Barbell Shrugged - Barbell Shrugged  — How to Grow Your Gym w/ Mind Pump  —  311

Episode Date: April 18, 2018

Mind Pump is an online radio show/podcast that has been described as Howard Stern meets fitness. It is sometimes raw, sometimes shocking and is always entertaining and informative. The hosts, Sal Di Stefano, Adam Schafer and Justin Andrews have over 40 years of combined fitness experience as personal trainers, club managers, IFBB fitness competitors and fitness thought leaders. This episode covers training tips, gym owner business tips, mindful eating, and everything in between. Adam and Sal discuss how they are working to combine the worlds of health, wellness and aesthetics, and much more. Enjoy! - Mike, Doug and Anders ----------------------------------------------- Full show notes ► https://shruggedcollective.com/bbs_mindpump ----------------------------------------------- ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Barbell Shrugged helps people get better.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedp... TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

I say this all the time on the show that probably what you need to do is what you're probably not doing. We all gravitate towards what we love. Because it's sexy. We're good at it. You're so good at it. What we're good at and what we love to do. But if you're being completely honest and having perspective, detaching yourself from it and looking for bird's eye view. Okay, this is how I train all the time.

What is missing in my routine? It's the things that you probably hate Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner. We are in chalk performance here in Newport Beach, California. Beautiful club. Beautiful club. Beautiful spot. Very nice.

Beautiful. Very clean. The ultimate in hospitality here. Doug and I. What did we get? Some power cleans? Some power cleans. Some wall ball shots. I did some Russian swings. Kicked the crap out of us. Our friend Viv just dropped off a ton of fish from Aloha Pokey.

That was pretty delicious. If you're in Costa Mesa, hook that up. We showed up. She just dropped the whole sea in here. Delicious. I almost thought you guys were going to make us get in the workout right there. Sal and I got really nervous. I just tore my Achilles like six weeks ago. Just took the boot off fucking yesterday.

When I met you the first time, you were hobbling around at the L.A. Fit Expo. Right. I was afraid you guys were going to throw a barbell at me. I'm like, no, don't do that right now. You were still getting to work even though you had your crutches on. I was like, you guys are doing more than five reps. I don't know if I can do this. We are joined today. Mr. Doug Larson is in the house.

Yeah. Sal DiStefano. Sal DiStefano. Adam Schaefer. Adam Schaefer from Mind Pump. What's going on, guys? Not much, man. Thanks for having us on the show.

This is pretty awesome. Yeah, this is great. I am stoked to hang out with you guys. You guys have such a broad history talking about gym ownership, growing gyms, running gyms. You've been in this life for so long from bodybuilding, the performance world. You guys hear the barbells in the background. There's a lot going on here.

That's right. We're in a gym. Yeah. Things happen here. Yeah. Sal's been doing it for, what, a year over 20 now, right? I've been in fitness now. Let's see.

How old am I? Subtract the one, carry the two. I'm 22 years. There it is. Yeah. Over two decades in fitness professionally. Long time. I'm 22 years. There it is. Yeah, over two decades in fitness professionally. Long time. And I'm at 16.

So 16 years doing it. And then Justin's right around, what, 15? 15, yeah. So we've been doing it. Justin's our other co-host. He's not with us today. Yeah. But he is the other co-host.

He's the less attractive, funny guy of the group, right? Right, right, right. So you see how ugly we are. Off YouTube. Even more ugly. On the podcast. You guys have him around to make you look good. Yeah, right.

That's exactly. We knew we'd be on videos. So we're like, we can't take Justin with us. I believe that's a real strategy, right? Like you're supposed to hang out. If you're like a seven, you need to hang out with fives and sixes, right? That's how you do it. You can't have an eight and nine friend if you're a seven, right? That's right.

That's right. Strategery. So if you don't know, these guys, they run MindPubMedia. It's an awesome, awesome, awesome podcast. How many episodes are you guys up to now? You guys are smashing shows. 700 shows. You guys only started

like two or three years ago. Three years. Three years. 700 shows in three years. That's a fucking ton of shows. Five episodes a week. Whoa. Yeah, we do a lot of talking.

Our superpower really is that we don't prep anything. We just turn the mics on and go. And it's a daily YouTube show. Yeah, every day on YouTube. That's right. Yeah, yeah. And you guys focus a little more in the physique world and bodybuilding world.

You have many different things that you do, but we're more in the functional fitness kind of cross-fitting world, and you guys are a little more on the bodybuilding side of things. Is that correct? I would say we are probably – your podcast and our podcast are very similar in that aspect, that you guys have really kind of focused in the CrossFit world, and a lot of guests are CrossFit people, and ours, we're kind of in the bodybuilder world,

although we haven't probably had as many bodybuilders. No. We're, you know, overall fitness, health, wellness, so pretty much the whole spectrum of what that is and what interests us. The reason why we initially especially talked more along the lines of physique and bikini and that kind of stuff is just because as kids growing up and then managing gyms, the kinds of gyms that we managed and workedini and that kind of stuff. It's just because as kids growing up and then managing gyms, the kinds of gyms that we managed and worked in had more of that crowd. And Adam competed.

Yeah, I was right in the middle of – so I, like, was it four years ago, I had fallen out of shape. I had left fitness for – I took a hiatus for two years, started up two of the first medical marijuana clubs in the Bay Area. And during that time, I felt way out of shape and after doing the marijuana thing for a while i was over it i was like you know this isn't my passion it was it was a great place to go make some money and start a business but it wasn't what i wanted to do long term and when i decided to get back into fitness i was totally out of shape and i thought okay well this would be a

great opportunity during this whole social media boom we were going through if I were to document the whole process and share that share my journey and then build a online business off of that so we were kind of right in the middle that Sal was kind of building his own thing on his own we weren't even linked up yet I was doing the the men's physique thing and working my way up the ladder after I did my very first show I got a great response from it I actually kind of fell in love with it a little bit. I enjoyed the competitive side of it, of competitive dieting and training and sculpting the physique. And I ended up going pro, you know, so I stayed after it for about a year and a half to go from amateur to pro. So we were in the middle of that when the show started. So a lot of people, I think, kind of categorize us as a bodybuilding type of a show because of that,

because here you've got this men's physique guy. But even then, and it took probably, I would say, 200 or 300 shows before I think people realized that that's really not who I am. Like, I don't identify with bodybuilding. I really don't. I didn't follow none of it when I was younger. I don't know half the guys. I didn't know half the rules of it.

Like, I didn't know any of that stuff. I just saw an opportunity to kind of get my name out there that way. I realized that these were the guys that were on the covers of magazines. These were the people on social media that everybody's following and listening to their information that they were giving. And a lot of it's crap. And so I saw this huge opportunity. I'm like, okay, I'm a smart enough guy to program, design, diet.

I'm pretty sure I can get shredded. I know I don't have the genetics to be a real badass at this, but I think I can compete. And so I did, and we built, I think, our first bit of momentum from that time that I was competing. But really now the show, we're kind of branching out. We're going all over the place. I mean, you know, we try to meld wellness and fitness

or the aesthetic with the health aspect because, and you're seeing more of this now. You're seeing more of this melding now. But, you know, just three years ago, or especially when we were running gyms, you were either into looking good or you were into being super healthy. So you're either like this hippie or you were this, you know, person who took protein shakes and creatine and, you know, and dieted and got shredded. And they never really crossed. And we thought that was ridiculous because there was so much to learn from both sides. And not only that, but in the middle somewhere is where the answers really lie.

And so that was a big goal initially with the show was to combine health, wellness, and aesthetics. Like something we like to say all the time is don't train and eat because you hate your body. Train and eat because you love your body. And that will point you in the right direction. And if you chase health, you'll get a great deal of the aesthetics. If you chase aesthetics, you won't get health health and eventually the aesthetics will be gone as well. But now we're also starting to branch out into other areas. So mind pump is, you know, we're definitely fitness and health, but we're also entertainment and a lot of the things that we're

interested in. For example, we just had Matt Kibbe as a guest on our show and he's a prominent, you know, libertarian speaker, talks speaker talks you know economics and markets and we just had him on the show and we're seeking out moving outside of fitness just and things that we're interested in because we want to provide entertainment along with good information and for us to entertain it's going to be things we're interested in go ahead i was gonna say so you guys are you're you're combining this wellness thing but you're coming from the bodybuilding world and talking about supplements and all of that. The biggest thing, one of the biggest things you guys do is kind of debunk all this crap

that goes on and people are taking methamphetamines without even knowing and or knowing, um, and it doesn't take too long before you're in that world. You're talking about, I don't have the genetics for it. Well, who does? It takes a whole lot of pharmaceuticals to be up on stage and start winning trophies uh feeling like you're you're growing in that sport when does that start to take the turn from i want to be the best at this realizing oh my genetics aren't capable of ingesting these things and well really focusing on the wellness piece i guess you said something that is that is true and it's not true right i think part of the problem is that when people get into bodybuilding uh and this was my

experience right so when i when i first got into it i was i was excited to to meet my peers and competitors i thought these are the one percenters right if you're walking around at sub three percent body fat getting up on stage you're with the one percent of the of the of the society really one percent of one percent even like you're one percent of the the people that work out, you're the 1% of the society, really. You're 1% of 1% even. You're 1% of the people that work out if you're getting up on stage and presenting a physique like that. So when I got into it, I was excited to meet these guys and thought, okay, I could probably learn from some of them,

and maybe some of these guys are really badass. And when I was at the amateur level, I was backstage my first show, and I'm talking to all these guys, and the stuff that they were telling me, the amount of gear that they were taking, the way they were, the way they were extreme dieting, the way they were cutting out fiber and fruit in their diet. And I just saw the way they were training. Their programming was awful. It was all intensity based. Everything I heard was awful. And I was so blown away that, that these are the guys that everyone's looking up to for answers. And they really, they all have hired some coach who's given them some cookie cutter bullshit to follow and it is it's it's based off

Of high intensity starve the body give you some gear. Yeah, and if you're not doing well, you're not taking top five You're not taking enough gear. And so here's some more gear and here's some here is steroids for anyone So yeah, here's some more steroids. Here's some more steroids. And that's kind of the answer for them. And then you've got these guys at the men's physique level. Okay, so if those of you don't know the difference between bodybuilding and men's physique, men's physique, you know, we prance around in board shorts. I don't got to have massive legs. I just got to look good on the cover of men's health.

That's like 80-pound difference probably, 80 to 100-pound difference in muscle. Right. So you've got guys, though, that are taking, you know, one, two grams of steroids to win in a men's physique show. And that's just crazy. Now, if you're trying to go Ronnie Coleman size and be that massive, you're right. It does take grams. Yeah, it takes grams of steroids.

It takes genetics. It takes dedication for a long time. But there's actually this misconception in the bikini and the men's physique world, and it's an epidemic right now. And this was part of the passion that I had when I came to the show and we started talking. I was like, we've got to talk about this because there's a lot of these young kids that are fucking up their metabolisms by the way they're training, the way they're dieting, and all the steroids that they're taking.

And I was someone who suffered from this. In my early 20s, I messed around with steroids for the first time, and I too thought the same thing. I thought I i was young kid you know i'd read a little bit i learned a little bit i thought i knew how to program i thought i knew about diet i wasn't getting the physique i wanted i seen this bodybuilder buddy of mine and he's just like oh yeah you gotta take steroids you gotta take steroids so the answer yeah being a young dumb kid right that's what i did and i took the steroids and i didn't get big i mean i

was taking all this stuff i spent about a thousand dollars on on juice the very first time i did it and i got strong as fuck every time i came show the gym i was adding five ten pounds to my pr every single time i went to gym so that was amazing i was like whoa but i wasn't putting size on i wasn't getting and for me i was a very insecure skinny kid who wanted to get big that's why that's why i went that route you know because i tried lifting for years i wasn't getting to the size i wanted. So the next step must have been steroids, but it couldn't be further from the truth. It's not that. In fact, you know, programming and nutrition and that is so much more important. And genetics. Yeah. And genetics. Those all play a much bigger role than the steroids do. But yet there is this misconception that, you know, if you want to look that way you need to

take a bunch of steroids so these competitors they get into this show and anytime they struggle or they don't do well in a show it's just oh you gotta take this now you gotta take this i mean it's it's crazy and i'm very transparent about like what i used and what i took to get to the professional level and it's not a lot but there's also a huge carryover from the bodybuilding world to the functional fitness side and the health that can be gained from doing a lot of those isolation movements one of the things in our world that is really overlooked is some of the isolation stuff and really just taking care of every single joint in your body you don't have to take it to the level where i have to be on stage to be a bodybuilder. Doing those exercises doesn't come with a speedo.

You don't have to get on stage to do it, but so many times in the functional fitness world, we see people only back squatting or only doing these big lifts, these huge compound lifts, and never working on any of the connective tissue. They're never doing bicep curls. Stuff's important, and there has to be that middle ground that you guys were talking about earlier. The cultism of fitness really is a travesty because there's so much to learn from the, you know, functional training side. All modalities.

From the kettlebell trainers, from the power lifters, from the bodybuilders, you know, using clubs, using sticks, using body weight movement. There's so much to learn from all of them. Of course, if you're specialized, you're going to do mostly one type of training. But that doesn't mean you're not. Like if you're a bodybuilder, will you benefit from throwing in a powerlifting cycle? You bet your ass you will. Will you benefit from doing some functional work?

Absolutely. If you're a functional trainer, are you going to benefit from throwing in some of the techniques and knowledge of bodybuilding and some of the techniques and knowledge from powerlifting and kettlebells. Absolutely. So, you know, this cultism that we have with fitness, and it's funny because people treat it like religion. Like you go to somebody who trains, like I just do CrossFit,

and you start talking about, oh, you should try something like this, and it becomes, oh, it becomes this like, no, how dare you. It's like diet. It's like trying to talk about diet. Like they say, what are you not supposed to talk about when you go over someone's house? Religion, politics, and nutrition. Talk about nutrition.

Talk to someone who's paleo that maybe paleo is not the best. And you have this big or veganism or whatever. Totally. You have a huge argument. It becomes this big deal. And we identify so strongly when in reality, man, if you're just more open-minded, you pay attention to the benefits of each. You can really benefit your body you can really benefit your mind there's so much we can learn from each other and that that you know that's

one of that's another thing that we try and do on the show is try to introduce all these different modalities and talk about the potential benefits of each and why sometimes it's a good idea to max yourself out like crazy and test yourself and to find out what you're really made of and to give yourself some meaning and why it's also sometimes good to go take a yin yoga class and get real quiet and be by yourself i just found that oh i found you in yoga like two years ago game changer game changer what i'm just gonna lay there for six minutes you want me to just breathe what am i gonna do there we're gonna train going slow a little bit maybe we don't have to go balls to the walls every second of every day seriously change the game I had no idea that that even

existed. One of the biggest fights I ever got in in the gym was, are we going to put yoga in the gym? I was like, fuck no. That's not gangster. That's not hardcore. I'm hardcore. There's a lot of benefit to that. People stay healthy. It's weird.

Doing the same thing all the time is literally the thing that creates dysfunction. It's what. Well, doing the same thing all the time is literally the thing that creates dysfunction, right? It's what creates whatever you want to call it, a recruitment pattern or patterning in the body or even in the mind or just how you think about things. And when you get stuck in a pattern, lots of things compensate, and that's where you get dysfunction. Now, from a very plain sense when it comes to fitness, if I do the same movement, however functional the movement is like barbell squats, barbell squats, arguably are is probably one of the most important exercises you can do, right? Yeah, tremendous carry over to all activities, sports functionality, squatting is a fundamental human movement. But if all you ever did for your lower body was barbell squat, you will develop patterns that can cause dysfunction.

Then when you go to do a split stance something or you jump on something or there's rotation or something in a multi-planar type situation, your risk of injury actually is quite high because you're so strong and so controlled and so powerful in one particular way that when you move outside of that, you have lost control. You've become, and this is true for anything. Look, yoga instructors, you know how many yoga instructors I've had to train because they come to me because they're lax, because they're so unstable, because of their extreme flexibility and range of motion, and they have no strength within that range of motion.

They hurt their hips. You know, you'd think someone so flexible, right, shouldn't have any joint pain. Well, the opposite is true. This is true for all these different things, and you can only really ameliorate that by introducing yourself to different modalities. And at the end of the day, besides being an extreme athlete and training in a particular modality, most people are not that. Most people want what?

Well, let's be honest. Most people, I say this all the time on the show, that probably what you need to do is what you're probably not doing. Yeah. We all gravitate towards what we love. Because it's sexy. And what we're good at. Exactly.

You're so good at it. What we're good at and what we love to do. But if you're being completely honest, right, and having perspective, right, detaching yourself from it and looking for, like, bird's eye view, okay, this is how I train all the time. What is missing in my room? It's the things that you probably hate and you don't want to do. And so I think once you understand that and you accept that, and then you start to try and integrate that into your routine, I think you'll, you'll benefit tremendously. But I think a lot of people get stuck with these, you know, we get very dogmatic about our approach,

not just nutritionally, the way we train everything. And I think that was a lot of the message behind MindPull when we first got together. That's why we've had CrossFitters, we've had bodybuilders, we've had marathon runners, we've had all these different types of people from all different professions and modalities come together. And then what we try to do is we interview those people. And then together, we kind of share with our audience, like, here's like the pros of this, and here's the cons of it. You know, and this is not us hating or loving on any of it whatsoever.

It's just kind of having some perspective and helping you guys have perspective on it. Because I'm sure your girlfriend or your buddy is telling you, oh, you've got to do this because it's the best thing and it worked for me. You're going to fucking love it. It's awesome. Right? That's the way they explain it. It's like, well, let's talk about the science behind it. Like, why is that so awesome?

Why did it work so well for him? And let's break that down. The same thing is like in nutrition. Like, how many times have you heard somebody who switches to paleo, switches to vegan, switches to that, and they see great results. Inflammation goes down. Their stomach is better. Energy levels are up. They're losing body

fat. And it's fucking paleo. No, it's not paleo, bro. No, it's not. It's because you were probably eating processed fucking foods and sugar all the fucking time. And you got that out of your diet now. It's not the diet. It wasn't that. It's the macronut And you got that out of your diet now. It's not the diet. It wasn't that. It's the macronutrient difference that you're doing now in the food. So we try and teach people that when you see these results

or when you love something, don't fall in love with the fucking name of it. Somebody made that name up. All the names are all made up. So really try and unpack what is it about this training modality, what is it about this nutrition plan that is making me feel this at this moment and all those names are a disaster you walk into any bookstore right now and it's like the nutrition section might as well be the self-help section like it's a disaster there's a billion fucking names out there just paleo and zone and it just goes on and on and on and it's shelves on shelves of books and uh let's just eat a vegetable right let's just start there right then we can get into gut health and the nine trillion other

pieces of bacteria inside us but let's just start with the most basic stuff like can we move every day in a better way if people did the things that they knew were good everybody knows the answer right most people know they intuitively know like a food is good for them or bad for them you look at that you say yes or no thumbs up down. Is this food good for you? And you hold up Pop-Tarts, you hold up an apple, you hold up lasagna, whatever. Some things are like middle of the road where they're kind of like, ah, could be, could not be. But most things are probably like, I have a hunch that's good for me.

I have a hunch that's bad for me. And if you could just follow through with not eating the bad thing and only eating the good things, you'd probably be pretty well off. So you know what's interesting about that? So we had, do you guys know who Paul Cech is? We 100% do. His episode for us, we're recording this right before this episode is going to post. He posts next week.

Oh, cool. So Paul came up and visited us, and we hung out with him, and we had dinner with him. And, you know, everybody had their plates served or whatever, and he sat over his food, and he did this kind of thing for about – It looked like he was praying. If you know Paul, you know Paul's not religious, right? Yeah he and then he started eating so later on we record the podcast i said what do you what are you doing with your food were you praying are you religious and he goes no no he goes i'm not praying really so what i'm doing is i'm asking my body if this is the food that it

wants right now and then i'm asking the food if it's going to work with my body and i'm asking he's doing all this which sounds sounds fucking crazy. It sounds weird. It sounds crazy when someone said it like that. It was two and a half hours of just like, I don't know what to do, Paul. Paul, I'm sorry. What did I do? Paul is a genius. Jesus.

In a million ways. If you haven't watched our episode or your episode with Paul, definitely go watch it. He's a genius. And he's a legend in the world of strength and conditioning as well. Oh, he's absolutely brilliant. So he did that, and he's telling me about it. And I had to take a step back and be a little open-minded. And I thought to myself, and this is what's interesting about health and wellness,

but just about the human condition. When you have something that crosses all cultures, so it's cross-cultural, it's been around for thousands of years, that is present within every major religion, right? Judeo-Christian religions, Islam, Buddhism, like Hinduism, different countries, different nations that never communicated with each other. All of these people, all of these humans had some kind of ritual before they ate.

You know, Christians prayed before food. Everybody did this, and you ask yourself, what is the utility of that? If it's cross-cultural, it can't be religion because it's going to be different from religion to religion. Like, why is everybody doing this? What it is, it is literally becoming mindful right before you eat. And that's back to what you said. Like, people intuitively know when something's good or bad for them. The problem is they don't listen. They don't even stop to listen. They just eat. They just eat. The only thing they're intuitive to is, does this taste good? And I crave it. Or they think they're hungry, but they're actually not.

Most people have never been hungry, by the way. I'm sure the average American has never gone longer than 18 hours without food. So we have no idea what hunger is. We know what cravings are. So there's no intuition whatsoever, or at least there is. We just don't know how how to listen to it and so when you look at some of these things that are done throughout these cultures you can really discover some amazing things well the scary part is where we're going now too i mean how how disconnected are you when's the last time you guys walked into a public restaurant and looked around and seen like more than five tables not with fucking cell phones out like think of that like that's the thing that you sit in front of a tv you got your iphone out and you're shoveling food. Talk about

not being present. How the fuck are you going to make a good decision on what you're putting in your mouth if you're not even paying attention to it? So now imagine this. Imagine you're like, you know, I'm going to start making myself healthier. I think I'm going to start taking care of myself a little bit. Oh man, I'm hungry. I'm going to grab a Pop-Tart. And then you get your Pop-Tart, and then you stop, and you do that Paul Cech thing. The odds

that you're going to eat the Pop-Tart are much lower. Right? Because you're going to stop, and you're going to eat the Pop-Tart are much lower. Right? Because you're going to stop and you're going to be like, does my body want it? You have to be honest with yourself. The truth is you don't want to do that, right? You just want to eat it real fast and then afterwards be like, I feel like shit. So do you guys always eat with just your food in front of you? You don't check your phone?

No, fuck no. We're just as guilty. We're just as guilty. We're just as guilty. That's why we can speak on it. It's a practice. I'm practicing the wrong way to do it. And it buys people not to. Here's something that I did as part of that that made a huge difference is I stopped drinking fluids with my food.

This is another thing I learned from Paul. I stopped because he said you should be able to swallow your food without any fluids. And I thought to myself, holy shit, I always drink. I must only be chewing like two or three times and swallowing it like it's a freaking supplement so i took the water away and i started eating and it forced me to like be present of my food prepare chew chew chew now i'm really paying attention to what i'm eating and it i mean this is recent this is like over the last couple years remember i've been doing this for 20 years so even me been doing this this long realized just how unaware i was of what i was doing when i was eating i made that decision and it started changing even my eating habits because i became more aware of what i was doing and that's that's the level

that we need to get people to because we're not we're not there it's just it's instinctual almost we struggle big time with it just like everybody else does i think and i think we've always come at everybody when we talk on our show it's not us preaching at people like this is how we are and this is how you need to be. It's like, listen, this is fucking hard for me too, man. Like I still have like there's routines that I've tried to put in. Another example of that is like I think we're becoming so plugged in, right? And Andy would talk to this for sure. And disconnected from our relationships and the people around us.

So we can't even sit without pulling our phones out. like i even have that bad habit because our businesses revolve around it so it's easy to justify it right like well fuck i'm checking on money or i got to answer this person that could be money like that's not i'm not glued yeah you are you're still plugged in right so i think yeah we talk about like things that we've put into place like for example for me you know seven o'clock is my time i don't care how much work i have or whatever it is at seven o'clock i'm shutting my phone and i walk how much work I have or whatever it is. At 7 o'clock, I'm shutting my phone down. I walk it upstairs. I put it up in the room.

And that's my quality time with my family, with my girl. So that is – but then I'll be the first to admit that there's times where I'm working at 6.50, and I'm deep into something, and it carries over into 7.30, and my girl knows. That's like my rule. So she's just kind of looking at me, giving me that look. When are you going to do it? And sometimes you look at yourself, and you're literally in it, and you're like that's like my rule. So she's just kind of looking at me, you know, giving me that look. When are you going to do it? And sometimes you look at yourself and you're literally in it and you're like, this is so stupid.

I can't get away right now. I don't know what to do. This is the addiction part. I know this is unhealthy. I'm eating while I'm staring at Instagram. And I'm going to keep doing it consciously now. Like I'm well aware that this is an addiction. Sponsors, we're going to take a break.

You guys have similar sponsors as we do, right? You guys hooked up with Organifi and Thrive. Love those guys, man. Yeah, we got to go into Thrive, what was it, a couple months ago? A month ago now. Check out HQ. Oh, you guys went into the place. It was so sweet.

Top to bottom. The place is so clean. It's like walking into an office. The most beautiful lights. Makes you feel at home when you walk in. CEO Gennar, he was awesome. Do you know what they do? I did not know this.

We just did this on our last Thrive commercial. Yeah, this is cool. We were talking about this. I didn't even know it, that you can actually put paleo, vegan. There's a drop-down menu. There's a drop-down menu, and then all the groceries that fit into that profile pop up. Well, that's dope. I didn't know they do it.

I didn't know that. fit into that profile pop up. Well, that's dope. I didn't know they do that. I didn't know that. I thought that was so brilliant. It makes it so user-friendly for those that are following a specific diet to be able to grocery shop that way. Or even if you're not following the diet, but you just know that that's kind of like the bang you want to take. Because I know so many people that say, like, I'm paleo. And then you're like, well, do you eat dairy? Do you eat beans? And they're like, oh, yeah, of course.

They're like, okay, well, you kind of like the idea of paleo, but you're not actually paleo, but you'll probably still buy a lot of paleo things. I'm paleo-ish. Paleo plus white bread. Wonder bread. Get over to their website, thrivemarket.com backslash shrugged. $60 worth of organic groceries. Free shipping.

You get a month free on their membership. And then Organifi. Super cool. They dropped a whole bunch of the probiotics, the red drink, the green drink. The gold drink. The gold drink. I just got the gold one the other day.

And the cacao. Have you guys had the cacao yet? I haven't had that yet. Oh, cacao bliss is next level, man. Oh, yeah. So a little bit about 8 to 10 ounces of almond milk. Blend that on a little bit of ice. Oh, dude.

Oh, I put it on nachos, cheese nachos. Oh, dude, get out of here. No, just kidding. The probiotics is just my favorite thing. I don't know how they put 50 billion things go into one little pill right down. You feel better, and then

what you just said, everything comes out easier too. Well, this is Tommy, guys, so he carries his probiotics wherever we go. So if you look at his bag, it's full of the Organifi probiotics everywhere we go. So get to Organifi.com or OrganifiShop.com and shrugged. It's a good thing these guys are here.

They know everything. I got your back. Code word shrug, you save 20%. We're going to take a break. When we come back, let's talk about opening a gym, scaling a gym, what gym owners can use from all this knowledge you guys have. Awesome. Thanks, guys. Thanks for watching the show. If you'd like to learn more about how to improve your snatch, clean, and jerk,

we have a free 55-page e-book you can get at flightweightlifting.com. It has sample programming specifically for weightlifting, weightlifting how-to technique videos, and other tips on how to improve all of your lifts. Go to flightweightlifting.com, and you can download that e-book for free. Download it now. You can talk more shit. Whatever you guys have. We're never done. More shit, less shit. We have for free. Download it now. You can talk more shit. Whatever you guys have.

We're the guiders. More shit, less shit. We have zero filters. Welcome back to Barbell Shrugged. Let's talk about opening some gyms. How do we scale gyms? You guys have a jillion episodes, all this experience, 20-something years, 40-something years just on Mind Pump itself.

And you guys have opened a couple gyms, scaled a couple gyms, 24-hour fitness. I mean, I think the average membership in a 24-hour fitness is, what, 8,000 people or something? Oh, massive. It's enormous. First company. You know, they were the first company in the fitness industry to reach a billion dollars. They sold for $2.4 billion. We were really lucky to be a part of them when they were in their heyday, when they were growing.

And they were really writing the book on how you monetize a big box chain. Now, it did take a little bit of a turn there. One of the reasons why I left is I recognized what was happening. But during that heyday, man, it was pretty awesome. The things that we learned, the systems that they had in place, probably some of the best sales procedures that you'll ever find. EFT, being able to charge people every month through electronic funds transfer. I don't think they invented it, but they definitely perfected it.

Oh, they invented it in the fitness industry. There was other... I thought Ray Wilson was doing it before. No, no, no. When they acquired it, that's when they actually rolled out the EFT model. So that was really what made them... The two things that really made them explode was the EFT model and then the cluster theory. Because there was like before, people would like you'd build a gym,

and if it got really, really popular and you're like, let's say you're in L.A. or you build this big gym, it's like, oh, yeah, we kill it over here. Now let's go open up another big city, and then we go to like San Francisco or something like that. And that strategy was like not a very successful strategy. So 24 Fitness was really smart. Like, Mark opened up, Mark Mastroff, the original owner, opened up, like, you know, for his first gym. And then he opened up another one, like, right up the road from it. And then one right up the road from that.

And then he did this cluster effect. So if you were from the Bay Area, San Leandro, San Jose, San Francisco area, you know, those are all. He's dominated. Yeah. That's what Starbucks does. Right. Yep. Exactly.

That model now has been replicated many times. But Mark Mastroff was one of the first gym owners to actually apply that. And he absolutely destroyed it with that between that and the EFT model. These clubs, I'll tell you, the amount of money that we would produce. Like I would run these AAA big box gyms. They were called AAA. And I ran some of the biggest ones in the Bay Area. And you're talking about clubs with, you know, a profit, you know,

a yearly profit of over $3 million. You know, one location, you know, making $3 million a year. This is after paying everybody out. They'd have dues bases of $150,000 to $200,000 a month. And then you're producing an additional $150,000 to $200,000 a month, and then you're producing an additional $250,000 to $300,000 a month in brand-new sales out of one box. So they did such a good job. But we had – I mean, you want to talk about some monsters.

The people that I know that ran clubs during that day that now don't work in fitness but do other things are now millionaires because of what they learned right now. And sales skills alone, which, by the way, if you're in fitness. That is the number one thing. Someone comes in and opens a gym, especially in the CrossFit world or in this boutique gym space, and everyone comes in with this huge passion. I'm just going to help people. This is soul work.

I'm going to change people's lives. Yeah, you can do that. Well, you're also going to be really hungry. If you don't learn how to sell $170 gym membership. No, you've got to know how to communicate effectively, which is what sales really is. And you've got to know how to be a closer. And you've got to know how to get what you don't get the first time they come around and bring them back in. And we did a really good job with that at 24 Hour Fitness.

And, you know, anybody who wants to get good at sales, this is the advice I always tell people, if you want to be an effective salesperson, which is, by the way, one of the best skills you could have, period, you're a good salesperson, that carries over to anything. It carries over to conversations. It's unfortunate that it has a bad name, though. Yeah. No, it's all it is. People hear salesman, they think, oh, bad taste in my number.

Yeah, right? No, it's about being effective. People hear sales, and they hear bad sales. Right. No, that, bad taste in my mouth. Yeah, right? No, it's about being effective. People hear sales and they hear bad sales. Right. No, that's bad sales. It's like people that look at CrossFit and they go, oh, it's all bad because they look at CrossFit fail videos on YouTube. Right.

So that's what they think the whole thing is. Right. And it's like, well, that's not quite true. No. The only time you remember being sold something is when somebody did it in a sleazy way and you were pissed off about it. Right. Every time someone offered you something and you really, really.

Yeah, because you buy shit every day, right? You buy shit every day. You're getting sold every day when you think about it. Every time someone's really helpful and you say, oh, thank you, and you go buy the thing, you don't think you got sold. Yeah, but you did. They were just helping you out. There's a process, right? First off, you need to believe in what you're selling because integrity comes through.

So you need to believe in it. And number two, you need to be able to communicate effectively so that what you know about your product of what you're offering, you can literally transfer that to the other person. Like if you come to me and you want to lose weight and I know the answer, I know how to get you where you want to go. If I could just take that information and put it in your mind, you'd buy my product all day long. It would never be a problem.

The good, the cool thing about selling gym memberships is the sales cycle is fast. So if you're in a big box gym, like some of the ones I've run, and you're a top sales guy, you're going to be doing 10 to 20 sales tours a day. You're going to get a lot of no's and you're going to get a lot of yes. You're going to get a lot of reps. You learn how to sell gym memberships and you do a good job doing that. Selling cars, houses, whatever, piece of cake. I did 50, you know, I did a thousand of these, you know, just the last two months. Part of that too is it's not

just the repetitions, although the repetition is the big piece, but it's also you're selling something that's not tangible. I mean, when you buy a car, you buy a house, if I spend a million dollars on a house, I get to live with the fucking million dollars I spent. Yeah, and the gym world is like, I'm going to buy this thing and I've got to wait three months before anyone will notice. Right, and you might get it.

We're selling you an idea. Can you just hand me the six-pack and I'll just leave right now and just give you the money? It doesn't work like that. No, not at all. You're renting use of the gym. What kind of other things did you see in the big box world that small gym owners really need to apply that they're currently not? You walk into a gym like this or any other gym and you're just like, oh, wow.

Can you spot things just right off the rack without walking into any small gym? These guys need to clean up their act. Absolutely. So, of course, there's always the vibe of the facility, although small boxes tend to have a good vibe because it's small, because people know each other. They've created, it's easier to create that in a small box than it is in a big box. So that's typically the challenge with big boxes. Culture is number one.

How do you create the culture in a big box that you get in a smaller box? But let's say you have a smaller box. What can you learn from the big box owners? Well, numbers fucking matter. Numbers matter. Get people in the door. Get leads. Make phone calls.

Talk to people. All of that matters. A lot of small box owners forget that and focus on their members and wait for people to walk in the door, which isn you know why that is. Which isn't going to happen. You know why that is, though. The reason why they struggle with that, and I remember every time I'd lose a trainer, right? So for 10 years, I managed trainers.

And typically, once they started getting pretty decent or if they got frustrated with the company because some new comp plan came out and they're all mad about it, they're going to make a little less money or whatever, and they say, F this, of here and they're gonna go do it privately now and i'd say to them i'm like listen you're not even one of my top three trainers here and you're gonna go leave and try to do this probably let me give you a little perspective here this club right here spends 25 million dollars a year on advertising you can and i'd stand them up and i said take a look at this gym right now there's about 150 people inside here right now they're all leads those are all fucking leads that you didn't have to pay for.

And you're not even talking to right now. You're not trying to sell in training. You're not trying to get involved in whatever it is that you're trying to do. And you mean to tell me that you're going to stop that fire hose of leads coming in. You're going to go walk out on the street, and you're going to be more successful than you are right now? It's something that drives me nuts when you start to talk to coaches as well because as a gym owner, so they'll walk up to you like,

I need more money. Can I run more classes? No. No, no, no, no, no. Your product's going to go to shit. It's going to be like, you're not going to have the intensity. You're not going to bring the energy.

It's not going to be fun. You're already strung out on 20 classes and now you want me to give you 23. Why don't you take half the classes but learn how to make a sale and go do some personal training right all these people in here are clearly paying their bills they've got 160 170 gym membership we can triple your hourly rate if you take half the classes but you go and do some personal training learn how to get into the sales process but that skill is so much different for the, this is all said under the context

that the training at your facility is very, very good. You are getting people results. Once you make the sale, you follow through and deliver on everything that you sold the person. They have a very good experience. They fucking love being there. That's all an assumption. So we're saying you've got to go learn sales,

but if you have a shit product or you have bad programming or you don't actually know how to train people or you're inexperienced, these are all things to take care of first. Build your skill set. Good product is number one. And then getting more people in the door to your good product is number two. Well, think about it this way. Why, how come, so a good, a successful small box, let's say,

CrossFit facility charges how much per month on average? $150, $200 a month, right? Let's say $200 a month. A big box successful gym typically charges how much per month? $30 a month maybe? $20, $200 a month, right? Let's say $200 a month. A big box successful gym typically charges how much per month? $30 a month, maybe? $20, $30 a month. Nowadays, it's getting pretty cheap now, right? Why can one charge so much more than the other? There's a lot of perceived value. There's a lot of value there, and people are willing to spend that much. And to think that people won't double that or triple that by offering more value

is crazy. If you think that won't happen, you're absolutely wrong. There's a lot more there. People spend more money on going out to dinner every month. So really fitness has been in many ways has been cheapened because they've gotten that kind of race to the bottom. And I'm very, very happy that the small box phenomena has exploded because it was a nice counter to what the big boxes were doing. One of the reasons why I left the big box gyms was it was a race to the bottom. Let's see how cheap we can make the memberships. We don't care if people use it. We know they're not going to cancel if it's cheap enough.

The model is nine bucks a month. Yeah. Just for nine bucks a month. You're like, what the fuck is going on? The model is, yeah, you see clubs like Planet Fitness that are thriving and growing right now and they're feeding them pizza. They're targeting a market of people that they know are going to fail. They know they're going to fail.

The people that are eating pizza every time at your gym, right, and are afraid of doing barbell complex movements, right, or compound lifts, because none of that you're allowed to do at Planet Fitness, and serving them pizza, dude, those are the people that quit. But they quit working out. They don't quit their membership. They've done plenty of studies around this. The average gym membership, right, the average person buys a gym membership,

whatever gym it is, they use it for the first three months. If they don't get injured, okay, in the first two months, which is another number, but for the first three months they use that. Then after that they give up or they stop or they fail, whatever it may be. But then they continue paying for the next seven months. So the big box gym industry has figured this out. And so like a Planet Fitness is like playing into that. It's like, hey, listen, this is what we're going to do is we're going to give this thing for so cheap.

We're going to feed these fuckers pizza because we know what they're going to do is they're going to come in here. They're going to get frustrated after a month or two, but they're going to keep paying us their dues. Some of them will probably pay the dues just so they get their pizza every once in a while. I've actually talked to people who said, you know, I've been a membership member there for like eight months. I never use it. But I went in the other day and ate a bunch of pizza. So I think I got my money's worth. Hashtag community.

It's that way. Exactly. But I think one of the bigger challenges, especially for gym owners, right, because we work for a large corporation, and I did own my own gym as well. I know how hard it is to scale. Like once you develop that culture, once you kind of built that success in that one facility, how do you duplicate that to another one? How do you take that and mimic that somewhere else? And there's a couple of things that I've identified since my time doing this.

One is systems need to be the same. Systems and look need to be the same. That actually makes a big difference. So how you check people in, how you manage the memberships, the way that classes are run, the color scheme, those things all matter. And Starbucks has already proven that. McDonald's has already proven that. That part matters. The other thing is one of the best places that you can pull from in terms of talent is within your own facility. That's one of the best places you can pull from.

And if it's a member who's been a loyal member working out with you, who's also got some talent and some skill and sales and whatever, that may actually be one of the better people to open up in a location because they're already bought into your system, your culture, how you run things. And that's going to be a little bit more likely to be similar to what you're doing. But that is the biggest challenge. Well, I think when speaking to like CrossFit owners, what's probably really challenging is, and I would love to hear your guys' opinion on this. This is just me speculating, but I would think that if you're badass,

like you're a really smart guy, you know what you're doing, you got a great culture that you've built, and you've built this successful box up, and I don't know what the normal range is. I'm guessing it's somewhere between $90,000 to $200,000 a year that one of these places are profiting at. So you've proven you can build a nice living for yourself,

but you want more. I want two gyms, three gyms. I want to make a million dollars a year that one of these places that are profiting at so you've proven you can build a nice living for yourself but you want more i want two gyms three gyms i want to make a million dollars a year the problem with that the person that it takes to oversee two three four five facilities is normally a different guy or girl than the guy or girl who was so fucking great at being that energy in the class and building that culture and the person that everybody came to the gym to come see he's probably not the systematic guy who gets behind reads all the analytics watching all the bills right right is that it's the peter principle it's where it's where you take someone who does really really well in one role and then you promote them to the next role which is a completely different skill set different different technical skills different personality type that typically does well in that role and then all of a sudden they don't do very well and then in some organizations they don't get

promoted again so they just stay in the role that's the wrong role for them. So if you're a really great coach, good people person, you're supposed to transition to the managerial role where now it's very systematic. You're doing the same thing over every day. You're making sure all the boxes get checked and all the logistics are handled. Those are different people most of

the time. You need both types of people but you shouldn't take one person and then flop them into the other role they're gonna they're not gonna do well i've seen that happen many times and i think you gotta know that right you gotta know that about yourself and be okay with that you gotta know that maybe maybe i'm not that guy like i'm good at killing it here and making a good living for myself you know am i the same person who just because you can do it well in your one box don't necessarily means that you can go do two and three like that because like you said it's a

whole different monster when you're doing that. You literally described me. We crushed it in one. We scaled to two. And I was like, where did the vibe go? What happened? Well, it's because I probably wasn't in front of as many people every day. I was managing coaching, like having a coach's meeting, and all of a sudden now we're talking about systems versus the attitude and the vibe.

How do we greet people? You know, what is just like, what does it feel like when you walk in and now you've got coaches spread out all over the place and they're trying to create this thing and no one can actually pinpoint exactly what it is. It's really challenging. Now, I know you guys are interviewing us, but I would really love to hear what you guys see in this space right now with because i feel like just like three years ago everybody and their mother wanted to open a fucking crossfit box and i feel like it's kind of peak is it plateaued a little bit do you see a lot of them closing what do you guys see domestically it's definitely plateaued i would say in the u.s definitely and actually here at chalk uh ryan the what used to

be i think you guys were talking about it you guys spent what 17 20 grand to open up oh yeah something like that we opened up 10 years ago yeah we spent 17 grand to open up we had we had you know nothing because 17 grand won't buy you anything but we didn't need anything we were the very first gym in memphis tennessee no competition nobody cared we were the sixth gym in all of san die, and there's 160, 170 of them now. So we had $60,000, and you're standing inside a million-dollar gym right now. Sure. He dumped so much coin.

He had investors. Now, do you have to do that now to stay competitive? I don't think you have to, but I think it's a good idea to make sure that you are well capitalized or someone else is just going to... It's a different monster now. It's a commodity now. You walk into a gym and you go, damn, this place looks nice. Like, okay, well, cool, cool, cool. I'm going to walk one block away and check out the one right down the street.

And, oh, it looks like shit? Cool, I'm going back to the nice place. It's just more competitive. I mean, you guys know how much buying a 45-pound bumper plate costs. Right. Well, you used to be able to go and buy a stack of rogue bumper plates the black ones they were fat and no one no you were literally going to a crossfit gym to buy a membership to a place where you could drop weights like that was just so unheard of right now you can do it everywhere no matter what gym you're at and you can't just go buy the 45 pound

black rubber weight from rogue it has to be the competition plate. It has to be an Alico plate. You have to have nice bars. Rogue's selling, like, red and blue barbells now. But you have to have, like, these cool things that make your gym cool to stand out because everybody has all this stuff. So, I mean, you look at the weights over there. Like, you're probably looking at $40,000 worth of just bumper plates.

So to get to that level, like, you don't have to do it. You can start small. You can be a personal trainer and build it up. There's endless ways to do it. But if you're coming in and you're going to take on rent and be in a cool spot on a busy street. How many coaches does it typically take for a location like this to be successful? How many coaches would you say would have to be running a facility like this?

Probably two full-time, two to three part-time would be my guess. You can go by with that, especially if the owner is helping out, especially if they have more than one owner helping out and coach classes on occasion. But I actually want to dig, since you guys are from the physique world and we don't have a lot of physique guys on the show, I want to dig back into that world a little bit. And something we don't talk a whole lot about on this show

because it's not quite as prominent in the functional fitness side of things is steroids that you mentioned earlier. I have a question for you. Like how – I think a lot of people that don't – He's like, how many should I take? Yeah, like how do I do it? Where do I stick the knees? No, a lot of people, especially when they're new to fitness, they kind of know that like it's a thing, but they don't really know much about it. And I think a lot of people think it's really, really bad for you or they're they think it's it's cheating so they shouldn't do it there's a stigma around it there's there's all these

different opinions from all these different perspectives like like in your opinion having been kind of on the inside of that having tried it yourself like like how how bad physically like physiologically are are steroids for you and what's the whole spectrum there I think it really depends and I know probably everyone hates that answer right but it does. It really depends on a lot of different things. We were kind of talking off air before we got on here, and I was telling you guys that you can totally tell a difference on a person who their body just accepts the testosterone better. Like, some people can take synthetic testosterone, steroids,

and their body just seems to love it. They can take more and more, and they just get bigger and bigger. And then you have someone like me who my experience with it was as soon as I got to, like, 500 milligrams, which is a very— That's actually a low dose for a professional, anybody competing. Yeah, for a pro body, but that was me at the pro level, right? So I got all the way up to about 500 milligrams a week, which is basically 2 cc's of 250 milligrams of testosterone.

So that's what I was taking when I got up to pro level. When I was an amateur, I was taking my therapeutic dose. So because I took steroids when I was in my early 20s, I had fucked up my testosterone. And I didn't really know it that much until I kind of knew it right away because I lost my libido. I didn't have my libido like I used to have it when I was like in my early 20s. I thought, well, maybe I'm just getting older.

I didn't really think too much about it because I'm still having sex. I've got a girlfriend. Things seem to be fine. And then as I started to get closer to 30, that's when I really noticed. Because now I'm at 30. Now I have mortgages, stress, things like that's going on in my life. And now I really noticed the impact of the testosterone. And that's where I thought, you know what, I better go get my blood work and see where it's at.

And I was really low. So anything under like the 300 400 range of testosterone is really low i was in the 200 range so i'm on the floor of testosterone for a 30 year old especially for a 30 year old male that lifts weights i should be a lot better than that yeah so i ended up getting on a therapeutic dose now the therapeutic dose for me is only about 50 milligrams of testosterone so compared to the 500 so i'm i did scale up to the point where i was taking 10 times that but once i start getting up to that point i started to have adverse effects i had gotomastia i had the i had bald my hair started thinning i started noticing my complexion my skin like i just would break out

all the time so i had a lot of issues with that now i know guys that were taking three times than i was and didn't have any of those issues but then i think that's just as scary it kind of reminds me of you guys remember i mean i'm sure you guys have ran into this, what I call skinny fat people. I've had these clients that were like models their whole life and they're like real thin but they eat fucking terrible. They don't exercise. So I can't imagine what the inside of that person looks like.

I think the same thing kind of goes with steroids that on the outside, somebody who's taken them and they don't see any adverse effects so they think that everything's fine but there could be a lot of stuff that's going on inside. It's really, you know, testosterone itself is a relatively, believe it or not, relatively safe hormone. The thing is that people are taking, on the low end, 10 times more than their body produces, and on the high end, several thousand times more, but they also add other compounds on

top of that, growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor and all these other things. But let's just stay with the anabolics, the testosterone and the derivatives of testosterone. We really don't know what taking thousands of times more than your body produces of testosterone does on the body long term. We have no studies. We just don't know because it would be, you wouldn't be able to conduct a study. You could not find, get a bunch of men and, you know because it would be – you wouldn't be able to conduct a study. You could not get a bunch of men and you would never get the funding to be able to give people that much and to be able to study what's going on. So it is a big – I can just see like one group is the placebo group and the other group is like I'm taking a thousand times what a normal person normally has. Like you wouldn't be able to figure out if you were in the placebo group or not.

The other group is just getting fucking enormous and you're just kind of the same. This is bullshit. Why didn't I get in the good group? We really don't know super long term what it does to the body. But the other thing too is you have to tease out all the other factors, which are also very difficult to do because people who typically take a shit ton of steroids

also typically feed their body one and a half to two grams of protein every single day, day in and day out, eat, you know, eight times a day. They probably also do other things to their body that might not be healthy. So we don't really know what just the anabolics by themselves at that amount do to the body long term because kidney failure, that's a common one with bodybuilders. Well, is it from the steroids or is it because you ate, you know, a thousand, you know,

grams of, you know, protein every single day for, you know, 20 years. Like we don't know what is causing what necessarily. So it's hard to, what we do know is the oral ones are way worse than the injectables, but we, but we also know, again, testosterone is natural in the body with women, far worse, far where you give testosterone to a woman, you are essentially putting them through a sex change. That's actually what happens if you're a female and you want a sex change, that's what the doctor does. They give you testosterone. So far more adverse effects on women than on men. I think it gets a bad rap, too, though.

I think that it's something that, if done safe, if done correctly, if monitoring your blood levels, if paying attention to these things, and if you're not somebody who gets addicted to it, I think it can be something that's no more dangerous than half the other shit that the average 25-year-old is probably fucking doing. You know what I'm saying? Probably safer than binge drinking.

Right. From that aspect. But now the problem with it. Depends how much you're abusing it. Drinking can be not too bad for you if you have a beer a couple times a month, one at a time in the evening. You can have some alcohol.

It's totally fine because you're not abusing it. Same thing with testosterone and taking steroids. If you go to a TRT clinic and you get an assessment by a doctor, they give you an appropriate dose to put you from, say, you're at 250, like you were talking about with your total testosterone, and now you're at 700. If the range is 300 to 1,100, now you're right in the middle of the normal healthy range for a person your age,

well, this is probably going to be a good thing. You're probably going to have more energy. You're probably going to feel better. You're probably going to recover better. You're going to be more motivated. You're going to have a sex drive back. It's a hormone that's totally necessary to have within a certain biological range. And if it's out of that range and you put it back in the range,

then that's probably a good thing. But if you abuse it, then there's bad side effects. Low testosterone for sure is unhealthy. For sure is unhealthy. Increased risk of cancer, increased risk of depression and mental issues. Achilles tears? Yeah. That's what happened to me.

So I've been off for six months now, right? So I'm off my therapeutic dose even. And what I do is every year I do this. So I typically, if I'm not competing, if I'm competing, then it's a whole other regimen. But if I'm just taking my therapeutic dose, after about a year or so of me consistently doing it, I don't want to be on it for the rest of my life so i every year that i learn more about my body or hone my diet in better or start practicing other

things to like maybe lower lower stress levels let me see if i can get off everything and see if i can naturally bring it up so i've been in the process of that for the next six months and that's actually how my achilles tear happened i didn't even know this that there's actually direct correlation with low testosterone levels and achilles tears and so here's my dumb ass i'm low testosterone right now and i decide i'm gonna get you know back into basketball shape that's all i'm gonna play basketball crossover dribble turned achilles tear not even i wish it was even that good i literally just i just scored i'm running back up the court nobody is around me and just pop.

I hear this pop. I go down. I text this guy, and I'm like, bro, I think I just tore my Achilles. And he's like, oh, fuck, dude, I should have told you that there's a correlation between low testosterone and fucking. I'm like, are you kidding me, bro? What the fuck is the point of me having a nerd like you around me all the time? You can't break me down like that, dude. I would have never put myself in that position had I known that. I actually did know. I don't want to tell them.

It puts me at an advantage. That's the number one rule of life. Anybody that thinks weightlifting is dangerous, go look at the numbers of pickup basketball. It is a disaster what goes on out there on the weekend. Everyone's tearing their Achilles, rolling ankles. Oh, I know. I manage gyms with basketball

courts. All the injuries happen. I called an ambulance with basketball courts. That's where all the injuries happen. I called an ambulance. No joke. Probably twice a month, at least. Oh, yeah. I was going to say once a week. I was going to say. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Awesome, guys. Thanks for hanging out. Yeah. Where can people find you? Mind Pump is the podcast. Mind Pump TV is on YouTube. And you can find us on social media, Mind Pump Sal, Mind Pump Adam, and then our other host, Mind Pump Justin.

There you go. Right on. Excellent. Right on. Thank you for coming on the media, Mind Pump Sal, Mind Pump Adam, and then our other host, Mind Pump Justin. There you go. Right on. Excellent. Right on. Thank you for coming on the show. Doug? Yeah, yeah. If you want to see some stuff specifically from me,

go to DougLarsonFitness.com. I've got seminars coming out. I've got some digital products coming out in the very near future. Also, you can follow me on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson. And Anders? Come to movement-rx.com. Solutions for gym owners, functional fitness athletes, dealing with shoulder, low back, knee pain.

Give us a call. Get to movement-rx.com and find me at Anders Varner on all of the things. Make sure you get over to iTunes. Give us a five-star review. Leave a nice comment, please. And we will see you guys next week. You bet. Thanks, fellas.

Thanks for making it all the way to the end of the show. If you liked the show, which I know you did, please go share it on Facebook, Instagram, or whatever social media channel you happen to be loving at the moment. Pinterest? Twitter? Tumblr. Tumblr.

Share it on Tumblr. Next on Barbell Shrug, we're eating donuts and talking macros with Amanda Bucci. What's up, guys?