Barbell Shrugged - Barbell Shrugged  — Over 40 Years of Strength and Conditioning w/ Anders Varner and Doug Larson  — 331

Episode Date: August 18, 2018

This is a special episode, where Anders Varner (@andersvarner) and Doug Larson (@douglaselarson) talk about their combined experience of 40 years in strength & conditioning. They talk about where it all began, how their training plans have progressed over 20 years respectively, the beginnings of a career in strength, how to create training programs for life, what it means to create a whole body approach to training, and much more.   Enjoy!   - Doug and Anders   Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs_40years ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please support our partners! @organifi - www.organifi.com/shrugged to save 20% @thrivemarket - www.thrivemarket.com/shrugged for a free 30 days trial and $60 in free groceries @OMAX - www.tryomax.com/shrugged and receive a free box of Omega 3 Fish Oils @Onnit - www.onnit.com/shrugged for a free 14 pill bottle of the leading nootropic Alpha Brain and 10% savings on all purchases. @foursigmatic - www.foursigmatic.com/shrugged  to save 15% on your first purchase ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com  

Shrug family, this is Anders Varner. We've got a sick bro show coming to you today. Doug and I are talking weightlifting for like two and a half hours. We actually recorded this many, many, many months ago when I first became the host of the show. We have been putting out a ton of audio-only shows because a lot of times Doug and I just roll around. We just creep around this country, find cool people to talk to, and we don't bring Colton.

Colton on the cam is not invited. No, we love Colton. But yeah, sometimes we just turn him on and we talk. And when this was happening, I had only been a co-host for like three months with Mike and Doug at the beginning of the year. And then I became the host. And there's a bit of a transition. And what I needed to be doing the most was getting on the mic and talking as much as possible, getting comfortable. And Doug and I decided we were just going to tell our whole training history from all the coaches, all the programs, all of our best stories, all in one place. And this is what we got.

So super fun show. I honestly love these shows so much. Last week with Lucero. This week, just Doug and I. But anytime we can get the bros back together to just hang out. Man, you can like hear how much fun we have. Because I'm in the room and I still laugh at the jokes we make even though like I made them or like we made them and I was already a part of them. I still think they're funny just because you can hear how much fun we are having as a crew.

Stoked to talk to you guys about the Program Vault. Make sure you're getting in. 12 programs, $47 a month. Everything from mass gain, weight loss, nutrition, macros, mobility, strongman, squat programs. I don't know. There's 12 of them in there. I'm trying to rattle them off in my head and I can't do it. Get into the program, Vault. ShruggedCollective.com backslash Vault. Enjoy the show. All right, good to go. Ready to rock? Yeah,

yeah, rock it. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Warner with my main homie, Doug Larson. We are here today. There is no guest. is no guest We are inside Vista CrossFit And Doug and I are going to tell you about everything going on in our lives Training We have been at this now for two and a half years Training together for two and a half years We've been at this for decades Yeah, exactly

We've been training partners for a couple years now But the training together And happens to be The only training goal I have right now is to ensure that me and you get together in a room somehow and hang out because this thing keeps me happy. And training with my bros is the number one thing that keeps me happy. That's my favorite thing to do is work out with my friends.

Exactly. I don't know what I would do if we didn't have the ability to get together to do this. But we've got this long journey, and I actually don't know all the little pieces of your story. You probably don't know all the little pieces of my story. Somehow we met 20-something years into this journey, and we're going to break this thing down right now. Starting from the beginning all the way to today. We're going to talk about goals. We're going to talk about how we accomplish those goals and where do we go from here, how do you structure all the workouts when we hang out together,

but what the other six days of your week look like, and I'm ready to do this. I love talking about weightlifting. Picking things up. It's the coolest thing ever. So let's get into it. Where did this thing start for you? For me, I was super, super fortunate. I've told my story on a variety of shows, but I'll tell pieces of it here again.

I was super, super lucky. I started gymnastics when I was four. I did that for five or six years. I stopped when I was like 10. And that was enough gymnastics to give me a really good base, like good mobility, decent upper body strength for a 10-year-old compared to the other kids in my elementary school, junior high, that type of thing. And then I was really fortunate to meet a very good strength coach named Mark Reel, who's an awesome friend of mine, who learned, he was a powerlifter that learned weightlifting

from Mike Bergner. Yeah. Right? And now he introduced me to Bergner, you know, back when I was like 17 or 18 at an NCAA conference. And so I was fortunate to know Bergner, not super well back then, but to know him having met him a couple times and then now being you know relatively close with him since we live 45 minutes away from his house we go up there on wednesdays and train which is always a good time and so i learned weightlifting from a guy who had done powerlifting had done weightlifting he had he had kettlebells he had gymnastics rings at his gym he had as close as you can get to a

crossfit gym back gym back 20 years ago because I started training with him when I was 14, and now I'm 34. So I've had 20 years in this type of setting. We weren't doing Metcons per time specifically, which is kind of how I define CrossFit as opposed to strength and conditioning. Although we did some stuff kind of like that. We did barbell complexes and whatnot before they were cool, but weren't specifically doing CrossFit.

But I've been exposed to snatches, cleans, jerks, squats, and deadlifts, and just heavy strength training, and then all the gymnastics elements as well for essentially my whole life. So I'm very, very fortunate. Yeah. I never had a clue that an Olympic lift existed for like the first 15 years of training yeah I've been in the gym for so long but I used to do I actually used to do clean and jerks to develop traps that was like part of my upper body training um when I first found them out and it was like

clean and super ugly press so the fact that you had a coach that actually knew what the hell was going on it's unbelievable my very first coach was like the largest meathead in the world so i am from chesapeake virginia and great bridge high school won 12 states state wrestling championships. And I was like 13 years old. And my, I was at this like really strange part of my life, right? I had, I was playing ice hockey. And when you are in Virginia, ice hockey is not something that is, you know, you're not playing against the best players in the country. And when I started to hit my teenage years, I very quickly realized, like, I'm going to have to go somewhere. So my aunt and uncle lived in Minnesota, and that was the original, like, original, like, plan. I was just going to go live with my aunt and uncle in Minnesota, play hockey, figure it out. Got recruited to go to this, like, hockey night in Boston,

which was, like, the first, like, national hockey competition I had ever, or, like, tournament. And we were on the Mid-Atlantic, and we got our shit kicked in so hard. It was, like, we were, like, the kids from the south and the kids from the north that actually, like, lived in cold places beat the piss out of us. It wasn't even close. And I quickly realized, oh, I suck. I need to go find people to go play against.

I shouldn't be playing first line on this thing and getting my teeth kicked in the way that these guys were doing it. So I quickly learned about this little thing called prep school. And I was about to ship out. So I left home at 14. And the summer before that, my dad looked at me, and I was probably like 3'1", and kind of soft, and about to go play against these monsters. Kids that were getting drafted into the NHL would come back and do a postgraduate year, and my dad was like, you have to go fight that kid.

It's going to be really, really hard for you. You have to learn how to do this. So he walks me into, it's actually really interesting so ben smith started training in the same weight room that i started training in underneath the stadium stairs at great bridge high school great bridge middle school and you can go back like crossfit journal's been there to like document this place it's just grimy as fuck and the strength coach was a guy named steve sakis and i'm pretty sure this was 20 years ago so i'm not afraid to say this but i'm pretty sure he was hooking a whole lot of people in town up with some pharmaceuticals like there was he was not afraid to dabble and what was whatever was going on did you get a lot of exposure to that growing up by the way like were people

offering that you that in high school did you offer steroids by like playing hockey and playing football because i never did i never did i never saw any of it in high school no i i i knew that the my the my coach he was gigantic like uh as cliche as you can be on the juice yeah um like you just he didn't my dad like trained with him back in the day, and it was just, like, understood this is, like, it's happening. But it was really rough. Like, the very first day, like, there wasn't a whole lot of science, I don't think, going on.

And this guy just, like, was just, like, mean. Like, he was just a mean strength coach. And the very first day, so we're hanging out with a bunch of wrestlers and i'm in there i have no idea so i'm like really nervous because these guys are like big and strong and like they actually like fight people for their sport and it was so competitive that like people would move to our high school to be on this wrestling team. So when a new 145-pound person showed up, the current 145 would be pissed. And you could feel this tension in this dark, dingy gym.

And the very first day that I was there, I remember two things. The new kid that moved into town and the current kid that moved into town just talking shit to each other all training session. And strength coach Steve St sakus got tired of them chirping at each other brought them outside and we had a fist fight in the middle of the freaking parking lot and i was just like this is weightlifting i don't have weightlifting is cool do i have to fight people and the other one was he put a barbell on my back

and said you have to do lunges around the track like that was literally day one for 400 meters for 400 meters that was he was like you need to learn about legs you have to go play ice hockey like go around the track and i was like you've never done anything like that you did 400 meters of walking lunges with a 45 pound bar on your back you're gonna be fucking sore for a week and a half not intelligent i would never do that to anybody now but that was like my introduction to leg day dude as a high school kid you're probably like that was badass i thought it was so cool but yeah i literally couldn't walk like that it's like whatever the like cliche like leg day oh i can't

walk like i was literally that guy the next day like it was so brutal yeah um what were were you at all interested in like o like Olympic lifting when you started doing this or like competing in it? Like where? No, not, not specifically. Um, I thought it was fun to do at the time, but I didn't know I was going to get so into it. Like in high school, um, I remember doing cleans and it's funny looking back on how

I was doing them. Cause I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Just like I see, you know, new, new people now. Um, but I was really more concerned with just putting on muscle mass and getting stronger. I was wrestling. I was playing football. And I started off with barbell training doing 20 rep back squats. That was like my intro to lifting weights. We have a lot to talk about in 20 rep back squats. Go ahead.

My upper body from gymnastics was beyond my lower body at that point. I was really comfortable doing pull-ups and push-ups and upper body calisthenics stuff. I wanted to be a Navy SEAL. I kept doing the Bud's Warning Order workouts where it's all push-ups, pull-ups, and then distance running, more or less, and a few other

things. But when I started doing squats and deadlifts, like 20 rep back squats and a gallon of milk a day, that was the standard. Why is that? That's like a unifying time and like the strength athlete's life, like 20 reps. And then I was just chugging milk for some reason. I think that connected with me really well as a person new to strength training, because it sounds so simple. Okay, you're going to do 20 rep back squats, drink a gallon of milk a day. That's really easy to follow. I know if I did 20 rep back squats drink a gallon of milk a day yeah that's really easy to follow i know if i did 20 rep back squats and i know if i drank a gallon of milk everything else is is you know secondary to this having those two things on

top of my mind one thing to do for training one thing to do for nutrition done yeah and it worked really well and i put on 20 25 30 pounds over the course of a year. From baseball season as a freshman to football season my sophomore year, I put on 20 pounds. And that mattered a lot. Or sophomore to junior, rather. That mattered a lot. I went from being more or less pushed around on the football field to wondering why people weren't trying so hard.

I really had that realization of like, wait a minute. I thought they weren't trying very hard, but holy shit shit i got better yeah i'm bigger and stronger now totally and it mattered i remember doing 20 rep back squats with 165 pounds for my first time ever yeah and then and then you know maybe a year later wrestling season the following year so after football season but i did 255 for 20 you know putting 90 pounds on my 20 rep back squat over the course of just less than a year and putting on 20 pounds in the process. Yo, that's strong. 255 is no joke.

Yeah, I was wrestling 189 that year, so I probably weighed 180 at the time. And yeah, brutal, brutal, brutal sets. If you're ever throwing up after doing just back squats, then you should try it sometime. It's well worth doing that was one of the very very first programs i think that i actually went on was the 20 rep back squat program it was like i was drawn to it in the exact same way it was just so simple yeah just do this and next thing you know it's like jesus 10 pounds a week five pounds a week and then all of a sudden you have to go to two and a halves and smaller increments.

5 pounds a week, man. I remember being nervous every Monday, like all day at school. Nervous because I knew after school, before practice or after practice, wherever I could get it in, I was going to have to do 20 or back squats with 5 pounds more than last week. And last week sucked. Last week was really hard. I barely made it.

I was going to try and put on five pounds and do it again. And that program actually has probably followed me through more stages of my training than any other one. Like I, you know, preparing for CrossFit regionals and stuff like that, like that was always a staple that was because it was so hard when it was younger i knew that i wouldn't be mentally prepared to go into any sort of competition because i wouldn't have had to face down 20 rep back squats so every time i was prepping for something i would always do a cycle of 20 rep back squats just to mentally know that i had already suffered more than i was going to suffer on competition day because it's so mentally taxing to just realize like oh my god like like rep 13 what the fuck oh my god you got seven more to go and it's you're gonna die yeah somehow you get there it's like running 400 meter sprints or 800 meter sprints like it's it's a full speed sprint for a minute or two yeah and once you get to rep

13 14 15 like you are starting to like take a couple breaths in between each rep like you do a rep and then you just stand there with a bar on your back going fuck i hope i can do one more rep yeah you wait you breathe you wait you do a rep you stand with the bar on your back like oh fuck me in the standing you wait you breathe and then you do another ugly rep ugly rep. And then you just do that until you're done. Your fucking hands go numb, your shoulders go numb. Hands going numb first. Then the shoulders.

Mine didn't anyway. Terrible. A great tool for a beginner. As a kid, I was like, damn, this is so much more intense. You know, the same thing happens when someone does Fran for the first time. They've never done anything like this. They do Fran, they're on the ground, they're fucking dying, and they go, damn, this is what same thing happens when someone does fran for the first time they ever done anything like this they do fran they're on the ground they're fucking dying and they go damn this is like this is what i need i found it and that's how that's how i felt after doing 200

back squats i was like i found it this this is the thing like there's no way this isn't gonna make me strong as fuck if you did you ever read super squats oh yeah i had the book yeah sure is that right? The author? Yeah. I actually don't remember 100%. I just remember I got it from Iron Mind. I used to read those Milo magazines in Iron Mind. Milo was so good. Yeah.

I think it was McCollum. But, yeah, I read the book, too, and I have gone back to it multiple times. And it's so funny how right and accurate those books are from back in the day. We're just like, man, just do the 20 rep back squat program you don't have to worry about your bench press you don't really have to worry about your deadlift everything else is just going to grow especially when you're a teenager and all the good jujus going on in your body testosterone's flying all over the place and all your body wants to do is just grow and um it's freaking phenomenal program yeah yeah mean, I put on 20 or 30 pounds, like I said, and that really helped me as an athlete in high school.

I never really even viewed myself as a football player, but I did well enough junior and senior year after having put on a bunch of weight and gotten much, much stronger where I was able to go play small Division III college football, which was super, super fun. Killer. It wasn't necessarily my passion. Once I found MMA, I was like, okay, not playing college football anymore. This is definitely what I should be doing.

MMA is 100% way more my passion than football ever was. But strength conditioning helped out with all of it. Did you only have one coach up until college? Strength coach? Yeah. Yeah, Mark was my main strength coach. And we didn't really have a strength coach in college either. Very cool.

In graduate school, I had some great coaches um dr brian schilling awesome weightlifter professor of biomechanics uh great great dude really really knowledgeable he was our like our main weightlifting coach and then lauren shu he was a canadian national champion he was kind of always in and out he had gone through that same graduate program i got my bachelor's and my master's in kinesiology human human movement science and competed in weightlifting in graduate school which is where i met bledsoe and where i met galpin and uh and chris moore like we were all competing on the same team chris moore was powerlifting we were all weightlifting that was a gangster setup but yeah i had some great coaches over the years that's awesome and

then mark would take me to nsca conferences and other strength coaching conferences and you know that's where i met all the elaco guys and i got a lot of great coaching going on those conferences yeah um just by hanging out at the Aleko booth and just lifting. And other lifters, they're training. And there's a bunch of coaches just kind of hanging out. Before CrossFit was big and weightlifting was big at NSCA, it was kind of like our own little clique over at the Aleko booth. We're like, this is where the weightlifters hang out. And so everyone knew each other as a super small community.

And that community has grown much more over time but i was fortunate to be a part of that from early age yeah my so yeah probably like my sophomore junior year my dad and i started training together so my dad um actually like trained really hard and was on like like oddly knowledgeable at like a when there wasn't like a whole lot of knowledge like he had just kind of been in the weight room. He played professional baseball for a little bit, college baseball. So he had a strange understanding of how to – for that time, I assume, probably a pretty –

there just wasn't a ton of information, I don't think. But yeah, so him and I trained together in the summers, and I feel like we always found, like, the dingiest, grimiest gym where there would just be, like, four monsters in there. And it was always the best, like, just everybody was working so hard in the places that we trained, but there was nothing nice going on. It was always, like, the rec center. Like, but there was nothing nice going on. It was always like the rec center. Like a spinning barbell didn't exist. I didn't know barbells spun until probably like 10 years later

when I found like a nice gym with a nice barbell. Like Aliko barbells, that was another planet. That was not something that we were doing. But I remember when our hockey coach would send us home for the summer with like the training plan it'd be like this book like here's here's exactly what you're supposed to do with the workouts with the pictures and it was okay i guess you could but i think that plyometrics was just coming out like i remember buying a dvd or vhs about plyometrics and thinking about speed training was something that was like i i was the only person that i knew that

was actually like thinking about speed training and single leg like jumping and bounding um did you have anybody or were you doing any of that stuff back in the day oh yeah i mean we played football so it's all about speed agility quickness um yeah mark mark was comprehensive in that in that manner where it wasn't just lifting in the weight room like we we would go to you know soccer fields or football fields or whatever and we would do speed agility quickness drills we would do all of our plyometrics he would teach me about stress shortening cycles and about about how how that type of training worked and how it was complementary to lifting.

I had the whole package back then. He would take me to his house after training, and he would cook meals and teach me how to cook and what was in the food, the nutrition behind it. He wasn't just my coach. He was like a full-blown mentor to me and still a very good friend. I talked to him yesterday. Yeah. Just a great dude. That's so awesome yeah super super lucky but yeah the speed agility

quickness stuff was was really valuable and that's something that i see a lot of people in kind of modern day crossfit don't don't have a handle on in the same way that they have a handle on olympic weightlifting like if you try to like teach them or not teach them you try to like you know do warm-ups where you're like even just doing regular skips it's like people all of a sudden they can't do it they're like oh how do i skip and i'm like yeah skip like it's just skipping that's my favorite people can't run sprints correctly they don't know sprinting technique if you said break down sprinting and teach me sprinting technique and like walk through it the same way you would walk through like teaching an air squat yeah they're like oh i

have no idea sprint or skipping is one of my favorite things to do in a warm-up because you can pick out the top three athletes in about four skips it's like the biggest tell like if your knee i think sprinting is one of the most underrated things in the crossfit world like i love it especially especially hill sprints i think i think hill sprints are are one of the greatest things for athleticism there is. Yeah. Like, especially as you get older. Like, as you get older, speed goes first. Yep.

Like, speed and explosive power falls off very quickly. Old man strength is, like, it's strength. Yeah. Like, the ability to produce some amount of force in a slow contraction, you kind of hang on to that a little bit. You lose muscle mass over time, too, of course, as you get older and older. But the ability to move quickly, be agile and and run sprints is going to fade very quickly if you don't continuously do that we're going to totally get into that because i have a hill outside my

house that i should name or something but it's literally like my the check-in every week i have to climb that thing six times a week in some capacity. And every week I just stand at the top of it and I'm like, damn you. Like this is going to hurt. This is going to suck. But I've got to climb it. Like I don't know why. You've just got to check in. You've got to go find out how much that hill sucks.

Dude, hills are awesome. They're like prowlers and airdynes and everything else. Like I like – there, of course, is technique to everything. But once you are – once you're good at sprinting, you don't really think about how you're running anymore. You just run. And I like, as far as a conditioning method, what we used to do a lot, especially back when I used to fight MMA 10 years ago. It stopped four or five years ago, but when I was at University of Memphis, I used to do this a lot where I would run sprints. And you just run 100% full speed, and you just hang on as long as you can.

Yeah. There's no like, okay, well, I'm running 400 meters. I'm trying to get a good time. It's just run 100% effort, full speed until you give up. Yeah. And that's, you can do that on an airdyne. You can do it on a prowler. You can do it anywhere.

Yeah. But, you know, Julian Pinot talks about this a lot too. Like, you know, going to complete anaerobic fatigue is something that gets people hooked on CrossFit. But then they kind of they learn how to pace and they start doing multiple workouts a day and they they get away from it and there's reasons to get away from it you don't necessarily want to do that every single workout for the rest of your life but i think people get too far away from it sometimes where you're getting on an airdyne and saying okay i'm gonna go i'm just gonna go 100 full speed

until i just mentally fucking quit yeah and there's no, like, okay, I slowed down, and then someone's like, come on, go, go, go. And if you're able to speed up, then you're doing it wrong. Yeah. Like, just hang on at 100% until you give up. Rest five or ten minutes or however long you feel like you need to. If you've never done it before, you probably want longer. You know, if you've never done it before, do it two, maybe three times, and you're probably good. The more experience, you can do it more.

But that's something that I think a lot of people have gotten away from. I've even recently gotten away from because we've been mostly powerlifting and weightlifting. As we'll talk about here in a little bit what our current training looks like. But awesome conditioning methods I think a lot of people need to reincorporate into their training. And there's no way to really

so you can run a hill like sometimes that hill that I run every week is literally like you get to a point where it's like I don't know if I can pick my leg up again. Like the hip flexor has stopped. I can't. There's no – the leg just isn't going up anymore. And you're like, cool.

I think that's why – so I think one of the reasons I enjoy training with you now so much is like your background is so different from mine. Where my mind comes from, like I never had somebody teach me. I mean, I had smart people. Like, my dad knew what the hell was going on. He knew how to squat. My first strength coach, like, knew how to program, even though it was probably way too much, way too fast. And, like, he was going to get you strong.

It was just going to be in a really, really aggressive, probably decently sloppy way, but he's producing state champions at a very high rate. Like, he knew how to make you stronger than the guy that you were about to face off with and develop the confidence. So that part was, like, always just built into me of, like, the grind. Like, you have to be mentally tougher than everyone.

You have to be stronger than everyone that's next to you, and the only way to do that is by basically killing yourself every day. So was never about like oh here's the science behind weightlifting it's always like no go grind this thing out as hard as you possibly can and then when you're done you'll know that you can kill the person next to you like it'll be a lot easier to face off whoever you're about to go up against like i imagine being a wrestler you just know that you're going to be stronger than the person next to you or you're about to go up against like i imagine being a wrestler you just know that you're going to be stronger than the person next to you or you're more mentally tough like you've

you've been under that squat rack more than everyone else and that was like how the mentality of that weight room every single day so i i mean i never had a person that was like scientifically or bringing in any of the physiology or like there was never an energy system come on and there was never like a part of something that i grew i mean those first 10 years of weightlifting or training in general like i was there was nobody talking to me like hey you know when you're playing hockey you're going to be going as balls to the walls for 45 seconds and then you've got two and a half minutes to recover we should probably be working on some anaerobic threshold like we should have a little bit of these you know sprinting slash like 400 type you know time zone

periods and then two and a half minute rest and then back at it and we're going to do that we're going to like section off what a period would look like and then you get a break and then we're going to do it no no no no no no that like that never existed it was like grind out this 20 rep back squat all right then we're going to grind out something else and then you're going to go grind out a lap around the track doing lunges and then you're going to feel great about yourself and whether it works or not you're going to feel more confident on the ice. That's awesome. My training was so much more analytical than that. My training was like, I think if you widen your hands like a half inch,

we could probably push your force time curve to the left just a little bit. Peak power would be at.4 seconds and not.5 seconds. I'm like, oh, okay, that makes total sense to me. Can we draw a graph on the whiteboard now? That way I really understand what's the bar path look like. Where's my relative center of pressure for both of my feet did you were you guys locked in on like the nutrition piece too um the nutrition piece wasn't quite as technical but but certainly he was he was teaching me what had carbs fats proteins or majority carbs fats proteins of

course everything has a spectrum there but um and then how to cook the practical part was the most important part for me like as a a kid, I was just learning how to eat. I wasn't learning nutrition science necessarily. It was in there a little bit. Um, you know, he'd be like, Oh, this is olive oil. It has monounsaturated fats, mostly oleic acid. That's a, that's an omega nine. That means that blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. Uh, and that's, and I enjoy all that stuff. Um, but it was more like, okay, well, what does a meal look like? Okay. Well, we we have we have a meat and and a potato and a vegetable okay that's a pretty balanced meal kid go eat it you'll eat a lot of it by the way and and he was really into grilling tri-tip steaks and whatnot we had big fajita feeds all the time with just mountains of guacamole and and that that was like even to this day if he just have like a special place in my heart because fajita feeds were like the party with my weightlifter friends in high school

and so when i eat fajitas now i'm like this is special don't worry we're about to go have a fajita feed when this thing's done here we definitely should before we train smash fajitas come back and throw them up no that never ever happened to me. Literally, the grind was not just in the weight room. It was also in the food. So I worked construction. Literally the worst construction worker you've ever seen in your life. I think my full-time job with them was like, hey, go sweep this room because I have no skills in that game. But it was two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I have no skills in that game.

But it was two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, like four eggs in the morning, and then fried chicken. It was like, if you're going to be big, you have to eat big. That was like the running theme. I was like that kid that was like, I don't want to eat another chicken breast. I just cannot. There's not enough mustard in the world to make this chicken breast go down. I see so many chicken breasts. Chicken and rice, dude.

Couldn't do it anymore. That was college. Tuna. You were talking about your tuna in an orange juice. That's the kind of shit that you end up doing when you – So now my life is very nice because I don't have to force feed myself every second of the day. I was told, like playing college football, I was told, eat until you feel like you're going to throw up, wait for the feeling to go away, and then do it again. And that's your day.

And after a while, you're like, God, like food is just – you're not doing it because you want to, because you like because it tastes good like you just need calories you don't even care how you get them so blending tuna and orange juice just seems like a way to get some food in you because you can just drink it the better chug you chug a whole blender full of that and then you go to class the the more you could shove into a liquid form the more calories the better that was so that was after the arguments of i just can't eat another chicken breast it was like we settled on fried chicken so every sunday night it would be like just gigantic amounts of fried chicken being made in the house and tons of peanut butter and jellies because that

was like that was just like snack food like go smash a 700 calorie peanut butter and jelly no no thought to man i don't know if we need this much fat with this much sugar right now like i don't know if we're really firing with the hormone level or the hormones that we need for maximum strength gains but that was like that was like all I ate for four straight summers. But I had, when I got to school, we had decent food. The school that I went, you know when, like, so it was a boarding school. And they had, like, okay food. Like, we had a flat top grill that we could get all the eggs we wanted, whatever it was.

They would just, like, make it for you. Yeah, like a griddle. And then, like, but I got to eat anything I wanted like it was it was like a buffet every day so training at school was awesome and training and eating was so much easier because it's just like i had so many options and then i get home and you have to think like oh now i'm cooking a week in advance like well we're gonna go to costco and we're going to buy that gigantic bag of chicken breasts. And, oh, so plain, so gross. Dijon mustard on it, trying to make it taste somewhat decent.

Just stopped working. Did you ever go through a bodybuilder phase? That was the only training I knew about. Like, everything I did was just straight. i didn't know what an olympic lift was everything i did was just a straight up like bodybuilding routine yeah but i didn't know it was it was everything so it's all like when i you know like goal setting or whatever all i did was train for sports i never cared about bodybuilding but that was like the only training that I thought existed. Yeah. Like, it's crazy to think that you found a coach that actually knew, like, about speed and power. Everything that I knew was, like, maximum pump and then as hard as you can and then go home and eat and eat as much as you possibly can.

Yeah. There was, like, it was a straight-up bodybuilding program. I was doing buys and tries. I was doing crunches. Do you have anything for beginner lifters? Just getting a pump and just doing hypertrophy training, bodybuilder style, is actually a great base. Yeah, you're getting super strong.

Yeah. So I didn't know for a long time that people didn't do legs. I only knew about legs. Like, I played hockey. So if you didn't have legs, you're not going to do well. Like, skating is shifting hockey at 100% for 45 seconds. I still think is, like, we would always talk about, like, we would all train in the summer. And then you get back to school,

and you kind of fuck off for a little bit because, like, you're back with your bros. And, like, we had access to the rink all day long, so we could, like, we'd have free periods during the day, and we'd go down and skate and just, like, screw around. And, like, we just wanted to be on the ice because we didn't have access to rinks in the summer. So when we got back to school, it was like, finally we get to skate and, like, play. And we had a goalie. And we hadn't been able to touch the ice in so long. So, like, weightlifting kind of, like, fell off.

But the way that, like, we were able to kind of set up our training with the school was, like, we – you had to play a sport but we created this thing called like weightlifting class so our sport instead of having to play a sport they let us just train and play hockey which was freaking awesome yeah but yeah I only knew about bodybuilding I didn't know I didn't know that an Olympic lift existed there was none of that in the the like manuals that we were getting from our coaches. I thought we were ahead of the game.

I thought we knew what we were doing. But the fact that you had a coach that could teach you how to get a bar to your hips and to jump was – I didn't even do a box jump probably until I found CrossFit. I just didn't even know that speed and athleticism were trainable. I was just always somewhat athletic and always somewhat strong but the fact that like leg day was only the training that i did or like the bodybuilder but like 20 rep back squats i didn't know people didn't do legs until i got to college and it was like wow uh no dude that hurts i'm not doing that. And then, like, that was like –

You're only going to do 20-rep back squats for so long before you're like, okay, let's cycle on to something else. Yeah, but, well, just in general, even if it's a 5x5 or Wendler or whatever you're doing, like, legs were just like – it was like a three-day-a-week thing to me, especially in the summers where we were, like, growing and trying to get strong. Yeah. And then, you know, like, you meet people and they're like,

oh, I don't do legs. What're like oh I don't do legs what do you mean you don't do legs what do you do you just go bench press I don't get it, bench and pull ups that was mind boggling to me when I started meeting people that were like really

into weight lifting but didn't squat yeah I used to love doing bodybuilder workouts like every every football season in college we'd always come off the season and then we were doing linear periodization back then which which i don't do anymore at all uh but the first six or eight weeks was was hypertrophy which is basically like we would do bodybuilding and then and then there'd be a strength phase for another four to six to eight weeks, and that would be like powerlifting. And then it'd be like all strength slash power,

and that'd be like all weightlifting. And then preseason, it's all conditioning and pure speed work. So it's some weightlifting and then mostly running sprints and doing plyometrics and then a little bit of assistance work. There's always some assistance work in there just to keep on muscle mass and whatnot. But doing that linear periodization model gave me perspective into all these different types of training even though i don't choose to do linear periodization anymore it's more of a undulating fashion that we

kind of do these days having a bodybuilding phase and powerlifting phase and weightlifting phase was really really valuable that that way when i by the time i got to to graduate school and was competing in weightlifting, I had all these different perspectives that I could take into my training. And so when I felt like I needed one particular aspect or another, I already had that experience that I could just incorporate right into my programming. What did things look like when you got to college? Because that was like a huge transition period for me.

And like, so I didn't play college sports. So going from high school where my hockey team, we were second in New England my senior year. I think we still have the record. I don't really know, but I think we have the record for most consecutive wins. Shout out to the bros at Williston-Northampton. That was so stupid. So we were really good, but I didn't play in college.

And then I was like like what do i do and then beer showed up like girls as it does yeah girl girls were living in the same dorm as me and training all the more reason to be as jacked as possible. I know. Bro. My five-day-a-week training plan quickly went to, like, a two-day-a-week training plan. I don't know. And for the first two years of school, and the main thing was, like, I didn't have a sport to train for. And I didn't know that just being super strong was so awesome.

Like, I didn't have – did you fall into any of this? No. Did weightlifting in college? No, I didn't fall into any of that. Like, I went straight from high school, three-sport athlete, lifting weights very consistently to getting to college to play football. Football is the first season, you know, of the school year. And so, you know, graduated high school trained all summer for for football went straight into football season and then got out of football season and straight into

off-season training yeah there was there was no breaks there for me at all yeah i wish well i don't really care at this point but yeah it was totally uh it was like a really weird weird time where i just did not um i had no no larger goal to lifting weights it was like why why do I have to go do the most painful thing ever like am I really gonna go start squatting with no sport to play this weekend like it there was there was some there was a downtime there for a little bit two days a week I remember and just like the most unmotivated training sessions ever of just like oh i've been doing this for five years now like am i just supposed to keep going yeah um what who did you so you're your strength coach at college pretty good we didn't have a

strength coach that's right no no i have a high school strength coach who certainly still was willing to help out in college. What did the football team do, though? Well, D3, it was a small school, and they didn't have the budget for a strength coach, or they didn't think it was valuable or whatever. We definitely lifted weights as a team, but it was like the impromptu strength coach

was the head football coach. Yeah. And so there wasn't anyone dedicated specifically to that. But I was so interested in training that, you know, I was constantly researching and reading and talking to people about it and communicating with my strength coach. And I was writing programs for all my friends by then. So I was getting experience with programming and then a lot of trial and error. So I didn't have a mentor with me day to day. But I had training partners like Andy Galpin, who's a very good friend now.

Dr. Andy Galpin, who's a co-host on the show and whatnot. We went to undergrad together and played football together. And then we went to graduate school and competed in weightlifting together. So, you know, I mean, me and Andy were training partners. I mean, that's 15 years ago now. That's crazy. So we've been longstanding really good friends and have stayed in this little crazy world of ours. But back then, we were like the only two people that were doing snatches and cleans. Some people do power cleans.

It's football. But as far as like snatches and jerks and overhead squats and all that, no way. There was almost nobody else that were doing that at the time. So out all the people that that we were hanging out with on the football team well now i was probably the most experienced olympic weightlifter there and so a lot of people were coming were coming to me because i was the only one that had a coach on any of that stuff yeah even even the head football coach a lot of times was like coming over me to ask me questions because he it just wasn't his field yeah he knew some things of course but it just he wasn't like an expert at all yeah i didn't uh the the fire got relit for me so um the brian borstein he actually started the gym with me um but he do you did you ever do body for

life um i i certainly knew what that was i had the book the the video they put out on the on the contest was actually super motivating i remember i remember buying that and giving it to my mom like this is amazing look at these look at how much these people changed i thought it was really really cool and i had the book and i i did a couple of the workouts but i never like got into it bill phillips what a gangster like the invention of the 60-day challenge, a 30-day challenge. Body for Life. Body for Life was, so Brian, so right about that time, like, the internet started. And Brian was super deep into Body for Life.

He started that one as a teenager. And I think he finished, like finished sixth or something like that, which is really interesting because now Teresa Larson, who I'm also in business with, she was also Body for Lifer. So both of my business partners have been in the top five in the teenage division of Body for Life back in the day. But the Body for Life challenge, if you go back and read some of that stuff um so body for life actually it was like a really interesting impact on my strength condition because like i stopped following a

program and then my junior and senior year i got really back into it when i when i met brian and he was so deep into body for life that i was like, man, I guess, like, this kid's – we're going to take – we're going to do this thing. Like, I had a real training partner for the first time in two years, and he was so deep into it. Like, he was in the message boards. He was, like, talking to people. He was – whatever the communication outlet was, I guess it was, like, forums back in the day. Like, that was the first thing. And he did the competition.

And he was in the top ten for Teenage Boys, which is baller because there was actually thousands of people. And these transformation competitions. And the diet was pretty legit. If you look back, the diet's pretty solid. The training program is pretty solid. And if I'm ever in a quick pinch and need like a 20-minute workout, go do that interval workout that he prescribes every four days. It's like increasing intensities over four minutes, one-minute walk, five rounds. It's a pretty good afternoon.

He's one of the guys who really pioneered high-intensity interval training. Him and Alan Cosgrove were really influential there. We actually did an episode with Bill, episode 187 of Barbell Strug. Brilliant guy, really well-spoken. Highly recommend you go listen to the episode. He was one of the most pro people that we ever had on the show. When he showed up, he just knew everything about everybody. He was super well-informed.

Of course, he probably had like, do research on everyone. But he knew all right off the top of his head, like, all of our backstories. Like, he never got any individual piece wrong. And there was, like, five or six of us there. Like, that guy was, like, a true professional. So the video that they made was so hysterical. It was the first time. So they intro the video, andillips and his brother are running out

into the streets in the middle of new york city oh yeah in their underwear posing and then they come back and they're in the cameras and they're like the do you guys see what happens when people see the potential of the human body i was like even at like 19 20 years old i was like uh dude they had to stop because you were gonna get hit by a car like they're not they don't care that you're there's a dude in their underwear there's a lot of those people in New York City you were about to get hit by a car they had to stop but there's some super cool stories in the body for life because they had um there was like a guy that was missing a leg that had massive transfer all the stories

of the people that won they got everybody and I think it was like a guy that was missing a leg that had massive transfer. All the stories of the people that won, they got everybody, and I think it was like Colorado or something together. And it was like that video was so cool. The book was super cool. I still have it on my bookshelf. Body for Life was like – that was probably like a really – and I was smashing EAS supplements like myoplex. Dude, I was myoplexing after every workout.

I was just so hooked into that. Oh, yeah. My advisor in graduate school was one of the guys who did like the original research studies on myoplexing after every workout. I was just so hooked into that scene. My advisor in graduate school was one of the guys who did the original research studies on myoplex back in the day. Meal replacements. That was like the first. That's right. Did you, when you were, so I think the first time I ever heard of creatine, I was like 15. Okay.

Did you get into the creatine? That was like the first time it hit the scene. Yeah. Were you into supplements and stuff in high school? Well, again, I had a strength coach who was able to do some research and think through it at a level that I wasn't probably capable of when I was 15. But, yeah, he recommended some very basic supplements to us, and creatine was one of those things where he was like you know

there doesn't appear to be any major side effects it it seems to work there's been many research studies that shows that it works it specifically works for and he had taught us energy systems so he's talking about you know the types of movements and activities where it will help and the types where it won't so basically it helps with explosive power it helps with weightlifting helps with one rep max back squats and running 10 yard sprints you're a football player this is a perfect fit for you even repeated bouts of sprinting you recover better between you know bouts of 20 yard sprints that that type of thing you know he's like if you're an endurance athlete which you guys for the most part aren't it probably won't help you so much but you know it's cheap i

think i think you should take it and then you know a basic whey protein supplement and and that was about it back then we didn't really take a lot of stuff he he's a basics our best type of guy and he likes to keep it super simple and so he never really pushed just like a bunch of different stuff he was like here's like the top two or three these are going to work keep it simple take those only yeah i Yeah, I've never actually been able to stick to any supplements ever. But creatine in high school was like the one that for some reason everybody was like, you have to do this one. Turns out even many years later, like that one still kind of sticks around as like this one's really good for you.

If you're going to take something, take creatine. Right on. We're going to take something, take creatine. Right on. We're going to take a little break here. We'll get back. I want to hear about BJJ, and then, of course, we hit this CrossFit thing in life. Yeah, I want to talk about what we currently do for training now in our 30s, kind of post our most intense competition years. What did Paul Tech call it? Your warrior phase?

That's right. We're exiting the warrior phase, and we're moving into the king phase. Dig it. Here we go. This is the king's training. We're going to get into that. The king's training.

Let's do it. So we're just hitting the red button, right? Back on. Good to go. Thought a flying barbell was coming at me. Welcome back to Barbell Shrugged. We're talking training today. Talking about the lifetime of our training here.

We just broke into the 20s. This is where things start to go crazy for me. Oh, yeah? Start to find some real purpose. So the first, the teenage years were always about playing hockey and trying to chase this dream. And things started to fall off the rails just a tad for a couple years in college because there was no real goal.

And then, yeah, I started. I mean, we talked a little bit about Body for Life, but I started like instantly after college. I found this CrossFit thing. And, man, the fact that I could take the thing that I had been doing my whole life for 10 years nobody when they're 22 years old has 10 years of training in their belt really and then all of a sudden people like oh you want to you want to compete against me in back squats or compete against me in pull-ups like now we have this structure in which all of the friends can get together and massacre each other every single day in the ultimate stage of your life

where you'll just compete in anything. It didn't matter. Oh, you want to race me down the end of the street? Okay, let's go. I just needed competition. I was 22, and the fact that I could compete in something that i really enjoyed doing lifting weights and then also compete against people that i didn't know on this random message board at crossfit.com and talk shit to people that i didn't know and think that i was like really

cool in this community of very i I mean, I don't know. So you were just doing.com workouts? I only did.com workouts. For how long? Probably the first four years of all of my training was actually – so, yeah. Man, if there was, like, a – I like to think that I was somewhere inside the first 2,000 people that found CrossFit. I don't really know the actual numbers. If there was like a stamp of like, you're number 99, 100.

My buddy that was doing – that was training MMA, we both met in Brandon. He came to me. He was doing these weird things. He was like, I'm doing like a million pull-ups a day. I was like, what stupid-ass training program is this? Like, you should be doing sets of like three to five pull-ups with a lot of stupid-ass training program is this? You should be doing sets of three to five pull-ups with a lot of weight hanging in between your legs. You're not getting strong.

What are you doing? He'd be like, you've got to come try this thing out. I instantly went from trying this thing out to everyone hating me because all I did was talk about how much faster I was or the competition that was going on.

My girlfriend wanted to kill me. My friends, I would just shut up. Stop talking about the stupid fitness thing you're doing. And I, but that was the next like 10 years of training for me. Like laid the groundwork. I loved Glassman. Glassman was my coach even though i've made i think i've only met him once simple handshake at the games but he was like he was

legitimately like my coach i could i probably couldn't now but at some point without ever being a level one coach i think i could do the entire what is crossfit like opening to the seminar just because i watched him do it so many times back in the day. Like it just made so much sense to me. It was everything that I was looking for. Like all of the pieces of constantly very functional movements

done at high intensity, just like that was everything I needed in my life. Like I'm going to be this. It was like athletics, just everything to me. Like I was never the athlete that was, like, so good at one thing or, like, this is the best sport.

But, like, if you wanted to take me to the batting cage, like, okay, let's go do that. I'd probably do pretty well at it. Like, we want to go run? Okay, cool. You want to go play hockey? We can do that. Like, it just fit because I was, like, 80% good at pretty much everything.

And that's all I needed to do to be good at CrossFit was like just be a little bit better at most of the things. And I could win workouts against my friends. That's one thing Mark used to say about me back in high school and college. He was like, man, like, at the time he was like trying to keep it as a positive thing. He's like, you're not particularly fast or particularly strong or particularly good endurance, really. He's like, you could just get second place at everything. You'd be really well.

You just need to find something where you've got to be so well-rounded. CrossFit and the CrossFit of martial arts, MMA, are the two things that I excel at. I don't compete in CrossFit. I had shoulder surgery in 2008 after getting my shoulder torn out of place in my fourth MMA fight. Now I just don't do overhead things anymore. I can't compete in weightlifting anymore. I can't even do handstands or hang from a bar anymore.

My shoulder doesn't go overhead without being in searing pain anymore. Tried to fix that for a long time. Trust me, I tried to fix it for like 10 years. Everyone thinks they can fix it. It never, ever works. So I've kind of given up on trying to compete in things like crossfit but there's so many crossfitty things i can do but yeah some people are like that they're not they're not particularly you know at the end of the distribution yeah in one particular particular direction but they're

kind of good at many many many different things and cross it's a perfect sport for those guys it was it was right up my alley. But when did you start, like, actually training MMA? Because that wasn't, like, a thing either. Like, you were in all the worlds that didn't, like, MMA wasn't a thing. Like, wrestling was a thing. Right. But MMA hit the scene probably about the same time as CrossFit, right? No, MMA is ahead of CrossFit in a lot of ways.

So I used to watch UFC 5 where people were breaking arms. It was like an actual bar fight almost. You had to go to the weird CD video store to find UFC 7. Right. And then Ken Shamrock, I remember watching one with him where he just massacred people because he was like actually trained. Right. That was like the only introduction.

I had no idea that MMA was going to turn into like a thing. Right. Yeah, I always thought MMA was a little bit ahead of CrossFit as far as the popularity, like the peak of MMA I think happened a couple years before the peak of CrossFit. You know, the reality show, The Ultimate Fighter, came out in 2005. CrossFit Games started in 2006. So they both started to get popular right around the same time because those were the two things that launched each of those sports, respectively.

I was fortunate that I happened to, you know, I lived in the Northwest. I lived very close to Randy Couture's gym, Team Quest, and that's where I started training right out of college. And so my wrestling coach learned some aspects of wrestling from Randy in college. So the whole Team Quest wrestling style and the specific moves and the specific way they did those takedowns, that's what I learned in high school, training with that wrestling coach. And he would go over and wrestle with those guys back in high school. And so we would actually do jiu-jitsu after high school wrestling practice

like 20 years ago. That was like my first exposure to it. And then I decided I wanted to fight MMA. I started doing jiu-jitsu back in 2004. Actually, I started when I was in Ireland studying abroad. Then when I came back from doing jiu Jitsu studying abroad I was like I don't want to play football anymore I just want to go do Jiu Jitsu and kickboxing which I also

started while I was over there so getting into MMA out of coming out of football like weight training for football dude the transition lifting weights for football to lifting weights for MMA is a beautiful transition like you're already doing like maximum speed power and explosive Dude, the transition lifting weights for football to lifting weights for MMA is a beautiful transition.

Like, you're already doing, like, maximum speed, power, and explosive training. And that goes over very well for transitioning into MMA. You lay a little bit of, you know, conditioning on top of that, and you're a monster. Especially compared to other MMA fighters who traditionally, they do way more so now, especially at the pro, you know, highest level. But it was more like old school wrestling training where it's like you just go for jogs. Yeah. Like endurance training was like what people do and like lifting would make you bulkier, make you slow,

or you'd put on too much muscle mass so you would be outside of your weight class. Now you've got to wrestle up a weight class, and that's not good. You've got to maintain weight. But a lot of those are old-school ways of thinking that people have bypassed in a lot of ways these days. But having that training background going into the sport of MMA was beautiful. Shrugged fam, hope you're enjoying the show.

It's always fun just hanging out with me and Doug, right? We just talk and talk and talk. We can talk about weightlifting forever. Get over to MuscleGainChallenge.com. Free e-book on, they should just call this e-book, How to Get Super Yoked. Because that's what the goal of the Muscle Gain Challenge is. Gain muscle.

You're going to get yoked. See? Simple. It's marketing. Make it easy so people understand what you're gonna get yoked see simple that's marketing make it easy so people understand what you're telling them um the muscle gain challenge is a part of the program vault but make sure you get in there and download the free ebook at musclegainchallenge.com back to the show i have been on the mat like three times in my life and the very first thing that i recognize every time

i've done it is oh shit i'm way stronger than these people did you when you started like fighting yeah is that like competing in mma oh yeah did was that like instantly like oh wow i am way stronger than these people yeah that was pretty much always the case. Not necessarily because I'm so strong, but also because I didn't start fighting MMA until I was in graduate school. So I had a great training background, but also because I had a degree in kinesiology and human movement science and then a minor in chemistry and nutrition, and having practiced and just put a lot of focus and attention to cooking and nutrition.

As far as weight cutting went, getting my weight down and then rehydrating, getting my weight back up, I was much better at weight cutting than most people. So I always entered the fight way bigger know, way bigger than the other guys. And so that was a massive help. And then that also made it where I could fight, you know, because I lifted weights oftentimes at, in the 94 kilo class, 207 pounds. And then I would fight MMA at 170. So I would actually bounce up and down from 207-ish to 170 for a very small unit of time. That's a massive drop.

Yeah. A massive cut. Yeah, That's a massive drop. Yeah. Massive cut. Yeah, it's a massive cut. I mean, most of the cut, most of like the weight loss only got me down to about 190, and then I do 20 pounds in 24 hours, that type of thing. The biggest cut I ever did was one. Just like spitting into a box, like all the old terrible sweatsuits. Spitting doesn't do shit.

Really? For the record. No. Especially. That's so funny. I have a distinct memory of being on a hockey road trip. I don't know what school it was, but all the wrestlers came up beside the car that I was in, and there was nine guys spitting into a box, and they all had jacked up ears.

I was like, oh, that's the wrestling team. It's a part of the culture. But it does nothing. It does a very very very small amount and as a as like a last resort the only time i ever spit in anything was like when i was driving to weigh-ins and i was like fuck i'm barely gonna make it that's so funny i've literally lived like the majority of my life thinking like oh that's like part of it they're like in the sauna spitting into a box while riding a bike like when you

think about think about like a shaker bottle like how much does a shaker bottle have in it like say it's 24 ounces that's a pound and a half right yeah well well what the fuck what if you have to lose 20 pounds like what are you gonna spit until you fill up you know eight shaker bottles or whatever it is no dude if you ever try to fill up a shaker bottle by spitting into it go and try it it takes fucking forever and eventually you're just like wow like you just don't want to do it anymore your your mouth is getting getting sore but like getting into not drinking or eating anything for 24 hours is basically assumed yeah um if you have to make a big cut and then it's like okay we're gonna go to the sauna at you know 10 10 10 in the morning we're gonna weigh in at eight o'clock at night and we're going to go to the sauna at 10 in the morning. We're going to weigh in at 8 o'clock at night,

and we're just going to stay in the sauna for 8 hours or 10 hours. And you kind of get in and get out, get in and get out. The whole key with the sauna isn't that it's not that you're so dehydrated. That's specifically the danger is that you're at risk of overheating. Dehydration plays into the risk of overheating, of course. But we call it the crockpot method, like low and slow is kind of the way to do it. So you go in the sauna. This is what we did.

Not recommending this for anybody. This is what I did. But, you know, I'd go in the sauna. I'd lay on the floor where it's, quote, unquote, coolest. Of course, it's still warm. That's why you're in there sweating. And then I'd make sure to get out like every 15 minutes for a couple minutes. Like, you know, collect my thoughts.

You know, feel good. Be willing to go back in. And I would just sit in there and I'd watch like family episodes collect my thoughts you know feel good be willing to go back in and i would just sit in there and i watched like family episodes on my ipod because i had a video ipod at the time and uh and that worked out really really well for me you get out you weigh yourself you see where you're at and sometimes you leave an hour too early and sometimes you gotta stay late the only time i ever missed weight i weighed i probably dig these pictures up. You're going to see them. Um, I weighed one night, one 98, 24 hours out. Like, but that was like hyper hydrated. I had like a full meal in me. Yeah. Uh, and you know, a bunch of water and all that. Cause a lot of times we would,

I would hyper hydrate for, for a couple of days and then cut it off a hundred percent. Uh, and that, that seemed to help. And I would one 98 and then I weighed in at one 72. And so I, that was like the time where I missed it. in at 172 and so i that was like the time where i missed it and i was like oh i was like okay this that was a rough rough rough cut i missed it luckily thankfully the other guy actually missed his weight too and so we fought at harris in uh in tunica mississippi uh against a big crowd and and i was able to do that do that fight against a guy who weighed the exact same he weighed at 172 also, so that was super, super fortunate. But 26 pounds in 24 hours was the biggest cut I ever did.

That's insane. And I felt fantastic for the fight. It felt great. I had an awesome three-round. It was only three five-minute rounds, so it wasn't like a title fight or anything like that, but I felt really, really good for the whole event. I've always wondered, especially with wrestlers,

we had a coach, like a phenomenal athlete. His name is Greg Kuchan, but he made it to regionals. He's been doing CrossFit for like two months. Couldn't deadlift. He PR'd his two rep max deadlift at

315 at regionals. He was so good at the breathing and burpees and all the things because in wrestling you do a trillion burpees every day oh yeah and like your anaerobic threshold and all that stuff like everything that you do in wrestling just prepares you for pain that you're going to face in the crossfit world but it was impossible to get him to put on five pounds no matter how strong he got no how no matter how many jars of peanut butter he ate like he couldn't put weight on for the life of him um and do you is there any lasting effect

that you've had in your life of like i can always lose weight but putting weight on is impossible and is that like a thing in with people that are like cutting weight like that like your body just is programmed to be smaller or not small but like to to kind of get to a point where it knows like okay like we've programmed this thing i'm at 200 pounds i could get to 175 quickly but getting to 205 would be impossible um well, I think a lot of that has to do with what your body's kind of natural weight is. Like everyone has a natural weight that they would be if you kind of just ate normal and you worked out for, you know, 45 minutes, three days a week. Like what would you weigh, right?

And so in my case, I'm a naturally pretty like lanky, thin person. I'm always above my natural weight. If I stop training or i stop like focusing on eating i will lose weight yeah and it's the opposite of that for some other people some people like if they stop training and they don't focus on the food they're going to gain weight yeah and those are those are equally relevant struggles on both sides like if you if you want to weigh more and like everything you do like to weigh more like you just can't that's a pain in the ass and if if you try to lose weight and you just can't, that's also a pain in the ass.

In my case, for MMA, my natural weight is like 190. So my natural weight was right about where I would water weight cut from. And so I would actually have to put more effort into gaining weight than I would into losing weight. I think, for me, gaining weight is more difficult because it's more expensive. It's more time-consuming. You have to cook so much food, and you have to eat so much food, and there's no time off. Losing weight, for me, is a lot easier. It's like a break.

It's like, oh, I don't have to make so much food. I don't have to cook so much food. I don't have to spend so much time eating. I have all this extra free time to go do other things. This is fantastic. Eating really is its own job when you're doing any sort of competition. You're always thinking about eating. Getting stronger is – dude, eating sucks so much every time you're trying to put on mass.

It's like every three hours you're just smashing some sort of just crazy. The amount of cheese that you can put on things to make them tolerable. Like we used to make like burritos every day. And like they were just, I mean, they were probably 1,200, 1,500 calories a piece of just like cheese and guac and like this ridiculous wrap with half a pound of meat in it. Like I can't go to a restaurant and order off the menu because I have to order two meals. Like eating sucks. Eating now is awesome.

It's like enjoyable. I feel great afterwards. Meals are awesome when you show up actually hungry. Yeah, exactly. Wow, i'm really uncomfortable right now give me 10 minutes so i can make myself more uncomfortable right and like re-refeed if you've ever eaten like all day long and you still aren't gaining weight that's a frustrating place to be it's you're constantly uncomfortable and you just just don't want to

fucking do it anymore after after a of years. Yeah, totally. So while you were competing in MMA, did you guys open the gym? Because you guys were like one of the very first CrossFit gyms in the country, not just in Tennessee or Memphis. I was competing in MMA right before the gym opened, yeah. Do you remember what your affiliate number was? I don't. I don't remember

the exact number but I was going to say it was like, if I remember it was somewhere in the mid twos. Yeah.

Yeah. That was late 2007. So were you still competing? I mean you still randomly will. Yeah, I started competing

in MMA in 2006 and then I, my last fight was like 2013. Yeah. I think. Something like that. Nice. I think. Something like that. Nice.

How often were you competing? Not very often. Yeah. I didn't like to compete all the time. Well, for the record, I'm not competitive at all. I actually don't like competing in anything ever. Like my whole life, I've just wanted to train. Like training is the passion for me.

Competing is like, okay, I'll go do this. It's kind of expected of me. It's a fun way to test myself. But I'm not competitive at all. I'm a super cooperative, agreeable person. Even in MMA, it's like I'm hesitant to go out there and be the first person to punch. I always like to get hit. And then I'm like, oh, okay.

Now that we've agreed we're hitting each other i'll hit you back not the best strategy for an mma fighter but like i was always very comfortable with that i'll let you hit me first set go go ahead okay now i'm bad now i'm bad yeah a unique position i think i was in that most people were not not in but yeah it was it was a great run i i like competing every like six months. Part of that was because I just enjoyed training, didn't want to compete all the time. And then part of it was because competing in MMA made me fucking nervous.

And I like walking around nervous all the time. Once I signed up for the fight, then that was all I thought about. And I was trying to run and grow the gym and all that. It makes you angry. Were you like an angry, that anxiety of, like, fuck, I'm about to get punched in the face

and I just signed up for it. Like, having to go into a fight... So I've never actually been in a fight in which I... Like, the only fight I've ever been in in my life was, like, two of them, and they were both on a hockey rink. And let's be honest,

if you're ever in a hockey fight, it very rarely has to do with are you a good fighter, especially at the level that is like really about who's a better skater. Your balance and your ability to skate and control yourself on two little blades is really like the larger indicator of who's going to win this thing. Like can you get pulled around, have the center of gravity and hold yourself in place so you can actually throw a punch? So I've been in like two of these things and there was no chance I was going to be the

loser. I couldn't even imagine if somebody was like, hey, Doug, I'm going to fight you in two months and I'm going to be fucking ready. You totally better be ready or I'm going to fucking punish you. My whole existence would just change. I would be terrified. Right. Yeah, like not being a super competitive person,

but still signing up for fights and then having them looming in the distance like two, three, four months away. It's like I just wanted that day to come so I could just do it, so I could be done with it, so I could get back to my life. But I always, of course, really enjoyed doing it. When I was in there, I like fighting. I hate waiting to fight, but I love fighting, which is why I like training because you're just doing the fighting part.

You're not just sitting around waiting for this one big day. That matters a lot. It did matter to me which is why which is why i was you know always thinking about it yeah it's interesting because i so the the crossfit thing to me was like legitimately like every single day we competed there was no um there was no regionals there wasn't the games was like a backyard barbecue and i actually had no interest in even going to them because it just it there was no incentive like why am i gonna go to california to run that hill like i can just run the hills out here against my friends i don't need to meet those people yeah and are you a super

competitive person i'm i like like if you play monopoly with your family over thanksgiving and like somebody cheated and you caught him would would you be like, fuck that shit! You can't do that! Monopoly. Would you be all pissed off? Monopoly, not at all. So, my sister is the intellectual. Because I wouldn't care at all.

I'd be like, oh, we're here for fun. Monopoly. Who gives a shit? So, this is actually a really, really good story. So, we have, like, a yearly Scrabble battle. And my mom and my sister, it's, like, a legitimate's like a legitimate like battle like they go at it and i just look at them like this is intellectual battle like i don't want anything to do with that but if you wanted to race me to the stop sign down the street yeah i'm definitely interested

and i definitely care so in athletics and in playing, I find myself to be very competitive. Less so now, but in the 20s, it was the most important thing. If we were going to run up a hill to ring a bell, I definitely wanted to get to the bell first, and it was really important to me to get to the bell. The intellectual battle, my sister, she's a gangster.

She's like lawyer, Princeton, D1 athlete, baller. She loves an intellectual battle. Like Scrabble, we literally sat down and we lay out the Scrabble board like Christmas. It's nice and friendly. I looked over at her. She's sitting next to me, and she was looming over this empty board. And I was like, you look like you're a freaking tiger,

like a lion about to attack your family right now. I just get out of here. I know I'm about to lose this thing. She is ruthless. So that type of stuff, it's not competitive in everything, but there are things that matter where I'm like, yeah, I'd like to beat whoever it is to the whatever stop sign we're sprinting to. I'd like to know that I can get there first.

Yeah. So what was your training like right before we started training together? So, actually, I mean, man, there's from where when I found CrossFit to when we started training. I mean, that's that was a that was like a that's a 10 year gap of I did every training program that I think you could possibly do um so i crossfit really gave me like the the platform in which i like learned about strength and conditioning and like a lot of the stuff that you learned very early i learned through crossfit of like periodization um understanding energy systems opt was like a huge piece of that so my partner at the gym b went and did the OPT cert and like learned about all this stuff and that was really cool Brian was like super technical in his programming

and I probably was like half into the technical side of things and the other half was like very much just the grind still like I love we used to play on a pretty regular basis. It was like, we just called it like WOD roulette, where it's like you get your training buddies together. Right. There's one pen. There's one whiteboard. Go write something up. Someone would write like a time domain.

Then someone would write like something they needed to work on. Right. If you really wanted to get after it, you could like write something you're good at. And then we just battle it out. Like there was a lot of, there was a lot of science of sciencey pieces to it there was also a whole lot of just like let's get after each other today um and i think a lot of the early days of crossfit like the people that were in it didn't really have that background like i've heard you in interviews

before where you're talking about like we had crossfit on the front of the door but it was really like a strength conditioning facility and we tricked people into like doing like single leg work and all this stuff and like we we tried we tried our best to make it as good as it could be for sure we added things we thought would be helpful and we removed the things we thought the risk reward the risk reward ratio was not that was not needed to be yeah we're trying to keep people healthy. Well, specifically in my training. In the gym, it was different. And we were programming for other people. But specifically for me, it was not that at all.

And it was every day we tried to PR something, which was stupid. Well, these are the reasons that CrossFit became popular. It's social, and it's motivating, and it's fun, and people like it. So Monday, for probably three years, so I did Wendler. Wendler was like the first. I mean, I did some pieces of this stuff earlier on. But when I really, really made like a. So there was like a. I went to sectionals before the open.

I went to sectionals in Southern California. And I was like the kid in the gym that was able to go out and drink three nights a week in grad school. And then I'd show up on a Saturday morning with a big hangover and do like a three-minute brand like i was just young enough dumb enough strong enough that you could be like good in your own gym right so you think your shit doesn't stink until you move to southern california and i went to sectionals and i took 51st and i didn't even finish or it was the first time i'd never finished a workout they time capped me it was like dude you suck and then there was like i realized that like in california there was people that were doing this and gave a shit like it was real and that gave me a framework in which i needed to be better and that's when it like it had already hit where i was like i'm just

training and this is fun and I can battle with my friends. And it was like, oh, wow, there's a lot of people doing this with their friends. I don't want to just be the best amongst my friends. I want to be the best like amongst everyone. So we opened the gym. I was already training with a pretty intelligent. I had a Paul Beckwith. I trained with him.

He is more or less a NFL slash University of South Carolina strength coach. He was like the strength coach at USC. And then now he owns Apex Performance in South Carolina. If you're there, go hang out with him. He's awesome. But super, super knowledgeable guy. He was the first person that really taught me, like, no, this is like how you program a workout and here's how you coach and here's how you like put the pieces together to like i watched him grow his gym i walked in there was like 26 members when i left um after

grad school two years later it was like 275 like he's fucking awesome um so much education that just like just hanging out in there learning from him like he was so much education that just like just hanging out there learning from him like he was the first person that really like brought the whole package the system of how you do this thing um so then we opened the gym out here and it was literally like from day one like we are going to the games like that was i didn't open the gym thinking i was like running a business that was like many years later it was like we were the sixth gym in san diego and all of san diego county and down there's probably 150 of them or something like i don't even know um but we were number six so there was invictus downtown they had one location at the time there was us and everyone else and i

was like we're gonna beat the shit out of those guys every year like they were the they were like the cream of the crop they still are um but they were like cj had real programming he had bergner in there all the time he had like he just had like all these people that were really really good coaches coming in and teaching this stuff on a really high level and we were like poor kids at the beach. We had no resources. We were working out of this. The ceiling was like eight foot tall.

We didn't even have mats on the ground. Half the gym had mats, and I was just like, man, we are the grinders. This thing is going to be really hard. But as the gym grew, programming got better, knowledge got better. Dude, I think I did every single possible program that you could ever imagine. But CrossFit was so cool because it was like when the Open started, we had, like, real dates that we had to peak at. But you couldn't peak in the Open.

You had to peak at regionals. And then if you were actually good enough, which I never was, to get to the games, like, you actually had this three-part season in which you had to maintain this thing throughout the entire year. And it really turned into a chessboard for athletics for me. I had a real reason to train

and a framework in which I had to learn and freaking loved it. Also leads to, you know, if you snatch, try and snatch and clean the jerk, you're one rep max every single day. And you're on a 20 rep back squat program. And you're on 5-3-1 program. Like sooner or later, the most you can lift every single day is going to take a toll on your body.

But I think. Your joints aren't going to like you eventually. It's going to be a long battle. So, yeah, I like to think of my CrossFit career really But I think – Your joints aren't going to like you eventually. It's going to be a long battle. So, yeah, I like to think of my CrossFit career really as like I was a somewhat large fish in a really small pond. We went to regionals four times? Yeah. Yeah, four times.

And, yeah, like, dude, I was broken. I mean, there was not a single joint in my body like i in an olympic weightlifting competition i dropped a 205 pound snatch on my big toe and shattered it and the next day i was right back at it because regionals was like three weeks out and i was like i got a snatch today so i just like taped my toe together and your ankles get fucked up. Way too much volume on that, which leads to a knee, which leads to a hip, which leads to the shoulder. I like to just – my body is because of the things that we are doing now. But towards the end, I'd just be like, yeah,

I'm basically like a tic-tac-toe board of jacked-up injuries. Like, not – there was nothing, like, torn. Like, clearly my body feels great now, but I never tore anything, never did anything. Like, super stupid, but consistently always banged up. And also realizing that, like, 22-year-olds are always going to be 22. So when you turn 32 and you're banged up, like, you better find a different goal quickly. Yeah. Because you don't want to be that guy that's chasing the dream and with no chance,

genetically no chance of going anywhere. Yeah. Yeah, the older I get, the more I'm like, fuck. I went through that phase where I was very beat up. All my joints are hurting all the time at one point I thought I had something like seriously wrong with me like I must have like a blood disease or something like that like something I've rheumatoid arthritis like something is wrong with my body not like my joint hurt because I did too much but there

really was what was going on I was just doing too much competing weightlifting competing in MMA doing a lot of strength conditioning on the side I lived in the gym quite literally i lived at the gym that was my house i lived i slept above the office so we just we trained a lot yeah we we loved what we were doing and and i'd go to weightlifting and then i'd go to jujitsu and then i go to kickboxing and then i go to mma and that was like 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. every day. And then I'd teach classes in the morning. That was just what we did. And it was way, way, way, way, way too much. And it was really fun, which is why I kept doing it.

But it totally caught up with me. Now that I'm in my 30s and I'm not competing anymore, my only goal basically with every training session is to have fun, feel good when I leave, and then some tangible, externalized, I got stronger, I got a good time. Those are all tertiary. Yeah. One of the things that was really cool and still is really cool

when I see the landscape of CrossFit is the real athletes showed up. I don't think I was one of those real athletes like they I competed whatever however many times but I I just even when we got to regionals and all the freaks got together I never had a chance of hanging out with those people at the top and that was like a really so like we've had Ryan Fisher on the show. He was seriously one of the very first people. He walked in the gym, and I was like, he had just come back from being on the Olympic bobsled team, and I was in the middle of a 20 rep back squat program,

and my lifetime goal was to do 315 for 20. And I was pushing it. I was getting close, like 300, 305. I'm like two weeks out, this looming, miserable set of close. Like, 300, 305. I'm, like, two weeks out. This, like, looming, miserable set of 20s coming my way in two weeks. And he walks in and throws 335 on the bar and squats it 27 times. And I was like, oh, my God. Like, there's people like you that exist?

Ryan's a fucking monster. Yeah. I had no clue that, like, I thought I was strong. And's a fucking monster. Yeah, I had no clue that I thought I was strong. And then I saw strong and I was like, oh! Oh no! Like I'm never going to be there.

And now when I look at the people that are doing it, he doesn't even matter. He is a total freak. And then you... I would watch him at region regional sometimes and i'd be like man he looks really average but if you put him next to me he looks like the freakiest athlete that's ever lived and you know he's finished top five three times and at socal and all the things and yeah but when you put there's a lot of freaks out yeah these days they finally showed up and

you know i so anytime regionals comes around and like i'm watching it on tv or whatever especially the games and i just look at it i'm like i should never tell people that i competed at regionals like i'm a fraud like those people are real i don't play the same game that they played like it's a very different sport now oh yeah it's only becoming more competitive mma went through the same thing like Like, anyone that competes in the UFC these days would, like, have fucking easily been the champ in the first UFCs. It would have been hysterical to watch. One of the first guys that was, like, super famous was, like, Chuck Liddell. Oh, yeah.

And when he started getting beat, I didn't realize that that was, like, it was, like, oh, no, no, no. All the really good guys are about to show up. He was just the super freak at the beginning, like fantastic at what he did, best in the world for a long time. It was like there was a whole crop of people that were watching him, and then it was like, I mean, it happens in every sport. Like Tiger Woods is getting his shit kicked in by all the 16-year-olds that he inspired to play golf.

He's like, hey, bud, all that money you were making really inspired some people to learn how to hit a golf ball, and they're about to eat your lunch. That's right. So what does your training look like these days? What does your week look like? So, yeah, so the goal, I mean, we mentioned at the beginning of the show, but literally my goal is to have as much fun and move as much as possible. And one of the number one things that has to happen is me and you got to get

together and hang out. That's like the kind of the center point. The text message goes out every Sunday and we figure out a day in which we get to bang weights around and everything is kind of centered off of that. So I, in going through all the injuries and going through just the nicks and dings and everything, I have kind of created this super cool little system for myself. It's, it's seven days a week.

I have to do something every single day. It's like in my calendar. Um, there's no specific day in which I do specific things, but seven days a week I go. So usually on a Sunday I go for a a 45-minute to an hour-long trail run. We have some really cool hills around here. I find that my body reacts really well to being on the trails,

being in whatever kind of nature environment we have around here, which is really easy in California because it's February. I can run with my shirt off and get some sun, and life feels really good out here. Yeah, trails are dope. So that's one day. So I'm getting, you know, five, six, seven-ish miles in, climbing hills, uneven ground.

Body loves that stuff. If I run three miles on the pavement on flat ground, joints hurt really bad the next day so have found a way to get long conditioning in in an enjoyable manner which is not easy another day well there's three days of weight lifting and all of it i really consider just to be like structural maintenance like lifting weights to me used to be proving myself and how strong i was to not just myself but to other people and like that was like my my worth was like tied up in it and now it's like i show up i if we deadlift 225 pounds or 400 pounds i'm just stoked that we get to

turn our glutes on and hamstrings and lift weights for the day like Like, the actual, I don't think that I'll ever get weaker at this stage of my life if I were to pick up 225 pounds every day. So that's like a solid day of weight training. Usually I'll try and get like a day of CrossFit in those three days of weightlifting. So even if it's like a Metcon with burpees and kettlebells, I pretty much consider that a weight training day. I try to hit a hot yoga class once a week.

I find that just being in kind of like a sauna and stretching happens to be really cool. And then one day a week, I go to some sort of yin yoga class or breathwork class. Like tonight, I'll be going to some breathwork class to just chill out. I've kind of structured a system. Oh, and then I have to climb that stupid, it's probably 200 meters straight up hill outside my house, which I that's like it's like a weekly commitment to myself so I kind of I when I think about like a week of training now I really tried to balance the intensity with the slow and turn recovery into like a movement piece which is really cool

with like the yin yoga or breathwork classes in which you're like, everything is down regulation, but you're still doing some movement pieces and like still connecting with your body. Weightlifting days, we lift some pretty heavy weights. Well, for what we do. One day of CrossFit to get some like pretty high intensity, short interval stuff. Hill sprints, really high intensity um and then yoga class is pretty pretty cool but just hot hot class sauna stretching um but i think i've found like a pretty decent balance and most importantly is it's just much more fun like i've eliminated all of the mental like i should be doing something to, like, now it's like, oh, I totally get to do this.

Like, this is awesome. Like, weightlifting is, dude, I love lifting weights. I love being active and moving. And the fact that I get to do it professionally, I guess you could say, in some capacity, like, and talk about it and learn about it. Like, it's, over the last 21 years, it's the single theme that has led to everything else in my life. Like, if I had never found weights, I would have never, I'd never be talking to you right now. I wouldn't have opened a gym. I wouldn't have, I met my wife in the gym. Like, I own a house. That's weird. weird all because i just really really enjoyed picking

up weights um so exact same boat so the fact that uh all those things yeah so all of everything that has ever happened in my life has come because i just really enjoy picking stuff up off the ground and um eliminating the ego out of training has been probably like the best thing that has happened to me in the last three years um finding a training partner like you that like we just fucking vibe and the whole thing is about hanging out like kills that if you are lifting weights and you're trying to beat somebody at something all the time, yo, you're focusing on all the wrong things. That may be the old man in me talking, but you're focusing on all the wrong things.

You should totally be focused on just hanging out, having a good time, enjoy your life, because you're always going to be able to power clean whatever. It's so stupid to be focused on that warrior phase or whatever. But we only get together. What do you do the days that I'm not hanging out with you? Basically, my training is split between doing jiu-jitsu and lifting weights. And then everything else is an afterthought. These days, it's kind of assumed that I'm going to go to jiu-jitsu

if it's possible during my day. There's really only like a class or two each day that i can make with my my current schedule mostly involved involving kids yeah um and i like to be around in the mornings with my kids i like to be around in the evenings once they get get out of school and we have dinner and the evening i like to spend with them put them to bed reading books and that whole thing and so i don't generally do anything in the evenings. And so there's only like a 9 a.m. or like a noon class for jiu-jitsu that I can ever make. If I can make it to that, I go to that, depending on how I'm feeling

and how beat up I am at the time. I got some neck issues from jiu-jitsu and MMA and football and weightlifting and all that. That's actually the reason I don't fight MMA anymore. It's because of my shoulders, because of my neck. And jiu-jitsu is a lot easier on that because it's not so much like holding onto the head like no-gi or like wrestling or like MMA.

It's a lot more holding onto your martial arts pajamas, your gi, the lapel of your gi putting that force or that loading across your shoulder rather than directly on your neck. So I love jiu-jitsu. I go to jiu-jitsu whenever i can same deal there like when i'm at jiu-jitsu it's much less about winning and beating other people of course i still want to win i still want to be competitive i want to do my best but it's about it's about learning it's about getting better it's about having fun it's about seeing you know my jiu-jitsu friends uh and i just really

enjoy being there i'm at an awesome school at gracie Baja Encinitas here in Encinitas. Really high-quality instruction, great culture, just love being over there. So if I don't go there, then it's basically assumed that I'm going to lift weights in some capacity. If I can't make it to the gym for whatever reason, then it's like, okay, I'm going to run a hill sprint, or I'm going to go for a trail run, or I i'm just gonna do a long mobility session or something like that uh typically for for lifting weights i actually love the structure that we're following right now like 10 years ago i followed a very similar structure and i felt amazing like whenever i do speed reps i do power training i always feel good i feel i always leave the gym with more energy than when I came in.

My joints rarely hurt. I feel athletic and powerful. I'm never overly tired. I'm never overly sore. So power training, you know, doing like, you know, it's kind of like Louie's dynamic effort method. You're doing like 60%, 70% for like doubles, you know, 10 sets of doubles. That type of training.

Weightlifting is like that. Weightlifting is mostly power training. You're doing sub-max loads for the fastest reps that you possibly can with crisp, clean technique. And so what we've been doing a lot lately for me and you, as of course you know, we come in, we build up to a daily max of something, say it's a deadlift, whatever a heavy technical single is. Maybe you get two of it, but you just choose to do one and then we do down sets you know say we do

you know 80 for you know five sets of triples or whatever it is and then we do speed work so say we do front squats for you know six sets of doubles at 60 and then we do some hypertrophy work which is which is usually single leg work on the lower body day. So we might do, you know, three sets of 12 for, you know, safety bar reverse lunges, you know, from a deficit or something like that. That's like the only like hypertrophy compound movement that we typically do. And then after that, it's a bunch of assistance work. And doing a lot of assistance work lately for me has been, has felt really, really good. So, you in the case of lower body, hamstring curls and even leg extensions, putting a kettlebell on my foot and just sitting on a box and just doing terminal knee extensions, calf raises even, glute bridges,

Brett Contreras style, putting a bar across your hips, laying on the ground, just getting that terminal hip extension, and just getting a pump in all the prime movers of my over of my lower body yeah on lower body days and the upper body days are really similar um and there's some you know some undulating periodization type things that we we um fluctuate our volume uh week to week to week and the rep range has changed a little bit week to week to week but but by and large, the template is pretty much the same, where we're building up something heavy, we're doing power work, we're doing hypertrophy work, and then we're doing assistance work,

and then we're done. And that type of training has doing like an upper-lower split like that, which is kind of like a four-day-a-week thing, and then the other day it's just assumed that I'll be at Jiu-Jitsu if I'm in town. That type of training makes me feel fantastic. It's really fun and it's very in our case like since we're training partners like it's uh it's very it makes it very easy to have it be like a like a hangout session yeah the whole time like you do a set i do a set you do a set i do a set we're just we're hanging out we're talking we're having fun uh viv is often there as well you know she's

in the mix and we're hanging out talking with her we have a great trio of people to lift with um we met con on occasion uh but met cons are they there's a bonding element to met cons because you kind of burn yourself into the ground then it's like high fives all around we do this thing together we suffer together that type of thing but but you don't really talk during that con so you really hang out as much during that cons because you're trying to get some work done. And, of course, that's a good thing. But if you're just trying to have a good time, then I feel like Metcons almost take away. It's like going to a movie on your first date. It's like you're just going to sit there and not talk to each other.

It's like, well, okay. We did something together in that school, but it's not like the best date, especially if it's your first date. One thing that I really dig about the training, and sometimes I want to pop Andy Galpin into the conversation and provide real science and magic to what I'm experiencing, but our training program keeps you strong as shit. Yeah. You get to a level of strength,

and, like, it never goes away, assuming you're on a good, like, maintenance program. And I don't even think what we're doing is, like, a maintenance program, but, like, for a longevity, like, we could do this training program probably for a very, very long time. That's the main reason I like it, is because I can do it for a long time. Like, we've only been doing it for this training program probably for a very, very long time. That's the main reason I like it is because I can do it for a long time.

Like, we've only been doing it for this specific program. We've only been doing it for about seven or eight months, something like that, like with this exact setup. And I put on, like, 10 pounds in the last eight months, and my joints feel amazing. I got good energy, and, like, it's all been good. Yeah, like, I feel like, I mean, I haven't done Olympic lifting in, like, six months and can still snatch and clean and jerk.

Well, maybe not the jerk part because going overhead is just a little freaky. But snatch and clean, virtually 90-plus percent. I mean, for the Open, I cleaned 300 pounds last week. That's fucking gnarly for me. And all I do is exactly what you said. It's like, hey, today we're going to pick up something a little bit heavy. Cool. Like, max for the day.

Sounds good to me. Doesn't need to be the one-round max of my life. But today that feels heavy. You've turned on all the muscles. You've challenged your brain. You've, like, gotten to this point where this point where like 90 is going to be doable most of the time so that extra 10 who gives a shit and it keeps you really strong and dude the isolation stuff that we do man it goes like straight back to the bodybuilding stuff and i

wonder like there was like a place on bodybuilding.com where it's like here's where your life is right now like go do this program like are you injured do this program are you like are you in your 30s and want to do this for the next 50 years do this program and i feel like we're on this like the programming right now keeps us like really healthy it keeps us really strong because we do touch something heavy and some sort of squat dead, push-pull something. We're doing something very heavy every single day. But then everything else is just maintenance and keeping all the muscles turned on the right way

so your body functions properly. And I don't think I've ever, like, I never thought that I would have a training plan that was seven days long or, like, goals for seven straight days in a row where i never take a day off yet my energy is high everything is like everything feels great yeah i assume that if you weren't four or five days going balls to the walls like you'd lose everything but now i'm training more frequently seven days a week my joints feel better but it's because i'm one the programming is tight everything's like you're doing the right things but i'm stronger just as strong as i've

ever been and significantly healthier which is the most important thing to me driving nuts by the way when people come in after like taking like the weekend off or something like that and they're like oh i'm kind of out of shape i took the weekend off i'm like what are you talking about like like if you train all the time you took the weekend off you should feel fucking fantastic yeah you should be like rested and ready to go like you didn't lose you didn't lose any fitness you should be recovered yeah well there's you know we're gonna we're gonna talk about lifestyle factors as well uh but we have uh yeah man people i people, there's a lot of dogma that just goes on in all of it, and people feel like this warrior, like,

I have to go fucking die every single day or it's not working. You're like, man, let me teach you about the last 21 years. Listen to this podcast today, and we will tell you that the best way to do it is to not try and kill yourself every single day you walk into the gym. Like, enjoy your life. Find a friend that you like hanging out with. Well, that's something that the MMA, to reference that again, definitely the MMA world learned early on. Like, all the early guys, they just showed up and fought every day.

You can't do that for very long. Like, eventually you have to decide to train to fight. You don't just fight. You don't go to football. You don't go to the NFL and they just like play a fucking just hard-nosed football game every day where all you do is fucking smash full speed. They have a couple days a week they do something like that. And then they have other days that it's just walkthroughs.

And they do a lot of studying. There's a lot of, like, watching film. And there's, like, looking at your plays. And there's, like, you know, they have a playbook. And there's homework. Like, there's many other aspects to the sport rather than just fucking smashing helmets all day long. I think a lot of the people, I mean, I really have no idea, like, what Frazier's training looks like on a regular basis. I know, you know, there's so many aspects to being a great CrossFit athlete.

Now I actually watch some of the YouTuber videos, and I am blown away at the level of gymnastics sometimes that these people are like. It used to be like if you could do it. When I was going to regionals, it was like if you were a girl and you were good at muscle-ups you were going to be in the top 10 because so many girls just couldn't do them i would literally watched a youtube video of brooke ends the other day doing like not just muscle-ups it was like strict muscle-up to like front lever to or or not front level, but like, like these combination like routines on the rings. And it looks so tight, like so pretty.

And I just was like blown away at the number of skills that these people have. So I don't know what the volume looks like or the beating, like how hard they're working, but I know that whatever they're doing like the skill level of these people they're practicing skills all the time I don't know if that means like they're back squatting to 90% every single day or like I don't I don't know what the full training regimen looks like but it's so impressive what some of these people are doing but they have to be there has to be whatever they're doing it has to be so well planned out on a volume side because the number of skills

that they're doing, the progressions, you just can't go 100% like they're doing it. It'll be very interesting to interview and talk to some of these people about what actually happens. I have a feeling

it's going to be more than what we're doing, but somewhat similar on like the kind of like a health and maintenance side for many months of the year of like pick up something heavy, let's go sprint some hills, keep our aerobic system going, lift heavy, work on technique all the time, work on skills all the time. But, yeah, those days are over. You have to practice skills now. It's like practice that goes into.

It's not just go beat the shit out of yourself. Three, two, one, go. Yeah, I think you should balance learning, practicing, and doing. Yeah. I got that specific statement from, I got an Evan Pagan, like that, that mantra or that,

that framework balancing and learning, practicing and doing has really helped me over the years where you're not just showing up across the gym and just doing, you're not just looking at a Metcon and then smashing the Metcon. That's a, that's a part of it. You should do that. But then there's also outside of the gym,

like how much are you listening to things like this? How much are you reading blog posts? How much are you designing training programs for yourself or for other people or analyzing training programs or et cetera, et cetera? Like you have to study the sport. You have to be a student of the sport. That comes down to not just, again, signing up for a MetCon, not signing up, writing a MetCon and then doing it. Before the MetCon or before your workout or what have you, what are the skills that you just don't have down yet? Where's your technique faulty?

Or what are your major weaknesses or limitations? And sometimes it's structural. Maybe you have a mobility restriction that keeps you from being able to do a certain skill. Like if you don't have full flexion overhead, you don't have full shoulder range of motion, well, your kipping pull-ups aren't going to be as good as they would otherwise because you're blocked at the shoulder joint. So you've got to go fix that. That's, in my mind, an aspect of skill training.

In order to accomplish a skill, you have to have the capacity to do the skill. So there's practicing the pull-ups or the kipping pull-ups or whatever they are and then there's okay making it where it's possible to do them and that that in this example involves fixing your shoulder flexion yeah who are you learning from the most these days or who's like on your radar and why are they on your radar for like people that you're learning from? Well, I mean, the majority of my learning these days is having conversations like this. Well, yeah, we show clearly. So we go around and interview people constantly. That's why we're here.

So, yeah, that's the majority of my learning for fitness and strength and conditioning is just, you know, being in the gym, talking with people. Certainly, I still practice and work out and I learn by doing. But as far as like getting new knowledge from sources, like people are my sources now. Our guests teach me a lot, both on the show and off. I'll answer what I was referencing. The answer that you wanted you told me about it probably like two three weeks ago maybe a month ago um that has kind of all it's like all of the science research is all in one place i wish i could now i just i'm dying you're talking about examine.com

yeah yeah there you go examine.com is fucking totally awesome if you like if you want to know all the studies up, right? Specifically for supplements, yeah. If you're like, oh, I don't know anything about alpha lipoic acid. I need to figure out if that's actually good for me. Where can I get a comprehensive look at all the research that has been done on that particular supplement that's relevant to what I want to use it for? Which means, is it going to make me stronger is it going to give me better endurance like it's going to affect my my blood pressure or my cholesterol levels or you know what aspects of health do do real research does real research show uh it's either effective or not effective for yeah i love the fact like

that we get to talk to these people some of these people that we get to talk to are so radical. Like, they, like, Mike Isertel. Guy's a killer. I was thinking that this morning, actually. I was on my laptop. I was like, I seem to Google everything Mike Isertel and just watch all the videos, go to his site, look at all his products. He's a brilliant dude, and he's hilarious. In doing the research on that episode before the interview, I literally, like, I, you Google his name,

and I was so stoked on, he literally has taken every single large muscle in your body and written the rep ranges for growth, the rep ranges for, like for strength, power, intensity, and recovery. And then he gives the exercises. It's these long-form, crazy, awesome articles, plus the science, plus the rep ranges, plus specific exercises. It just goes on and on and on.

And he is just like, man, I wish we had had five hours to interview him and actually get into everything that he knows about hypertrophy and training. The interview you guys did with Brad Schoenfeld, killer. Love hanging out with Breckin Charis. That guy is super rad. Of course, Andy Galpin. I love hanging out. He is fucking out there.

He knows way too much stuff. I mean, I even said it in the episode, but he was like one of the first people. I was like, wait a second. They're scientists that talk about strength training? Like, no way. Speaking of Brad Schoenfeld, I want to read his hypertrophy book, which I haven't gotten a copy of yet, but Andy's friend's a brat, and he was telling

me about that book, and I looked up online, and I needed to order it. Apparently, it's a very, very comprehensive book about all the research that has been done on hypertrophy training. Maybe that's what we'll do. Incredibly well-cited and supported. We'll have a Bro Book Club episode, which we just crank out a book. Schoenfeld's

book is Bro book club number one if you're out there listening make sure you listen or go read it buy it we'll talk about it let's do it i'm totally down to do that but we'll have we'll have maybe grab brad and then uh breck and traris or andy or whoever and bring them on the show for it you guys want to see how show episodes happen that was it right there um but yeah those guys i i the fact that there's somebody studying it and like there's so much stuff out there and i i like i said earlier like my whole the first half of training to me was just such a grind and just work harder squat more you know mike isertel in in his episode was like...

That's episode 303, by the way. If you haven't watched it, it was probably my favorite episode we've ever done. Content was great, and he fucking just smashed it personality-wise. He was hilarious the whole time. I literally listened to it on the way up this morning. Him and Paul Cech were able to...

Another one. Go listen to that one too. Both of those guys, like, nailed the stages of my training and my life so well. Like, when Paul was talking about this, like, warrior phase where you have to go prove yourself and then getting into the king and queen phase, just the stages of life, he just nailed. And he was nailing so many pieces of like the over training but mike really drilled home the over training piece to me when like froning came out like i feel like froning like set his training up so that when the camera showed up he was doing eight

workouts that day like he probably took the week off before but he showed up and he literally caused an entire generation of strength athletes to overtrain. You watch that show, that episode or documentary, whatever it was, and the next day I was like, fuck, I've got to do three days to keep up with that guy. And then you just kill yourself. When Mike was talking about, oh, you see that guy over there? I have to train more than him. Well, what if he's overtrained?

There's no fucking way. Like, I still have to train more than him. I was like, I did that. I know what that sounds like. That's a bad way to go about things. I do think you have to find the line. Like, you've got to cross the line to find the line type of thing. So there's some value in just slapping on some volume just to see if you can handle it.

And then you can back off once you know, okay, I overdid it. Some people do the opposite. They're, like, too conservative all the time, and they never really push themselves. So, you know, it swings both ways. Yeah. Ready to wrap this thing up? Let's wrap it up. Right on.

Where can people hang out with you? You can find me, Douglas E. Larson, on Instagram, and then, of course, everything on Barbell Shrug, Barbell Collective. Right on. Come to shrugged.thelowbackfix.com. We've got some morning routines. We've got some movement pieces getting you out of pain. If you're dealing with chronic low back pain, come and hang out with us.

We have answers, programs, seminars, morning routines seminars morning routines ebooks you name it shrug dot the low back fix dot com come hang out with us make sure you get to itunes subscribe give us a five-star review say something nice don't be a jerk that was pretty friendly of me right oh yeah uh subscribe to us on youtube barbell shrugged all of the socials, Barbell Shrugged podcast on Instagram. Come and hang out with us. This show is just getting good here. First one that you and I get to hang out and talk training, man. This has been freaking awesome.

Yeah, and if you're digging this, of course, share it with your friends. Put it on social media, put it on Facebook, put it on Instagram. We appreciate you sharing the show. I love it. We'll see you guys soon. Yeah. Let's go lift weights. After we get some tacos.

Yeah. Fajita Friday. Shrug fam, hope you enjoyed that. A lot of fun just hanging out. Final call. Get over to shrugcollective.com backslash vault. We've got 12 programs, $47 a month. You're going to save all the money anywhere from short-term three-month programs to long-term

18-month programs. CrossFit, weightlifting, mobility, nutrition, macros, strongman, your first pull-up. That would be cool if you got one of those. It's $47 a month, 12 programs, access to all of them. Get in there, shrugcollective.com backslash vault. See you guys on Wednesday.