Barbell Shrugged - Ben Bergeron: Chasing Excellence, Building The Fittest Athletes in the World, and Mastering Principle that Create Champions  — Barbell Shrugged #363

Episode Date: December 12, 2018

Ben Bergeron trains some of the world’s fittest athletes. A former Ironman competitor, triathlete, and CrossFit Games competitor, he has coached athletes to six world championships. As coach to the reigning Fittest Man and Fittest Woman on Earth, Ben is considered one of the top coaches in the sport of CrossFit. He created and continues to provide CompTrain for free as a way of sharing his knowledge with the CrossFit community.   Ben has dedicated his life to helping others become the best version of themselves. He founded CrossFit New England in 2008, where he coaches his members on their quest to improve their fitness, health, and approach to life beyond the gym.   In this episode, we talk dive into how to build the fittest athletes in the world, why CrossFit New England has succeeded in the last 10 years, personal development is at the heart of a champion, developing a growth mindset is the key to long term success, and much more.   Enjoy!   - Doug and Anders ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs_bergeron ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Please support our partners! @vuori - www.vuoriclothing.com “SHRUGGED25” to save 25% storewide @thrivemarket - www.thrivemarket.com/shrugged for a free 30 days trial and $60 in free groceries   ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Shrug family, today's show with Ben Bergeron is the best conversation I have ever had in my life. It is better than any conversation I've ever had with my family, friends, mentors, coaches, or training partners. It's the best conversation I've ever had in my life for many reasons. First, the day before, I did 90 Min minutes with Mike Boyle, who is someone I've wanted to talk to for years. He's a legend. Two hours before that conversation, I did 90 minutes on the phone with Mark Englund. He has studied language and communication for the last 12 years.

His presence alone forces you to be at the top of your game. Before that, I'm pushing the 100 interview mark on Shrugged, giving me tons of confidence that I could hang with someone like Bergeron. And before that, the thousands of conversations with friends, forcing ourselves to have long-form, elevated conversations, thinking deeply, overanalyzing, and developing complete thoughts around a subject. This is the best conversation of my life because I think about having good conversations every day of my life. I have standing calls every week with people I consider to be great thinkers. People that are not satisfied just running successful businesses.

These people need depth to inspire them and provide purpose to their life. This is the best conversation not by accident but by design. I've been waiting my whole life to get on the phone with Mark England to discuss the art of language. I've been waiting years to see if I could talk training on the same level as Mike Boyle, the greatest trainer of all time, and my whole life for the opportunity to sit down with Ben Bergeron and walk out of that room knowing we nailed it. Today's show is the culmination of thousands of hours of personal growth, practice conversations, and life experiences with one of the best coaches to walk on the face of this earth.

I look for moments when I wake up and think, today I have to be better than I have ever been. Today's that day. This interview is that conversation. I want to thank everybody that has been along for this ride. Get over to at Anders Varner, tag the Shred Collective, hit us with the hashtag go long. We're loving these long shows. I appreciate everybody that reached out last week. Get over to douglarsenfitness.com. Dude's got killer programs over there. Movement-specific mobility, nutrition for weightlifters.

And if you are looking for help business consulting, he's got a lot of experience running really successful businesses, mainly this one. douglarsenfitness.com. Looking forward to everyone taking a screenshot. Put it on your phone. Tag me at Anders Warner. Give us the hashtag GoLong.

We'll see you guys at the break. They had no idea who it was. And they were like, I'm bombing in front of three girls right now that are like the coolest girls right now. And I am just, I should shut up. And then he forgot their names. Yeah. It just threw my whole game off and i was over too yeah they were like this guy there's no way they're sharing this podcast when it goes up

all right good to go can you do welcome to barbell shrugged i'm andrews marner hanging out with doug larson ben bergeron we are crossfit new england this is like the super og heather was giving us a little background this This place, it's gorgeous. In the gym now, we are in your office, which is a separate part. I'm assuming CrossFit New England didn't start with this beautiful vision in mind. It was just getting some people in a gym and trying to create a little community. What's a little bit of the story of you getting into CrossFit? And one, welcome to the show.

This is super cool. Thanks, man. I never really thought we'd be sitting at this table. And one, welcome to the show. This is super cool. Thanks, man. I never really thought we'd be sitting at this table. I'm just like a gym rat. I've been watching all your stuff for years. I'm just a gym rat, too, so that's all right. And, man, last night I was hanging out with Mike Boyle. Now I'm hanging out with Ben Bergeron.

And our life is radical right now. Makes for a dope weekend. How did you get into this CrossFit thing and get into the gym and just a little bit of the evolution? Yeah. So thanks for having me. Yeah.

The way I kind of CrossFit evolved, CrossFit New England evolved from a personal training business that I had. And the way I became a personal trainer was probably not the way that most people are doing it these days where, you know, they see the opportunity in the fitness world. And I had no aspirations of being in the fitness world. I was doing kind of more of the investment in the finance side of things after college, but I had this really big like epiphany, this revelation type moment, which was 9-11. When that happened, it rocked my world to the point where I realized I didn't want to be sitting in a cubicle or behind a computer for the rest of my life. I wanted my life to have more meaning, purpose, and impact on others.

And I didn't really know what shape that was going to take. So I took some time off. I moved out to Wyoming to be a ski bum for a year. Kind of decided between joining the military because obviously there's a lot of impact you can have there. I became a firefighter because I was so inspired by the acts and the heroics of the actual day there but i fell on becoming a trainer because the two real one is that i was kind of passionate about it i i was a guy that of all my friends read the most men's fitness magazines yeah and i was doing uh triathlons at the time so it was it was um it was already a passion i had some level of a skill set,

nowhere near where it should have been. And then the next piece was probably the biggest one. It was the easiest. There's no barrier to entry. I just came home and I started training people. Whereas the other one, like Fire Academy and the military. It's like a two-year process. Yeah, just like it's harder.

Can I just get a paycheck, please? It's harder to understand. Somebody just pay me something. How do you even like, it's like a two-year process. Yeah, just like it's, it's harder to, can I just get a paycheck, please? It's harder to understand. Somebody just pay me something. Like, how do you even like, what's the first step, right? And the first step

was so easy in this one. So, started training people at a globo gym, started training people in their homes and then, from there,

found CrossFit a few years later. That started about 2004. Found CrossFit in 2006. Became affiliated in the intermediate. I became a strength and. Became affiliated. In the intermediate, I became a strength and conditioning coach.

Working at a private kind of elite New England prep school. Which one? Noble and Greeno. Hell yeah. We used to play them. I went to Williston

and out west. There we go. My kids still go there now. At Williston? No, to Noble's. Oh, nice. They're the green color people, right? They're blue. Yeah, blue and white. Yeah, go nice. They're the green color people, right? They're blue.

Blue? Yeah, blue and white. Yeah, go ahead. We don't need to go down the prep school rabbit hole in the first five minutes. So then from there, started a boot camp type thing. That boot camp turned into CrossFit and then started doing CrossFit in the high school gym when the kids were at school, the parents would come in. How did you find CrossFit?

Because nobody was talking about it. What year was this? 2006, 2007. Hold on. I was the guy that, like you just mentioned, Boyle. I was going and listening to Boyle. I was reading Boyle's books. I was subscribing to every newsletter.

Back then it was forums. I was in every forum with Mike Mahler and Kettlebell and like i was trying to get like every next thing that i could because i knew in my heart like what i was doing was not it like i was doing nasm and like issa tough stuff and i was doing the nsca protocols and it just felt like it wasn't um i didn't know it at the time but i was the reason i was constantly searching for the next thing was because i knew this wasn't um i didn't know it at the time but i was the reason i was constantly searching for the next thing was because i knew this wasn't it i knew in the way i knew i'm like i was doing iron man triathlons training these high school kids i'm like my worst fear was like having to work out with them i don't want to be exposed like i'm not fit but like yet i'm doing these

like world-class things and people are like you're so fit you're so fit i don't feel the part so i found crossfit started doing some of my members, and started doing it myself. My first workout was Cindy. Nice. Did Cindy, and, you know, thought I was kind of fit. Do you have to pull-ups and stuff? And did maybe like 18 rounds and thought I was kind of like a stud. Went on CrossFit.com and I was like

C. Spieler C. Spieler. 33 rounds. Like what does that mean? Yeah. How? How is that possible? And then all of a sudden you're like you're like your whole. Every 30 seconds. Every like every like inclination

of fitness that you've had like it gets rewritten. Yeah. So, I mean, the way I really found it was just one night scrolling through the internet trying to find the next best thing, found.com, and obviously the first thing I clicked on was the Nasty Girls video. I think it's everyone's first video, because how can you not click on that one?

We were hanging out in Daniel Tosh. Yeah. We were at the Spartan, the Tahoe, yeah, we were in Tah were at the Spartan the Tahoe we were in Tahoe at the Spartan World Championships and they locked Tosh

Daniel Tosh in a freaking shipping container for 24 hours to see who could run the furthest sensory deprivation total darkness the only reason I say that

is because Nicole Carroll was hanging out without him for a whole 24 hours and I was was like, she's the coolest ever. She's right there. I'm still not comfortable talking to her. Those 95-pound squat videos. That's right. Overhead squats.

Find the biggest, meanest guy in the crowd, and she would just kick his ass. So that's what I mean. You see that type of stuff, and you're like, oh, my God. This is totally different. So I remember training for my last Ironman. I can remember being on a training run on site with my training buddy And you're like, oh, my God. Like this is totally different. So I remember training for my last Ironman. I can remember being on a training run on site with my training buddy and telling him about this thing and the CrossFit Games and what it was. I was like, this is the next thing.

This is like – this is what I've got to be a part of. This is what fitness is. You should see these guys. Like not only can they do what we do, but they can like lift and they look the part. It's like – so the writing was on the wall really early on for me that I knew that this was something I wanted to be a part of in a much bigger way. When did you guys start looking into building the gym and actually renting a space? So found CrossFit 2006.

Became an affiliate in 2007. We moved into this location. Did you have your level one? So I got my level one in 2007 as well. Gotcha. So you didn't have to. I don't know the answer to that. And then we opened up our location that we're currently in now in early 2009, January 2009.

So wait, when you were doing your triathlon stuff, were you lifting for that or were you just putting in the miles? Yeah, but I wouldn't lift lower body because I run and bike. That's what every triathlon. So I would do pull-ups and bench press because you still got to look good at the beach. What fitness was was so skewed in my mind. You just don't – it's like who can – back in the day, it was – I went for a run, and the answer was always like how far did you go? No one ever asked how far did you go there's never no one ever asked how fast you go you know so it's like as long as you can go farther as long as you do an iron man and you can bench 225 for reps like you're fit that conversation still exists though if you like i was in a actually at a globo gym hanging out with my family and i was in the

locker room and this guy that was clearly not fit was like, yeah, I got to run 23 miles tomorrow for the marathon prep. And I was like, no, you don't. You should not. I don't want to say anything right now, but don't do that. Please don't do that. There's so many other ways. What did the early days of CrossFit New England look like? Because nobody was talking about this thing.

Yeah, so it was obviously a smaller membership base. Yeah. Didn't have quite everything dialed in as much as we do right now in terms of the business operations and what we're trying to create. But in terms of the fulfillment and what I felt like I was doing and creating, it was phenomenal. It was amazing. It's like the life as an entrepreneur is – Did you go all in like full time? I went all in. It was amazing. It's like the life as an entrepreneur is – Did you go all in, like full time? I went all in, yeah.

There you go. So we did it part time because I was still a strength and conditioning coach and running CrossFit just in the morning classes. So I do two or three classes in the morning and then coach the kids at school in the afternoon. We did that for a year. And then after that year, that's where we found this location and went all in. The dynamic between being a strength and conditioning

coach and coaching athletes and then finding CrossFit and saying, I want to go do this, those two worlds don't talk well to each other. The Boyle strength coach, the pure strength coach side and then the CrossFit

whatever side. I think that's unfortunate. Yeah. How can we – we're both trying to achieve the same stuff. You know, fitness, strength, conditioning. Like why would we not talk well to each other? So I want to steal, borrow, and use every methodology that I feel like works. So I was doing – when I was doing my strength conditioning stuff with high school kids,

I was using CrossFit methodology and vice versa. You know, it's, there's no reason not to use both. And I would use what I've learned from endurance world as well. Like, you know, not necessarily for certain populations of athletes, but, you know, when I'm training my elite athletes for the games, like, why am I not going to use use that it's yeah well i think that's something that you had a huge benefit of having a real strength conditioning coach where i just came straight from whatever like bodybuilding magazine workout and then it was like straight to crossfit and i was like oh this is it i didn't have that like right real strength coach and then you go right into CrossFit and I was like, I'm just going to do Fran every Friday

because that's the coolest thing ever. I had no real clue. I had to learn strength conditioning. If that's a true story, if you actually did Fran every Friday. Yeah, I did. That's amazing. Well, it was because everybody that was like, how much can you bench? So if I ran into somebody, I had to have like a respectable time or I

sucked and I was 23 years old. Yeah, and if you had that strength conditioning background your goal was a better fran you'd have a better understanding of how to improve it yeah it's not just do fran every which is the part that right through crossfit i learned programming program design like how to get better at things it was actually not until like sectionals or the sport showed up where I was like,

Oh, now we have a season to worry about. Yeah. How do we get to a point? But, um, yeah, I never had like a real strength and conditioning,

like coach teach me here's a training block. Right. Um, when you open the gym, I feel like that, that puts you very far ahead, even in the CrossFit world where we all thought we were doing the biggest, baddest, coolest thing.

But seeing where CrossFit is, but coming from that strength and conditioning background, that puts you miles ahead of the actual people that were showing up in the early days. Yeah, potentially. Yeah. You know, I still, you know, CrossFit is the methodology that I default to. It is the thing I believe produces the greatest levels of general physical preparedness. But I want to steal and use everything that's available to me. For our regular members, we don't do, I would say we weigh we, we weigh way, you know, we are doing CrossFit for the people that are trying to keep like out of the nursing home, trying to lower their

triglycerides, people that are trying to get daily function and trying to look good on the beach. Like it's CrossFit. It's like very similar to what, um, you know, Greg Glassman preached way back in 2004, you know, for my, my elite athletes, it's a little bit different because as you said, for the elite athletes, we know when game day is. When you know when game day is, it changes the ball game. When you're just trying to stay in this constant ready state, which is what regular members are doing, CrossFit's the best thing going.

It really, I mean, it is the best thing to date we've ever found in terms of producing high levels of fitness. And we have to define what fitness is if we're going to talk about that. But for our elite athletes, it's not just, let's do Fran and things of the like every single day we come into the gym. We have to take a little bit of a different approach because we know when we need to be ready and peaked for this thing. And, you know, it's not necessarily like, you know, we're not talking like rest, you know, Russian periodization

or Soviet block training or something like that. But if you are competing and then you take a rest period after that, like by definition right there, you have a periodized program. Like you're not just

constant ready state, which is phenomenal for military first responders and the regular everyday civilians because they don't know when game day is. So that is the appropriate approach for them. military first responders and the regular everyday civilians because they don't know when game day is so that is the appropriate approach for them at what point did you decide that you wanted to coach athletes like at the highest level like did you see the crossfit games go oh yeah

i'm definitely doing that like i want to compete myself i want to have my athletes to compete and i want to see how far i can take it like where was the transition there yeah the um the answer was when i saw it i was like yes i saw the first one um and that's when I had that training run I can remember and be like I want to be a part of that so right away I was attracted to what the CrossFit game stood for and what they were trying to test um from there I didn't know what kind of avenue I wanted to be playing it I thought like if I could even get to that and watch it that'd be phenomenal. I competed on it from the team side of a few times.

And then I had this kind of like, it wasn't like sign me up, I'm a coach. I just had this kind of like organic growth into the sport, which started with training my wife, who was an individual training at the CrossFit Games and had some top 10 finishes at the games. And then training my team. So I was a player coach for a while. We did well at the games.

And then I got injured. I stepped back and I became a coach. And when that happened, my team won the games and that brought a little bit more attention. And then Chris Spieler, who I mentioned before, reached out. I was friends with him through level one seminar training staff. And he said, do you want to be my coach? And at that time there were no coaches, like no one had coaches. So I didn't even know what I was doing. I didn't even know like what I was signing up for.

So I started off just writing programming and cause that's what a coach was at the time. It was coach was a programmer. And through our relationship, we got close. It became more than that. And I talked to him about mindset and how to be a better competitor and all the like but I still didn't really know what the heck I was doing and where the boundaries of coach slash friends slash programmer was um but that opened the door to train some other athletes and I started training you know I'm working with Becca Voigt and Michelle Etondra and then Katrin and Matt and Cole and Brooke and so on. But really, my coaching did not come – I didn't understand what I was doing, what my role was as a coach. And I didn't feel comfortable as a coach, and so I started working with Katrin.

And the only reason for that was not because I was like, I'm five, six years into this. And I, it was because she, she lived with us. And when she lived with me, um, she becomes a part of my family. And now I'm going to talk to her the way I talk to my family. And now it's not just about what we do in the gym. It's about the way we conduct ourselves outside the gym. And once you do that, the mental character approach that we take to everything that we're doing, you know, the dinner conversations that we're having transfer over. And all of a sudden we saw, you know, we had no aspirations of having her go in to win the games the first year she won. She missed the games the year before. So like our goals were simply to get there and do the best we can. You know, actually the honest truth is we had no goals.

We didn't talk about goals at all. The goal was like everything which I talk about, which is, you know, let's just invest ourselves completely into the process, which is these tiny little minutiae steps. Let's do the best we can today. And we had so much fun doing it. We built her from this immature, young, emotional girl

who was crying on the competition floor the year before when she didn't make it to now probably known as at least one of the fiercest, most mentally tough competitors in the field. How do you take somebody through that transition? That's a big leap. I'm sure it didn't happen overnight, but what does that look like?

I don't think many people remember what she was like. There's before and after pictures where she kind of just looks like a normal girl. And then now she, you're like, oh, she means business. She's, whoever that is, she's real. Like you don't just casually pass by her. Like, what's up, Katrin? Like, you can tell. She's a savage.

It was. There was a transition. But it was, I don't want to say it was deliberate because I didn't know what I was really doing at the time. But it was very purposeful. We'd have conversations and most of the conversations did not yield around how to improve clean and jerks or, you know, butterfly pull-ups or how to get faster mile times. It was, what does a competitor look like? What does a champion look like in the gym every single day? And it starts with, when I give you, when I give her feedback, the feedback I'm going to give her is about how she responds to feedback.

It's not necessarily, that's the number one thing I want to start with is do you have a, you know, it's such an overused term now, but this growth mindset, you know, do you have the ability to, do you believe that where you are is fixed? Do you believe that what you're being dealt is the starting point for something greater? And if we feel like where we are right now is that some starting point that we can mold and develop into something better, then now you're coachable. Now you're coachable. So now we can learn and we can make things better. If you can learn, make things better, then all of a sudden the mental approach that you have is not you. It's just something that we're starting with and not to make this thing better. So I believe just like, you know,

turning someone from an eight minute miler to a six minute miler, like turning someone from an eight-minute miler to a six-minute miler, turning someone from that clean and jerk 225 to 315, everyone knows those things can happen. You don't have to have certain genetics to make those things happen. Enough hard work and those happen. It's the same thing with your mindset and your character and your mental toughness. If you work on those things, they get better. Now what most people do is they think that mental toughness, they think that the character we're looking for is about gritting your teeth.

It's like heavy metal and yelling. And that can be a part of it, but it's a very small subset of what we're talking about when we talk about character development, mental toughness, and the rest. So if we just start to, the question was kind of like, how do you do that? And the first thing is you bring it to light. You bring awareness to it. And when athletes start deviating away from it, because you can talk about it all you want. This is no different than it's business or your family or you're coaching an athlete. As much as you talk about it, the talk means nothing.

It's only about the standards that you tolerate, not talk about, standards that you tolerate that matter. So once somebody is complaining in the gym, if you let that go, complaining is a lack of mental toughness, period. Like that's it. If you are complaining, you're looking for external factors for why you are having trouble or there's adversity in front of you. If you complain, you are not mentally tough. If you as a coach let your athletes complain, you are not building mental toughness. So the first thing is bring awareness to it. Never whine, never complain, never make excuses.

And then when they do that, no matter how small, bring awareness to it. That's a complaint. Let's flip that around. Switch it in your head right now. And all of a sudden, it starts to it. That's a complaint. Let's flip that around. Switch it in your head right now. And all of a sudden, it starts to change. It starts to manifest. And now all of a sudden, when they're in workouts, they're not like, woe is me, pity party, poor me.

It's, there is no excuses. There is no complaining. What does this mean? What am I feeling right now? Okay, this hurts a lot. Is that a good or a bad thing? It's probably a good thing. Yes, I know that person's ahead of me.

This means that I need to dig in. It that's the starting point so if you get someone in the gym just a regular athlete and they're like i'm never gonna get a muscle up or whatever it is like do you go to that person and say like you know you know say that again but in a positive context or or like what could you say besides that that is motivating for the future so you can get a muscle up like what are those conversations someone comes up is motivating for the future so you can get a muscle up? Like what are those conversations? If someone comes up to me and says I'm never going to get a muscle up, my first response would be a question, which is what are your goals? And if their goals are I want to compete at the CrossFit Games, I want to do well in the Open, I want to be able to do every workout prescribed. Okay.

Then, yes, we should be able to try and get a muscle up. But we need to start there. If their goals are I want to look better naked, I want to lower my triglycerides, I want to stay at the nursing home, I want to be able to play soccer with my kids when I'm 75 years old. Okay, then what's the rush?

Why do you need to learn muscle up right now? It might not be the best thing. But flip back to the first one. I want to learn muscle up. We decide that that's a worthwhile goal to pursue. If it is a worthwhile goal to pursue if it is a worthwhile goal to pursue then what we need to do

is what most people do what most people are focusing on is they're kind of like I call it my development

of an athlete it's a pyramid scheme right it's a pyramid scheme not a pyramid scheme I love pyramid schemes it's all fake guys he's just saying this

it's the world of finance over here he sounds like he knows what's going on you want to know why you're so successful where all that money came from yeah that's right yeah it's a bait and pyramid scheme of self-development so it's but is a pyramid structure is a pyramid format where the top and the smallest and the least important but what people talk about the most is like the strategy that they bring to every workout the strategy whether it's whether we're talking football, basketball, or CrossFit. Football, it's, you know, do you run a zone defense? Do you do,

like, a man-to-man? Do you play cover two? Do you do an air attack? Whatever it is. Basketball, do you do a full court press? Do you play a triangle offense, dribble, drive, or whatever it is? In our sport, it's okay. We're going to do a man-to-man. You're going to open up with nine straight muscle-ups. You're going to break those guys up. How are you going to do the snatch? Is there anything to touch and go or whatever? That's what everyone talks about is this strategy piece of things. And it matters. It's a piece of the ballgame for sure.

But I think what matters a lot more is your ability, right? Can you do those things? If you want to go nine unbroken muscle-ups to be able to start, you have to be able to do the nine unbroken muscle-ups. So now we're to that spot right there where, like, we have to improve our ability. What most people do is they pound themselves over the head about, like, got to get a up, got to get a muscle up, got to get myself. And they don't do two things, which is first is let's root the cause of why you cannot do a muscle up. Is it a neurological issue or is it an organic issue? If it's a neurological issue, that's a skill thing. It's a timing thing. It's a coordination thing. If it's an organic issue, it's, it's a muscular,

it's an engine thing. You don't have the strength to do it so let's do some quick assessments and like eliminate one of them can you do you know h you know eight chest to bar strict chest to bar pull-ups like okay can you do eight controlled ring dips with a turnout at the top okay this is not a strength issue right this is going to be a timing and a neurological this is a skill thing so it's a skill thing what we do then is break down the next level of the pyramid the the process. What is the process that we're going to need to do to accomplish that skill set? It's not going to be just jump up and flail on the rings, jump up and flail on the rings. We have to break it down. And this is not, this is a timing thing. So we'd work on is let's develop a progression to improve the timing and the positions on the rings. From there, you take the necessary steps, which is where most people fall off because

it's really hard to have the patience and the grit and the fortitude and the humility to take that and like, no, no, I'm just going to get up on the rings to really just sit with a process and not succeed. And that's why it takes this level of character. You have to have this humility. You have to have this dedication. You have to have this resilience to be able to sit there and pound on your craft and not do the sexy things

over a long period of time. It's like you could take Katrin's program and give it to every single person in the world and be like, here's how you do it. I do. It's called calltrain.com going to they're not going to sit there and do the skill work yeah they're not going to sit there and do the strict pull-ups with the tempo so everyone in every sport you know there's there's two sides to like what makes the differences right and to me most athletes yeah there's people that try and get by on natural talents.

Like there are people in the NBA and NFL that like will skip training camp, do the minimum, and they just have these phenomenal talents, right? Most of the athletes at a super high level are putting in the work. They're showing up in the CrossFit world. This is like we're probably, you know, they do a phenomenal job. Everyone is in the gym for six to eight hours a day. So if that's no longer the differentiation, what is the differentiation? It can't be just the time you're putting in. It has to be the little things and we call them the aggregation of marginal gains. The sum of these tiny little differences,

right? Which is what are you doing for your warmups? What are you really doing for your nutrition? What are you doing for your mobility work? What are you doing for your mindset pieces? What are you doing for your recovery? What are you putting into your sleep practices? And when you drop in these little, I wish that they were 1%, truth of the matter, they're like halves of percents, right? And we start to add these things up over this big, long, massive timeline. In the short term, if we started doing things just a little bit differently, over the course of three months, there's no difference.

Over the course of a year, we might be able to see a little bit of a difference between my practice and yours. But over the course of three, five, and seven years, we're going to be in totally different worlds. It's people that have like, you know, in the real world.

Anytime I'm talking to anybody about even some of this stuff, it's like, well, how much attention are you paying to all the little things? Like people move so fast through their lives. And I'm sure you see it with like the regular clients were like, I just got to get this workout in. They come in and they just like smash the workout and then they leave right away. And they never actually take the time to realize they were at the gym. All those little tiny things from just, I don't know.

We get to talk to so many cool people that we get to make these little tiny changes and have these conversations so you become aware of how all these little things stack up. Did a lot of this come from your life or was it working with Spieler at first and seeing his success? How do you start to build these systems into your coaching? Because they've got to come from somewhere.

Yeah, you start piecing things together from experience and from... The massive bookshelf behind you. Trying to learn and read and talk to people smarter than you. And, you know, I think that, you know, my approach is I'm just going to kind of constantly try and like absorb as much as I can and then reformulate it into my own kind of like picture of what I think is the best approach. So I'm just going to steal, beg, borrow,

and plead for every bit of of tidbits that I can. And then I'll see how this fits into my kind of philosophy. I feel like opening a gym was the first time I ever started to realize these things. Because you get your ass kicked so much. You're like, why doesn't this thing work? It's because we don't have a system for running classes. And you have to start really breaking that stuff down. Even an athlete, if you have like, when those real athletic athletic people like when katrin walks in and she's clearly very athletic it's like they just kind of get it like that the athletic side of things but what is the i guess

when you start working with a client now what is the how do you start to bring their awareness and their attention to all the little ways that they can get better? So if I'm, if I'm working with a regular, um, everyday member at the gym, you know, as you said, like, uh, they come in, they get their workout done, they leave. That's to me, that's pretty awesome. Like the step one is like coming in and working out like that. Just doing it.

Yeah. I mean, that's the habit we're trying to instill. Like just could get the consistency of showing up. Coming in and working out. Just doing it. Yeah, I mean, that's the habit we're trying to instill. Just get the consistency of showing up. If you don't work out, there's not much else I can do for you. You're not here. I can't talk to you. I can't see you. So step one is that consistency play.

In the CrossFit world, we call it mechanics, consistency, then and only then intensity. When most people see the YouTube stuff, they flip it upside down. But for us, the number one stuff, they flip it upside down. But for us, the number one thing, you know, yes, it's consistent, it's mechanics, but like what we're really trying to do is just build good habits. You know, and if you're going to the gym four or five, six days a week, that's exactly what we're talking about. Like if you had a twin brother and you guys were like the exact same and you know, you graduate college and then you guys start to diverge on different paths and one person goes to the gym four five six days a week and the next person skips it at every

opportunity you know the one brother you know starts to get up early and do some gratitude practice and you know meditation and you know whatever it is and the other one sleeps in snooze snooze snooze and rushes off to work the other one gets home and they you know cooked a nice meal the other one like grabs the five you know cooked a nice meal the other one like grabs the five guys on the way home like again after three months there's gonna be no difference between those two brothers but after a year there's probably a small one and after three years a big one after you get the get the picture so what we're trying to do is just install really good habits and um the way we can do that is by bringing awareness to what we feel like moves the

needle for athletes and for um i use athletes as interchangeably from elite athletes and everyday members. And I, I call it like the five factors. I believe that it has to do with your, what everyone knows when you go to the doctor, if it's a good doctor, it's just a push medication to you. They say you should eat better and exercise. So it was the first two, but those are really obvious ones. Well, I think that the next three are equally as impactful.

And that's sleep, which I think is sleep is really overlooked. And it's probably the thing that I do the poorest job of. It is your mindset, which is if you do all the right things, but you don't believe that they're going to work, they're not going to work. Your mindset is more powerful than that. And there new recent research out there about in terms of stress you know and there's um they put these people through stress um they did these surveys and um they asked people you know how much stress did you have in your life in the past year like little moderate or high and then they track the track the the populations and no surprise the athletes that

report that they have the highest levels of stress were the most likely to die within the next five years it's like a really perfect correlate except there was a second question which is do you believe stress is bad for you if they said no i don't believe stress is bad for me those people that experience the highest levels of stress had the same mortality rates, the same success rates as people that had the least amount of stress. What happens is when you think that your stress is bad for you, when you get into that sympathetic nervous, when you get in that fight or flight mode, your arteries constrict and contract. Coronary heart, you die of a heart attack. When you don't believe

it's bad for you when you believe that those butterflies in your stomach that anxiety that most people feel when you believe that it's getting you in a ready state which is what's happening to everyone before a workout what's happening to everyone before a presentation if you tell yourself this is getting me ready i am prepared which it is it's increasing blood flow throughout the body. It's sending more oxygen to the brain. You are becoming in a heightened state. You're basically, you know, Bradley Cooper in Limitless. It's taking a pill. You're like, you're in a better performing state. Same thing. You just tell yourself the different story. Your mindset controls is the jam. It's a

huge piece. And the last one is... That's very similar for depression, by the way. Like people that your meta feelings, like how you feel about how you feel determine whether you're gonna be depressed or not yeah it's uh like um it's like you're depressed because you think you're depressed about being depressed it's like this like this like weird kind of loop about this whole thing yeah you're sad and you feel bad about being sad. Yeah. That's why you're depressed. Exactly. As long as it's not like a neurochemical type thing, I believe. Right.

And the third, the fifth one of those kind of five factors is relationships. Is it hard to get athletes to believe that they can create their own success in the sport or just in life? Yeah. But that's like, it's independent. No.

It's like some athletes like Katrin. No. Like Katrin's like the sponge. Katrin's the ideal student. You tell her something. It's like, it's independent. No, it's like some athletes like Katrin. No, like Katrin's like the sponge. Katrin's the ideal student. You tell her something, it's awesome. Like I'll have a conversation with her once, like four years ago, and she'll repeat it to me like verbatim,

like exactly as I said it like four years ago. Whereas other athletes, like a lot of students, you have to repeat it five, six, seven times before they hear you for the first time. So it's not like a black or white, you know, like yes or no type thing. I think it's just like everything, it's athlete dependent. Some people pick things up really quickly. Other athletes struggle on the learning curve.

Do you feel like that is something that can really, like when Matt Frazier walks in, is he the same way? Is that like a universal thing of people that are operating at the highest level of like, oh, that makes sense. I'm going to implement that instantly. No, at the highest level, all the athletes are – it's the same spectrum. Yeah. You would think that at the – Let's pull this down. Sorry.

You would think that at the highest level, all the athletes would kind of fall into the same cohort, the same mentality, the same learning. But that's not the case. It's the same thing there. You'd think that those athletes at the very highest level, the world class, the one percentage of the one presenters, all of them would have this, you know, MO of just like I'm going to do anything necessary this way. But they're humans. Like they don't want to expose weaknesses.

They don't want to be weaknesses yeah they don't want to be wrong yeah it's interesting they don't want to struggle they don't want to fail i feel like when i can look at like kobe bryant he talks about this stuff and he's the freakiest athlete like when you look at lebron's training and you realize that he built like a six million dollar gym in his house that looks exactly like the one that they have at the stadium that's state of the art he's spending 10 million dollars a year or whatever it is on his purse on his trainer on doing everything he wakes up and has his massage and you're like oh that guy's doing he's chasing greatness in every single asset or aspect of his life and he's got this growth mentality and he probably if you were to ask him he'd be like man i need to uh i'm struggling with xx and x and you would look at him be like

huh what you just spent 10 million dollars on your body this year like you're the freak of the freak yeah and you have this mindset that you need to consistently be getting better a quarter of a percent at a time in every area of your life like that's what it looks like when it all when when someone has that mentality plus the genetics plus the hard work plus all the things it's a really wild package that a human can put together yeah um the i guess these these principles and these values though have you built this stuff into your coaching staff and how, I guess, all of your coaches are going about working with athletes that are gen pop and not the elite of the elite? Yeah. So it's funny you mentioned principles.

It's one of the things I've really kind of invested a lot of effort and my own time and resources into is developing principles inside of our own organization. Did you read that book yet? Yeah. I'm reading it right now. It's on the shelf right behind him. Missed it. It's a big one. Yeah, it is a monster.

I'm 150 pages into it right now. It's over here. Right there. Oh, you still have the white thing on it. That's why I missed it. Yeah, I'm in the middle of it right now. It's awesome. I can't believe that guy has a principle for every single thing in his life. Yeah, I'm in the middle of it right now. It's awesome. I can't believe that

guy has a principle for every single thing in his life. Yeah, but I think that principles are phenomenal though, right? Because they're the fundamental truths that guide your actions, behaviors, and decisions. If you have those in place and they are really hard and fast, bright lines, it takes away so much ambiguity in your life and so many like gray areas and so many decisions you have to make. It's just, if it's embrace harsh realities, which is one of his, then when it comes time to have that conversation with your coworker that you're not sure if this is going to be, um, a touchy subject and you're not sure if it's worth investing into it. Like, no, this is a principle. We expose the harsh realities. This member is not pulling their weight.

We need to, it's easy at that point. You know, it's, so to answer your question, yeah, we put in a lot of, I shouldn't say a lot, but we put in principles that we operate our business by. I have them in my own personal life, which I think is, helps a ton in terms of, you know, trying to run this multi-faceted entrepreneur slash father slash coach slash it told me about that I'm five months into it right now the

father ship thing yeah plus the entrepreneurship thing plus the yeah I don't get to the gym six days a week thing so I think it depends on on again like I would always start that first first question of what's your goals? If you want to be the best podcaster in the world, if you want to be, then there's not going to be any balance. You're going to have to sacrifice everything else. Kobe Bryant's the first one to admit he doesn't have balance. Katrin doesn't have balance.

I want it. To me, I want to get to my deathbed, look back on life and say, did I love, live, lead, learn, leave a legacy? Like to me, that's my balance. And I want to make sure that I'm across the board at all times balance. I don't even want to be like what some people are doing, which is like, I'm going to crush it and work for six years. Then I'll kick it with my family and then I'll pursue a hobby. And it's this teeter-totter that's like all over the place.

To me, that doesn't pay out either i really want the balance across the board all the time because if i sacrifice one of those things i don't know when the end of days is and i don't know if i'm going to have the other things when i get there i've seen firsthand so many people that try to crush it professionally and their thought is when i turn 40 45 or 50 i'll retire and kick it with my wife and my family and they turn that age and the family and the wife isn't there, you know, or their health isn't there, or they don't have any hobbies or friends. It's like it's hard to fall back on something.

And, you know, I think that you need balance across the board. I shouldn't say that. I want balance across the board. Other people will float your boat, man. It's interesting. It's like what's your goals? Because we go and do this stuff, and, man, we enter, like, I took my family's in New Hampshire, and I took the bus down from,

and I literally felt yesterday like I was in high school going to, like, the state championship, New England championships, whatever it is. And I was like, I'm about to enter into this, like, rock star matrix where I get to go do all this stuff where 30 minutes ago i was like family man playing with my little baby on the ground and then all of a sudden like you shift into this balanced world of like now i gotta go play that's awesome though right like you have to be like fully invested playing on the ground with your baby and you weren't thinking about the other stuff,

like fully present and aware. I think that there is a real thing to the balance. I think that you can – and I think that the thing that I really try to do is be present enough that when I'm playing on the ground with the baby, you're like, this is awesome. Yeah. But I very much recognize the shift in my life and the mentality and everything when

it's like we're about to go on a ride here for five days and talk to the smartest people in the game um this is something i did a really poor job of and i'm trying to get i did a really poor job for a long time when i became um a dad and started my business and all the rest was, you know, there's so much freedom in terms of the way we want to operate our lives. It's one of the best things about being an entrepreneur. So I had this idea like kids can come to the gym and then I'll be home at three o'clock and I'll just do work at home. And what ended up happening was I was never fully invested in present in anything. Kids are at the gym. I'm trying to play with the kids, but also do my work and not doing a good job with anything. I would come home because I can at three 30 in the afternoon and just do work at home.

And now the kids are hanging on me and, you know, I'm trying to like, I'm at my screens and the screens don't go away and I'm on my computer and it's like, nothing's good. So that's where I started. And so these principles, which is from six to six, I'm the work guy. And I'm not gonna be, I can't be thinking about my family. I just, it can't. And then from the other 6 p.m. to six, that's where I'm with my family. And I'm home every day at six o'clock.

When I get home, I don't even bring my computer home. And when I get home, my phone goes up in my bedroom and I don't check it. It's like that's fully present now. It's so much better. Yes, it's not the same as being home at three o'clock, but those weren't good hours at all. They were more hours, but they weren't better hours. Now I get home and I'm like where you are, which is awesome. I'm on the floor playing with my kids and I'm not worried about like,

I didn't get through my emails. Yeah. The, the principles thing is an interesting one, especially as reading this book, it's, it's really wild to me because I feel like you set up these principles, and then you have to set boundaries around those principles to ensure that they actually happen. And that one's really tough because, and I've just been working with people, you start to realize how easily they can kind of like, oh, well, I'll just go not adhere to this thing that I think is important one time. And it kind of, you'd say, if we can start making that quarter of a percent move in the right direction, that all adds up.

And if, unfortunately, that quarter of a percent, really easy to let yourself slide, but if you let it slide in the wrong direction, the ability for people to kind of break up with their old life in the middle of trying to become a better person is incredibly hard for people to do. I guess just maybe some of the insights into really helping people understand that they can move past who they are today and they don't have to keep going down this unfortunate path where they just keep letting themselves off the hook

and really sticking to something. And that's really hard to do for people because it's comfortable to go and stay where you're at right now. Yeah. There isn't like a real question outside of like your experiences and helping people with it and what has kind of worked so what you're asking is how do you get people to change yeah i guess like it's the hardest thing in the world to get people to do right get people to do any sort of change just

start making something in the right direction and then not falling back into the same rut because it's so simple because they're they're literally going from i'm anders today and i want to be the anders of tomorrow and then they do it one day it's like man that felt really good and then the ice cream shows up and i'm like i love ice cream i'll just do it i'll do it on day three because i already did it two days and it's like no you have to do it every day it's really really challenging and just working with people in business or in the gym, whatever it is, they don't realize every time you let yourself off the hook. But how do we get people to stick to the change? So I think that it goes along with what I talked about before. It's about the standards that you tolerate. It's not what the standards

you talk about. A lot of people talk about that they want to get a six pack, but then they go on the way home when they buy a six pack, right? It's like, if you're, it's not about what you talk about, it's what you tolerate, it's about your behaviors. So if you, you know, if you want to make change, like the first thing you need to do is create a strategy, right? If you want to lose weight, okay, is that going to be, you get up and run every morning, is that you're going to cut out processed foods, that you're not going to eat sweets, whatever it is, like you figure out what the strategy is going to be, right? From there, you have to create the standards around that strategy. So when that happens, if you, is I'm going to do this every single day.

And from there, you have to tell yourself the right, and this is what I think most people do. So like, okay, I'm going to create a running program. I'm going to get up before work every day and go for a run. Okay, that's what I'm going to do. And then from there, like the standard is like, I'll do it five days a week. I'll do it six days a week. I'll go for two to three miles, whatever it is. But then they miss the next step, which is they tell themselves a certain story, which is I'm the type of person that dot, dot,

dot. I'm the type of person that even if you say this ahead of time, even if it's raining, I'm still going for that run. Even if I only got four hours of sleep the night before because I went to that concert, I'm still going for a run. Even if I feel a little bit under the weather, I'm still going for that run. Even if it's snowing out, you just figure out all of those excuses. You say, I'm the type of person that, and now you become this belief system. And people want to reinforce the self-belief system they have about themselves.

If you don't do that, and you have this kind of like fuzzy goal and strategy of how you're going to lose weight, it's because the way you can do it is run in the morning before work. But then also you don't feel like it. Well, feelings can be really persuasive because the bed is warm,

the snooze alarm is right there, and it's cold outside, and running you know is gonna be uncomfortable, and you're not good at running yet, so it's a painful experience. Well, if you're listening to your feelings, you're doomed. Your feelings are setting up for failure.

You gotta live your life by principles, which is I am doing this because I am this type of person. The idea behind the process is to commit yourself to the process forgetting about the results. I don't care what the results are at the end. The results are not what we're chasing. The thing we're chasing is the streak. It is the habit. It is the discipline inside of it you know seinfeld had this seinfeld had this a young um um comedian came up to jerry seinfeld and was like i want to be a comedian you know he gave me some advice and he was hoping for like this is how you become creative this is how who you should talk to in hollywood this is how you he said buy a calendar he said, buy a calendar. He was like, buy a calendar? Buy a calendar and write a joke on day one.

If you write a joke on day one, put a big X on that first day. The next day, write a joke. Put a big X on that day. Day three, same thing. Your goal is to create as long of a streak of Xs as you possibly can. The goal is just the habit of doing it, right?

The goal is just go and execute. Don't listen to your feelings. Your feelings are freaking lying to you. They're built into your DNA to make you lazy. They're survival mechanisms. It's about short-term pleasure and calorie restriction and trying to like make sure that you are just in this comfortable environment. Well, that is the fastest streak, the fastest road to mediocrity that's ever been built if you distrust every feeling that you have and just went at things that are true to who you are and what you want to accomplish true to principles you get a whole lot farther a whole lot faster i think that that's something though that as a population maybe as a country i don't know just as like a human

thing in 2018 we are so disconnected from the way that we actually feel. Like we don't know. If you're like, how do you feel right now? Like, good. You're going to get the quick good just right away. Everyone is just accustomed to saying that. Like, how are you doing today? Great.

Nobody's really in touch with, man, I feel like empowered right now because I'm 12 days in a row into writing that joke. Yeah. It seems to me by getting people to not focus on the outcome so much and to focus on the process, you're getting them to focus on only things they actually have control over. Yeah. Is that accurate?

No, that's exact. The first conversation I had with my athletes, my elite athletes, is I literally go, okay, what are the things that we're going to be talking about at the CrossFit Games? And people are like, okay, we're going to talk about the workouts that's coming up next. We're talking about the last workout.

We're talking about judges that miscounted. We're talking about the leaderboard. We're going to be talking about the weather. We're going to talk about our nutrition. We're going to be talking about, so let's write down all these things. We come up with a list of about 30 things. Let's draw a circle around five of them.

The five that we can control. Our training, our nutrition, our sleep, our recovery, and our mindset. If it's outside of those five, you have no control over it. You have no control over the weather, the judges, the programming, or anything else. If you're focusing on those things, you have no control whether you're going to win the games or not. If you're talking about those things, you only have so many mental matchsticks you can burn. If you're burning them up on things that you don't have control over, there goes a waste of matchstick.

It's literally like matchsticks are like effort. You know, it's a resource. You have only so many thoughts that you can put towards things. Let's put them towards things you can control. You can do that. That's what the process is. Taking every available and, you know, the kind of under the unspoken thing here is the more you obsess about those controllables, the more success, and we can define success, but the more achievement you get. You know, and we go, for our elite athletes, we kind of go down rabbit holes. So we talk about sleep, but we have a sleep process of about 15 to 20 items that we're trying to check off every day. Hold on. What does that look like?

That's the secret sauce. We don't get that. We don't get that. But it gave like some references of it, right? It's like, are you sleeping at a certain temperature? Is the room totally blocked out? Did you go through some sort of like wind down process? Are you, when was the last time you drank something and ate something?

When are you, so it's like, you're not just going like. You're preparing to go have good sleep. Right. It's not just like. It's one of those five things yeah exactly yeah so it's not just a matter of like am i getting eight you know seven or eight hours of sleep like okay you're checking the the the quantity that's definitely a big step that's a big big step you know seven eight nine ten hours like where are you on the spectrum and then from there it's like okay what's the quality issue well quality we can control. It's not just default, like I'm a bad sleeper, I'm a light sleeper.

It's like, are you taking the necessary steps inside the process to make these things better? When you go out into the world, like you've created this idea of what the right mindset is, and do you hear people talking to themselves and you just put your head down like, oh, you don't get it? Yeah. So what's really interesting is you see it on the professional coaching side. You hear coaches at the podium after games and press conferences. You hear them in the locker room talking to their athletes. Professional coaches in the four major sports don't know this stuff.

They're talking about things outside their control. The old coach of the Boston Bruins, you know, Boston followed him a lot. There's a TV series called Behind the B which airs on the local sports station here in Nessun and it's like all the behind the scenes. He's horrific at this. He's terrible at this. He's talking about, okay, we're going on a road

trip. This is a really important road trip. We're five games back outside of playoff spot. We need to make a major push to get these closer. When we come back, we want to be within three spots. All of that stuff is completely outside your control. So if you win those five games back outside of playoff spot. We need to make a major push to get these closer. When we come back, we want to be within three. All of that stuff is completely outside your control. So if you win those five games, but all of your competition also wins, you move no closer. Is that a failure?

Yeah. It's just like they're putting all this emphasis on things that they have no control over, as opposed to coaches like Brad Stevens of the Celtics and Belichick, who Belichick is the, you know, the media hates him and everyone outside New England hates him, but he's the mastermind of this. Everything's probably because he uses the system and he's not giving them the

nugget that they want. Exactly. But I mean, we're going to kill him today. The idea is right. No, we're going to try and get a little bit better about, but about a quarter percent, if that's cool. It's become famous now in New England.

It's on, we're onto Cincinnati. So we're onto Cincinnati is a saying that in New England now, it's about focusing on what you can control. In 2007, I think it was, the year they won the Super Bowl. I can't remember what they've won so many now. They're all blended together. Boston. You guys used to be so tortured. That was

a very subtle fuck you to the rest of the world. So, one of those years, they lost to Kansas City on Monday Night 42 to 17 just like in total crushing they got blown out really embarrassing week three and the idea was all the questions where is Tom Brady too old you not have the talent on the field you know what are you gonna be here next year what do you and his answer to every single question the press conference was we're on to Cincinnati who they were playing next week it was like what do you think they have talent on the field we're on to Cincinnati do you think that your quarterback's was, we're on to Cincinnati. Who are they playing next week?

It was like, well, do you think they have talent on the field? We're on to Cincinnati. Do you think that your quarterback's too old? We're on to Cincinnati. Do you think that you

ran the wrong offense? We're on to Cincinnati. It's like, we can't control any of the things that all the questions, he's basically telling them, you guys don't get it.

You're asking all these questions that are outside of our control. The thing that we have to focus on is preparing for next week. And they went on to

destroy Cincinnati and win the Super Bowl that year. Some people just get it. How much of – so when you put together these five things, when you actually sit down and write a program for somebody, like a new client, or I know you've been working with Cole, but say Cole Sager walks in and it's year one, are we laying this whole system out or are you just slowly building people into like is it a two-year process to actually be like the full ben bergeron package um at this point now it's probably a two-year process yeah i mean two years seems to be like

how long it takes to actually write yourself yep um keeps coming back to that number so start breaking up with yourself today people yeah right um you know it's not a matter of like i hold things back um but it's just it's a process and we're not going to get there on day one you gotta start chipping away yeah simplify things yep it's really crazy for you on a on a personal level like you're doing so many things right now and you you said that you still want to have some balance like what does that balance look like for your training like for as far as like your day-to-day workouts and you know for for eating as healthy as you possibly can like how have you systemized those things to make them you know very quick where you

can get on with the rest of your life yeah uh so Uh, so the first thing is, um, what's the goal? My goal is no longer to compete the CrossFit games or anything even close. You know, I'm ultimately aware of how fit those guys are. Um, and that's not what I'm striving for. Um, I want to be able to live my life at a really, really high level on a functional capacity side of things. I want to be able to, if I get invited to go climb Kilimanjaro tomorrow, I want to be able to do that without training. If I want to be able to go heli-skiing, I don't want to have to train to get in shape for that. I just want to live kind of at the upper end of athletic capacity, but not at the elite level. So what that looks like for me is I take the 6.30 a.m. class every day at my gym. So Monday through Friday is a 6.30 a.m. class and then after class I'll do a 10 minute something.

Whether that's bench press and bent over rows, whether that's do a 5x5 squat or it's like today I did a minute of skier,

minute of treadmill run, minute of sit ups and I did that four times, like 12 minutes of just kind of moving through I just want to sweat a little bit more. So I'll do, that's basically its class, which is CrossFit class.

It's an hour long, but the workout, as you guys know, is five to 25 minutes, and then I do 10 minutes afterwards, and I'm buttoned up, and I'm showered, and I am ready to coach. I coach the 830 class every day. So I can't give myself that two-hour window, but really it's a 15, 20 minute CrossFit workout followed by a 10 minute something. Are you on the pre-made meal train

right now? So I do, um, my kind of like nutrition, a personal approach is, uh, the quality side, uh, probably more over the quantity side. I do kind of pay attention to what I eat, but I'm not weighing and measuring. I'm not putting things in things before I eat them. I have an idea, but not dialed. But I am big on the quality side, and I get things from a company called Paleo Power Meals, and I probably do at least 21 meals a week from those guys. I've been doing it for, man, three, four years.

I'm not sick of them. It's phenomenal. Dude, pre-made meals are where it's at. Yeah. It's so easy, man. It's so like, literally, I mean, every single meal is that. Breakfast, lunch, dinner.

It's like there's no cooking time. There's no prep time other than like if I need to heat something up. But I don't need to heat things up. You try to just eliminate all of the variables and cooking is a massive variable. Yeah. Like if I, whenever my wife leaves town,

I'm like, you don't get it. I'm 48 hours away from being a bachelor because I'm going to eat all the food you made and then I'm literally left with fried eggs. And that's all I got got you're like a dog you leave a dog alone with all the food it's gone in like an hour yeah and then they starve for three days they throw up like you have like a raccoon in the pantry and i'm like all i got's eggs this is terrible i'm just gonna put the ground beef in the pan eggs are good it could be worse thanks

turn it on high i just buy hard-boiled eggs now i just have a i just have like a dozen two dozen hard-boiled eggs sitting in my fridge at all times just like anytime i'm just like i just need something they're just right there it's so great um one thing about kind of building a gym over all of these years um especially in the crossfit world we constantly are talking about community and i think many gym owners when they into it, like community to them means we're going to go on a bowling night or whatever. Like we'll have a gym dance or I don't know what the hell they do, but you know what it is, what I'm talking about. I want to go to the gym dance. I would love to go to gym dance. I should have thrown a gym dance. That's amazing. I wish I had thrown a gym dance now. That would have been so good um but does your community rally around these

as like this is our core principles of this community so i love what you said i think that community is um is the heart of what we're trying to do in terms of what we're trying to build both as a crossfit gym um and as crossfit at total it's i have i believe that community is a big part we're doing i think that the approach people take is really misunderstood. I think that exactly what you said is people think that

community is built through events. And, you know, doing a dance, doing a social, going bowling, doing that. God, I hope there's a dance

out there. You know, celebrating members' birthdays and hosting competitions and throwdowns and bring a friend days and all that stuff. Like, that's like, that's

the price of admission for running a gym. Like you just do those things. That's what you're supposed to be doing. But because you do those does not mean you have a strong community. That's like saying we have a really good family because we go on ski trips together. We go to soccer games, we celebrate birthdays. Like, no, that's what you do because you're a family. And if you want to be a really good family, you got to go to the next level. And the next level is understanding that our job as gym owners is not to get your, this is going to sound weird, is not to get your members fit. Our job is to create really strong relationships. If you, we are in the relationship business, not the fitness business.

If you think that you're in the fitness business, you will not get people fit. If you think you're in the relationship business, you'll get people fit. You can't coach people until they trust you. Trust is at the heart of every relationship, whether it is your spouse to spouse or your parent to kid or teacher, student or coach athlete. They have to trust you. Now, if they don't trust you, no matter what you say or how many initials you have after your name, what certifications you have, there's no buy-in. And every time you tell someone to squat with their knees out and with a lumbar curve and weight in their heels, they're always kind of like, oh, man, like you just think you're better than me, huh? Yeah.

Like you have to create a relationship with this like no questions asked. I know that you have my best interest at heart. And that's done through this term that I use, which I think it's from like Covey or Carnegie or one of those things, but it's the emotional bank account. And that emotional bank account works the same way as a regular bank account does. If you want to build up wealth in your bank,

you put in more deposits than you do withdrawals and your wealth grows. It's a really simple equation. Well, if you want to build up the relationship wealth that you have with somebody, you put in more emotional bank account deposits than you do withdrawals and your relationship with that person grows. So then you just have to define what are deposits and what are withdrawals. Withdrawals are things like ignoring, gossip, disinterest, breaking promises,

intimidation. You know, if we're like, hey guys, you guys want to go work out tomorrow? Let's work out tomorrow at 6 a.m. and you guys don't show up. Like, okay, no big deal. You don't show up the next day. Okay. And then, okay, you guys do show up, but when you do show up, you don't talk to me once. You're just kind of on your cell phone. Like, dude, I'm not buying into that relationship. Like there's inconsistency, there's breaking promises, there's disinterest, there's ignoring. Like all of those are withdrawals. But if you show up the next day at 6 a.m. and you ask me a lot of really good questions and use my name and you pay deposits by investing into me and showing me that you care about me, well, now when you ask me

again to show up at 6 a.m., I'm like, yeah, dude, I'm going to be there. Now there's a relationship. It's reciprocal back and forth. And I believe and trust that you have my best interest at heart. Over time, I don't know if it's three minutes, three hours, three weeks, or three years, over time you build up enough of a relationship that you can trust that person. Now, in my mind, CrossFit, we have the best fitness product that's ever been created on the history of the earth, constantly very functional, relatively high intensity, seems to be producing the best results. How dare you change the definition to relatively high intensity. That's not changed.

That's good. That's why I said it's mechanistic to see then and only then intensity. And the intensity is at the psychological and physical tolerance of the athletes, which is what no one's talking about. They just think it's like maximal absolute intensity, which is like can you do Fran in under three minutes? No. Like grandma should not do Fran in under three minutes.

It's at her physical and psychological. Like, if you push her and you push her and she breaks down mentally and she doesn't come back tomorrow, that was above her intensity level. Like, you got to know that for the athletes. Last night when we were talking to Mike Boyle, one of the things that he was saying that more people should do is go to technical failure rather than actual all the way failure did you subscribe to that at all yeah that's so that's what we say that is threshold training so threshold training is where um mechanics and intensity are uh are exactly at odds right with this perfect blend so whether you're talking about um getting someone to prove their mile time or someone to prove their grace or someone to prove their clean and jerk, threshold training is the best way to get there. It is where if you go too low, well, then you don't have the intensity. You're not going to get the certain adaptations

you're looking for. If you go too high, mechanics break down. You're not going to get the same adaptations you're looking for. That threshold, technical failure is what he called it. Yeah. So technical failure is exactly that same kind of blend between the two so that's where we prescribe to for everything you know in terms of um like endurance like lance armstrong type stuff or marathon like this is so well known in their world they do it off of heart rate and uh perceived exertion or wattage or pacing but everything everything is based off of that and those lt those lactic threshold training sessions are the most potent potent and most powerful he who trains most at or around lt lactic threshold gets the fittest like if you spend a lot of time in zone one or two like

practicing you're gonna get really good at your mechanics like really really good if you spend all your time at you you know, zone four or five, you have huge power output, but maybe move like crap and have no efficiency. You need that perfect, really you should be spending your time across all spectrums. But the majority of the time should be spent in that threshold area because that's where the majority of it happens.

As one of your, you know, elite athletes is getting prepped for the games, like on a yearly cycle you have these these five different areas you said that there you need to be contributing some time to each one of them how do those how does the time allocated to each area fluctuate as competition approaches okay so um it's not really um how much time it's more like the focus. So after the games, we go through a recovery phase, which is basically like, hey, you go do what you want to go.

Go travel around Iceland and stop at every hot dog stand that you want to stop at. Like don't go to the gym, and then we'll talk to each other in two or three weeks essentially. From there, it's a ramp-up process to get to the peak, you know, slightly before the game so we're ready to go. And as we go through that, the focus dials up a notch in each of those five categories. As we do that, inside of particularly the training category, there is different phases and approaches in terms of what I call the three-headed monster. The three-headed monster is your skills, your strength, and your conditioning. In our sport, you need all three ofheaded monster. And three-headed monster is your skills, your strength, and your conditioning. In our sport, you need all three of those things. And, you know, most sports you need kind of all

three of those, but our sport is really well balanced. So your strength is, you know, can you clean and jerk 300 pounds? Can you snatch, you know, X, Y, Z, you know, you need strength. Can you squat 450, whatever it is. Your skills is how many muscles can you do unbroken? Can you walk your hands? Can you do pistols? So on and so on. And your conditioning is, what's your mile time? What's your fran? You know, you need all those things. We do a little bit of a peer-to-peer approach where we put a little bit more emphasis

early side of the year into certain categories. And as we get towards the games, other categories take more emphasis in. Because certain ones, strength, no mystery, takes a little bit more time to develop. Whereas conditioning, you know, strength takes years. You know, if you want to get strong, certain ones strength no mystery takes a little bit more time to develop whereas conditioning you know strength takes years you know if you want to get strong you gotta kind of get ready for you know for the long haul yeah um if you want to get conditioned like give me a couple months i'll get

i'll whip you into shape in a couple months yeah well that's why guys come out of olympic weight lifting at a high level and can get conditioned and do really well at crossfit pretty fast people come out of the endurance world they kind of look like they're beginners for years. If you come out of the so yeah, in the CrossFit space, you're going to have a really hard time being a high school and college cross country runner and

competing in CrossFit. But if you come out of it as a collegiate weightlifter or gymnast, strength or skills, which take years, the conditioning side is the fastest one to move the needle on. Especially if you're sick in the head like Matt Frazier and you sit on your freaking... Well, he's willing to suffer and put in the conditioning.

You sit on that rower and airdyne in your mom's basement. Exactly. So he came into the sport as the strongest athlete, right? Already the strongest athlete. He has this work ethic where he can work on his skills and he has the humility to kind of pound the pavement and he's incredibly analytical so he'll figure out like the little nuancy things about like something like a ghd sit-up like okay where am i in the world of ghd sit-ups and like okay i am not up to snuff and i'm not a world class contender what are the things i need to do to move the needle on this and he'll sit there and

pound on those for a long, long time. From there, he's also willing to... The one that a lot of people don't do and the reason people don't excel that come out of the weightlifting world is the conditioning is one that hurts. That's one that sucks a lot. Being strong is fun. So it's fun to

throw around. You know what I'm really good at? The airdyne. Oh, great. You have no friends. There's no rest time in there to hang out. That's right. I like doing singles and then chilling for five minutes, talking with my friends. I'm on Instagram. I got to rest.

I got a 1RM coming up. I got chairs in the gym. Yeah. That community piece, though, just you're out here in your office. We walked in. You have three coaches on the floor, and all three of them plus your wife in the first five minutes of us being here

walked in and introduced themselves to us. They had no idea who we were. It was really awesome. Very cool. That whole thing is very much a part of what's going on over there, and it's very obvious right at the beginning when we walked in. We go to a lot of gyms, and that doesn't happen at the vast vast vast majority wow and uh it was very cool and just in when we train and see people and go and you you instantly recognize culture and values and and

you've instilled good things in it um one of the very first people that came in and introduced himself was the intern is there a long internship program that you guys have in place here? So we have an internship program, but the length of service is variable depending on – Until they get it. No, it's kind of determined by – we have a – I think it's a three-week minimum. So you have to be here for at least three weeks. But we've had interns that have been here for three, four months. So it's somewhere in between the two of those.

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really so i'm real all the things you're talking about one i loved your book it was awesome uh as we talked about before like i uh our bookshelves look very similar um yours happens to be the only one that presents the smorgasbord of these ideas and a very structured approach and also relates it all to weightlifting which makes for the best book ever because i totally get all of it like he's talking about weightlifting i know what he's talking about um but yeah i i'm very excited to implement a lot of this stuff into her life like i had to go learn it in a very hard way which was deciding one day i wasn't going to be the best at partying anymore deciding i really wanted to be a crossfit athlete deciding that i was going to open a gym and then when i did that i was like

oh shit i've really backed myself into a corner now like now i have to be good at this well how am i going to be good i didn't know that when i even when i started like i just assumed i was going to have a business i didn't know that i had to like commit to the process of being good at something and putting in the work so then all of a sudden i had this gym and then people showed up and it was like right at the growth of crossfit was like man how are we going to handle all of these people and get the right messaging and the right programming and the right like how do we control this chaos that's going on and you build this massive thing right and um i had to go learn and now i just kind of what i was talking about earlier of like finding when i when i communicate with people and i hear them not on the right path and I just want to be like

stop stop just everything you're saying about yourself right now like if you could just relearn how to communicate with yourself and give yourself an opportunity to grow it's so much easier but you just you have put yourself in a box of this is who I am I can't grow out of this I have to this is I'll never be able to do that. Or that person succeeds because they have this skill. It's like, well, do you think they were born with that skill? I don't know. Like, were they just really charismatic to begin with?

Or did they practice the skill of charisma? Like, did they learn how to make people like them? That's a real thing. And in being a parent now i realized that i had like i would love in five six seven eight ten years whatever it is to be able to have a conversation with my daughter and if i assume there'll be another kid at some point but to be able to like our first conversations to be about this versus love my dad and all that. But like he showed up and meets her for the first time and he's like,

you want to watch a baseball game? And I'm like, man, baseball is cool. But like, that's like a little weird widget that goes on in life. Like, I don't care if she can run to first base. I would really love for her to know how to like, um, talk to herself in a way that gives herself the ability to grow and use the right words and have a mental capacity for growth and yeah baseball is cool and of course he's just trying to have family time and all that but like the way that i think about talking to her and who i want to be as a parent now that i've been through owning a gym being an athlete doing somewhat high

level crossfit competitiveness and like really deciding that i want to be good at things like you can instill that stuff in them and that is the basis for the conversation so where do they go when they're 35 years old when they've been learning this for 20 years and now all of a sudden they graduate college or whatever school means at that time but it it's like, oh, I just have to implement this system. They don't have to go and learn the system. It's already there. It's already hardwired of this is just the way we live. And that's like the culture of the family versus I have to go find out.

I have to go read all these books and try and create this education for myself because I don't have it. It seems like I love that methodology. That's phenomenal. It's really an enlightened approach to parenthood. That's really cool to hear. I think one of the big things that I've been trying to work on is resisting the urge to give accolades for inborn talents or otherwise, which is what I do with my athletes as well.

If somebody does really well in the gym, try really hard not to say, like, nice job on that. Wow, you're really strong. Yeah. Now it's like strong is a pass fail. You read Carol Dweck's. It's exactly that. Yeah.

It's exactly that. Praising the effort. Yes, exactly. So for now it's like, know wow really good it's you know when my um kid comes back from school and he's got like a star on something it's not wow you're really smart it's good job you worked really hard on that doesn't feel good or like i think i we've been layering and layering and i hope it takes effect but is like um let's do hard things hard things. Let's, let's be challenged. Let's it's let's, let's make mistakes. Let's make, let's fail. Like, um, when I'm working,

that's why, how I talked to my, my four-year-old and six-year-old all the time. Like, let's go like, Oh, like it's hard. That's okay. This is cool. It's good. It's hard. It's supposed to be hard. I'm not talking with my athletes elite or the the regular members is um if we're trying to learn something new like they're trying to learn a double under everyone wants to everyone's afraid to make the mistake to get tripped up on the rope and they're all saying it's like let's do let's let's do some double unders and i'll talk to you after you make 10 mistakes go like just and now it's like okay so i gotta make 10 mistakes before we can take the next step yeah so let's just make a bunch of mistakes like go make make make 10 mistakes yeah like let's it's totally fine like we're gonna try and learn to climb a rope a different way

okay like don't show me the old way i know you can do the spanish rap and it takes you six minutes to get to the top let's try this way instead and i want you to fumble and let's make a lot of mistakes along the way just don't go back to the old way. Let's just make a bunch of mistakes. And also, as you ingrain this theory of like, it's not pass-fail. It's not where I am now. I'm growing. I'm becoming something better.

It's okay that this is the starting point. We've been talking about kids. Before we move on, as far as disciplining your kids, when your kids make mistakes, how do you view disciplining a four-year-old or a six-year-old so um i love this quite um it's something i did terrible at in the beginning um so because i'm not very good at it yeah i'm asking yeah no for real i got a three and a half year old is my oldest right now yeah so that's so with my first so um

i have two older kids that are my stepkids, Heather's from a previous marriage. They're 18 and 14 years old. They've kind of, you know, they're kind of grown up in their, one's grown up and one's a teenager right now. But they're amazing, amazing kids. With my four-year-old, I'm sorry, with my six-year-old now, when he was born, that was kind of my first.

And when he was, you know was going through his toddler years, man, I did a terrible, I wanted to be his best friend. I wanted to love and I wanted to show affection and I wanted to like him just, I did a really poor job of disciplining him in the early years. I was way too nice. Way too nice, that's really where I was.

For the first three years and the last six months months i've flipped that around quite a bit um and i think it's really i think that we have a better relationship because there's more clarity and rules and call it principles but you know the the most the least happy dog is a dog that has no rules it doesn't know if it's allowed to poop inside or outside doesn't know if it's along the couch or upstairs doesn't know if you can jump up on people they have no rules and because doesn't know if it's allowed to poop inside or outside. It doesn't know if it's allowed on the couch or upstairs. It doesn't know if it can jump up on people. They have no rules. And because of that, they live this constant life in like flux.

The really well-disciplined dog is the happy dog. And if you create really clear guidelines, rules, and expectations for the way someone acts or behaves or anything else in your family, your team, your organization, I think it brings a lot of autonomy. It's that discipline equals freedom. I think it brings a lot of happiness.

And if I could go back, that's definitely something I would have changed. I would have been more of a disciplinarian. My wife took that role on for sure, and it was good cop, bad cop, which is not the right way to do it in my mind. I got the same dynamic. I'm definitely good cop. My wife's a bad cop um which was is not the right way to do it in my mind um i got the same dynamic i'm definitely good cop yeah my wife's bad cop for sure yeah and it's uh it's flipped for us now for sure not flipped in terms of good cop bad cop but flip me i flipped yeah where now it's bad cop bad cop but they know the rules yeah but and it's not like um it's just a matter of you know it's it's again it's what i talked about earlier it's not about the what you talk about it's not like – it's just a matter of – it's, again, what I was talking about earlier.

It's not about what you talk about. It's what you tolerate. And I've just learned to be better at disciplining. I'm still not good at it, but it's still the hardest thing you have to do as a parent in my mind is you don't want to send your kid in timeout. You don't want to be stern with in timeout. You don't want to, um, you know, be stern with your child, but they're necessities. You got to create the, the guidelines and there's, there's certain things that people respond to and people, certain things people won't. One thing I will, um, I've learned this from my wife and, um,

man, it's just so not like the norm is, um, it's so powerful and effective is, um, no empty threats, which is if you say, um, um, let's say the kids are arguing over playing with, uh, a doll or something like that. You're like, um, Bodie, my son, Bodie, I'm like, Bodie, if you don't share that with Harley, my other kid, if you don't share with Harley, there's going to be, you're not going to the birthday party this weekend. And now if he doesn't share that and you still let him go to the birthday party, you're done. Because now like, why is he going to listen to you? My wife and man, if she wasn't around, there's no way I would have done this. He doesn't go to the birthday party. And those threats, every threat is real with a consequence behind it.

So it might not be the birthday party, but it's how many people are like, if you do that, then you're not getting another cracker. If you do that, then there's no TV tonight. If you do that, there's no, we're not going to the movies. We're not going to visit grandpa. When she says it, it's for real. And it's like how it's so hard in the moment to follow that up with an actual discipline of removing something. Because you want to go to the birthday party.

You want him to do that. You want him to do all these things. But now the kid's like, we say something, and it's for real. They're not empty threats yeah how do you how do you kind of think about the the idea of like structure and creativity as a kid growing up or just with anybody because you have to lay these rules out and then me at my age now i'm like i don't want structure i want to be in this creative zone where I get to kind of create chaos and then weave my way into, like, whatever the new era of things is. And when I look back at, like, school and all these things, I'm like, man, do I really want to send my daughter to regular school?

Because at 35 now, I'm like, structure, like structure who wants that like i'm an entrepreneur i want to be at the cutting edge like i can't listen to other people's rules so you lay these principles out in your own house but at the same time you've kind of defined a life of being creating your own your own path right i don't really answer that yeah it's i'm out yeah i'm out you gotta go yeah it's uh you can think out loud so here's in terms of school like i did i i hated school i did not do well in school i needed to be um like if i'm not interested in it, I'm done. I'm out. I have no interest. I just can't pay attention. There's no motivation.

There's no, I can't chase a carrot for just getting a carrot. I need to be, like, I need to know. And so my 14-year-old is going through this right now as well. Incredibly, we went and got him tested for certain things because he's kind of struggling at school a little bit. And so it came back, like, phenomenal reading, phenomenal math, phenomenal memory. He's so far removed from learning disability stuff. But what came up was when – He's bored as fuck.

So when the questions were really easy, he did terrible. Like second percentile. Like of 100, 98% of the population beat him. Like terrible. As the questions got challenging, he went up to like the 85th percentile. He's like he has to be – this is me. He has to be challenged. He has to be engaged.

He has to be like this is fun. This is has to be like what like this is fun this is exciting if it's like boredom and mundane and like this like he's out i think that was the universal principle if anders applied himself more but here's the thing when you were more interesting maybe i would he doesn't like school like so like this is the thing so he doesn't like history he doesn't like biology he doesn't like history. He doesn't like biology. He doesn't like all these things. It's like is he going to need those things when he goes – like if he's going to do like follow – like do something like outside of those –

I know when he gets in something that he's passionate about, he's going to be phenomenal. Yeah. So I almost feel like we should be swinging school to meet him, not fitting the round peg in the square, whatever that saying is, right? Let's not try and smush

something in. I feel like it's school's fault for not engaging him. Well, he goes to prep school up here though, right? Yeah.

They do a really good job of that stuff. And the other thing is like it's... Because you're allowed to be really smart at those places. Well, it's also if he

was at a regular school, we never would have known this, right? Because it would have been like this is – and they don't even pick up on it. Everyone at his school is so exceptional in every way that – I think that I – and it's going to be – it will be very interesting. I hope we come back and talk to him like when he's a junior in college because when you go to those – when you go to prep school up here, you go to a private school where they actually care about the way you think, not just here's the test and I hope we get our ranking so we get our funding.

You get to college and they don't care. And I just stopped caring about school completely. High school was so hard that the rest of school for college and grad school was just a joke. Oh, I don't have to go? I'm still going to get a B? Okay. You're not really creating a system in which I'm

supposed to care about anything that happens here. Here's my money. Why don't you just give me the piece of paper and I'll just go out and figure it out. Part of this is that whole discussion of is the academic system that we live in today just completely antiquated? Is it a product of like our industrial or agricultural past that does not fit today's world, today's society, and today's what we can do outside of that? Like, you know, part of it is, yes, you need the basic skill sets that they teach you in school. You need to be able to do –

Reading, writing, arithmetic. Yeah, exactly, right? But then at some point – and I want to have some understanding of like world history. Yeah, those things matter. But once you get into the next level, if you're not passionate about it, if you're not – like some people are. Thank God they are because that's why we have Elon Musks and stuff like that and people are going to drive us in the future.

But if engineering or mathematics or those things don't set you on fire, but like my son, music does, can't we kind of just push him towards something that he's passionate about already? Yeah. I don't know at what age that happens. Do you have conversations in your house about, you mentioned earlier, and it spawned this thought question, about just you talk about how important it is to try to do really hard things in your household.

I think that that's something that can be instilled because the thing that I think, or when I see people struggling in their lives, they're not really reaching to do the hard thing they think that I want to get the paycheck and not have to do anything they don't realize that you might be getting a paycheck but that eight hours in the middle of your day you're just wasted your whole life and I think that when and the idea that kids are going to absorb and watch what you actually do versus what you tell them, you can create a situation and a system of learning in your house, and this is what I'm striving to do, so I'm talking out loud or thinking out loud,

but where if they think about what it takes to do really really hard stuff their like risk profile or their their idea of doing the profile that they enter into the world of it's not i i'm gonna go get a job they're they're going hopefully going to be looking to make an impact because you and heather have create cross created across new england you're you're the dad that's going out and coaching the best athletes in the country they're seeing this happen right in front of their eyes every single day and it's normal to them that the best athlete in the world would call their dad that's a really strange system to grow up in as a kid like nobody else has that it's a really weird thing to go and sit and talk about that as a family of,

Katrin just called, I might be coaching her. Who's that? She's the best in the world, and they just called your dad. Like, it's a really, how do you communicate that to them? Or is it just part of the conversation of, like, we talk about greatness a lot in the household um i i think just like accept the the environment to which you're a part of as normalcy and reality like it's it's um yeah i i um i feel so lucky and amazed and i i'm living the life that i exactly what i would

want to be doing right i do every single thing I want to do every single day, which is amazing. And I don't take it for granted for a second. At the same time, I don't think it's like different, strange, or exceptional or anything else. It's just kind of the way our day goes. So, you know, Katrin lives with us and Cole comes and visits us and spends you know 10 days with us and you know you know we have these athletes that are walking in and out of our homes all the time I don't think

that's weird for our family I don't think it's weird for our kids I think that that's the I think that that is the fact that it's not weird creates a strange well it's not weird creates a strange, well, it's not strange to you at all. It's how we've done before.

It's strange that it's not strange. Exactly. The way that they feel about the value you're supposed to create, like he's struggling in school on easy questions. Do you know what conversation we're having at home this conversation at school is so boring that they just will enter into the world knowing that they have to have a better conversation than the majority of human beings it's a really interesting way to to to grow up uh slight change of subject regarding katrin living with you like how how does that change the dynamic that you have with her versus your other athletes and and kind of where

did that come from like did she propose that did you suggest it like why is she living with you um well she doesn't live with us now she did when um uh so the story of that is um when she didn't qualify for the crossfit games um and she you know infamously infam infamously kind of failed at regionals on the rope climb and knocked her out of the games. She didn't make it to the back of the games. After that incident is when she reached out to me and asked me if I would be her coach. I said, yeah, why don't you come out here?

She was in Iceland at the time. Come out here and train with us for a little while. She was still in school at the time. She came out with us for a prolonged visit and she stayed with us for probably about three weeks. that's where she started to live with us so she just stayed in our house um from there she went back to iceland i trained her from afar and then she finished up that semester and came back and then moved in with us and she lived with us for i don't know it's probably um six months eight months i don't know maybe a year i'm not um

and that's how that kind of evolved. And then she ended up getting a apartment in, in town here. Um, again, it was kind of like, it just seemed like a normal thing. It's like kind of the, we've had, we've had other athletes that come and visit. And then, um, when they visit, they stay with us. So, um, whether it's, you know, when, when I was coaching Matt or, you know, Brooke or Cole or Chris Buehler, they stay with us when they're here. And then we've had a bunch of people, other people live with us. So, you know, James Hobart lived with us for a very long time, for probably three years. It's kind of a normal thing in our house.

It's just kind of the way we operate. I was like asking people that I know are kind of lifelong learners and have been in the industry for a long time. Like what are you reading and learning about right now? Like what are you super excited about that's kind of new for you? So the kind of thing I'm putting, so I'm always trying to learn how to connect with people better. I think that's like, that's really what coaching is. If you can get people,

there's always the X and O's of the sport, right? Can you figure out the right progressions and identify weaknesses and all that? But I always think that how you connect with people is super important. So I'm always kind of doing that on the side. The other thing I'm always trying to do as well is better myself in terms of like

time management, overcoming obstacles, putting my mind in the right place, a lot of stuff we've kind of talked about. But the thing I've kind of like put my narrow focus into is I have this business called CompTrain, which is an online training platform. Um, it's basically like a workout of the day type thing for elite competitors. Um, and the business is exploding and it's a, so I'm kind of like learning how to run that type of business. And it's a SAS business, which is a subscription as a service model and, you know, the business consumer industry. So I'm trying to figure out a lot of the, um, like dialing in the customer journey and figuring out how to operate this at scale. Um, and that's where I'm putting a lot of

kind of my, my efforts in right now. So everything from like, um, how to, um, work on marketing to, um, you know, creating the right systems in place for an SAS company, to how to get at scale, to creating a good team and a good culture and everything else. The online programming piece. Do you struggle with that since it's not face-to-face? Is that a tough one to really connect? How many athletes? You had a couple hundred people at regionals or something. was last year the year before yeah so we have clearly working

but how long of a process kind of going through going from only doing in person to moving everything online so again that was kind of like it doesn't feel weird or strange because again it was like this really kind of natural evolution where the way comp train came about was i was training my team for the CrossFit games, my team at CrossFit New England. And instead of sending them an email every day, like this is what we're doing for workout, I went on and created a free blog and just gave those guys access to it. So it was like, cool, like here's our workout. I put a picture of us from the previous days of training and here's our, and I called it competitors training. It's like,

it's, that's what we were doing from there were doing. From there, they told some other people and they told some other people. And really quickly, we had about 10,000 people following this thing. It was like, oh my gosh. Okay, this isn't just for us. Other people are looking at this thing. So cleaned it up a little bit, rebranded it.

Now we have 30,000 people a day checking this thing. It's like, whoa. Okay, this is like, maybe this is something. One of the people on my staff, Harry, is like, whoa, okay. This is like, maybe this is something. One of the people on my staff, Harry is like, Hey, I know you're really into like making this thing free and keeping it free. What if I kind of like chunked off on like a little niche of the niche? And I decided, saw what I could do. And like a subscription type thing was this, I did this just for masters. We had a whole bunch of masters at our gym. I'm like, again, makes sense. Like go

for it, Harry. Next thing you know, like built up to a nice million dollar business. It's like, okay. So like now there's an opportunity there. There's like, we have like, you know, close to a million people checking the site a month. Like this is like something we send, you know, um, a hundred something people to regionals last year. We had, uh, six games athletes. We had 50, 57 masters athletes at the games last year. I mean, there 50 57 Masters athletes at the games last year I mean there's only 200 athletes at the games we sent 57 of them were ours it's like geez like okay number this is so like I'm like okay we've put like nothing from a resources thing behind this except for Harry who's phenomenal

and a monster and you know the strong the hardest working guy I know but what if what would happen if we kind of put something behind this so that's what our early part of probably about spring last year we started to put a little more into this try to turn it into a brand something that people would be proud to wave the flag for and now we're taking the next step

so we kind of create a product now we create a brand and now we're creating the customer experience and the actual culture behind it and everything else. How many people are you specifically coaching? It's not a million or whatever. I specifically coach just three. It's Katrin, Cole, and Brooke.

Nice. Are you still working with Matt at all? No. When he moved to Tennessee, I stopped working with him. Does he work with anybody, or is he just kind of on his – He works with Hinshaw. Yeah. I don't know if Hinshaw is doing his CrossFit training stuff.

Those guys are kind of on his... He works with Hinshaw. Yeah. I don't know if Hinshaw's doing his CrossFit training stuff. I feel like those guys are kind of like they know... They're putting the work in to know what they need to be working on. Yeah. I mean, Hinshaw, he's a great friend of mine, and I'm still friends with Matt. We chat from time to time. But Matt splits his time between Tennessee and Vermont now, and I think that Hinshaw, if he was to say who...

Does he have a coach? I'd say that Hinshaw if he was to say who does he have a coach I'd say that uh Hinshaw helps him out the most yeah do you have any thoughts on kind of like the the you've been here basically since day one in this CrossFit thing seeing this massive boom and almost kind of getting away from the idea of the games being the center focus of all this and moving into this health thing do you have any just thoughts on just cross the macro of crossfit um since you've been through so many pieces of it yeah um it's so my my first quick answer is um i'm up i'm really

excited about it i'm not excited about because i'm jumping on the bandwagon. This is a shift that we made internally at CrossFit England before HQ did this. So we used to be like competition. We were a competitive gym. I know about those gyms. I was one of those for about six years. We won the CrossFit Games as a team. We would send two teams to regionals. We'd always have individuals at the games and at regionals.

Our goal when the Open was there was to have the most participants in the Open. I used to, at the beginning of class, be like, everyone that has signed up for the Open, please have a seat. Everyone that is still standing, please go to the front desk and sign up for the Open, and class will stop, start when you are done signing up. It's like everyone signed up for the Open. My thought was we are a crossfit gym if we were a running club if we were running club i'd want you to

sign for a 5k i stole that from you so many times that was the deal so but so many times then i had this epiphany this realization like competition is a really small thing of what we're doing inside of this world so we turned it from being like the most competitive gym in the world to now our mission is to create a family of humble, hungry, happy people who kick ass in their 90s. We made that shift in terms of like, okay, what are we trying to create? We wanted this really close group knit of people. Let's call it a family, right?

Family stands for forget about me, I love you, right? From there, we want them to have certain character traits. It's not just like a group of people. Let's call it a family, right? Family stands for forget about me, I love you, right? From there, we want them to have certain character traits. It's not just like a group of people. We want them to be humble, hungry, and happy. We'll kind of define those things. And then from there, we want them to have certain levels of capabilities of fitness. And it's not about three-minute friends or doing well in the open. For us, we're going to measure our success by when our members are in their 90s, what kind of capacities they have. So let's have them kicking ass in their 90s. We made that shift into the health perspective away from the games about two years ago.

And the fact that HQ is doing the same thing, like, man, that's – I love it. Now, if it was, hey, CrossFit games are dead. We're going to bury it. It doesn't exist anymore, and we're putting all of it over here. I would think that's really sad because – I called you. Sounds like you did this rebrand a lot better than I did. I've dedicated most of my adult life to the CrossFit Games.

So that would be a really sad thing for me in terms of what I've done, particularly for the athletes I work with. But in terms of what's happening with the affiliate side of things, wow. Like, yes. Because that's where all, you know, when you look at the metrics of, you know, the demographics of what CrossFit is, there's about 4 million people doing CrossFit worldwide. 400,000 people signed up for the Open. That's a really big number. It's one of the biggest participatory events in the world. But it's 10%. 10% of our athletes are competitors. 90% do not compete.

So we should be, the games are really, now it's sexy and it's cool and it's amazing. I think it's one of the best sporting events in the world. And man, that week at the games is my favorite week of the year. It's amazing. But it's's one of the best sporting events in the world. And man, that week at the games is my favorite week of the

year. It's amazing. But it's not what CrossFit is. It's not. So I'm glad that there's been a refocus on it. Well, it's interesting. I mean, they do that was the big marketing piece for a long time. I mean, Glassman stood on those stages

and basically put his middle fingers up and said, come get some. Yeah. I have Greg Amundsen. Let's go. And then Froning came and then Frazier showed up and Catra, like all these people. And that was the thing. Is CrossFit and its methodology able to really, I don't want to say turn its back on that kind of mantra and attitude and culture,

but there's going to have to be a gigantic shift in the marketing, which is a significantly less sexy way to go about marketing. And it's, I think, a road that is very, very challenging to go down when you're saying, I want you to be healthy when you're 90. CrossFit New England, it works because they know Ben Bergeron and you have the trust. Does the macro of CrossFit have the trust to really carry out a message that's similar to that?

Yeah, I think that, I don't know if it was strategic or it was by default, but the fact that they went after the elite first is really kind of the only way you can do it and create that credibility. So we have the fittest on earth. We have the Navy SEALs. We have SWAT teams.

We have Greg Amundsen. Like we're the best, the fittest, we can produce the fittest athletes in the world. Then from there, there's this trickle down offense where we can also get you off diabetes medication, get you to lose 100 pounds. If we started there, if we started with sweating to the oldies,

if we started with getting people off diabetes, we're not getting to the Navy SEALs. It just doesn't work the other way up. So the credibility and the trust is the fact that we can produce the world's greatest fitness in the world. Well, fitness, it's about the jargon.

It's work capacity across broad time world domain. If you add in health in know, it's about the jargon, you know, it's work capacity across broad time world domain. If you add in health in that, it's just across your age, across life, regardless of age. So now we have this metric of health. Well, we know we can produce the highest levels of fitness to this across your age. And there's what health is. If we define what health is, health is not the absence of disease, it's capacity so can you do work you know it's a productive application of force over a varied amount of you know whether we're shoveling a driveway getting up off a couch or running a marathon or competing in you know a spartan race yeah well part of it that's interesting to me is like they they could post a video that's like

matt frazier eats an egg 1 million views guy loses 100 pounds has a much better life his family loves him again he doesn't think about suicide 74 views and it's a hard road to go down did not so sexy but that's that's from a you gotta make it cool first like you're saying like yeah that's basically a... You got to make it cool first, like you're saying. That's basically what Tesla did. Like they came out with the Roadster, they came out with the Model S, like these high-end, cool luxury vehicles.

There have been many other electric vehicles that were just like... You got to make it cool first and then you backtrack to the masses. Yeah, it's also like, what are we trying to do? Are we trying to get engagement

and likes? Or are we trying to actually move the needle for someone from... So those people that need we trying to do? Are we trying to get engagement in likes or are we trying to actually, um, like move the needle for someone from a, so those people that are, um, lose, need to lose a hundred pounds. They're, they're not, they're not, they might not be liking the Mac Frazier thing either. What they're doing is they're trying to save their life. And what we need to do is get to the doctors and the nurses and the doctor and the nurse say, okay, get to the box. That's how we're going to save your life. And what we're trying to do, I say we, in terms of CrossFit in general is, okay, get to the box. That's how we're going to save your life. And what we're trying to do,

I say we in terms of CrossFit in general, is kind of rewrite the prescription of how to cure chronic disease. In the past, it's been a bunch of medication and no one's talking about this underlying thing of what actually causes it, which is really simple. It's lack of activity and processed foods and carbohydrates. You eliminate those things and all of a sudden, you know, it's the cure. I mean, it is the cure to whatever ails us. How much do you guys do regarding blood work and working with functional medicine docs or whoever else?

With our elite athletes, we do it. We do blood work routinely throughout the year. We also, I mean, we're trying to, you know, how much we use of it and how much of it moves the needle for us, yet to be determined and probably will never be known. But we're going to try to uncover everything we possibly can. So we've done, we do everything from stool samples,

from a gut microbiome to blood testing, to sweat analysis for sweat rate and sweat composition. You know, we do HRV and all that stuff. Right. And it's like, of all this stuff we get, maybe we get to, you know, maybe there's a 1% in there somewhere, but we're going to use it all for our regular members. Um, we, we, we don't have it systemized. We don't have it there. We don't even have a good relationship with a functional medicine practitioner at this point. We have a relationship with a blood testing company, but it's loose and it's not part of the journey

of being a CrossFit New England member. And that's something we're working towards. That's where we love to be, right? We love to be in this 360. We love to be where someone comes to us and we can fix whatever they want. If they want the three-minute Fran, gotcha. You want to lose 100 pounds, gotcha.

Need to get you off of diabetes medication, gotcha. Got like this skin rash, gotcha. Like gut issues, IBS, gotcha got like this skin rash gotcha like gut issues ibs gotcha and like we might not be able to do it in our in in-house but we have a network of people that we are working on a professional systemized level that we can refer you to and it's all inside of our communication system it's not go talk to this person and let us know in six months if you feel better it's like we have the communication going back and forth. We're not there.

Was it tough going from that hyper-competitive thing? Because athletes think, I mean, you've got until about you're 32, 33 years old before things start to go bad. And then all of a sudden now you have a mission statement that includes being a 90 year old that's that's a that's an interesting transition to to start talking to people that are focused on athletics and performance to what does it look like in 60 years yeah um some of the struggles or just the process and going into i guess rebranding the mission of of what you're doing here yeah i, I mean, we're constantly evolving. We're constantly changing it. You know, so we've evolved our coaching staff. We've evolved our mission. We've evolved our approach. We've evolved our programming.

It's all kind of changed over the last five years-ish. So I couldn't pinpoint like that one thing of changing the mission as a big hiccup or a big push that we had to get through because it's it's again it's what yeah every day we're trying to change and make it a little bit different a little bit better um so it wasn't one kind of like i'm always initiative it wasn't like we're rebranding today and now it's like now we're this i'm always interested in that process because i did it in like 48 hours. I was like, we're new.

This is the new thing. That thing doesn't work anymore. Trust me. I did that thing really well and I was hurt and jacked up and burnt out and we need a different approach. Yeah. So I say that it's like we took this drip, drip, drip approach,

but there are kind of like tipping points along the way of like, okay, now we have these different programming tracks you can follow. It's not just about like, now we have these different programming tracks you can follow. It's not just about like a competitive program track. We have one that you can follow like if you're trying to stay out of the nursing home. We have one that you can follow like you want to get better at sports outside of the gym. So when those things get implemented, those are the things that people are like, okay, something's different here.

When we stop talking about the games and we start talking about health in the 90s, that's probably not as big of a talking point. We move the needle from over here to over here. It's more internal that seeps its way in. Right on. This has been an absolute pleasure. Very cool. I appreciate all this time. I'm glad to be here with you guys.

I should say I'm glad to have you guys here. Where can people find you? Like everything else, like online. On the internet, duh. So there's Ben Bergeron. Specifically on the internet, where can they locate you? Benbergeron.com is an easy one. Benbergeron on Instagram is an easy one.

Doug Larson. Yeah, you can follow me on Instagram at Douglas C. Larson. Also on my own website, Doug Larson Fitness. Check it out. Shrug Collective, at Shrug Collective. I'm Anders Varner, at Anders Varner. Six days a week in the Shrug Collective podcast going out, three, four YouTube videos.

Lots of momentum. Things are fun. Doug Larson, I appreciate you, buddy. Yeah, yeah. We'll see you guys on Wednesday. Shrug family, I know you love that show. That show was incredible. That interview is awesome.

I'm going to listen to this show at least five times. If you count, that's 10 hours of me listening to this. Just think there's so much stuff in there that I need to master. Guy's a legend. He's coached the best athletes in the game. There's a lot of things we should be learning from him. Thank you to everyone that has been a part of this fun journey. I want to thank our sponsors,

Viori Clothing, V-U-O-R-I Clothing.com. Use coupon code SHRUG25. Also, thank you to Thrive Market. Get over to ThriveMarket.com forward slash SHRUG. Save 25% on your first order. Doug Larson Fitness for all things fitnesses, nutrition for weightlifters, mobility. I also want to thank all of you for tuning in. This has been the coolest 2018. This has been the coolest ride of all time. I never thought

I was going to be the host of Barbell Shrugged. And you guys have been so welcoming and so cool and so awesome reaching out, telling me you enjoy the show, thanking me, telling me how much you like these longer shows. It's just so cool to be a part of this family. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you. If you ever want to reach out, say something to me on Instagram. I will write back. I love meeting, hearing from everyone that's listening to the show so thank you so much this 2018 has been just absolutely ridiculous we got a couple weeks left and we're going to be rolling into the new year just firing on all cylinders and thank you guys so much I appreciate it we'll see you guys on Saturday