really see just like, does their brain really work with their body? Like, is it fully connected? movement literacy some basic coordination you you understand some like or you can make it even more complex instead of doing like skipping like it's fun and doing like an an a skip teaching people how to like drive through the floor um and and just understanding where they came from and how long they've been training like a basic training age goes a long ways and understanding and then in the middle of it the ability to be flexible like you don't have to do a single leg deadlift to to test somebody and and

see how where their imbalances are like you can do it with a split squat with a very low load rear foot elevated split squats and find out if they can get the same number of reps. I always found for me personally, and this is very much like a stylistic, how you fit into helping people to actually just get them moving as much as possible. So they feel like they're getting some sort of workout. At the same time, as a coach, you're sitting there making a checklist of, well, these are the things that as soon as we finish this 10, 12 minute long assessment where they've gotten their heart rate moving, they feel like they've done something, they've probably fallen or like felt the imbalances. Now we can sit down and actually have the conversation of, look, these are the things

that we need to work on. We're going to get you strong. We're going to work on your diet. We're going to work on all this stuff. But here are the real issues that we need to work on. We're going to get you strong. We're going to work on your diet. We're going to work on all this stuff, but here are the real issues that we need to work on. Like we're going to make you better at all of the things you want to get better at, but we also have to start at the bottom of the things that you're really struggling with to get, get those built up quicker. Um, I think that that's an important piece for the coaches to understand of like understanding who you are as, as a coach, how you connect with people and, and being able to move forward from there.

Cause I found when I started doing the long, first off, as Doug said, if you're working with the military, which is who we were working with when we had to go through like 50 people in a day and we were doing fms and actually measuring all the stuff because they need the exact data um a lot of what i thought was like my special sauce as a coach just gone i hated it i hated it because it wasn't fun like i i never enjoyed the process of like measuring and watching somebody pick one leg up and try and get it over the rope so that I could write the number like that stuff just like it killed me. So that

having a way in order to just be able to connect with their clients and find out the things that they need to work on is, is, is going to be a really important thing to just finding out who you are as a coach and how you relate to people. I feel like if you're a CrossFit coach, you could easily get away with just doing the overhead squat, you know, you know,

start with just a wide overhead PVC pipe squat. And if they can do that, then go close. And it'll tell you – they'll tell you ankles, knees, hips, thoracic spine, shoulders. It'll tell you. So I feel like you could just do that. Because the key is you probably do want to know – I think one of the mistakes that CrossFit's make is by not doing that

and you put a 40-year-old accountant in this class with his snatches and he's trying. And I've watched numerous times where a coach is just too afraid to say, hey, man, you can't. But if you got him on one-on-one and he can't do it over his squad, that's the time where you say, look, here's some movements you probably will work towards, and one day you will be able to. But until you get the green light,

if, if you see snatch, do this instead. Or if you see X do this, they can prevent, I feel like, you know, number one,

prevent them from looking like a dummy and two can prevent them from getting hurt. You know, that would be the only thing I would say should be pretty necessary. I'm going to mess up some of the actual tests that we did. But I remember when we started testing our athletes, like assessing them on performance pieces, not just benchmark workouts, but like testing, like neuromuscular efficiency in multiple, over multiple lifts, that stuff got really fun

because then we could tailor in CrossFit. That's kind of like the big thing. Can you have a really high one RM and then the percentage of that for a five RM, six RM, 20 RM, like how do we really take this maximum output and extend it as long as we possibly can and then ensure that you're at least at these minimum thresholds,

but then pushing it further as high as we can and build that capacity? That stuff used to be a lot of fun because you see people just take their 1RM, back it down. I want to say that we would get it to like 60%, 70%, something like that for max reps and hope that they're, you know, I wish I could remember all of it. I haven't coached like a CrossFit competitive athlete in a while, but that stuff was really fun when we started to test that because you would

see people knowing they had to hit numbers to be considered like elite against the field or against other competitors that we had data on yeah and it would just turn into a bloodbath of them trying to ensure that they were like good enough to be able to stand on the floor with them i think that's a great way to you know see what energy system person's lacking uh there's a crossfitter a CrossFitter we just started working together this week, but he's going to come to Lenoir Ryan. We're going to look at his VO2 max

and then we're going to look at his lactate threshold, his ability to clear lactate. It's going to be so much fun. He's basically doing a beta testing on something I'm working on. I got my man, the triathlete coach. I love him. He's amazing.

He's going to help me do some testing that he does on top of what I do. So we're going to, like – we're going to narrow this dude down. We're going to set exactly where he's the weakest. So it'll be fun. Yeah, we start hanging out with the freaks of the freaks. I mean, we used to take them through – it was almost like a three or four-week-long process once we got it pretty dialed in um anywhere from running like um it was like your one one mile or one hour run for

max distance and then testing going back to like 1rm 3rmM, 20RM, and a ton of lifts. And then once you put all of that stuff together, you get a really good idea of where we need to go in training and building athletes. You got his aerobic capacity. You have anaerobic, and you have – yeah, you have alactic, lactic. You've got it all. That's beautiful.

And you can test recovery times. Like how much are we falling off once we would get people to a specific place? Like that stuff is, that is probably the most important thing. Once you actually get to a competition, knowing that you've got two hours to get back to a hundred percent. Like take clearance. Yeah. You got to get that mess out of there.

And if you're someone like Matt Frazier, it takes him a minute, 100%. Like take clearance. Yeah. You got to get that mess out of there and move on. And if you're someone like Matt Fraser, it takes him a minute. It takes him two minutes to get back to 95%. That's why he wins every time. That's just, you know, like I'm anxious in this. I want to find out, you know, how much can you improve somebody's ability to do that? Like obviously genetics play a huge role.

You know, I feel like Matt Fraser, he found his wheelhouse in CrossFit because as a weightlifter, he was average. I mean, what I would consider average. I don't know that he would even be in the top 10. Yeah, he'd be in the top 10 in his weight class now.

In CrossFit, he does stuff that people have never even heard of. I'd love to test him to see what does separate him from everyone. And I think as a coach, you need to have as many of those tools as you possibly can. Like there's plenty of PTs out there that are teaching strength coaches how to run assessments that they would do in a lab. And then if – or not in a lab but in their in their clinic and then you also need to have the tools that i mean our the person that taught us kind of like the baseline model that we used um was opt james fitzgerald yeah um it's not opt anymore to opex um but his his basic assessment and then we took that and massaged it and kind of made our own

and based on how long we had with people and if we could if we could have them for a month if we had them like depending upon like what we were working on but um taking those those models and then using them on your own but if you're somebody that's like super interested in working in that in that uh space in between a pt and getting somebody out of pain through strength conditioning or through strength training like you should go to someone probably like in the active life rx with sean pasty's like that that's where he we're actually interviewing him tomorrow but that's where a lot of a lot of his clients come from is like being able to get people uh out of clinics back on the gym floor lifting weights but if you want to like know exactly how to get somebody that wants to compete

and find out where they need to get better testing energy systems testing all that stuff like opex was phenomenal for us because we we we had this like this base model that we could build our own stuff off of to test all these energy systems to test um the neuromuscular efficiency tests for the past it's like putting that stuff together it was just what it was just brutal watching people go for it. I think having a full understanding of the entire spectrum of strength conditioning is valuable. If you have a physical therapist who they're competent as a physical therapist and they're dealing with athletes probably in an orthopedic type setting, if they then go learn from the strength coaches, they become better physical therapists. Likewise, strength coaches they become better physical therapists likewise strength coaches same deal if you if you understand training you're good you're good with athletes and you you know the basics and then you go live in the pt world you know not as a physical therapist

you don't have to go to school but like if you just dig into that world a little bit you know maybe like maybe you volunteer at a clinic or you just you ask a physical therapist to come come watch you train your clients and have conversations with them or you know teach me how just pay someone to teach you how to do assessments yeah or just go go watch you train your clients and have conversations with them or just pay someone to teach you how to do assessments or just go read like Greg Cook's movement book. That's the functional movement screen and selective functional movement assessment program, which the SFMA is much more in-depth than the functional movement screen. It's specifically made for physical therapists and other professionals like that.

If you read like Muscles, Testing, and Function with Posture and Pain by Kendall, that was really helpful for me when I first started doing assessments. You know, so they're just basic physical therapy textbooks. Like if you haven't read like a basic, like the Newman text, like basic kinesiology, like you should understand anatomy and kinesiology at a deep level. If you haven't read any of those books, then I highly recommend them. They're very good. I do too. I have a theory that within the next 10 years, if you don't know these basics, you become obsolete,

especially when there's people already making a movement towards, you know, people needing to have, you know, higher degrees. But you do need to separate yourself. And because of the internet, Like if you don't know, you can't hide anymore. People will see like, you know, you'll see someone like Greg Knuckles and then you'll go on there talking some

big garbage. People will start to see. So you do need to separate yourself. Yeah. Well, doing the work to like you, you don't need to go and create your own assessment until you're a hundred, 200 assessments deep.

Right. Go and do the FMS until you realize that the FMS isn't your thing. Right. Until you've, until you've taken the FMS and you go, well, I can do it in this way. And this is more suits me and the clients I'm trying to work with.

Like, it's kind of like the OPEX model. We went and spent all the money to go learn the model that he was testing all of his elite CrossFitters at, and then you massage it to your program. But only after you put it into use so many times and, and then you're able to tailor it to exactly what you need. Like these base tests that people have created, you should totally understand them,

but then realize like you have to grow from the basic model into something that suits you and, and establishes a conversation and trust with the clients more than, more than something that is more cookie cutter, like the FMS or OPEX model or whoever's model you're using. And then there's so many other things that we haven't covered. Like, you know,

you got the, Doug, have you ever done the dynamic strength index it's like you gotta it's measuring peak force you know whether you're unloaded and loaded so a lot of people do a vertical leap and nowadays it's not that hard because there's so many you know if you have something that measures velocity you can do this but so you measure a person's ability to reduce force unloaded so vertically then you look at you know like the a lot of times they do the uh isolateral mid-thigh pull i mean isometric mid-thigh pull or you could really it would be anything like you could do

a squat and look at how much force you can produce you know but it's looking at weighted versus unweighted so you're looking at are you like a you twitch weak person or are you like a slower twitch like strong person or somewhere in between. Then there's the reactive strength index, which is a really good one for athletes where you do like a depth jump. And so they're looking at the ratio between ground contact time to the height that you jump. Once again, now we're looking at, like, the neuromuscular system. You're looking at, you know, does this guy have a good stretch-shortening cycle or is he just all strong and slow? And so it's just great ways of, you know, of looking at, you know, elastic strength too.

Like, you know, is a person elastic or are they not? Are they just, you know, slow and, like, strong or are they bendy? Which, you know, as a weightlifting coach, I need bendy, you know, a weightlifting coach i need bendy you know is what i'm looking for i'm looking for a lot of elasticity but there's so many tests force velocity profiling which is what we do now a lot so looking at like based on the percentage like say you do squat and deadlift you do you test them at 65 70 75 all the way up to 100%. You're looking at like velocity drop-offs. So you start to see, once again, then you can pinpoint, not only are you going to find out, is this person fast and weak, strong and slow, or in between, you look at the exact

percentage of which the drop-off happens, and you can focus in there. But these are for the top 1%. When you're trying to get to the Olympics or trying to win a gold medal, 1% matters. Yeah. And like you have to create a program at that's at that level to be able to meet people where they're at and, and actually design a program based off those specific assessments.

Right. Like that's just being able to perform the assessment and be able to perform the test you have to know how to interpret the data which is also can be just as confusing if you don't have the reps to be able to understand like if somebody came to you and they were all fast twitch and super powerful you wouldn't be like okay now we need to work on your aerobic capacity taking them as far away from their goal as possible. Not unless they want to be like CrossFitters. But that, you know, like you have to really have all the data in the world.

But if you don't know how to interpret it into building an athlete that is or building a client that gets them closer to their goals, it's just a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper and none of it matters. that is or building a client that gets them closer to their goals, it's just a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper and none of it matters. You guys, this is going to blow you away. You know what probably the cheapest form of athlete monitoring or in this case we're talking about assessments is a simple questionnaire. So you give it – through testing they found out that it's so much more reliable than even velocity.

So you give a person an assessment or a questionnaire, and they do it daily. And you look at, like, let me give you a basic one. You can look at hours of sleep. You could ask them quality, meaning did you sleep better than normal, normal, or less than normal. Then you look at total calories. There's just a few basic things. And, like, are you feeling depressed? Are you feeling stressed?

And so then you take those. And then what's cool, Doug, you can develop statistical process controls, which is a fancy word for saying you look at the standard deviation. You get their mean. Here's their average. Here's what I average. And then you develop some processes above and below. And if they go above or below those, there's the average, here's what I average. And then you develop some processes above and below. And if they go above or below those, you know, there's a problem. Like if they're sleeping

too much, they're probably depressed. If they're not sleeping enough, you got to say, you got to assume stress is coming to play more than what you're doing in your gym. But now you can start to ask them, it can prompt you to say, Hey man, are you stressed out at school? You know, is there, is there relationships hurting? But we've started doing that. But all you need is like seven days of data to develop this awesome, you know, control sets where you can start to see people like deviating from their norm. Whereas a coach, I can immediately say, hey, whoa, let's talk.

What's wrong? But that's more important than all this fancy stuff we talked about yeah um you know i have a totally unrelated question you mentioned velocity training uh here a little while back like we both got one of the flex units which i think is fucking totally awesome because it tells you exactly how fast you're moving which which is really cool because you can set you know like a pr at 0.8 meters per second and a pr at one meter per second or whatever it is so cool um something i want to do and i'm wondering i'm wondering if you've ever done this is uh you know warm up and then put on you know 60 kilos as like my first set and do a

triple and then get an average velocity for my triple and basically i make make a make some type of a chart or a graph where you have weight on one side and then velocity on the other side so like the you know the y-axis might be like every 10 kilos 10 20 30 40 50 all the way to however much you can squat yeah and then the other one might be like 0.1 0.2 0.3 meters per second all the way on out to maybe like one and a half meters per second something fairly fast so right you do your triple at 60 and then you know you rest your your two minutes or however much you feel like you need to rest, and you just add 10 kilos every time, and then you just plot them all on your chart, and then you see, is it fairly linear? It should be. Is it kind of linear?

And then it just all of a sudden just completely flattens out. It gives you a comprehensive view of kind of how you are able to respond to different amounts of resistance. Yeah, Brian Mann, if you Google velocity-based training and then go to images, he did a really cool little image which shows you it should be fairly linear. However, the majority of people aren't, but it'll be awesome because with velocity, you can detail the exact quality strength. You know, it's vague if I say someone is fast and weak or strong and slow, but this you'll see the exact percentage, exact quality, where they're having a problem. And you can spend the majority of your time there.

It's less of an impact. So, like, for example, if it's 65%, if I'm a lot slower than I should be or if I dip way down there. So I can spend all my time – or not all of it. The majority of my time is 65%. So as we get older, it saves me from having to beat myself up with 85% plus intensity levels. But, yeah, we do that.

I do that with every one of my athletes. Well, every one that I can – you know, in person that I can work with yeah that made me laugh go ahead doug sorry oh and i was gonna say like if you look at a like a force velocity curve in textbook it always shows if you have if you have force on the y-axis and then velocity on the x-axis it always shows this kind of um like the like a kind of like the left side of the letter u there's a there's a curve where it's it's flat against the y-axis then it curves toward the x-axis then it's kind of flat against the x-axis and it's not it's not linear at all and it'll say maximum strength on the high end and then um you know maximum velocity on the low end and then all the speed strength strength

speed stuff in between but i've always i always wondered how close to that kind of theoretical textbook graph my numbers would actually be. Yeah, we do that with all of us. And it's important, like, as a weightlifter, if like, if in that strength, speed, speed, strength, if you are, you know, if you're suffering, then obviously, that is a big red flag for me to focus on that. Because I need, you know, power is everything in weightlifting. Like right now we have, I'm working with Mallory Garza. She's one of our top lifters. And I think one day potential Olympian, but she is super fast. I mean like white lining, but then you put her under load and her ability to create powers is not that good. So she realized, so she's that person that looks

like she's dead lifting and then she cleans it,ks it. And so we're working specifically with pulling and creating power. And here's what's crazy is that we're finding it's more about intent than ability per se. So because she's seeing this number, she is exponentially getting faster simply because she's learning what fast really feels like. It's crazy like that's one of the beautiful things about velocity is you teach intent uh it's and it's a it's the quickest response that you can get from anything i've ever seen before so yeah yeah my current setup right now is like one day a week for lower body i'm doing heavy stuff and then one day a week i'm doing fast stuff kind of like maximum effort and dynamic dynamic effort but i'm familiar yeah but i'm able to measure it i'm able

to measure my my dynamic effort days and so it becomes much more fun because on your heavy days it's easy to quantify you just see how much weight you put on the bar but on your on your fast days you know you say you put on 100 kilos and you're doing your squats like i don't know did i do better than last time worse than last time should i bump the weight because i'm actually going faster like you don't know because i'm going way slower yeah yeah it's it's really nice to be able to actually see what the numbers say and even on a certain velocity even on you know the heavy day you can like set a process control of like you know like 0.3 meters per second. Cause you know, when you start to get lower than that is you're entering that place where I might miss. And so as a, as a master athlete, or even as a

athlete, even in my young ones, it keeps me from ever going quite past that point. I don't want them to fail in the squat or the deadlift very often, like once a block at most, I want them preferably to save all that because it's really rough on the body to take it to failure and so and we're not power lifters so it's not it's not advantageous to do that well like in young athletes too like i say say i'm training a like a 16 year old kid well that that kid probably wants to max out all the time but maybe he's fairly new and and he doesn't he's not ready for it and he doesn't need it and there's other ways to make progress that are safer and whatever it is

but you could do your concept your concept of max out friday but this this friday we're maxing out at 0.6 meters per second and then next week we're doing 0.8 and then we're down to 0.5 and you can you can kind of stagger the maxes so you're getting a max and you can get a pr and you feel good about it, but you're not lifting the absolute most weight your body can possibly move regardless of technique every time. Yeah, see, this is the rabbit hole of velocity.

It's endless and it's so much fun and it's safe. You know, I know there's a coach out there who I'm friends with, but he like always gives velocity, you know, like he gives it a hard time. It's because he doesn't understand it. Most people do that about things they don't understand. But he'll say, I don't know why they're having these young guys.

They don't need velocity yet. They just need to lift. Well, he doesn't understand that there's a safety aspect to it. If you're in a room filled with 35 kids and you're by yourself, in a high school filled with kids with testosterone levels, testosterone is oozing out their eyeballs. So it gives you a way of saying, levels, testosterone is oozing out their eyeballs. So it gives you a way of saying, look, do a max off the blocks, do a max clean up blocks,

but don't, you know, stop when you get below 1.3 meters per second or whatever it is. And then you prevent any of those crazy injuries that you always hear about. Was it Spencer that was talking about how they've got cameras lined up in their high school gym that's calculating all of this stuff? All of it. And, like, it's an easy – I can't remember the name of that system. I can't remember either. I'm not going to say if I did because I love gym wear. But it's just – it's so easy to use. It just turns on automatically.

The minute they get to the rack, it's like starts measuring them. So it's, it's, it's a good system. Doug, what's our code. We're tired of giving mash's codes out to these people. Mash has got all the money. If you want to buy one of those flex units, you can just go. Don't use mash. What is it?

Mash five. Mash five. Mash five or, or barbell shrug. If you love us, barbell shrug. If you love us Barbell Strug if you love MASH if you love the old guy who's like suffering through school for the record this is if you couldn't tell

from this conversation this is just something that we happen to just love using we don't really get a lot of money from any of this we just we like those guys and we like that unit and I'm happy to promote it because I think it's fucking awesome yeah me too i mean all of my elite athletes are now required to have one because you know it's if especially online because it's so tough online for those guys because i'm not there and it's too late the next day to say oh you should have stopped you know

well no shit i should have you know but know, but now I can set limits. I can set process controls and, like, prevent, you know, them from, like, you know, Sandra. Like, if she gets hurt right now, all these last, well, five years because we've had to go next year, all is for nothing if we hurt her now because if she doesn't perform here in a few weeks, it doesn't matter. Everything we've done, all those world championships is null. Null and void.

So it's so important for those elites. Yeah. Mash, before we wrap this thing up, I was lifting with a kid yesterday who was listening to the show. I call him a kid because he's the same age as me, and I feel like a kid. And he heard us talking about you squatting and went over and started following you on Instagram.

And he goes, how does that guy keep doing what he does? I was like, I don't know. Last time I was in a room with them, it only took about four sets to build up to a 411 pound front squat for a double. And he was done for the day.

That's all he needed to do was hit squats and go home. He was like, guys, and this guy that I train with out here, every once in a while is like a big dude. But he was like, he was just like, how does he keep going? How does he keep doing that? How does his body stay in one piece? It doesn't. I'm a fool. You should tell him because he's crazy yeah yeah this crossfitter i'm working with uh trevor he's he lives near you so i'm gonna like um try to hook

you he's a super nice guy but hell yeah let's do it i'll race him i thought you would be you would be really good for him to get to know because i will assess him but you're the real deal. You've actually coached and done the things he wants to do. I'll race him for sure. Yeah. Where can people find you, Mash? Mashtheleague.com or Mashtheleagueperformance on Instagram.

Doug Larson. Doug Larson on Instagram. I'm Anders Varner. At Anders Varner, we are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged get over to Barbell Shrugged dot com forward slash Diesel Dad that's where all the dads are getting strong lean and athletic without sacrifice and family fatherhood or fitness and

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We'll see you on Wednesday.