Barbell Shrugged - Back Squat 1001 x 3: Training and Nutrition to an Insane Feat of Strength w/ Chris Duffin, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash - Barbell Shrugged - #472

Episode Date: May 27, 2020

In today’s episode the crew discusses:   How do you think about squatting 1001 x 3 The deadlift records before the back squat A childhood of overcoming adversity Building training equipment for strong people The insane training protocol leading up to the 1001 x 3 squat Nutrition and calories it takes to squat 1001 x 3  Lessons learned from achieving goals And more…   Find Chris Duffin: Chris' Instagram Chris' Personal Website   Kabuki Strength Instagram Kabuki Education Instagram Kabuki Strength Website   BearFoot Athletics Instagram BearFoot Athletics Website   BuildFastFormula Instagram BuildFastFormula Website   Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Travis Mash on Instagram   ————————————————   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   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   http://pm03.com/shruggedfree to get a free bottle of PM-O3   http://onelink.to/fittogether - Brand New Fitness Social Media App Fittogether   Purchase our favorite Supplements here and use code “Shrugged” to save 20% on your order: https://bit.ly/2K2Qlq4  Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://bit.ly/3b6GZFj Save 5% using the coupon code “Shrugged”

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seeing everyone's opinion of COVID. I don't care. I'm in my house. I'm training. I've got to do the work. I don't care about your political beliefs. But if you want to just watch fitness and watch people working out and seeing people hit daily challenges, you need to get over to the Fit Together app. It's F-I-T-T-O-G-H-T-E-R. That is where you can find it in the App Store on all of the platforms. The Fit Together app, I'm posting workouts daily in there. And it's really cool because I hate Facebook now. I like our group, but I just cannot get into looking at my feed again

and seeing just the bazillion people and their opinions about everything. So Fit Together has come in, and they're really filling a void for people that like to share workouts, um, and, and be on a social media platform that's specific to the fitness industry. Um, there's group classes,

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Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larsen, Coach Travis Smash, Chris Duffin. Dude, you're one of the strongest people that's ever walked the face of this earth. That's a really, really cool thing to say. You just got done the Grand Goals. That was the name of it. I can't wait to hear. Obviously, it's 1,000 pounds, but I want to hear a little bit of the creativity and where this thing came from.

You just got done squatting 1,001 pounds for a triple. And we have a lot to unpack because just saying that sounds insanely freaky. Seeing the video of it, seeing your post after doing it. We have some friends, I can't remember his name right now because I'm drawing a blank. The guy that invented the breath belt said he flew out. What's his name again? Gosh darn it. Yeah, we're all doing the same thing right now. But he said he flew out and he said it got really dusty in the room. There was a lot of grown men, very strong human beings that were weeping, lots of crying, emotional stuff going on while you stuttered underneath a thousand pounds.

Jesse, by the way, Jesse, that's right. Um, he's going to be so excited. We all forgot his name right off the bat. Um, but I talked to him about it because I knew he was flying out there and, um, he said it, it was just the most incredible thing you'd ever been a part of. Um, when did this pop into your brain that this was going to be an actual feat that you wanted to chase? Four years ago. Four years ago, I sat on a couch and made a video, posted it on YouTube. It was actually March 2016.

And by that time, I'd been lifting 25 plus years, competing for 16 years. I'd been ranked number one in the world for like almost a decade straight in like one lift or another. And I was making a lot of changes in my life. So I was walking away from a very secure career, making some personal changes, launching my businesses. And I looked at my competitive lifting and looked at what I wanted to do. And I didn't have the fire to do it anymore. And I'm like, why am I like

doing this? Because I feel that other people want me to, or whatever it is. And I'm like, I just, I just want to do what I want to do. And there's like several main components to that. So one of those is just trying to chase just phenomenal over the top things. And I didn't believe in the construct of competing that I was able to really do that anymore. I was kind of held back by some physical limitations and other things. And I, again, I just didn't have the fire. And if I don't have the fire, it's not going to happen. But to be able to inspire people to like, that they can accomplish a whole lot more than they ever think that they can. Right. And second piece of that is also, I do love like pushing the physical and mental limits personally. So it's a time for really self exploration, but also on the physical aspect, I'm, you know, I'm launching businesses that

are built around getting people out of injury, kind of not doing what I'm doing. I have a great idea for health and longevity.'s called squat 1,000 pounds yeah and uh and and so so um but there's a piece of that like I learned so much in the when you put your your body in the the in your mind everything in this position of you're on this raggedy edge where everything can fall apart at any time and it literally is you learn so much about what works and what doesn't. So, you know, prehab, rehab, you know, training methods, like everything, everything's right there. And so instead of testing for six months or a year, I can find out in hours, days, weeks,

like I can learn really fast. And then the other thing is in building my own social platform and stuff like that, being able to raise awareness for charities and things that I believe in. And so every time I've done a big feat, so there's actually been several in this four-year period all built around this, it's tied to that. So currently, I'll just throw a pimp this out there. We're raising money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Foundation. And you can buy shirts on our site, Grand Goal shirts, 100% of proceeds go to the Leukemia and Lymphomas Foundation, or you can donate directly via the same page as well, if you want to skip doing shirts or donate more than what a shirt would be. So the goal was, grand goals in the video was, I wanted to squat and deadlift a

thousand pounds. I didn't throw out there that I wanted to do it for reps because I didn't, I knew I'd take so much heat because everybody would be like, that's crazy, that's impossible, it can never be done. Nobody could do both of those for reps. And so I just said, I'm going to deadlift a thousand pounds. I'm going to squat a thousand pounds. That's what I want to do, which is still kind of crazy over the top. So, so I, so the first year I did the, the deadlift. So it took me about a year of training and I came in, I did a thousand pounds for almost a triple. I didn't quite lock out the thirdlift. Uh, so it took me about a year of training and I came in, I did a thousand pounds for almost a triple. I didn't quite lock out the third rep. It still stands as the Guinness world record for the sumo deadlift. It was a thousand and two pounds, uh, that I did. And then, uh,

and then I did a number of, you know, other axial loaded feats. Cause that's basically what my training program about was building my axial load tolerance. So, uh, squatting and deadlifting or other variations. So I did a bunch of squatting for 30 days straight, 800 pounds. I did something similar with 400 kilos, 880 pound deadlift every single day as well. Both pretty big things. And then yeah, wrapped it up, uh, finally this last year. Um, so it's been a fouryear training cycle with the last year dedicated solely to this run-up to the 1,000-pound for a triple. And I wasn't going to announce that it was going to be a triple, but it became pretty obvious as my training that I was going for more than

that when I'm doing in the upper, you know, 900 pounds for multiple reps, multiple sets every single week. I'm like, well, I may as well go ahead and let the cat out of the bag on this one. So, yeah, but the deadlift was a surprise to everybody. Uh, what's that? I was gonna say, what was that learning curve like with, with squatting heavy or deadlifting heavy every day? And I know some people do the squat every day thing. Travis is, is a fan of that. Um, you know, what, what's the learning curve like when you're, when you're squatting

heavy every day versus if you're only doing it once a week or twice a week or whatever it is? Yeah, when you're doing something super heavy like that every day, you've got no margin for air, right? If you get something that comes up on you and starts hitting you as, you know, an issue, it's just going to compound and hit you as a train wreck because now you're going to, if you're hurting one day, the next day is just going to get worse. If you've got some sort of strain or tweak, now you're going to be in worse position. If you've got the intensity set at the right level, it's more achievable. But when I was squatting 800 pounds every single day, that's pretty major. So at that weight, and I know Travis knows this as well, a lot of people look at things as a percentage of max. But when you start getting

heavier, it doesn't really, it's not the same thing. Because a 90% of a 500 pound squat is not the same thing to the joints, the tendons, the system as a whole is 90% of a thousand pound squat. It, you, the same frame of reference. So people that look at that and go, Oh, I could do that.

No, you can't. They have no, no understanding whatsoever. I know Travis is agreeing with me here. No understanding whatsoever. What that actually means when the intensity, the overall load is just so much higher.

800 pounds is 800 pounds. Yeah, they don't know what it's like to push that body past the biological tipping point. You know, it's like you're taking your body where it's not meant to be. And so most people don't know that. Yeah, if you squat 300, you might be able to do 80% for like a set of 12. Right. If you're squatting 1,000, you're not doing 800 for 12. No, exactly. Exactly. No, nor would you want to even try that. No, totally. So, so how, how is the rest of the training session structured? If you're,

if you're doing 800 pounds on a squat to start the training session, you're training every single day. Like what's, what's the rest of your volume look like well that wasn't that was that was two years ago that i did that so that was not how i trained uh leading into this um i actually hope to be squatting more than a couple times a week but i've been getting old like when i did the deadlift the final phases i was squatting so we'll talk about the deadlift final phase and i'll jump in answer your question the squat so in that I was doing 12 to 15 reps off the floor once a week between 900 and 950 950 pounds and then a second day of the week I was doing deficits I at 800 to 850 pounds for about 12 to 15 reps. So the whole training cycle over the year was actually about taking my traditional powerlifting approach, which was deadlifting heavy, maybe every

few weeks to take to building to where I could do it weekly and then taking it from weekly to going, okay, how about I do a partial deadlift or a band assisted deadlift on my second day of the week and just getting things packed tighter and tighter. Cause that's the more work that I can do in a shorter period of time is going to result in more strength gains. Right. And so it was all about, you can't just jump to squatting every day. Or if you've, again, if you've been deadlifting heavy twice a month, you can't just go, I'm going to deadlift heavy twice a month you can't just go i'm gonna dead lift heavy twice a week all of a sudden so you have to slowly build to that so i spent a year doing that especially your level you know what's that most most humans i mean like if you squat 400 pounds you could probably start squatting every day it wouldn't be a big deal but for

someone at your level you you can't definitely can't do that you can't just go from like no way no you would be dead i feel like right now my face is very similar to when i was watching the first ever live us ufc fight where i was like huh huh how like it's just hard to comprehend the amount of weight that is on your body every single day. What were your numbers before you decided a thousand was the goal? Like you've got this ramp up period. Do you have to put 200 pounds on your best squat ever? Like what, what's the gap that you're trying to cover? Yeah, that's a, that's a good question. I don't have a definitive answer for that because it's all based on, it's not like you're walking around with a, a 950 pound squat year round, right? Yeah. So my best, even on your best day,

it's still like a 93%. My best squat ever in the gym was 944 pounds prior to this. And my, my best competition squat, which was cutting to a 220 pound weight class and doing all that was 880 pounds at a 220 which was an all-time world record. Yeah. Adding 60 pounds from 940 to a thousand is, it's a four-year process. I mean, that's a gigantic jump. That's not 315 to 400. My deadlift with straps was over 900 pretty much anytime I wanted it to be when I started that cycle as well, the other one. So not to mention mention triple like it's a big difference from a 940 for one to a thousand for triple is a big yeah and there's a huge there's

a reason I chose the reps too because to me uh well I wanted to do the squat and the deadlift to show that I'm not a specialist like Like there's people that can be just phenomenal deadlifters based on biomechanics, limb links, all this sorts of stuff. And I'm a good deadlifter, but I'm a good squat. Like I have a really average build. Like I'm five foot 11 with completely average ape index. That's, you know, arm to torso and limb length measurements. Like I'm not built for any one of those. And so that was important to me to show. It's not just because I built the squat, I built the deadlift. Like I had to do the work and build it. And the other is, yeah, to your point, Travis, a triple, like people can't grasp this when you're dealing the really heavy weight,

doing it for a single, the amount of stabilizers and stuff that you have to control the spinal position goes from a few seconds to 20, 30 seconds. And that's huge. That's huge. And to wear that down becomes incredibly challenging. So like, if you watch my video, you'll even see rep one is easy. Rep two still looks easy. It's like, I even thought to myself, I'm going to hit four. I'm going to smoke this today. And the third rep was the absolute grant because everything, the ability to stabilize and control position yeah gave out yeah and when you do it with those heavy weights yeah it is literally when you're done with that set it's like you went for a 400 meter sprint you can't breathe

for five minutes you're struggling to gas and it's like oh you're out of shape no the diaphragm actually has to work just so bad to stabilize. It's consumed all its resources. So when you get done and you try to breathe, the diaphragm's fatigued like you just did a sprint. So it's really, it's kind of a mind fuck when you first start doing it. Excuse my language. But like, it's like, because you're sitting there like, and it's like, I don't know how to explain it.

It's really interesting because it it feels like you've done something that you haven't done because you've fatigued that same resource that normally does that other thing so i wanted to jump in so bad because i watched the video and i was like he should have just convinced himself he was going for four and the third one wouldn't have been so hard because like i was going for four yeah. Well, that's what I'm saying. Because like, it kind of looked like that thing where if you walked in, you're like, I'm going to hit three. Three is going to be the hardest because you're just mentally preparing for this is the max.

But if you were almost like without hearing you say that, if you would have been like, I'm going to hit four for sure. Three would have been a no doubter. And then four would have been the grinder. But it's awesome that you thought i'm going to disagree with chris with a guy like at his level like it has nothing to do with his mental capacity like he is like very mentally down it is a total physical physiological response there it was out of his control he could have thought whatever he wanted and that was going to happen my body was shutting down exactly he was the most doubting human ever on squatting that's ever lived nothing else he could have done mentally it would you know it was just physiological yeah so i want

to i want to go back to doug's question so doug was asking about the training process for the squat and i i think this is something for people to really understand so it was a year-long training cycle and the end of it is very opposite of what most people would think would be happening. But the beginning is, so what we're doing is picking exercises that are going to or areas of my strength that need to be developed qualities that need to be developed. So looking and assessing, it's like being able to maintain torso position is absolutely huge. So back strength, upper back strength. So there's a lot of things like good mornings in there, a lot of rowing.

Rowing that's actually kind of got an axial component. So bent over rowing, not on a machine, things like that that are built in there. But picking a squat movement that is still far away. So at that point, it was front squatting. All right. So I still got the axial loading. I'm building a lot of those qualities.

And then as we get closer, start getting closer and closer to that variant of the squat that I'm going to specialize in. So I went to the transformer bar, which we have, which has a lot of different settings. And I was able to play with a couple different settings per week, working on different qualities with that. And then every step of the process, we're getting closer with the squat and starting to taper out those other developmental activities, right?

So it's just basic block periodization, but periodizing movement, not necessarily, you know, sets and reps like a lot of people would think. In those training cycles, there's obviously a little of that going on. Now, as we get into the last like three or four months, so I was squatting twice a day, and I wanted to keep that up or even increase it if I could, but I found maybe it's age, maybe it's the amount of weight. I was able to do it on the deadlift, but the bar is much lower.

It has an impact. The higher up it goes, the more harder it, it has an impact the higher up it goes, the more harder it is to actually stabilize and keep in position with that torso and everything. Um, I wasn't able, I kept running into recovery or, uh, getting on the cusp of injury type stuff. So I ended up, uh, doing my second session is belt squats. So for development, I was doing that. And then I switched to the Duffalo bar as the specific, because that's what I was going to lift on was the Duffalo bar. And then when I talk about tapering stuff out by the final phases, there was literally nothing else in the program those last couple months, except for squatting once a week.

And that was it. If I could have done it more frequently, I would. But we're talking about managing intensity loads and volume at really incredible amounts. So I was doing, I squatted over 900 pounds. I think it was about 30 reps per month. So in a two-month block, two and a half month, I squatted over 900 pounds about 100 times with a good portion of those being on the upper end, 950 plus. So the last two months, my average, so I was working on increasing the average load, uh, that I was doing. So it was like one week, it's a 940 pound average load over, you know, six to eight repetitions, you know, eight, eight repetitions would be about average and over in a couple of sets. Um, and then it

was 950 pounds and then it was 952 pounds. And so it, that final phase is like my last workout was a workout with 980 pound average load. So a lot of people go, Hey, how, how sore were you after that final triple? You know, how intense, how hard was that with a thousand pounds for a triple? And it's like, that was fucking easy. It was the same thing with the deadlift. People said, Oh my God, it must've taken you a month to recover from that. No, it was fucking easy. They're like, what? I'm like, did you look at what I had to do to get there? Hitting nine reps with 982 pound average load two weeks prior and every single week.

You know, the training to get there is so much more because I'm not a 400. You know, the other guys squatting a thousand pounds are anywhere between 300 lightest would be 380 pounds to 440 pounds. Yeah. So I do a lot more work to get there because I don't have just the mass to be able to throw at it. So I had to train. That's the unique thing about what I did. Not necessarily the lift,

but the training that I did is so far out there over what anybody's ever done before. Yeah. You basically walked on the moon is what you did. It was so crazy hard. Like I couldn't, I didn't realize till about two weeks, a week ago, like how zapped I was mentally. I couldn't think straight. I couldn't like, and we say squatting once a week, every single day, about two or three hours was focused on recovery modalities of some sort. It's movement, it's movement work, it's tissue work, it's blood flow work. It's like, and then, and then you know you know doing fast relaxation like everything that i did i did i basically wasn't involved in my companies like to any significant

level um you know just like that's all i did yeah i'm actually really interested in the recovery modalities that you use because you have to create so much stability and so much tension in your body to be able to do what you did that the recovery and keeping just any sense of flexibility and like fluid movement athleticism anything to just keep your body functioning i don't even know where you would start i mean a foam roller doesn't even seem like it would – On a foam roller, George. You know what I'm saying? Like what normal people would consider recovery methods. Like where did you start to even break through that?

My foam roller weighs – one of them weighs 240 pounds and the other weighs 320 pounds. They're big steel rollers. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the tools that we sell, but they're all very large steel items. Yeah, I've actually seen those, but I've never used them before. I'd love to hear more about it, like how you developed that and how you specifically use them, what it feels like, like the whole thing. Yeah.

Well, let's just talk about recovery as a whole first. Yeah. I didn't miss your last question, even though it took a few minutes to get back to it. But, you know, There's a couple things I like to look at as far as priorities. Number one is sleep. You've got to have adequate sleep. You've got to be prepared for sleep, and you've got to get good quality sleep. It's everything that you can do to get in that moment.

For me, it could just be simple things like an Epsom salt bath, making sure my room temperature is exactly 68 degrees. I've got a chilled bed that I lay on. Like everything that I can do sounds over the top and everything is, but sleep is number one. So it's a thousand for three. Yeah.

Can't be regular in all areas of your life and then want to just squat a thousand for a trip. So number two is laughter. Like just being able to, you know, be, be chill, enjoy life. And, um, it has a, there's a really, and there's actually a, a, an interesting impact that that has on like diaphragm response and other things that are going on in your nervous system and all that, but is, is to be able to shut off that sympathetic side of the nervous system, get it back into the parasympathetic, your rest and recovery as, as much as possible. Um, so that's, uh, that's number two for me. And then, uh, then from there is movement. So movement is your number one healer.

But when I say movement, there's a lot of pieces to that. So walking around with a little bit of, you know, let's say, twist in your pelvis, a little anterior pelvic tilt, minor, just minor things, a little tweak, you got a little limp that you can barely feel. That's not good movement, right? So you're not going to, you're, you're missing this opportunity of all day long moving well and being able to recover from just your life. Right. And so my tissue work would start immediately post because the sooner I can get everything back into get that balance of, um, length tension relationships of the muscles around each of the joints and get everything back into get that balance of um length tension relationships of the muscles around each of the joints and get everything where it needs to be so that i'm not hurting like if i'm hurting and in bad positions i'm gonna have a huge loss in in recovery uh so so the soft tissue work starts immediately post it's a really light uh session then because you're and then i

would come back a few days later and go really deep with our with our tools. And I'll dive into those in a second. I want to just kind of walk through methodology first. The next one is after that, it is really circulation. So anything that's going to enhance circulation, turnover of nutrients, clearance of things going on the muscles, whatever you want to call it. There's, I'm not going to get too technical blood flow. So, um, so I do maybe a BFR session, um, uh, passive one immediately post session. I do a couple with like my movement based work. So I'm doing some, you could call them correctives or whatever you have, but you know, getting in good positions, queuing things to happen. Um, you know, some light,

uh, movement work with some BFR a couple of times a week. A lot of times I was only squatting once a week. So the two days prior, I would do a lot of that movement with BFR so that I could fill back out because you know, the muscles just haven't, so that I could fill back out because, you know, the muscles just haven't, they're not engorged with muscle, you know, that full, right? Like a bodybuilder, but the more fuller the muscle, the better I'm going to be prepared walking into the session. And if I'm only squatting once a week, they're not going to be as full, uh, daily use of nitrates. So there's kind of a pimp for my supplement company, Build Fast Formula, because we make a, we started the market on daily use of nitrates. So basically like a pump product, but instead of pre-workout, use it every single day. And there's actually a lot of research

backing this up. And it's linked on our website. But, you know, anything that falls in that category using daily has a phenomenal impact. So it's not just going to make your muscles look full and vascular, but think about the enhancement that that's going to have on recovery and also getting everything filled out and ready for that next training session. So those are kind of how I look at it. So I don't want to get it too tied into soft tissue is the answer and everybody has to do it. Honestly, I don't believe that people, if you have to do that, you know, soft tissue work or stretching work or anything like that to get your workouts done,

you're doing something wrong with your workout. You're either training it too high or too intensive a level, and your fatigue is accumulating too fast over your recovery, or you're moving like shit. And to make a point of that, actually, I did a post on my Instagram. I think it was last week. So two-week post squat. I don't stretch. I didn't stretch the entire time and you look at the post uh one of them i'm doing damn near a full split the next one i'm doing a full uh fall back you know um my uh my cat my my lower leg is on the ground and i'm laying flat shoulders uh fully overhead on the ground not them you know i'm not a I'm not a mobility guru. I'm not the most flexible person around.

That's pretty damn good for somebody that can squat and deadlift 1,000 pounds. I was about to say, nobody would expect you to be. That's incredibly flexible and mobile. And so that articulates the point. I have the right things happening in my body because you lose mobility, not from the fact that you lift heavy,

you lose mobility when you're putting, when you're putting your body at risk and it starts tightening the muscles around whatever joint is there and starts limiting the mobility to protect yourself. This is a basic neurological function. So I just make that point because I want everybody like I sell soft tissue tools. Okay.

One of my best friends is Kelly Sterrett who has the supple leopard. Like you're gonna, in life, nobody moves perfect. Nobody trains perfect. You're gonna have issues and you're gonna need to do some of that triage work here and there. But if you're having to do,

if you're having to foam roll your IT band for two years straight, you're a moron. Like you're, maybe not a moron. Maybe it won't be after this statement, right? Find the root cause. You don't have an IT bad problem. You have a squat problem. Or a walk around life problem. A walk around the life problem. Something's going on. Sitting at your desk problem or whatever. So anyway, all I want to say is if you have those issues pop up, fix them, but understand if it continues, find the root cause and fix it.

Right. Or get someone who can, you know. So Doug, our tools, I co-developed with Donnie Thompson, who is an interesting thinker, intuitively does a lot of things well. And so he started coming out with these big heavy rollers to roll the body instead of rolling on a roller. We're seeing great results. We don't know exactly why that is. My belief is that it's because when you're on a roller, one, if you're a bigger guy, you're not getting much pressure. The second being, you're still actually in control and tight and doing positions. So you're actually not fully relaxed. And you're, you know, the end of the day, our best understanding of soft tissue work is, we're not actually doing anything to the muscle or the tendons or anything like that.

We're actually just sending signals to the brain. And clearly I'm going to get a different neurological response if I'm tight control, controlling positions versus being relaxed in the rollers rolling me. Now we took that a bit further with doing a lot of pinpoint type work with these steel tools in creating. And then I worked with a company called AccuMobility out in Boston. They do a lot of soft tissue tools in creating these, we call it active mobilization using the tools. It's basically pin and stretch or ART or what have you, except what we found with our larger, instead of using someone's thumb, this larger surface, it's a two inch diameter radius that we could get in deeper, not have that again, pullback response that someone would have from a really sharp thing getting in there.

You can stay in deeper and longer, move better. We get a really lasting response. Don't know why. Like if you do an ART session, typically range of motion, sometimes it reverts back in 45 minutes. Sometimes it's a day. Usually we find that our mobility stays for, you know, two or three weeks with these tools. The guys working, so it's the first thing on the rehab bench at like the LA Dodgers. And we're in 75% of major league baseball, by the way, and in every single major league sport in North America, using these type of products and stuff. The guys love it because work on an NFL player with your thumb or, hey, here's a nice tool. Oh, and it weighs 20

pounds and does half the work for you and you get a better response and you're not beat up. It works pretty well. So we've got full, if you want to, anybody wants to check it out, I don't really want to spend the whole bunch of time on it because we've got a whole, we walk through the whole body. We show people how to self use them. Um, and then they're used pretty heavily in clinical practice and stuff now as well. Uh, but basically it's, that's what it is. It's, uh, and then we, we have them at our gym and love them. So this is, I'm non-biased. I don't own it. So I will be a, uh, a voice for you. It for sure works way better than some foam roller thing. Exactly. It works better than a foam roller. You can do, we do some knurling on it. So you can actually grab the tissue and do, you know, grab the skin and fascial layers and twist

and shear those as well. So you can get, it's a matter of a lot of people don't understand. There's like deep neurological, uh, deep neurology, like in the, in, in the tissue itself, but there's also superficial and peripheral that actually, so like the superficial and peripheral would be like something that like cupping would do or light scraping like Gua Sha or, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, Graston people that want to copyright names, you know, whatever, scraping. We have a great scraping tool, by the way, too. So anyway, I use all this stuff in my protocol. You know, I want to get deeper into this. You know, I saw the video afterwards, and you're super emotional.

And obviously, I've been in the powerlifting world a long time. And people like you or like me, I'm often curious now that I'm on the other side of things, like why we do what we do, especially why does someone do a thousand foot three? I know that your childhood was a little bit rocky. Do you mind getting deeper and explaining what causes a human to decide to squat a thousand pounds three times? So when I talked about that first opening of the podcast, and I'll kind of dive deeper in that, is the inspiration piece and showing people that they can accomplish a lot more than a lot of times what they think. And yeah, I've had a really different life. We'll put that. And in my, and I try to do things.

I try to walk the walk of what I preach. So I have a bestselling book about my life. It's called the Eagle and the Dragon and the philosophies kind of surrounding that. And it's a, it's really important for me to walk the walk of what I believe in, what I preach. And this is one of the ways that I can do that and being able to show people that through understanding what you value in life, you can create effective goal setting. And then from there with discipline, pull off things, phenomenal things in this world. If you want, if you take these simple things and elaborate and really hit them. And so for me, I got really emotional in this video because I've been,

I kind of dive deep in some of those philosophy points in, in writing, in some of the videos I do, and obviously in my book. And that's the cusp of like what I hope to share and what people can get out of this. And sometimes you don't, you don't see it. You're online and people like, ah, Chris stuff and shit, you know, those squats high, blah, blah, this, this, whatever it is, you know, and it's on and on. And, um, but at the same time I get emails and messages and stuff from people that have followed me through the years and they connect with the message and it's somebody, Hey man, I, I was, I was on the verge of committing suicide. My life's fallen apart, you know, and, and I

connected to this and, you know, I pulled through and, or, Hey, I've always wanted to just, you know, start my own business. And you gave me the, business and you gave me the inspiration to do that. The list goes on, overcoming addiction, so on. And that's great. That's what I love hearing. That's how I'm trying to impact people. Let me ask you. After the squats, this is why I got so emotional, there was a thousand or so comments that popped into Instagram, a lot of positive

stuff. I had about 500 messages like that popped through on my Instagram of stories about overcoming addiction or again, you know, like major people are sharing these major stuff and how watching and following, you know, the messages that I put out and things had an impact, like life changing things on them. And so I was emotional from the lift and I'm getting these, just pouring in these tremendous stories of, and it's all about like, oh my God, people are connecting what I'm trying to do and why I'm doing it. And it just, it was too much for me. Like you, if you've seen the video, I'm a balling, I'm a balling mess. Um, and, uh, uh, and so it just meant so much to me knowing what I'm doing. It hasn't, it has an impact, like being able to differentiate all the bad

shit in the world that can happen to you and taking ownership of something that you can control and affecting that and really divesting what you have the ability to impact and do in the world is very different than what's happened to you you can't control those things they're going to be what they are, but they're not who you are. You are. That's the question I want to ask. You're your responses to those, how you respond to your actions. You got the young, right?

So you got those young kids out there like in a world filled with like, I did this because my mom and dad did this or like, you know, I have a rookie childhood too. You know, like I had a abusive stepdad long story. So, but or like you know i have a rocky childhood too you know like i had a abusive stepdad long story so but like you know there's kids out there that i could use that like in my family there's four of us two people you know i have a brother in prison yeah my brother's in san quentin right now so and like then there's two of us who are the opposite so like you know for a young kid out there right now who might be listening, who's got, you know, rough childhood, their parents, you know, abandoned them or maybe their dad beats them, whatever it is.

Like, what would you say to them about like, you know, you can't control that. And like you just said, that doesn't define you. How does that person grab up their balls and say, I'm going to go and do something positive? Right. So it's just exactly that. It is understanding that there's bad shit, things that are going to happen to you. And yeah, it's going to affect you in some way or another, but it is not who you are. You are defined as an individual in this world, in this universe, whatever you want to say, you're defined by your actions and responses to those things in life. Let's take a simple, let's take a simple

analogy. You got somebody, you meet somebody, Travis, you're a lifter and they go, ah man, I can never do that. I'm a guy with a bad back. I'm going to be in pain. I'm never going to be moving the rest of my life. I'm going to have this problem forever. And they live in this. They tell everybody this story of I'm the guy with a bad back. I'm never going to recover. I'm going to have to deal with this. And it affects their personality, everything about them. Or you can say, you know, what am I going to do about this? And maybe it's something like it's broken. You got hit by a car. Well, maybe you can become a motivational speaker or maybe you can overcome it. Three years ago, two years ago, actually right before my daughter

was born. So there was a, there was a, a sideline in there. I, I attempted the conventional deadlift a thousand pounds. I can't get in good position for a conventional deadlift off the floor, so I can't tolerate volume. So about six weeks of deadlifting between 850 and 880 conventional, three times a week for reps. I was no longer able to move, and I couldn't. I had to learn to walk again. I was in a walker. I, uh, was, um, and I had

drop foot nerve damage for six months. Um, and I, I easily could have been that path, but it's fixable. I'm in zero pain today and I've gone on to do something like squat a thousand pounds for a triple by by saying I'm gonna figure out a way I know the right people I know the methodology and I'm determined I'm confident that I'm going to be able to figure this out and I worked my fucking ass off every goddamn day until I found a so I I started making progress and then I was back in the game again. Now I'm not saying every problem can be fixed like that, but me being in that situation, I guarantee there's a whole lot of people that would have let that define

their life going forward is I am the person that is this. I'm the person with an abusive stepfather, and this is why my relationships are shit. This is why I can't hold a job. This is why I'm a drug addict. This is, this is, because I'm that person. Okay? That shit has happened. It is not who you are.

Your environment does not define you. Your actions and your responses define you. He taught me a lot what not to do. So I just don't do it. I I do the opposite and it's worked out. Now, did you have any times when you were younger, when you were, you know, maybe you're like in your mid-teens or something like that, where you were worried that that might be you going down that path or like you weren't as confident and as put together and as mature and adult as you are now and you very easily could have gone down the wrong path.

Um, uh, I, I didn't, uh, at times have the confidence that I could really be a successful member of society. Um, I wasn't sure I'd be able to figure out how to get there at times. I'm not sure if you've read my book or know much about my past there, Doug, but... I read about half of it. Damn COVID stopped me from traveling. It was my travel book. So, but yeah, I mean, I did not have an example of or know like how to get there, like how to go to college, how to fill out the thing.

How do you get a job? I didn't know this stuff. So, yeah, there was definitely questions around that. I mean, obviously, people around me were dying. And there was drug addiction, people going to jail, all that sort of stuff. Um, so let me just give a, let me give a, I'll say a 32nd primer on my life, but it's probably going to be a few minutes, um, for listeners that, uh, uh, uh, aren't aware. So I grew up homeless and we're talking very, very poor, Family of seven living on less than $5,000 a year in the mountains.

We're killing animals, foraging for food. You know, you got to fill up a jug of water in a stream and put it on a rock in the sun so you can get it warm to bathe. And, you know, if we had living quarters, you know, it might be a condemned home with no doors. Sometimes it was, but maybe it didn't have electricity or running water and back and forth. Because, you know, during the summer, we'd just be in the mountains camping. And during the winter, we'd try to find something close to the schools. And this is your brothers and sisters you're talking about, the seven?

Yeah. Yeah. And my parents. So, um, and, uh, so there was a lot of stuff that went on, you know, when you're living in the environment, there's drug running, drug addiction. I mean, that's what my parents did for a living was growing weed in the Northern California wilderness. Um, you know, there was murderers that we had to deal with. There was a serial killer that tracked my family for a while. He ended up coming back in the early 2000s once he got out of prison.

Tracked down my mom again in Eastern Oregon and was trying to chase her down. She escaped at gunpoint. Police ended up finding him on his property with four dead and buried women. Anyway, I've seen some shit. I got taken custody by the court system for a while. Parents got us back in Eastern Oregon.

I did really well in athletics and academics. Got myself a full ride of academic scholarship to engineering school. Things got worse for my family. I ended up, things got worse for my family. I ended up taking custody of my three younger sisters. My brother was down a bad path by that point in time, so I didn't really have an impact for him. And sorry, family of six, not seven. But, and so I raised all three of my siblings while I went through my engineering school, my MBA, while I pursued my career. And then, you know, we get to the kind of the success side of things.

So I ended up doing very well in the leadership front by putting a lot of principles in place that are in my book. I became a corporate executive where I was hired to come in and run and turn around companies. Like I turned, you know, ran and fixed an aerospace company that was a major provider for Boeing, got them prepped and ready and sold and saved everybody in the company's job. I did some stuff like that in automotive, high tech. Did that for almost 20 years. Was really well paid and sought after for what I did. Um, heck, I've got, uh, got awards for engineering and innovation, uh, from college. And, uh, anyway, uh, walked away from all of that too, because I felt that I could have a bigger impact in the world.

Uh, and that's where I, I walked away from that, redefined my life. That's when grand goals, basically around the time it started and a lot of major relationship changes in my life to align everything to where I could have the impact that I felt that I could have on the world, which is showing people that through adversity, through stressors, through some of those negative things in your life, you can adapt and become a stronger and better version of yourself. So just like going to the gym, people don't realize if you quit having stress to adapt to, you start atrophying, you start weak, getting weak, and you start the process of death. That's where atrophy leads. Same thing in life. If you don't put some struggle instead of yourself, if you don't put the challenge in front of yourself, you're going to get mentally weak.

You're going to get emotionally weak. Okay. It's the same thing. Human beings, this is basic physiology. We adapt to stress. Okay. Too much with no opportunity to recover. You go down a bad path. You fall apart. Just like

the gym. If you do CrossFit seven days a week, seven hours a day, you're going to get fucked up. So same thing in life. That's why my brother's in San Quentin. That's what would have happened to my sisters. That's what happened to a lot of people around me there growing up in that environment. It was too much, but we can build, we can use this stress, not only become more resilient, more ability to tolerate more stress. So my companies are built on the physical nature of that. Kabuki Strength and Build Fast and Barefoot Athletics are all around the physical nature of that.

But that's why I do these podcasts. That's why I do these inspirational pieces. That's why I wrote my book, is to hit the mental and emotional aspects of it. Going to take a minute to thank our sponsors over at Bioptimizers. As you know, everyone is facing challenges with recent virus pandemic from stress, financial sickness, and quarantines. There's a lot of people who haven't, there's not a lot of people who haven't been touched by it. One of the highest risk factors is a weakened immune system and a lot of what affects that weakened immune system is determined by your gut health gut issues aren't just about bloating or indigestion they can be the

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Are you still close with your siblings? What about your parents? Yes. I'm very close with my sisters. I have a good relationship with my mother now. My sister's kind of, well, anyway, long story. Yes, I have a, she still lives out in the middle of nowhere in the mountains away from society because that's where she wants to be. And so she's out in the desert with her rocks and happy though.

Yeah, so it's that. And so, and I learned a lot through introspection and surviving and living through those environment. And that's where I show people kind of, uh, the book is all about asking questions and it gets more in there as you get into their honors. The last quarter is really where it all comes together, but asking you the right questions to do the introspection, to really understand what you value in life. And people don't do this work. They want to set goals and chase things that look all nice and what they see out there that's catered to them instead of really understanding what they want out of life and understanding that because you have to have that before you

actually start setting goals. Because you're going to have all sorts of goals that don't lead you down the life that you want. I can use a lot of different analogies to show people that, but it is now how to set goals that you can actually create a life that will live those values. So I don't tell you how to do it. I don't tell you what's important. I don't tell you what your values are, but really walk that process and be able to live a life that realizes that. Do you remember kind of the impetus or the first one, two, three times that you kind of realized all this struggle that you're going through, you can turn it into the positive? Because it seems like that may be the thing that separated you from your siblings and heading down the right path versus kind of the wrong path. I'm going to have to think.

Let me give that some thought. I've never been asked that question before. Good job, Andrews. I got my bell shrugged. Kaboom. Oh, God. oh god i i think it was probably sometime in high school um and for me lifting was like a big part of that. So I was this kid that didn't interact, you know, I wore dirty, you know, that's what I had, you know, toes sticking out of my shoes. I was laughed at, made fun at. I was the nerd. My family was very hyper intelligent, well-read, even though we lived in the woods. The trip to the library with giant stacks of book. My, my father was a member of Mensa.

My mom was, you know, going to school to be a chemical engineer before she decided that she didn't want to have anything to do with society. So we weren't stupid and, and, and respected that. So like in school, you know, I'm, I'm the poor, yeah, I didn't have a lot of self-confidence. And as I started really, I decided I wanted to lift weights for general reasons that you would as a teenager, which was, yeah, to look better, not get beat up in a fight, you know, cause I'm the, I'm the nerdy kid. And, uh, and it's, that's when I realized like the more I threw myself at things, the challenges and obstacles, that I just came out better and stronger.

And that's where, obviously, my passion for the iron and learning that and then being able to apply that to, oh, this is life in a general as a whole, right? And I probably maybe didn't connect all those dots, you know, at that time, but the realization started kicking in that, you know, being able to take on challenge is going to make me a more confident and more successful individual. Yeah. It's kind of one of those, like once you do the thousand for three, you realize why you went through all the struggles to begin with.

Um, I guess when you, where is like kind of the, the next, do you have any sites on any future goals? Like in, in the, in the following weeks now that it's happened, I mean, where has your mindset been? And you're kind of standing there holding the trophy. Is it the big letdown? Is it you feel fulfillment? Is that what you were chasing? Is there like, what is the emotional internal conversation of like, yes, I did it. Or is it like, Oh, it wasn't as sweet as I thought it would be.

Well, this is a really important discussion to have because we see this happen in athletics all the time. Right. Yes. Particularly, you know, professional athletes where they get done and Oh wow. Where do I go now? What do I do? We see high rates of suicide and depression and and i had a plan especially in power lifting where they walk out and they're 400 pounds and they can't do anything and you're broken yeah yeah like it's in strength sports it's very very prominent

so i had a plan i was actually excited and ready to be done, to move to the next steps. They're not physical in nature that I have planned. I still plan on being physical lifting, but my lifting is all going to be focused around health and longevity, being there for my family, you know, showing people through an example myself, because what I did wasn't necessarily the most healthy thing, right? You guys get it. General Pop doesn't get that sometimes. They're like, man, you were eating kale solids prepping for that thousand triple, right? All organic. Yeah. Anyway, that's a whole other discussion. Yeah, totally. So, yeah, I've got a huge number of things that I am focused on, but I haven't been able to, like, projects that I've been wanting to move on and not been getting much groundwork because everything I've been doing

has been so consuming. So a number of that is kind of around my businesses, the educational content that i can help uh get out there uh but then personal they're things like i can't now like literally so the week after me and the wife were starting uh well she started she already got a head start because she got her lessons started uh beforehand but we're working on want to work on getting our pilots license we want to get a plant a plane uh license. We want to get a plane. She's getting launched with doing a lot of cooking and lifestyle brand stuff right now.

So she was a runner up to be on MasterChef USA and Canada. She lived in both areas. So she's phenomenal in the cooking regard. If you're going to squat 1,000, you've got to have a good cook. Oh, man. The truth. Yeah, go on my channel, find her links, and you'll find her in the food that I eat. You're going to be mighty jealous. That's like, that must be a,

that must be an anniversary. I'm like, no, that's a Tuesday. You got to eat seven pounds of meat a day. I'm really going to be working on helping promote and build her brand. Like I said, we want to, we want to start flying, get a plane. I've got this vehicle. There's actually a build thread on Instagram, Duffin underscore, yeah, Duffin War Rig. Anyway, it's this one of a kind thing. It's so over the top, of course. 47 inch tires, four wheel steering, central tire inflation. Uh, anyway, it's, it's a thing. I'm going to finish that this year, start getting back into my four wheeling. Um, and like I said,

there's, there's a whole lot of stuff that I, uh, that I love and they fit my values. So lifting for me, this is where it comes to understanding your values. Lifting is one of the ways that I express those values. So when lifting disappears, because I understand what my values are and how I want to live, I don't fall into an abyss because that was one expression

and I have ways to express those values in other areas. And I have a plan for it. I'm not going to walk through all of those, but I've just given you several good examples of what that is. And that's why this is really important to understand. Because when we talk about planning out your life, like somebody's like, I want to be an NFL player. That's my goal. And guess what? They work this path and they don't quite get there. And they think that they're never going to get what they wanted out of life. But if they understood why they wanted that, then they can discover that there's actually alternative paths that will let you realize the same thing. So for me, like my prior career working in the industrial sector wasn't a loss because one of the things that I really value is my ability to be able to inspire people to do things that are phenomenal.

This coaching, this mentoring, this leadership, right? Accomplishment, that's a huge one for me. Obviously, we see that in my lifting. I wanted to do phenomenal things with the business, but I was able to coach and mentor and lead people and really vastly impact their life. Now I feel I can do that bigger with the platform that I'm building and that's why I made the shift. But I was able to realize that in that work as well. So anyway, I'm just – yeah, something that really comes to – I did not – Living is an expression of minus values.

Exactly, yeah, 100%. So it's not the only way. That's like the primary point I'm trying to draw. 100%. I think one of the – just in hearing you talk and knowing – like from reading the book and knowing or understanding a little bit of your childhood, coming from a place of such scarcity in your life And now hearing you talk, it sounds like you just come from everything is your life is just filled with abundance and you can go anywhere, do anything. And a lot of that comes. Pretty surreal. The idea of accomplishment in that you,

you set out for this goal 1000 for a triple deadlift, a thousand, like you set out to do it, but that doesn't always come with the mentality and the understanding in this deeper sense of purpose like i i guess now that you live in this place and the idea of abundance is so obvious in your life you know how does that play out and in a way of like keeping it all together like how do you direct all that energy when it sounds like you have nine businesses going on a whole bunch of ideas, you're building a car.

I mean, so kind of like, how does it all come together? Let's be clear on abundance. I'm not rich. Well, I mean, but I'm rich.

You can still live in life. Yeah. That I, everything that I get to do, I, everything I want to do, I get the opportunity to do. And it's all encompassed like building my vehicle and you came from a place where there was no opportunity i own a manufacturing company with engineering all in-house and i can do this custom

one-off stuff like it all fits together like everything you know as we're building the lifestyle brand like traveling around the northwest and shooting shooting videos in her cooking series in different locations all fit like it's all like my work what i do for work and what i want to you know like consume or appreciate in life are all the same things and that's where i am abundantly happy right because i don't have to go to a job to go home and work all week so that I can get a couple hours of freedom

on the weekend to chase what I want to do. It's all mixed together. And then like, with the work, like, hey, it's four companies. I'm not the CEO of any of them. Not even Kabuki Strength. Like, what's your role. I'm not the CEO of any of them. Not even Kabuki Strength. What's your role? I'm chief visionary officer. But that's it. I provide long- to be able to do that because here's, here's where I think this company should be and how it should be impacting the market and how it should be impacting people. But I don't have to do the work to make that happen. And then that provides a

phenomenal piece for my employees of engagement because they're not getting told what to do. Yeah. I don't have to go because to me, I want people that get, I want people to be able to enjoy their jobs and take ownership and be able to treat it like their own, like they own the company and they get the drive where it goes. Cause they do. And so that gives me significant, like feel good. Right. Cause I've been in that position. I don't like being micromanaged i don't like what's the fun of getting if you get told how to do a job yeah like all your creativity is gone so at least by the way creativity if you haven't figured that out it's like one of my core i have like seven core values having creative outlets that is huge for me that was one that was missing

in my prior career because it was you know know, running industrial companies. Like, yeah, we did. I mean, we, we really went down, uh, and I love like seeing the emotional, mental lifestyle progression throughout your entire life. But I do actually want to talk about your powerlifting career and, um, a lot of just the stages of that, um, getting to a 900 plus pound squats, no joke. That's world-class. Not many people have ever done that. Getting to a 900 plus pound squat is no joke. That's world class. Not many people have ever done that. There's only one person on this podcast right now that I can even remotely relate to that. Mr. Travis Mash, you say those numbers to me and that's like me plus Doug's back squat all in one. Where did competitive powerlifting come into your life and kind of the coaches. Were you in the West side scene where, where did,

you didn't just say 1000, you just didn't get, not get to a 900 pound back squat. Like there's a real progression of, I love knowing who the coaches were along the way. So I'm glad you appreciate that. Cause, uh, you know, not a lot of people mentioned, Oh yeah,

you just did that. That's one of the things that you do in life. It's like, no, that's the freakiest thing I've ever heard. It's like decades of like a huge amount of research and testing and working your ass off. And,

uh, I'm 43. Yeah. So at 43 years old, you did one of the freakiest. I'm the oldest person to ever squat a thousand pounds. I'm the oldest person to ever deadlift a thousand pounds. I'm the oldest person to ever deadlift a thousand pounds. I'm the lightest person to deadlift a thousand pounds.

I'm not sure if I am on the squat, but definitely for scrapping it. There's a lot of 35 year olds walking around that are like, Oh, I'm 35. I'm old. And like, I remember Ronnie Coleman and his videos, like it takes a long time to build a world-class body. It's like, right. It takes so much time anyway uh so i've been lifting since 1988 uh and just i told you the reasons already yeah uh so i can look good to the girls

and not get beat up in a fight yeah and then 2000. Yeah. I was training and there was a couple of guys prepping for a bodybuilding show. Okay. And they looked, they were bigger than me. They looked better than me. And I'd been reading, you know, all that was available in the nineties, you know, your Arnold encyclopedia, bottombuilding and Bill Pearl's book. That was my training foundation. So the first 12 years of what I did, that's what I did. And I'm like, God, I run circles around these guys in the gym. I lift more than them. I work harder than them. Shit, I'm going to find some sort of lifting competition and just do it so I can say, ah, I did that.

So I found this bench press and deadlift competition, and it was a one-time gig. I trained for six weeks. I didn't know what a deadlift was, by the way, before that, so I found some pictures and thought I knew what a deadlift was, and I went to the competition. I did a bench press. Did a 440-pound bench press and a 513-pound straight leg deadlift.

You just pick it up, right? No big deal. Wide foot, you know, medium sumo stance with hands even wider than that. Oh, my God. I know. If people saw a picture of this, I, but that was before I was social media,

right? And camera phones. Good for you though. Yeah. Right. I wish I would love to see that. And, uh,

I got done with the competition. I'm like, Oh, so like I'm doing this, like maybe the rest of my life. It was fun. fun yeah i love competition and and so i started powerlifting and uh i found uh yeah i found there wasn't a lot of resources there was a west side barbell site and so i read everything i could on that and i followed

a west side barbell methodology till about 2008. Had a number of injuries and decided in my recovery process that I didn't like speed training because it actually, yeah, a number of reasons. Yeah, I agree. What's that? Yeah. I agree with you. Yeah. One, it wasn't additive. And actually, I found that it put me kind of on that

that injury risk the really fast contractions with like so insignificant weight yeah so so anyway i started exploring more basic uh periodization and block periodization methodology at that point uh and then about 2010, because of some of the injuries I kept pushing on the, uh, I have to figure things out. Like, this is what I do. If you haven't figured this out, like I just keep diving deeper and deeper. Next thing you know, I'm pushing people on the clinical side. And next thing you know, I'm like, I'm, I'm meeting personally.

I'm going to like, I started doing a clinical continuing ed courses basically on a dynamic neuromuscular stabilization, spine mechanics, and so on. And so there's a couple paths that I was leading. I was heading down that path and my lifting path. And so this is kind of the impetus for Kabuki Strength and the movement methodologies that I do. I started meeting these people, conversing with them, going back and forth. The next thing you know, I'm lecturing with like Stu McGill and Craig Liebenson who brought DNS to the United States. I'm doing guest presenting at chiropractic colleges on topics and stuff like that. So I ended up developing this really great network of friends of, uh, friends, uh, that are the likes of, uh, you know, Stuart McGill, Carrie Kelly Starrett, uh, Craig Liebenson, you know, Charlie Weingroff out of New York,

like all these really like people trying to change, not just like clinicians, uh, or educators, but people that are literally trying to change each of their, uh, their professions. Uh, and, uh, that's how I ended up in this world trying to change, uh, strength training for the better, I guess. That's cool. Um, and so I, I, I opened a gym. I forgot to mention that. So I was running, I think I was running an aerospace company at the time and I had a home gym.

And by that time, about 20 people were showing up every day. And my ex-wife is well ex-wife now she's like uh you need to go find some spot because i'm done with uh i'm done with 20 people being in my garage every night giants they're so loud so i opened weights everywhere so i opened a 4 000 square foot training facility on the side in 2008 2012 moved it to a 9,000 square foot location with a business partner of mine, Rudy Cadlib. If you want to check it out, he just deadlifted 500 pounds like a smoke show

in his driveway at 71 years old. I saw that! That's him! That's him. Not bad for a natty 71 year old at around 200 pounds, right? those are the guys that i want to be like me too pulled 500 me too that's that's freaking life goals man you know what it's

like saying you've never pulled 500 to the people that pull 800 to a thousand regularly you're like they're like really 475 that's it it's like set three. Never felt so weak. I should tell you, like, sometimes I'd start my deadlift work. I would literally start my deadlift workout at 500 pounds. Well, the bar doesn't bend into position, so I am actually technically doing a different lift if I lift less than that, because my setup would have the weight like three inches. Yeah. There's logic to it. I believe you. I just haven't put the bell in the coffin on him. Actually, that's exactly what I'm trying to do. The whole, uh, just a straight alpha game right there. Like let's squish you down. Let's squish

you down and pretend like I'm being funny. So good. And so, yeah, I'm running, me and Rudy are running this facility one because same, same philosophy. Like I knew to be successful, I had to have the right methodology. Okay. I had the right equipment and I had to have the right environment, the right people around me. So the only way to do that, I wanted to be the best in the world. I'll be honest.

Like I want to be the best in the world. So I built my own freaking training center. I built all my own equipment because I didn't like what was out there and, uh, and started developing really this, uh, movement. So all the people I mentioned, they work more on the clinical or research side. And it was really like putting this together in my head. Like, what does this look like under really heavily loaded applications? And so out of that took me like four years or so to really wrap my head around, uh, the, the basis for our, our biomechanics movement education that we do. And, oh, so I had, I had some coaches, you know, working in the gym and this is before it was a business. So they were just doing their own clientele.

And I would mentor them and stuff. And then when I founded Kabuki Strength, I took one of them. He'd been working with me this whole time. And so that's Brandon Sin. He heads up our educational content. He heads up all of our coaches. And he started doing all the work. Because I just don't have time anymore to like write my program, manage it. And I really like having someone that has a non-ego,

non-biased look and to be able to bounce things back and forth. So a lot of people are surprised that I have a coach. Okay. But I also think it's great because it's, I use our educational system. I use our coaching system as a client, you know, not the old, the old hair club for men commercials, but like that. I, so I've been coached since 2015 by Brandon through this whole process, through the whole grand goals. And a lot of it is because there's a lot of content when you start putting this together and travis knows this like uh you know programming is it takes work and you've got to do statistical analysis you've got to be looking at back there's so much stuff and so he's actually done the work of building our database that actually has those tools to be able for our, for other coaches to be able to use in the same systematic fashion.

So every, every client that we have has individually tailored programs based on their, their needs, their capacities, their tools, all this. But the process that we arrive at for creating those programs is the same. Okay. And so he, he has all that up. Like I don't, I don't have time to do that. And he's, he's the person that's been with me that understands that some of the core philosophy, but he's a better coach than me. And he's better at the data.

And he's better, you know, he's, he's better than me at this. And so, so he's my coach and the coach of me this entire time. All the, all the members and athletes that go to your gym, are they very focused on being their strongest possible self? Or, I mean, I imagine the culture when you walk in is a little bit higher intensity, higher level thinking than it's a normal spot. It's interesting. So, um, because we're focused on movement and injury and stuff like that, I'd say only about 40% of our clientele, this is worldwide, are competitive strength athletes and some like, you know,

strongmen, powerlifting, whatever it is. And the rest, the 60% are people that just want to get stronger and be out of pain and be, you know, have a more positive impact on their life. And we work with people, I can't name names, but like, you know, the head, the head S and C coach for some of the best essence, you know, best teams in the world. They might be clients of ours too. You know, it's just, it's all over the place in that regard. Our gym is an interesting model.

I'm not in the gym business. We're in the business of supporting gyms from, uh, with, with our, with our equipment, with our education, uh, our educational platforms. And so we don't advertise our gym and we don't recruit members or anything like that. So any client that is a, uh, that is, um, uh, any of our, our, our online or virtual client that is local, they just get to use our gym for free. So we just don't have that. So it's that many people, uh,

honestly, I probably have like 40 members to our gym. Um, that's, that's it. Cause it's, uh, that's,

we create education, we create tools and our gym is, is our, we call it the lab because our's our testing facility it's where we validate anything that we bring to market that we walk through these programming principles that we walk through this movement principles we've tested these barbells uh we've tested these tools we know for a fact that they work um but it's it's it's different than like uh a lot of like what people would think they think it's a very focused just like straight power lifting gym a lot of what people would think. They'd think it's a very focused, just straight powerlifting gym.

A lot of our members do powerlift. Like I said, at least 40% are probably competitive athletes. It's a gym of lifting nerds because people that come to us are a bit cerebral. They find us because they're seeking education and stuff like that. It's a really warm and welcoming environment actually a lot of people are quite surprised because they're expecting to walk into a west side barbell type place and it's a it's a different environment yeah hey fellas just as people don't get hurt and broken yeah hey as a whole do we have an

extra 20 minutes i would love to talk about the way you were eating if you guys have time. I can, but you guys can't. I promised my wife I got to watch the kids. Gotcha. Yeah, that's what I actually wanted to know. Mash, where can they find you, buddy? I'm super interested in the nutrition side of getting to 1,000 pounds. I just know we all have things going on right now.

Tell them where to find you, big man. MASHLEAD.com. Look at that. Get off the screen. It was really fun talking to you, Chris. I want to tell you something, MASH. Today on YouTube, I tried to Google old training videos of you because now I'm going to do it with Chris Uphman.

I want to see you getting after it when you were younger oh my god i got my youtube goes back to 2007 and they used to i used to document like every set like every workout that's awesome pretty cringe stuff my friend that's awesome i was looking for you today mash on for i had like 20 minutes in between things i was doing and i was like i'm gonna look up look up old mash videos. You don't have that much. All you got smash lead on there. Yeah. All the old stuff.

All the old stuff. It's the mold, like from elite FTS. Like there's some pretty cool stuff of when I, uh, Chuck and I going at it. I love it. Chuck.

We'll get beaten pretty badly. Is what it was. Oh, I'll bring it. Thanks a lot, dude. Um, Chris, I want to, uh, there there's there's no way to uh get to

a thousand pounds without you know i would the the nutrition has to be so dialed in and i just want to know what what were you eating over that period of time like that's just an insane feat not just the weights but to get there and the process and nutrition is so hard. Well, I do have a little bit of a different approach on occasion than a lot of strength athletes. To get there, obviously the heavier I get, the easier it's going to be. So my goal was to get to 300 pounds. I made it to 285. I'm back down to 260 already now in three weeks, but my body doesn't like being that heavy. So it's a real challenge for me to get that heavy. And being that heavy or heavier is not healthy. And to get there, you're not eating healthy because to go up that much weight,

it's not all muscle. I've been training for 32 years now. And so you're not going to put on five pounds of muscle a year, even seven pounds, anything like that. So the rest of it is just straight. It's fat. So it really involves eating horrifically bad, honestly. But to prep for that, I get super, super lean so that I get more responsive. So a lot of lifters stay on this continual bulk forever, the heavy guys, and you'll find your blood markers start going bad,

your insulin resistance starts going up, all these sorts of things. So I got really lean early last year. I spent three months probably around like 6%, 7% body fat. And there's photos if you do, anybody wants to doubt me, uh, because it's also a great photo opportunity time, right? When you're doing that. Um, and, uh, and that got me really primed to, to just start bulking heavy. And so I didn't push it that hard at front. So it was a continual process of pushing up. Um, I try not to overcomplicate things too much. I get a base level of protein in. When I start pushing it really, really heavy, you can only consume so

much protein and it actually starts affecting your digestion and also your hunger. So I really don't push that much more. So it's really pushing carbs and fats. And that's why, again, then getting lean and responsive phase. Cause you want to, again, fill out as much muscle as you can and, and,

and have the body respond as best as possible to that. And, uh, yeah, I can't say that I was actually eating healthy by any means. Well, where were you? Um, kind of, I wouldn't expect that it was a a clean

process to do it was nice i mentioned my wife's i mentioned my wife's cooking and uh so there's a lot of baking mixed in there too um i loved having uh you know one or two full uh strawberry rhubarb crisp pies every week um for example. Just breakfast, before bed snack, a little ice cream mixed with it. So as a whole, I do eat a lot of really whole foods as much as I can. They just try to get more caloric dense as I get closer so I can get it down. I would guess that my calorie, I didn't track it because I literally would, would eat everything that I could possibly eat every single day, like the last like four to six months. So there's no point in tracking if I can't fit any

more in, um, I guess would be, it was averaging about seven or 8,000 calories. That's the problem. I'm not a big eater. Like I can't do 10,000 calories every single day. Like the 400 plus pounds strongman do. Yeah. I, so I literally would just eat until I gag and then wait and do the same thing again. Um, but you can look like if you scroll through my wife's Instagram, you'll see. Um, so it's a really good, like if you're eating at that level, you definitely got to be getting, uh, your colors in. So lots of, uh, lots of greens and fruits and stuff like that because, uh, you need to be clearing things through the, through the liver. And there's a lot of those, uh, micronutrients that have a big impact on how the organs work

and stuff like that. So, um, it doesn't mean just, uh, eating rice krispies all day long every day. Right. So, um, but like I said, my wife's Instagram is a pretty good look at that. If anybody just wants to scroll through it, it's almost all food pictures and you'll see exactly what I was, what I was eating. So beautiful, amazing food, a lot of mixture, but then over the top of basically a nice clean diet, um, or a well balanced diet,

uh, is just a lot of crap, like a lot of calories, pies, and, uh, you know, a half,

it's to be expected, a half a cup of olive oil dumped in my protein shake and stuff like that, of whatever I can do to get those calories, uh, up there, by the way, with all of it, anybody wants to try that trick.

It's really amazing. Uh, just put a, and I'll say a quarter cup. So all the way, with olive, anybody who wants to try that trick, it's really amazing. Just put a, and I'll say a quarter cup. So, olive oil is interesting. It will go right through you, right? It'll go right through you, and actually too much. So, you got to find the right amount. So, it's quarter cup

will usually, mixed with a protein shake, usually work pretty well for most people, and then you can start going up, but at some point you'll find that, uh, it just shoots right through you. Everything gets, uh,

well lubed. We'll say, we do a lot of coconut milk. You ever do those? They taste great. And there's their, their full fat. I just hate coconut flavor.

Oh really? That's my, yeah. I don't know why I can't stand coconut, but when I put it on desserts, I'm like, that's an amazing dessert and you destroyed it with coconut. Oh, really? That's my, yeah, I don't know why. I can't stand coconut, but when they put it on desserts, I'm like, that's an amazing dessert and you destroyed it with coconut. So no, that one wasn't out of my repertoire. And, but it also too much will, will actually start affecting your digestion, your hunger, your appetite as well. And then there's just knowing

like what types of foods and stuff, slow digestion. So you want things that actually, you know, move through pretty, pretty well. So things like bananas, they actually slow your digestion a little bit. Almonds, same thing. So there's a stuff that knows that like typically known as healthy food and it would normally be appropriate, but when you're trying to actually put a mass amount of food in, um, cabbage is great. So just like a break off of a chunk of cabbage immediately post meal, uh, and eat that, uh, will help with, uh, help with that digestion and keeping things, your hunger up and moving through. Usually I'll do a little bit of sauerkraut because it has all the probiotics as well as those

prebiotics and the stuff that you'd get from the cabbage as well. So just a, you know, a fork full of sauerkraut. So it's, it becomes tricky stuff that helps you try to be able to just get more food and process it through, which is not what most people have to deal with. Right. And it's, it's, it's horrible. Losing weight is like, people think it must be fun and it is not. Losing weight is so much easier than bulking at that level. And anybody that's done it will tell you the same. The first thing that I did, the first day after that squat, I didn't eat till dinner that night, and I probably had a 500-calorie dinner. And I was like, yes, I don't have to eat.

Totally. I was so happy that day. It becomes there's so much pressure. Yeah. You feel like if you don't hit your – Well, and then you have a day you have a day of low calories and all of a sudden your weight dips on and you're like i gotta spend a whole another week like building back up for that day that i skipped a meal because i didn't want to didn't want to

force it down yeah and it just consumes your life you just you have to eat all day long which means you have to meal prep all day long which which means you have to spend a lot of money to do it as well. Like it's just losing weight. Like your whole day is free. Make up meals. Eat when you're, you know, you're hungry. Don't eat too much, but then the rest of the day you can go do whatever you want. Yeah, exactly. So it's, it's a lot of, a lot of misconceptions around a weight gain. And then, like I said, little unknown facts about different types of food and how to stimulate the appetite and things like that. And I'll be honest, I smoked weed every damn night so that I could get my appetite up at the end of the day.

So I couldn't do it during the day. I'm not going to do it around training or work. So I'd get home and do that. And so that would allow me to get dinner in and then like a second dinner and then some dessert and like so most of my calories were in the evening because i had that extra added assist uh boost to the appetite because i didn't have a way around it happy hungry sleepy that's the performance enhancing side of cannabis that people that that and it also helps with that i talked about the uh the rest relax and laughter all that sort of stuff like it helps you get into that phase like yeah my training to finish up around five or six o'clock and i'd go

to that because that's gonna help with my recovery in that aspect right yeah um to get out of that because i'm not saying people that should do this in a normal state, but you're in a hyper amped aptitude when you've just done three sets over 950 pounds. Like, you don't calm down, you're not going to sleep. So, definitely really helpful with that as well. How long did it, excuse me, how long did it take before you felt like you really had the right people and team around you to really attack the goal? I mean, nutrition, rehab, recovery, like there's, there's probably a very tight circle of people that are 100% dedicated to your goal and it's borderline impossible. I mean, that's why many people don't hit their goals because it takes so many people around you to be dialed into your dream. How intuitive there. My support team is phenomenal. I've got my coach, right? I also have my guy that

manages my training every single day. So he's, he's loading the plates, um, making sure that all the spotters come out and are available all at the right time, uh, which they're all trained and they happen to be working here, right? So he's pulling some guys from the shop and the warehouse and, uh, they're all lifters of course too, right? But, um, at right, right at the right time, getting me pre me prepped wrapping knees doing all this stuff he you know i've got my soft tissue person uh i've got my in-house cairo i've got my like people like this was not a one-man job no i had a number of key players in place and um yeah that really didn't come into place until, uh, really this last year. Um, and that was what,

uh, allowed me to, to do that. It was a year prior cause there's also other things I needed to be able to step away from my, from my businesses. So it was a year prior. I felt really strong with my management team that I can do that. And that's what actually allowed me the time to write my book. So I knew after coming out of that project, spending another, you know, time with my team, you know, working for the next three or four months while I was getting lean and stuff that I'm like, okay, I've spent my time. I'm ready to start embarking on this process. It's really not that last like four months that I become very distant from work and stuff. Like it's four months out is when I became like all time consuming. The rest of it is, it's not like

I spent four years like this, right? Or even the whole last year. Cause again, those other blocks of training, they're not affecting you mentally, uh, neurologically and that same approach. So, uh, but that last year there was a couple other key hires, uh, that I had that filled, filled some of those roles. Um, but yeah, um, I'd had my chiropractor on call that I used twice a week. I had my massage therapist that we'd work several times a week, sometimes on a daily basis in-house. He was also the person that basically was my training day handler. What can I say? I'm a prima donna. I don't know. But that's what had to be done like every session was like prepping for a competition at those levels then I had my you know I had my coach and then

people that could backfill because some of these people you know we're business they're traveling doing sales calls to run doing seminars that sort of thing so I had to have some people that could backfill some of those positions as needed. And yeah, that's a pretty big team. Plus the well team, I mean, watch those spotters work on any of my training sessions. The racking system I was using was pretty sketchy. And there's a reason for that. This was originally supposed to happen down in San Diego and I wanted to have something that I could transport. And I also didn't want to have a rack, giant rack that really kind of surrounded and, and, uh, you know, it's a visual thing, right. And over, overcame the lift. Um, so, you know, I've got this, you know, group of five or six people that could, that could move in and float to that position. And the fact that it's in our warehouse, you know, we've got a

gym, we've got our educational offices and recording studio, we've in our warehouse you know we've got a gym we've got our educational offices and recording studio we've got our warehouse and we've got our manufacturing facility all in one building so yeah i couldn't pull this off just being a guy go to a gym or being a guy go to gym with a great even a great uh team of uh of lifting partners. Yeah. Wouldn't happen. No. So I had to create my whole life around this. Absolutely. Pull it off. Uh, one thing I was actually thinking about it, like, uh, at the beginning of this and my wife doing my food. Yeah, exactly. I mean, she, she was the one that actually made me think of it. But, um, an additional thing that I wanted to think, uh, wanted to ask you about is in general, um,

you talked about your diaphragm and how tired and actually the amount of bracing and trying to get air. Was there any additional, like super intense breath work that you were doing in that as a practice where it's not back squatting but you're doing breath holds you're you're under a bunch of weight you're doing walkouts you're doing something in which you're stabilizing your core and forcing your diaphragm to move and be able to practice getting air to fill your belly to actually be able to stabilize so i did a lot of uh kind of like dns drills i'm not sure if you're familiar with those heard ofard of it though. But they're basically body weight drills, but in very specific, really locking in your position really well. And then some really intense bracing.

Some of mine I ramp up with the use of bands or more challenging positions. And then everything was timed around. So the duration of what my expected lift was. So I expected it to be about 30 seconds. So this is when I talk about movement work and stuff, this is what I was doing on almost a daily basis as well. Um, but not, not fatiguing myself coming into the training session. Um, so timing it through the weekend is as appropriate with that, but it was all based around being in that position, cueing the diaphragm and then the coat contraction of the pelvic floor.

Uh, and then managing that intensity. So it wasn't for duration. Like if I could do it for a minute and a half, it means I need to make it more challenging because it's all about managing it for that length of time and trying to ramp the intensity for the given time that I would need to hold that in place. And then trying to now overlay breathing over the top of that. Because again, this is something that I'm doing for, there's

going to be breath involved, especially when you lift up and then also between, between sets as well is over overlaying that. So, so we're using at least two functions of the diaphragm, uh, which is, uh, you know, respiration and stabilization. What's interesting is when you start overusing the diaphragm, uh, you'll start seeing changes in stool composition, uh, or need to use because it's also the third function of the the the the diaphragm is uh is the sphincter uh i've never guessed that there you go three functions three functions of the diaphragm learn all of them when you're training to squat here's the thing yeah don't take a if you want a maximal lift don't take a big shit right beforehand so yeah in case you're gonna do that at home hold on to it case of diarrhea early in the day isn't gonna be very bad for you yeah so yeah um

so yeah there's a lot of very specific anybody that wants to explore that i've got a website www.kabuki.ms which is an indexed video library, um, of, uh, a lot of different drills. And we put a lot of the DNS. It's kind of a foundational piece of, uh, how we look at the body, uh, and controlling torso position. Last question I got, what does Kabuki mean? I've only been wondering this for a couple of years now. Yeah. So it, uh, it has a few different meanings. Um, one of those being, uh, that's core meaning is, uh, Japanese. It's a form of Japanese theater. And typically it's, uh, um, you know, someone coming out and sexually, uh, men like dressed as women or with makeup or whatever,

but it's, it's basically putting a mask on. That's how I look at it. Um, so it's putting a mask on and becoming, you know, another version of yourself. There's a kabuki mask behind me. Unfortunately, there's glare on it. Can't quite see it right now. And we also see it. It's also sometimes used as a termed as the, what the Japanese would use as the mask before going to battle. And we see this in a lot of different cultures as well. This, before, you know, a lot of basically any culture out there, you'll find some sort of ritual before going to war. And that is face paint, mass, something like that, because it is

now all of a sudden the person that is, you know, the father, the, you know, a member of the community, how has to go out and, you know, do battle and do things that wouldn't normally be part of who they are so that they can, so that they can protect that community. And so they have to become a different person. That's why these rituals are in place because when you come back, you still have to return to who you are. Right. And so, and, and we see the same thing in sports a lot of times these days. And we call it getting your game day face on. And so at Kabuki, I frame it as we provide the equipment,

we provide the methodologies, but at the end of the day, you've got to bring the mental game. You've got to put your game day face on. And so we call it the squat face. You got to put your game day face on. And so we call it the squat face. So we make our Kabuki mask look like what your face would look like while you're squatting. It's actually a rendition of my face in a squat. So even my little baby, she'll look at it and go, Daddy, Daddy.

That's awesome. The Kabuki emblem is everywhere. It's like, Daddy. Because they recognize that, which is kind is everywhere. It's like, daddy, uh, cause they recognize, uh, they recognize that, which is kind of, uh, yo, yo, before we wrap up,

that's it. Like, I can't, I could, I can tell you, like I can preach to you. I can inspire you. I can write books.

I can do all this to try to impact that side of it. Yeah. At the end of the day, it's you. Yeah. Yeah. Yo, before we wrap up,

I know you have a couple of, of unique specialty bars that you've developed um you want to walk us through those and and kind of tell us the thought process behind maybe two of your favorites um i'll talk you through like the philosophy of design um so uh there's a lot of movements uh that we do with a traditional straight bar that put us in poor positions for joint mechanics and or positions that we really have to fight with with a lot of technique and to master to be able to overcome those. And so our barbells are built around biomechanically sound principles. So we're putting the joints in the correct positions and being able to get those proper

length tension relationships. And also, if we can, accommodate for variability in lifters as far as size, mobility restrictions, things like that. So what we do is we reduce the negative stressors around lifting and allow you to be in better positions and then possibly even get greater range of motions and greater training effect from the same movement. So the transformer bar for example, a lot of times you see somebody squat with you know some butt wink, they're getting in the hole. May or may not be an issue,

but if you've got a history of back issues, that's going to be problematic to be putting the back through flexion and extension under load. And a lot of common ways, any trainer knows that if you put a kettlebell in somebody's hand and have them do a goblet squat, it fixes that.

The reason for that, it's not that the weight's sitting in front in their hands, it's the fact that we've moved, well, the load is still sitting over the midfoot, which means we've actually moved the spine and allowed more spinal uprighting behind the load. We have also, with that load in front, it actually cues this downward position of the ribcage and the diaphragm alignment with the pelvic floor. So now we've got incredible core stabilization, the use of the diaphragm, the co-contraction of the pelvic floor, and working against all that thoracolumbar musculature as the outer sheath to create the stabilization needed to manage those spinal mechanics and remove that from there. A traditional barbell requires extensive amount of stress on the external rotators to get in position.

So there's some shoulder issues, aggravates the bicep insertion in the shoulder. So the transformer bar, the handle is getting a good position. And we actually are able to manipulate the load in space. So we can mimic a goblet squat. We can mimic a front squat. We can mimic a goblet squat close, a goblet squat far away. It's the only bar in the world where we can actually manipulate the spinal mechanics and have anyone. So watch an NBA, you know, some of those seven foot six NBA players, people like to make fun of them on Instagram because their squat looks like shit. They will never in their life be able to perform a back squat because of their levers,

uh, without either compromising technique or not doing, uh, so with a transformer bar, we can do that. I mentioned, uh, us being in 75% of a major league baseball. That's why, uh, we can actually get these athletes in great position so they can get a great training effect. And immediately you start changing spinal mechanics and everything else starts changing. That huge knee caving problem and all sorts of the depth of that short ass squat. All of a sudden they're squatting great depth, great control of hip position. All this stuff comes into play. We do little minor features like our handles and that are angled down

out in front of you on like a safety squat bar. Safety squat bar has some of the same concepts, but it's a fixed position. You can't actually manipulate it and dial it in for your needs and put it into a lot of different positions. But it's in this weird rack position. Up in this rack position, so if your hands are up for those listeners, out in kind of front of your neck or your face, you don't have the lats in a position where they can effectively contract for stabilization of the spine. So that's how we connect the shoulder into that stabilized torso position. The lat is a key spinal stabilizer. So ours brings it down so the elbows are at the side. You can actually, it puts you in a position where you can put the right things to happen in place.

The Duffalo bar I squatted with, the reason I squatted with it, a straight bar. Over the years, heavy squatting will end up destroying your shoulders. Anybody that's been at it, lifting heavy for over 20 years is going to tell you the same thing. Again, huge demand on the external rotators, bicep tendon insertion, all that sort of stuff. So one, we move that hand position down, relieves the stress. It moves out and actually the bar actually rounds over around the scapula. So if you're familiar with the scapula, how it sits in the back, you'll notice our back actually forms around it. So it's actually not driving the scap forward, particularly for anybody in a low bar position and allows it to be able to move

properly. That lower hand position allows you to get that better lat engagement, which again, it's going to allow you better stabilization and reduce your risk of lumbar disc issues. Oh God, shall I go on? Basically, all our bars have a phenomenal impact on reducing injury risk and allowing you to get more from training. I'm a living example of this. And like I said, it's validated. 600 plus colleges, basically all the top names use it. We're expanding through all the sports for this reason.

The simple thing is unless you compete in a sport that uses straight barbells or a movement that requires it like a cleaner snatch, you can't really do a something special, a specialty barbell for that. Um, there is, there's no reason that you should be like the like the straight barbell is an antiquated design for these products. There's always a need for a straight barbell, but the basic movements, like a neutral grip deadlift, a bench press, and a squat, are not desirable with a straight bar.

So same thing with, imagine pressing. Your hands are straight out, which actually throws you into an internal rotational bias. So people, powerlifters have to be taught how to actually engage into external rotation when they're not actually getting external rotation. They're actually getting the joint back to center. But as soon as you get towards fatigue or max effort failure, you'll lose it a little bit towards internal rotation.

And that's where every single injury while pressing comes from. Doesn't matter what it is, pec tears, rotator tough cares, AC joint issues, they all come from that. So I can get people that can't even bench with a straight bar to their chest without pain to be doing a bench press with three inches of range of motion below their chest with zero pain with hundreds of pounds for reps by switching to our Cadillac bar. Why? We get that arm, we stack all those joints in the right position, and we remove those negative stressors, and damn, you're going to get the best pec and delt workout that you've had in years.

So I'm a huge believer in what we do, and it's proven over and over and over again, and that's where it's validated. Check out our board of advisors. We've got some of the best people in the world in numerous different disciplines from physical therapy, spine biomechanics, orthopedic surgery, all over that endorse what we're doing with these. It's awesome. Right on, brother.

You crushed it. This is what I do. This is why they call me the mad scientist of strength. Yeah, man. This is a lot of fun. Where in the Pacific Northwest are you again? Portland, Oregon. We're going.

Got to get rid of the donuts too. Got to do the voodoo. I ate one voodoo donut and I had to take a four hour nap after. We've got better than that here too, by the way. That's a, the voodoo is actually mediocre to local, local Portlanders.

I don't know what it is. We love, we love donuts. I don't know. It's got to have something. It's good. Um. We've told everybody the entire show where to find you, but what's the final send off? Where do you want to point people? I'm actually, well, I mentioned the websites a bunch of times. Everything's housed. I've got a personal website. There's not much there except links to all my websites and a link to my book.

And there's actually, you can get a free audio download of my book and another book. If you sign up for an audible account through, through, through, through my website as well. So Christopher Duffin.com C I H R I S T O P H R. Then the way you normally spell Christopher Duffin, which is like muffin,

but with a D. Christopher Duffin.com. And you'll find the links to Kabuki Strength, Barefoot Athletics, Build Fast Formula, and a free audio download for my book or just links to Amazon if you want to buy it. It's in all different formats. Yeah. Doug Larson.

Yo, Chris, thank you for coming on the show, brother. I really appreciate it. All right. And type my name into any social media platform. Just Chris Duffin. I'll pop up. Instagram and LinkedIn are the two ones where I actually interact with people. So I don't really do anything on Facebook or any of the other TikToks or whatever.

I've got accounts in all of them, but Instagram or LinkedIn would be where I interact. So I'll type in my name. I don't need to give monikers. There you go. Doug Larson. You bet. Find me on Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. I'm Anders Varner, at Anders Varner,

where barbell shrugged at barbell underscore shrugged. OneTonChallenge.com, forward slash join. Super total, 2,000 pounds, snatch, clean, jerk, squat, deadlift, and bench press. Free download. 97-page e-book over at OneTonChallenge.com. Hey, man, this has been really cool. We got to get out to Portland. We got things to do in the Pacific Northwest.

You guys had some phenomenal questions in the course of this. So I just commend you and your podcast and loved it. Thank you, man. It was a really good time. All right. Appreciate it. Insanely strong, huh? Unbelievable.

Make sure on Monday you are getting over to barbellshrug.com forward slash physique. We got four brand new programs coming out. You're going to save 75% on the entire bundle. All of them meeting you where you're at. Dumbbells, kettlebells, abs. Unreal. You're going to be so shredded. Summertime's here.

Plus two nutrition programs. Personalized to who you are, your lifestyle, and your training plan. Also, reminder, get over to Fit Together. Download it in the app. Come find me. I'm in there hanging out. It's radical. I love it. Super fun because I don't have to deal with everyone's mess. You can just post the fitness stuff, which is what I like. Get into the app store. Download Fit Together and come find me at Anders Vs varner as well as our friends over by optimizers make sure you get over to p3om.com forward slash shrugged free to get

your free probiotics p3om and then organifi.com forward slash shrugged friends we will see you guys next week