Barbell Shrugged - BS INTERROGATION SERIES - EP3 w/ Jacob Tsypkin

Episode Date: June 23, 2013

EP3 w/ Jacob Tsypkin

All right, Mike Bledsoe here with Barbell Shrugged interview series. I'm here to interview Jacob Sipkin from CrossFit Monterey. He is the owner of CrossFit Monterey and Monterey Barbell Club. He is running a website for competitive exercisers at tzstrength.com. That's Tango – what's the Z, Sam? What's that? Zulu. Zulu. I was in the military. You'd think I'd know how to say that. That's tangozulustrength.com. 70sbig.com.

He's written some articles for those guys and for Juggernaut Training Systems as well. Make sure you head over to barbellshrug.com and sign up for the newsletter so that we can inform you of all the stuff we got going on. Doug, Chris Moore and I have put together a weekend training camp for CrossFit gyms to help improve CrossFitters on things like weightlifting, nutrition, mobility, powerlifting programming for CrossFitters and stuff like that.

It's going to be a little strength oriented but that's where we see most CrossFitters needing help. So we got those training camps coming up. Sign up for that newsletter and we'll be able to tell you where we're going to be. Also we have Zach Critch's weightlifting seminar is out now, and you can buy that in the Barbell Shrugged shop. So check that out as well. So, all right, we're going to get moving on with this interview.

Got Jacob on the line here via Skype. We're both sitting here with a – you guys can't see us out there in iTunes land, but we both have our shirts off and sporting pretty sweet beards, I tell you. How's it going, Jacob? It's going good. Thanks for having me on. You just got done training, so what did you eat for, what did you do for training today and what did you do to eat, what did you eat after you trained?

I snatched some light weights um those are the only kinds of weights i lift so and then i front i front squatted some light weights and then i got on the airdyne mostly for the sweet quad pump and then i had some uh gotta get the blood in those legs yeah then i had some some chicken and some sun-dried tomatoes and some spinach i'm not paleo i just happen to feel like eating chicken and spinach and sun-dried tomatoes, and some spinach. I'm not paleo. I just happen to feel like eating chicken and spinach and sun-dried tomatoes. Yeah, it's strange. Even if you don't eat paleo, it's still okay to eat vegetables. I actually hate them.

I just kind of force them down. Do you do any kind of juicing or anything like that? You juice your vegetables? Oh, juice my – I thought you were asking about the other kind of juicing. Like, no, dude. Man, we went straight to the point. I barely squat double body weight. If I barely squat a double body weight on juice, I think I'd kill myself.

I don't juice anything, no. I just force down some spinach once a day. People ask me that about steroids. They're like, you do steroids? I'm like, look at me. I'm not very impressive. If I did steroids, I'd be way more impressive. If I did steroids, I wouldn't be way more impressive.

Right now, I'm a shade below mediocre. I'd maybe be on the upper end of mediocre on steroids. You pride yourself on being a better coach than athlete. I don't really have a choice other than to pride myself on that. So, yeah, I guess I do. I'm kind of in the same boat, mediocre athlete. I would like to think I'm better coach than an athlete. If I weren't, I would suck at both, I guess. Tell us a little bit about what you do. What's your focus when you're coaching? You also

have the barbell club. You're definitely very weightlifting oriented. I know you've hung around with the muscle driver guys a little bit. Yeah. So I opened the gym with my business partner back in 2008, always with an eye on kind of developing competitors. As the gym grew, I got to do more and more of that as we brought people in. I'm doing less of the kind of working with the classes and more of developing competitive weightlifters and CrossFitters. I was really lucky back in late 2011 when Glenn was still at California Strength, Glenn Pendlay. He invited me to come up there with them,

again, for coaching purposes to kind of learn from him. So I was really lucky on that end. So yeah, weightlifting definitely is a big part of our gym, both for the regular clients and we have a weightlifting team. Most of our competitive crossfitters try to compete in weightlifting during the offseason. And weightlifting is definitely kind of one of the pillars of my competitive CrossFit programming.

But that's really where I'm at is my goal is to produce competitive weightlifters and competitive CrossFitters. Very cool. So you kind of got the gym off the ground. You have your general exercisers, and then your personal focus, maybe what your passion is is developing the competitive athletes yeah definitely i i hate losing and i can't win myself so i have to live vicariously through people who who can the majority of your athletes don't spend uh an extended period

of time with these you say a lot of them are military and they're basically they come in town for a year year and a half years, and they're back out. So you have a limited amount of time with each person. Yeah, basically there's two military bases here. One, you know, on average, somebody's going to be here from the shortest period, usually six months, up to occasionally somebody's two, two and a half years, but usually like six to 18 months, which it sucks on the one hand. We lose a lot of cool people and good athletes. On the other hand, we're always getting new people in, but it's definitely a challenge to produce good

athletes, especially from scratch and only have them for a limited amount of time. So this last year, we happened to get some really good athletes come in. They were already regionals level athletes. I can't take any credit for developing them, but I feel like we were able to kind of step their game up a level and definitely have helped them move forward. And they'll leave too, unfortunately, but hopefully they'll be better off for their time here. What kind of weight got you into CrossFit, and what got you into weightlifting? CrossFit, I was doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and you know, Monterey, we're 40 minutes from Santa Cruz, which is where it all started. And my Jiu-Jitsu coach was a guy named Mike Weaver

who would come down from Santa Cruz, where he lived, to train us. And I was just talking to him about getting in shape for a tournament. He said, yo, check out CrossFit.com. And I distinctly remember I did what he called Barbara Light. It was Barbara, which is 20 pull-ups, 30 push-ups, 40 sit-ups, 50 squats, five rounds of three minute rest. Except I scaled all the numbers back like 10, 20, 30, 40. Did it in my front yard of my parents' house. I was 17 at the time on like a, with strict pull-ups.

I didn't know what the hell a kick thing pull-up was. And, uh, I wanted to die. And that was, that was like October of 2005. And, uh, for some strange reason, I kept doing it. I still haven't figured out why. Um, weightlifting, I, you know, later in the, in like maybe 2010, I was getting more into the strength side of things and, uh, ran into a guy who wanted to be a weightlifter. And at the time my weightlifting coaching was, I thought it might've been good, like for the average Crossfitter but now i realized it was shitty um but i got we all look back we all look back as coaches and go i mean

if you look back just three or four years ago it's like oh fuck what was i doing those poor athletes you know oh yeah oh yeah i'm like look what the hell was i saying i don't i don't i don't even know is that are those sentences but uh? But met Glenn a couple times at meets because California strength, where he used to coach, is only about 90 minutes from here. That's Glenn Pendlay you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, Glenn Pendlay. And kind of talked to him a little bit, and he invited me to start coming up there whenever I wanted,

which I was lucky I could manage on Fridays to go basically spend the whole day there, which was cool because it was their max-out day. So I would drive up there at like 6 in the morning, train a couple of times, uh, learned a lot being around those guys, training with them. Um, and especially learned a lot just being able to talk to Glenn and talk to Donnie Shankle and them and kind of getting their ideas. And, um, yeah, so that kind of came full circle in that, uh, it made me a much better CrossFit coach. You know, I'm better at coaching the, and I'm better at kind of understanding how people get better,

and, you know, made me a much better weightlifting coach too. And so I do both now. I try to coach, you know, try to balance it, but I definitely like coaching in both atmospheres. What do you recommend people do? Like, if they're wanting to go from just uh you know being a crossfit athlete for you know getting being healthy and they want to kind of take it up a notch to to being a competitive athlete what what do you what do you see most time is people's holes in their

game where do they really have to shore things up well um i mean if we're talking about somebody average like you know they're a competent athlete you know if we're talking about somebody who doesn't have gross you know mobility issues or this or that um movement i mean that's that's a really broad term i guess but my entire philosophy of coaching is based around like the best athletes are the ones who move the best. You know, if we, if we took, if we took the top 20 guys or maybe even pretty much all the guys who got to

the CrossFit games, I don't think we'd see huge differences in like VO two max and lactate threshold. The differences aren't going to be that high. They'll be there, but they're going to be marginal. But look at the way Rich Froning moves compared to any, pretty much anybody else and he just he's

consistent he's the same every single repetition no matter how tired he is and I really think that's why he wins um so what the what the average person has to do step one is get your movement in line make sure you're snatching correctly cleaning jerking correctly that's important squatting correctly but the little things too I mean is your are your wall balls efficient are your muscle ups efficient um and it's just learning it's learning to pay a lot of attention to those little details about how you move in every regard that is kind of the baseline and the first step in becoming a competitive crossfitter in my opinion so you put a lot of basically the priority is on movement absolutely first absolutely i think i think movement trumps capacity i think

if you learn to move better your capacity will follow but you can have amazing just like work capacity however you want to define that you know vo2 max lactate threshold whatever and if you move like shit you're not going to be efficient enough to have winning times just that's just how it's going to be yeah the the movement is going to allow you to express that physiology. Yeah, well, and being able to move more efficiently is going to be over time. The more efficiently you move, the more intense your training is going to be. And over time, the more it's going to increase your capacity because the training is more intense because you're not moving like shit. How much time do you feel like you need to spend with somebody refining that movement? I mean, I know every person but, uh, how much time do you spend with people refining movement before you kind of maybe move

on to me? And do you, do you ever get a point where like, there's a strong emphasis on, uh, energy system training where you're, you're trying to, you know, increase, increase aerobic capacity over here. And you're trying to maybe work on lactate threshold training over here. I mean, there's, there's always an emphasis on that stuff. So first of all, I mean, a big part of what I think is that less is not more. More is more and competitive CrossFitters need to train a ton. There's never a point where we're not focusing on movement, but definitely, you know, if I have an athlete who moves beautifully, but their aerobic capacity just sucks, yeah, we're going to put a little more effort into that. But I mean, part of that, you know, I see no reason why you can't be doing

both, right? If you're going for, you know, whatever you're doing, you want to do like aerobic work, you're doing a 5k row. There's no reason that you can't be working on your mechanics at the same time. And in fact, I think that having better mechanics is going to allow you over time to increase your capacity more because you're doing more work with better mechanics. How much time do you guys focus for the competitive athletes on, I guess, skill practice versus straight up balls out, you know, Metcon wads? I guess it depends on the kind of, on the phase of training. You know, we, I start really cranking the Metcon volume up. Last year, I didn't really start cranking it up until like January this year. It's going to start earlier,

probably, probably around September, October. Uh, I feel like one of my mistakes last year was not doing enough aerobic work. Um, yeah, I guess it depends what you mean on skill practice. Like I don't, I don't consider the lifts to be like snatching, cleaning jerk. I don't think you're doing skill practice really, unless you're at 80%, you know, like you don't consider the lifts to be like snatch and clean and jerk. I don't think you're doing skill practice really unless you're at 80%. You don't get good at lifting heavy weights by lifting light weights. But in a typical day, like right now on Monday, you'll see heavy snatch work, strict muscle-up work, some heavy squatting, and then some Metcons and some accessory work afterwards.

That's pretty typical of our training load. We train five days a week generally. So I don't know exactly how much time we put into it, but there's always, every single training day, there is absolutely a component of moving better. Even if you're in the middle of a Metcon, I expect my athletes to be consciously trying to move as effectively as possible. And we find that when they do that, they get better scores because you're being more efficient you know you're not

you don't see guys in the top 10 of the crossfit games who don't have beautiful efficient butterfly kips and have a pretty pretty good snatch technique and have effect you know efficient muscle ups it just doesn't happen yeah that's something that uh i would say maybe I remember watching like 08, 09 games. Huge difference. And, you know, some guys were efficient and some guys weren't. And, you know, definitely the guys that had more efficient movements were doing better. They were winning. But these guys were making it there with inefficient movement.

But now you just don't see that anymore. No, no, not at all. And, I mean, I've been to every CrossFit Games. I was there in 07 at the Ranch. And I mean, it's just the differences are pronounced. If you can find videos of the way people moved in 2007, 2008 is probably easier to find. But I mean, it's just an incredible difference. It's not the same sport anymore. That's the best just an incredible difference. It's not the same sport anymore.

That's the best way to put it. It's not the same sport. Yeah, I mean, just look at regionals. You know, these guys are deadlifting 315 for reps. And they're, what was it, the 225 squat cleans. Oh, yeah. I mean, was it four rounds of four? So it was like 16 squat cleans with those rope climbs.

Yeah. It's like, you know, before they were doing that with 155, and people were like 16 squat cleans with those rope climbs. Yeah. Like, you know, before they were doing that with one 55 and people were like, Oh shit, it's so heavy. Oh yeah. I competed in the 2008 games. I remember when Dave Castro announced,

you know, it's going to be heavy squat, clean grace at one 55. And everybody was like, Oh my God, squat cleans with one 55. I literally, this morning I had one of my lift,

one of my girls, one of my CrossFitters, do max reps in five minutes, clean and jerk, with 155. And she, again, she got 16 reps. Wow. And the men's weight was 155. And everybody was like, oh, my God, that's so heavy. And it's just the game has completely changed.

Yeah. What do you see the biggest mistake you made as a coach coming up? What was that game-changing thing you discovered that you might have been doing wrong where you're like, oh, fuck, I need to change this? I think long-term, it's just been a process. I definitely used to, I definitely used to program like it was like crossfit.com, you know, no, there was no organization. So it was, it was a process of learning about like effective programming models and stuff like that. And I'm

not, I'm not like the type of things that everything has to be percentages and numbers, but, but I definitely, it used to be randomized. There was no, I mean, I guess the biggest mistake was I didn't have people squat three times a week. Like, it's the best way to put it. Yeah, that's a good one. More fresh in my mind is like the stuff that I didn't, that I did wrong, I think coming into this season. Like I said, I think we need to do more aerobic work.

I think we need to do more work in general. I was just too tentative about, you know, about overtraining, which I more and more think is not really a thing. Yeah. I find that like with our athletes, the hardest thing is like, I find myself having to scale back training because they're not taking the recovery as serious, you know, 11 months out, 12 months out, you know, eight months out from a competition. They're not taking the recovery as serious because it's not close. A lot of them aren't jumping on board until it might be too late in the game. You feel like you may be digging a hole for them,

but if they took the recovery a lot more serious, you could throw that training volume at them. One of the good things about our population is that most of our competitors are a little older. Uh, we have a few people who are like, you know, 2022, but most of them are military officers or like, like military officers, wives, they're a little older, you know, late twenties, early thirties. So they, they definitely are better about taking that stuff more seriously. Um, and what we found is that when they were taking it seriously, when I would lower the training volume, everybody was hurting.

Like we, before regionals for our team athletes, you know, the way it worked was that of the six people, there was only one day per where everybody did two workouts. Other than that, they all did one workout a day. And we did a, we did a testing week about two weeks out where, and everybody was like, oh my God, I'm so sore and stiff. So we actually brought barbells, a rack, kettlebells, everything with us to the house where we're staying at Regionals. And we had the Regionals team doing extra workouts because they were stiffening up from the low volume. So I really think that I should have had them. Oh, wow. I'm going to quote Matt Perryman, who wrote a great book called Squat Every Day,, everyone who is not dumb, like everybody who knows what they're doing should read. If you're somebody who's totally new to the game and just have no idea what you're doing, don't read that

book. But for somebody who's more experienced, who can get out of it, what he's saying, Squat Every Day by Matt Perryman is awesome. But he says in that book, one line really stuck with me is that the body is not a machine with a limited fuel supply. It is an ecosystem which responds to cultivation. And that's really, really true. I mean, if you can avoid taking complete rest days as an advanced athlete, do it. Like get in the gym and do something seven days a week, even if it's just row of 1K and squat the empty bar and roll out.

So definitely going to be calling for my athletes to do more total work this season in terms of more structured warm-ups with skill practice, more aerobic efforts. But yeah, I definitely think that CrossFit athletes not only need high volume, they thrive on it. And another one is gymnastics i just didn't treat muscle-ups and handstand push-ups and pull-ups with the reverence they deserve as events in crossfit especially for girls that's where like chicks you win on gymnastic ability you win on muscle-ups and handstand push-ups and kipping pull-ups. So that's just for everybody. And it's not that we didn't do them. It's that I didn't approach them intelligently.

I needed to be approaching them the exact same way that I approach snatches and clean and jerks and squats and programming them in not only as part of Metcons, but as stuff like 30% of your max kipping pull-ups for five sets with a one five sets of 10 five sets with a one-minute break or whatever uh i needed a more intelligent system for programming gymnastics i would say those two things were probably my my biggest mistakes this season yeah um yeah i'm personally looking more at uh developing some gymnastic strength work um stuff that may not

be common maybe a scaled version of of uh of uh levers and stuff like that yeah may not be common, maybe a scaled version of levers and stuff like that. It may not be used directly in a conditioning workout for CrossFit, but it's going to definitely have a good transfer over and keep people's shoulders strong and healthy. What do you see in most competitive CrossFitters? What's the biggest mistake you see them making? You think maybe there's some people out there that think, you know, I want to be competitive, I need to do this thing.

What is that thing that you see people thinking they need to do they probably shouldn't be doing? So, you know, for my aspect, what I'm used to seeing is that we have people come into the gym who have maybe they've already been competitive crossfitters on aters on on like kind of a lower level they're not at the top level but they've done it what we see typically with competitors or people who are trying to be competitive is that they have put far first of all they put far too much effort into metcons and don't have enough of a structured strength strength program And that's not to say that it's not important to do a lot of hard conditioning. It is, but you have to be strong. And, I mean, they just never put the effort into learning how to move.

They'll learn how to do a muscle-up, but the most important thing to them is getting the muscle-up right now, and they'll fight through this ugly, like, elbows-out, you know, big arch-in-the-back muscle-up, or they'll, you know, like elbows out you know big arch in the back muscle up or they'll you know i'm sure you see this all the time they power snatch more than they full snatch oh yeah oh my god and it's it's it's just they they are impatient i guess the word for it and they haven't taken the time to go find the good coaches to step back and say i need to learn how to do these things now and And that's not just CrossFit. That's, I think, American athletics in general.

Well, American athletics in general, we have a bit of disregard for the basics, right? We give kids pitching coaches for baseball when they're frigging eight years old. Yeah, they don't even have like a, I mean, they don't even know how to walk or run properly. And they've got a coach teaching them how to throw a ball. Yeah, we put kids into sports year-round. They never get a chance to climb trees and play and do this and that. They don't get the effective GPP base, for lack of a better term. So that's not just in CrossFit.

It's in American athletics. I guess we could call it a disregard for mastering the fundamentals. Yeah, I think lack of patience hurts a lot of people in any goals that they have, really. Absolutely. And it's hard. I get it. When you're competitive, you don't want to wait. But those athletes who can wait, who can be patient, both in the short and long term, I mean, look at the way Rich Froning competes. You ever see him look like hurried, impatient? No, he just shows up and he works and he works. And all of a sudden he's in front of everybody.

And that's kind of, that's almost like a longterm analogy is that you got to think, where am I going to be at in two years, three years, five years? You know, I have two of my best athletes. They're,

they're weightlifters and I'm thinking of where they're going to be in, in eight to 10 years. Not where they're going to be right now. They're young. We young we have time and I think I think that's what people need to do is they need to learn to take more time yeah I know uh one of the things I learned uh you know when I was being taught how to shoot was and then I've also heard it used in uh by some coaches as well as slow is smooth and smooth is fast yeah you know people need to remember that even with weightlifting where speed is a big component but you know be patient and learning learning positions and moving from position to position absolutely and then uh once it's smooth you know then then smooth will be fast and it won't be it won't be so tough yeah you have to be able if you can't do it if you can't

do it correctly slowly, you're not going to do it correctly quickly. And that's, again, that's both a literal, you know, literally applicable to the lifts and stuff like that. It's also metaphorically applicable to, like, you need to step back and learn how to do the basics before you're trying to snatch max singles every day or whatever it is you're trying to do.

Yeah. All right. Let's go ahead and wrap this up. And what's any final words of wisdom you'd like to pass on to people? Something that you think most of these CrossFitters need to hear? Squat more than you're squatting right now. Learn how to do the lifts position by position. Do your gymnastics.

And take a lot of ice baths. Oh, yeah, the ice bath. All right, I'm going to let you plug websites and all that kind of stuff. Go for it. Cool. I write for Juggernaut Training Systems. That's JTSStrength.com and occasionally for 70s Big. I also run a blog for competitive CrossFitters. That's tzstrength.com. We're looking at getting some people to the games in the 2014 season. So check it out if you're looking to compete. Cool.

All right, guys. Make sure that if you enjoyed this podcast, go to iTunes. Give us a five-star rating. Leave a friendly comment. If you don't like this podcast, I don't know why you made it this far in. But don't leave a comment. Don't bother putting stars on there. Also, go to Facebook. Like us on the Barbell Shrug fan page. Find us on Twitter at Barbell Shrug, and follow us there. We just started doing some stuff on

Instagram and Vine. You'll be able to find us in there. The Vine stuff is a lot of fun. All right, guys. I will see you next time.