Barbell Shrugged - Building a Massive Aerobic Engine for CrossFit w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Richard Diaz - Barbell Shrugged #537

Episode Date: January 6, 2021

Richard Diaz, is founder of diaz human performance, a California based sports performance business, The Natural Running Network and creator of the Natural Running Coaches Certification Program.      Mr. Diaz has extensive experience in clinical sport specific diagnostics (VO2 max and resting metabolic assessments), running mechanics video analysis and gait correction and of course coaching.  He is the  host of this weekly podcast for runners titled “The Natural Running Network”.  The interviews are commonly easy going, honest and brought about to provide entertaining commentary spiced with education and training advice.   Richard in his storied career, has rubbed shoulders with some of the greatest athletes of our time.  Not one to mince words or hold back an opinion, with over 1,000,000 downloads and growing, he believes and often suggests;   “If you are a runner, love to get out and challenge yourself, this is a show you don’t want to miss.”    He will often tell you, he does not like to be referred to as a coach, he feels his role is more of an adviser.  The fact remains he is sought out for coaching advice from athletes from around the world. Richard has recently released his new book “Training the Dark Side” which is the most unique approach to training you will ever undertake.  Considered to be a Game Changer for endurance athletes!     In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged:   Why CrossFitters struggle with aerobic capacity How to build an aerobic engine How to flush lactate out of muscles during a workout Testing VO2 Max and heart rate Using fat for fuel vs sugar   Richard Diaz on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram   Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   ————————————————   Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa   Please Support Our Sponsors   PowerDot - Save 20% using code BBS at http://PowerDot.com/BBS    InsideTracker: insidetracker.com use code “shrugged25” to save 25%   Fittogether - Fitness ONLY Social Media App   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged www.masszymes.com/shruggedfree  - for FREE bottle of BiOptimizers Masszymes

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Richard Diaz in an absolutely phenomenal conversation about building an aerobic engine, developing aerobic capacity, and what you are missing, specifically if you are a crossfitter, in developing a bigger engine that will help you improve your Metcons. You can definitely get into the show notes. Get over to Richard Diaz's website. He's got an awesome program with a good buddy of mine, Ryan Fisher, called Dark Horse Training. And some cool YouTube videos.

I highly recommend getting over and checking out if you are interested in building a bigger engine. Specifically for people that are interested in competing at CrossFit. Building an aerobic engine is something I always did. And this conversation is really cool. Talking about pushing some of the lactic acid. engine is something I always did. And this conversation is really cool talking about pushing some of the lactic acid, staying in the fat burning, which will help you stay more aerobic. So you do not totally redline and feel all that pain and burning in your legs. Want to thank our sponsors over at Organifi, of course, because we love them, the green, the red, and the gold.

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using the promo code shrugged. And there's never been more important time to boost your immune system than today. Buyoptimizers.com forward slash shrugged. Friends, Richard Diaz, let's do it. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson. Richard Diaz all the way from California hanging out with us on Zoom today.

I need to tell you that the specific reason your name popped into my brain, we met in person for the first time, even though I've known who you were for quite some time. But now that we're able to do these podcasts on Zoom due to COVID, as we were just discussing, this could not come at a better time. Before I destroyed this shoulder, I was about four weeks into the first real program I have followed in a while. It's our program called Aerobic Monster, which is a 12-week rowing program just built on pure aerobic capacity. And as I was getting into it as i was like getting a rhythm for all the different time domains and the really just watching my own aerobic capacity

get better to be able to sit on a rower for 30 minutes and still feel good i was like i gotta call richard diaz he knows everything about this um but that that's specifically why I texted you back because I was sitting on the rower and it was like one of those moments where you're like out for a long run and like all the stars align and you have the best idea. You're like, I got to call that guy right now. Man, tell us a little bit about kind of your past. I know I learned about you through the OCR community when you started coaching Hunter McIntyre. I know you've worked with Fisher with some CrossFit athletes. One of your athletes now, I believe, Jen Ryan, used to be a coach at my gym. And it turns out she's like the fittest 40-year-old walking on the face of this earth.

So whatever you're doing over there, it's making magic. So full disclosure, Jen was here on Saturday, on Saturday. Um, she was here with Lauren Fisher. Yeah. They're crazy. Lauren had reached out to me. Uh, well, first of all, uh, back up some weeks ago, I invited them both over, um, because I was really, I'm intrigued by the concept of measuring outcomes where this particular space is concerned. Uh, as you probably know, I, I'm intrigued by the concept of measuring outcomes where this particular space is concerned. As you probably know, I'm sure I shared with you, I wrote a program with Ryan Fisher called Training the Dark Side. Excuse me, Dark Horse. There's two different books. was just something I got sucked into doing because I just, you know, to be clear, I don't

know much about CrossFit other than you lift heavy shit and you max out for about 40 minutes and you compete. I mean, to be very honest with you, that's what I kind of know about CrossFit. It's not really in my wheelhouse. I have owned, for many, many years, I've owned fitness facilities. I had a training facility that would blow your mind that was essentially CrossFit oriented without me ever using the term CrossFit. So I'm no stranger to weight training and this type of thing, but my jam is measuring outcomes through cardiopulmonary diagnostics and you know vo2 max testing and such and such so uh i keep hearing and you said it yourself and you had alluded to the fact that you're in a program that you guys wrote or are involved in uh talking about

aerobic capacities and i think that's an oxymoron in the sport of CrossFit, because pretty much everything you do is anaerobic. And so when you talk about the energy system you intend to solicit to, trying to be aerobic while you're trying to compete at high intensities, that dog won't hunt. It just doesn't make any sense to me and so in conversation with Hunter and Ryan we were kicking this around I said guys I just don't understand why anyone would be talking about aerobic capacity in a sport where it's highly anaerobic and so not to get crazy, but just to share a thought. Let's just say, for example, you're a really fit individual. You have a really high VO2 max score, but your threshold, the point when your body is shifted exclusively into sugar, is really low. And this occurs commonly with athletes that are into high-intensity exercise because their fast-twitch fibers are dominant.

They just tend to really solicit those fast-twitch fibers all the time, which inhibits the capacity for oxygen to pass through that muscle fiber. And so there's a thing called the arterial venous O2 difference. So you've got a shit ton of oxygen coming into the body, but it's not being absorbed by the muscle. So the venous return is you're just – it's like Elvis leaves the building. It comes in and goes out. So there's really no benefit of getting that oxidative metabolism. So in absent the ability to be aerobic while you're doing these efforts, you should really be tuning your body to be more

capable of surviving an anaerobic environment. So this is a function of lactate tolerance. And that can be deemed a bunch of different ways as well. So what I was really researching a lot and spending a lot of time looking at was, what are the mechanisms to become more efficient in moving that lactate out of the working muscle quickly so that you're able to continue to produce high intensity loads? And I don't think anybody's really looked at that. And if they did look at it, I don't know who they are and I never read anything about it. So it became an interesting study for me.

And when back in the day, when I would write something about aerobic, this or that or heart rate specific training, to be very honest with them to steal and other people shit. You know, you read it somewhere sounded good to you, you believe that you bought into it. And by the way, that's called education. That's essentially how people roll. They do steal and other people shit, right? And it occurred to me, why am I doing this? At this point in my life, why would I go reach out to some other person to get information when I probably have more data to draw from than most anybody I've ever met? I mean, I have tested over the last close to 30 years, thousands of athletes. I mean, literally thousands of athletes that I have in my databases. And I

go back before computers were cool. And it was hard. You know, it was like, I've got like, books of, you know, training logs, training logs, yeah, whatever. But handwritten training logs. There it is. Yeah. So what I did is I sat down one day, I said, you know what, I'm going to print it. I got out my laptop and I got my printer out and I just started printing between 20 and 50 year old, apparently healthy individuals responses from the VO2 tests I did. And I started messing with the numbers a little bit to see what I came up with. No preconceived notion, no, no, you know, going to validate my thought, I just wanted to see what it looked like. And so I started developing some fear, some theories

behind that. And then with with Ryan, what we did is we invited Jen Ryan, we invited a fellow from Kansas City, Eric, comedy, do you know, Eric? I know the name, but he's an Invictus athlete. Yeah. He came up and who else was it? Made about four athletes. And so commonly when people are looking at metabolic response to work, they do a VO2 max test on a treadmill or they do it on a bicycle erg, right? And all they're doing is putting work on somebody and trying to see what the outcome is. Well, there's a mechanical aptitude tied to this that nobody seems to be looking at. So what I wanted to do was see what is the difference in this turn point, this metabolic turn point on the bike versus the rower versus the skier versus the treadmill. And so we started to see some fascinating outcomes

when someone would go anaerobic relative to the device they're on relative to their mass or gender. And that was kind of interesting, right? So we started writing training protocols based on the information we were getting from this. So fast forward, you know, I've been playing with this a lot. And I thought, you know what, I need more information. So it just so happened when Lauren reached out to me, Lauren Fisher reached out to me, she said, Look, Richard, really dig what you were doing. And I really could use some help with my, my, my, you know, ability to beat fatigue. And will you help me? And I said, you know what? I'm glad you called me. I want you out here. Get Jen in the car. Come back out. Let's do this. So just this past weekend,

same thing. I put them on the rower. We look for threshold. I put them on the bike. I put them on the skier, just looking for threshold. I wanted to see what the metabolic turn point was. And to take it a step further, what we did is we compared it to Watts. I wanted to see what the power output was relative to the expense. So if you look at heart rate, look at heart rate as expense. What does it cost me to do what I'm doing? Look at Watts power output as the yield. I paid this, I got this, right? And then to take it even a step further, I wanted to see what their perceived exertion was. And I gave them a one to 10 scale. So I wanted to take them to nine. I didn't really care about a VO2 max. I want to take them to nine perceptively. I feel like, oh shit, I'm at nine. I couldn't do too much more of this without failing.

And I wanted to see what the power output was. I wanted to see what the heart rate was. And I wanted to see what the metabolic expense was. So we did this analysis on all these different devices and came up with some really interesting conclusions. And without going into grave detail and sharing their personal information, just let me say that what we found was, A, Jen was a killer on the rowing machine. And she was literally killed on the skier. I mean, it came down to that. So, yeah. So what we started to look at was, and what I've been playing with, and the reason I was fishing for this information

was, I wanted to be able to write some training protocols that were very specific to the outcomes of a given type of athlete. Yeah. And so that's kind of what I've been playing with. And it's interesting because you know you guys are in this business more than I'll ever know, that a lot of guys in this sport, women in this sport, they just go hard. They go to the fail. Yeah. And I really believe that that's a big mistake. You're not going to get better by pounding your head against the wall.

You're just going to get a headache. Yeah. I was that person. That was my, that was my MO in competition. Go hard, hold on. Yeah. Well, yeah, and then, you know, you gave everything you had, so you want to pat yourself on the back for being a soldier and going in there and taking the hit. You know, I'm an old guy, so you probably won't. I used to work with boxers, and so I use these boxing analogies.

Do you remember a guy by the name of Scott Ledoux? Doug Larson? Boxer? No, I don't know. Well, all right. So Ledoux was the warm-up guy for Muhammad Ali. So he would fight him, and he'd stay in the ring for, you know, 10 rounds. But it was just a clinic.

Muhammad Ali would just tattoo this guy. And so I liken the way a lot of people approach this CrossFit mentality as that type of a fighter. Everybody says, hey, you did a great job. You took a good beating, right? But I think that's probably the misconception I'd love for you to dig into, kind of going all the way back to the beginning of, like, most CrossFitters, when you talk to them,

are going to tell you that the goal is to not go into that anaerobic state and stay aerobic so they're continually at, like, call it, if it's a 20-minute AMRAP the beginning the the rpe is going to be a six or seven but they're going to have like a negative split in the rounds that they are are putting out so you know in in essence running a 5k how do you how do you pace mile one and two before you have to really step on the gas at the end to maintain that negative split. But you're saying that there's no, that that's not building an aerobic capacity for CrossFit. Did I understand that correct? Well, so aerobic capacity in my mind means that you're developing

your ability to stay aerobic or stay into your fat stores as an energy source yeah and that means you're soliciting your slow twitch fibers and so as you start to develop these slow twitch fibers you lose force production because your power output lives in your fast twitch fibers gotcha so um what we want to do is we want to maintain that ability to produce work, improve the ability to produce work without the inhibition that can come about when lactate production starts to come on. So let me just share that the more, you know, people I think get confused with this. The more time you spend aerobic, the less likely you're capable of supporting this ensuing production of lactate.

So when you get into your carbohydrate, you're developing lactate. And the higher into your carbohydrate you go, the more lactate you produce. Then it just becomes a function of what you can tolerate. And there are people, you realize, I've tested so many people at this point in time, and I'd see these anomalies. I'd see a guy come in that from the gate his metabolic processes were anaerobic. He just does not do anything with fat stores. He just can't burn fat, right? But they don't share with me that he'll go out and do, you know, world championships at Spartan, youan, do the Ultra Beast.

I'm like, how in the hell does a guy go out there and put down 30 miles on a mountain at altitude and be anaerobic the whole way? You know that there's not enough sugar to support the work. So there's something going on. He's not able to feed well enough to make up the debt. So where's the energy coming from? What is it?

It's lactate. Lactate is a usable energy source depending on the way you promote the work. What I started messing around with is these pathways where your body is pushing lactate either through the lactate shuttle system that throws it off in these quiet parts of the muscles in your body, lets it sit there for a while, and ultimately come back into your liver, get converted to sugar, and ultimately back into the working muscles as glycogen. I liken it to be an energy rebate.

Okay? So let's say you're spending 1,000 calories an hour. This energy rebate might give you back 300 that you spent. It rinsed it, it cleaned it, it put it back in the muscle, gave it back to you. You didn't gain another 300 calories, but you reprocessed some of the work that you dispelled. And so in CrossFit, that's not the end game because the problem isn't running out of energy. The problem is being acidic. You're so toxic because you're not getting the lactate out of the muscle well enough that it just takes you out.

So I can tell you that now that I've had this program out there, and I've had it, you know, it's global. I've got an email I could share with you from a guy in Switzerland that, ironically, the guy's got a master's degree in exercise science. He was flipping out. The guy swears to me that he produced a 285% improvement in his force production and staying power in eight weeks doing the program that I wrote. Yeah. And he, I mean, now he's coming at me like, when is, when are you going to do the next version? You know?

And I'm like, gosh, I really wasn't into that so much, you know? But now it's kind of fascinating to me. So I'm playing with it. But at the end of the day, the short story is this. What I'm doing is I'm manipulating anaerobic metabolism. I'm trying to teach the body to figure out, okay, here comes the lactate. What do we do with it? And how quickly can we make this lactate leave the muscle?

I don't care about whether it's going to come back as energy. That's not important to me. I want to be able to get it out of the working muscles so the muscle can keep doing the work. That's basically what I've been playing with. Do you have any standards for CrossFitters, for people that they're not, not endurance athletes specifically, they're not OCR athletes, they're CrossFitters, for what their VO2 max should be and or what their anaerobic threshold should be relative to their VO2 max? Well, I could tell you that as a rule,

when people come to see me, the first question they ask after they've been tested is, so how to, is this good? You know, which is the best for us? So that's the first thing out of, am I, I'm elite, right? It's like anytime I get blood worked on or like my blood pressure, I'm like, I'm awesome. Just tell me I'm awesome.

I want to know the answer. Yeah. And then they want to know if they have potential to win. Based on the information, how much better can this get? So I'm kind of hesitant to say what I'm going to say, but I really want to say it. So I got to be careful how I say it. Someone that we know came to me and i've worked with him over many years so i'm not going to use names hunter mcintyre yeah i'm not going to use

names but uh i can tell you that over the course of the time we worked together when i first met him goal was win world championships at Spartan you know here you got a guy so over 200 pounds and he's racing a guy that weighs about 140 pounds soaking wet and the challenge is 14 miles on a mountain it's like shit that's going to be a lot of work yeah and uh so we set about working on that and this individual was capable I would be on my my chase bike with him on a 13 mile run and at a sub six minute pace he would be 60 percent 66 percent fat utilization so below threshold he was he was dominantly in his fat stores for 13 miles under a six-minute pace at 200 pounds, which is crazy. Yeah.

Which is crazy. And VO2 score was probably in the neighborhood of just near touching 70 VO2 score. And 70, in my mind, it's touching on elite fitness, regardless of what sports you're trying to be in. Believe me when I tell you, in all the years I've tested people, I've seen a handful, I mean, literally less than five fingers of people that can blow in the 80s. That just doesn't happen very, very often. I mean, I guess it depends on who you hang out with, but believe me when I tell you, I've run into some pretty intense athletes

that never get into the 70 range. So where I'm going with this is that changing the game, going into more high-intensity efforts, shorter duration, lifting very, very heavy, trying to chase that down. We've seen progressive reduction in his VO2 score, progressive reduction in his threshold. The good news is that for the sport he was in, it didn't make any difference because we were looking at force production. We're not concerned about this energy system. We're not worried about staying power.

What we're worried about is tolerance in the capacity to produce a shit ton of work inside of an hour. And you are not going to run out of your energy. I don't care where it's coming from inside of an hour. So I keep trying to, you know, peel him off the ceiling because he's freaking out and tell him, look, don't worry about it. What you're doing is fine. Just keep doing what you're doing because it seems to be a winning formula. Your strength is up. Your endurance is well enough to produce the work.

Yeah. So I don't know if I was being evasive to the question, but I'll get somebody that I have tested people that blow in 80s, runners. And if you look at, there's a book out there called The Lore of Running. It was written by Dr. Tim Noakes. I think it's probably in its sixth edition now. I mean, it's huge. Everything you ever wanted to know about running is in this book.

And he points out what the VO2 scores were of all the greatest runners in history. And when you look at the outcome, so, you know, 210, 205, whatever, marathon times, then you look at their VO2 scores and they're not over 70, you know, maybe 72 or something. So what you're looking at there is efficiency, right? They're just very, very efficient with what they have. They don't have to go into the paint as hard to produce the work they produce. Yeah. It's really difficult to point, okay, your VO2 score equates to you will be able to do this.

Because there's too many variables. If I remember correctly, back in grad school when I was looking more at this than I do these days, the cross-country skiers seem to be the ones that were in the mid-80s, like very consistently. Why is that over other athletes, like over the marathon runners, et cetera? Yeah, well, so this is an interesting question, and you're absolutely right. Historically, cross-country skiers have very high VO2 scores, and I think it's because they're engaging so much muscular over endurance. So like a runner is dominantly in his legs, a cyclist dominantly in his legs,

rower. But you know like a skier when you're engaging your upper body and lower body while you're moving you're introducing more opportunity to produce or deliver oxygen to more working parts of the body. And, you know, VO2 max suggests that you're able to contain this oxygen somewhere on your body, right? And so because we might have wimpy arms and great legs or, you know, vice versa, I think that's a limiting factor. But the reason I thought it was interesting is because when I started working with OCR athletes,

these are athletes that run grip and pull with their arms. They're using a lot of upper body strength. And I started noticing that their aerobic capacities were much higher actually relative to their VO two scores. Then I saw in other types, you know, I worked a lot with triathletes and runners. They were killing it compared to a lot of these guys. And I mean, I got to a place where I was starting to get nervous.

I thought something was wrong with my equipment, right? I actually called the manufacturer and said, am I crazy? Or can this guy really have this high of a threshold relative to his VO2 score? And see it over and over and over again among this, you know, this group of people I had been working with. And since I've done so much of it at this point, I've come to realize that it's just – I think I point it to the fact that they use so much of their body in the work they do. Yeah, I was actually wondering – that was going to be my question.

Doug kind of hit on it. But when you start to look at the different implements that you're using for training from the ERG to the ski or from the rower, C2 ERG now that we have a ski erg, and the airdyne and running, are there major differences in the training outcomes based on kind of like a one, two, three, rest, one, two, three, rest. And like the recovery times in there, are there, what are some of the differences that you notice in, in the tool or the implement that people are using for training? Well, again, you know, this is what we've just been doing research on and we're finding that, um, um, well, your friends in Jen's case, I noticed that there was, from a standpoint of power output and sustainability and expense,

she could put out a tremendous amount more work on the rower than she could the skier, and she could do it at a lower cost of heart rate and produce more watts um and so just you know the inability or training uh experience with the skier is limited her capacity to to do the work so that's why i'm writing that's why i'm writing writing training protocols specific to the event. So I found that the bike and the ski erg was very similar. Really? Yeah. See, I would totally think that the ski erg was the one that people are able to recover on,

assuming they have kind of the hip flexion strength endurance to go along with that because the rest interval in between finishing a ski and then going back to the top seems like the longest turnover of all of them well it gets to a point where you're not going to see a fluctuation in your heart rate response just because you get that little pause in the action right you don't so it's it's really a function of work work over time yeah i think it's really got to do with uh training adaptation um and so let's look at that for a second let's just say hypothetically that your vo2 excuse me your your anaerobic threshold or if you like we'll call it lactate threshold at 150 beats, was 150 beats per minute on the skier, okay? But you dismiss that and you just hammer out to like 175

until it just shuts you down, right? You're not going to get the same type of progressive training outcomes that you would had you kind of respected that threshold. And I don't respect it like don't go past it, but I shove up a little bit above it't respect it like don't go past it. But I shove up a little bit above it. And I come down a little bit below it. And we do it in regressive and progressive fashion. So it might be a two to one ratio, one to two ratio, however, we feather it. And then we still get into the paint, but for shorter duration. So all I'm trying to do is just give the central nervous system a key on what am I going to do with this lactate and where am I going to put it and

how soon can I get it out of the working muscle? And so for example, I used to do a lot of work with triathletes. I mean, before there was all this stuff, there was triathlon. And I would do dual assessments on the triathletes where I would test them first, VO2 max on the bike, on a trainer, their bike on a trainer. So mechanically, they're accustomed to the position they're on because of their own bike. And hammer them into the ground on the bike because they're not going to fall off. Like a treadmill, you're a little reticent to push all the way out because you're afraid you're going to go flying, right?

But I'll take them to the paint, and then right after that, a little cool-down run or something, and then within 10, 15 minutes, get them right on the treadmill and see a threshold on the treadmill 15 to 30 beats higher than it was on the bike. And they were fresher on the bike than they were on the treadmill because we're bipedal animals. We're accustomed to being upright and on our feet. And that's a much more natural movement pattern than spinning your legs in

circles. And quite frankly, for the longest time, I used to tell people when I saw this outcome, you got to get a cycling coach because you suck on the bike. You know, because you're, you know, you're metabolic consequences, you're gonna you do Iron, you're going to blow up if you try to hold this heart rate. But it turns out that to some degree I was mistaken. It was more the fit on the bike. They just weren't on the bike well enough to gain the mechanical advantage they required to be more efficient on the bike. So, you know, that turned me into a bike fitter.

I started fitting people after a while um but i guess the the long and the short of it is the mechanical aptitude matters and you you want to marry the specifics of your metabolic capacities with the device you plan to compete on so you might be doing uh we were talking about acid bath. And I said, okay, you got three devices. That's a workout for everybody. Do you remember what event that was? It's three times seven. So seven minutes on the bike, seven minutes on the rower, seven minutes on the skier. Yeah. I want to say it was at the Dubai Fitness Championships. People want to go and

Google what that exactly is. I got it. Lauren brought the idea to me yeah i heard it was like the most painful thing that every like elite crossfitters don't get humbled too often like the crossfit games guys are like yeah that was hard it really sucked but but that one left them crippled in the back of the locker room about two minutes after for a long time it's funny you say say that because I posed the question to, after we tested everything, I said, okay, now we're going to develop some program. Give me a workout. Give me a workout that you hate. Acid bath.

Like they immediately jumped into acid bath. I said, well, tell me what that is. So she goes seven minutes on there, seven minutes on there, seven minutes on that. And I said, okay, so let's look at it so what do we how do we want to approach x device from a training perspective and what we i wrote a 10 minute protocol for each of those devices i want to go a little further out actually it was 10 minute per round so i might have them do um uh 10 minute stint on a bike, introduce a strength workout. And then, so we did like three strength workouts and three rounds on whatever device.

And we took them one at a time and we wrote the protocols for the cardio component to marry with the strength. And this is kind of how I did the Dark Horse program. The workouts were very similar to that idea. And I, you know, I mentioned the one guy that got some scary results, but there was more than, I mean, I got a lot of feedback from people that were saying, I can't believe how much better I I'm able to,

to produce work in a relatively short period of time. And I think that the reason I'm that world renowned in this is because I think for the most part, in this type of industry, people are pretty staunch about their processes. They're pretty comfortable in their skin about what they do. You know, they know what gave them gains. So they're going after that. Right. And to just like dispatch all those mindsets and start to go after something completely contrary to what they've been doing is it's, it's tough because you're, you're fearful of backing up, you know, ah, I did that guy's program and I sucked, you know, now I got to rebuild, you know?

Yeah. And women tend to take a leap of faith much better than, than men do. Yeah. What, when you look at a workout, uh, like acid bath, seven minutes of three different really gnarly max effort seconds to a minute walk in between to get to the next device. Are you going from 10 and backing that down with the idea that we're able to stay at the same RPE throughout the 10 minutes or are you fluctuating from like, yeah, well, first of all,

I, I, uh, it's interesting. You keep using, uh, perceived exertion, um, because I rarely do that.

Um, I will use perceived exertion when I'm working with a client and they're doing work and I want to know where I am with them. Yeah. So for example, let's say I put you through, uh, I put you through intervals, uh, and I can't tell just by your facial expression and the way you're moving, whether that's a 10 or whether it's a five. So with a lot of the people that I personally coach, I'll walk them through, say, where are you? And they know from history with me, give me a number. I don't want to hear, well, I feel okay. I don't want to hear that shit. I want to hear I'm a six, I'm a seven, I'm a nine. So we introduced that concept in the training. But just to kind of get a sense of how you might feel, because you might be feeling pretty normal

in your workout at a nine. That's what I do. I get to nine, right? Where getting to nine wasn't where you should have been. You should have probably not got past seven and a half, at least in the beginning. And duration, how much time are you going to spend at that number? So, you know, looking at it a different way, and the way I paint it was, so we find, for example, thresholds 150. Now at 150, to be clear, that means you're 100% into your sugar stores, which means now everything you produce in the way of energy is coming from carbohydrate, which also means that you're producing lactate. And the higher over that number you get, the more lactate you produce, the more potential it is to shut you down. Right?

So we start there. I may have them, maybe depending on what we're doing and the length of time come five beats below that, but I'm keeping them right there in the pain. I'm keeping them in the pain cave,. I'm keeping them in the pain. But I'm just not, you know, progressively hammering them in the ground. I might say, okay, we're going to spend three minutes here. Then I want you to go one minute, 10 beats up. And then I want you to regress back down to that starting number

and stay there for a minute or two. And then we're going to go 30 seconds, 25 beats up. And then we're going to come back down, but not that far. We're going to come back down to the 10 beats up. So what we, now you love that you use the word flow because this is how I refer to it. We have a flow pattern and I start to paint these numbers. If you've seen the thing I posted on Instagram the other day,

I actually showed the whiteboard. i have these like refrigerator magnets with icons for the different things that i'm talking about yeah anaerobic aerobic vo2 max strength and i put it a pause button and i start putting them on this infinity symbol and showing the timelines that we're going to visit each of these segments and then i'll say okay we're going to do each of these segments. And then I'll say, okay, we're going to do three rounds here, or four rounds, it just depends on what we're trying to prepare ourselves for. But collectively, when you're looking at the most of the workouts in CrossFit, in my mind, they tend to be in the neighborhood of 40 minutes. Right? Is that pretty fair? In competition, you're probably going to hang out more in like the 8 to 16 20 minute range and the longer efforts are going to be in that 40 minute range but they're doing like five of them

a day so in a way it's like one giant workout with right an hour and a half recovery in between well so but so the end of the day, let's say, for example, you do a 20-minute intense workout. You get a break. You're going to come back later and do it again. It takes about – once you're in this recovery mode, meaning you're just laying around, rehydrating, eating some food, whatever, inside of 10 minutes, all that lactate production that's been taking you out

is gone. That's moved out of the muscle. You're ready to go again. Now, your muscles are still going to be fatigued. Your perception of fatigue is going to be high. But at the end of the day, what you want to do is make all the work easier. You know, I'm sitting here looking at you. By the way, I have to apologize for my lighting.

I'm looking at you guys are rock stars, man. Your shit's all clean and i just spent a whole weekend hanging lights in my garage because this is a hell of a job this is life right now i got studio lights all over yeah i got i got one studio light but it's i may say something bad to my wife she's like get out i'll be like i'll just go to the garage now i got everything i need i got squat rack studio lights let's make this thing happen but where i was going with this is that uh in your sport it's all about technique with the weight if you don't lift the weight in a clean line you can't lift the weight you wanted to lift right yeah so mechanical efficiency is a big deal yeah mechanical efficiency in the cardio elements are also a very big deal. And being able

to marinate your energy systems is a very big deal. And so it's a serious component of the whole process. So I don't talk to people about how to lift the weight. You know, I assume that you guys are pros at that kind of work for the most part. Yeah. What you need to know is how, how do I keep doing this without having to lay down on the ground when I finish? Yeah. And that's kind of where I saw my role in this. I think another thing that aerobic capacity, I'd love to hear you kind of talk a little bit about the intricacies of recovery is aerobic capacity is, is, has a lot of components in that it has like this pacing component and going for a long time. But in between efforts, the aerobic system is also responsible for being able to lower your heart rate and get you prepared for going into that next effort. Are you testing recovery in between workouts, in between high effort? Well, what I do is during the VO2 max test, as soon as you tap out,

when you're like done, you're saying, okay, I've had it. We start a recovery phase, and the recovery measures your heart rate response over two minutes. And it gives me a percentage of your maximum effort at one minute and at two-minute recoveries. And so when I write training of your maximum effort at one minute and at two minute recoveries. And so when I write training protocols, I look at that. I want to see, okay, you got up to 180 beats per minute with your heart rate. But inside of two minutes, you're back down 115.

So your recovery is really good. And then I'll see somebody that might not get back down below 160 in two minutes. It's got shit as a recovery, right? So the training protocols are going to take that into account. And the amount of recovery I'm going to ask of them, given their recovery, is going to be common straight with the way they recovered in the test. So, for example, going into my world with runners,

I might have them do hill repeats. I'll govern them to 120 beats per minute recovery. You don't get to go do another one until you get back to 120 because otherwise the work is crap. You're just not producing force like you were a moment ago. And I want quality efforts each time. So same thing with lifting, right? You want quality efforts each time. And so if you're inhibited because you're not getting enough recovery, and again, that's a moving target, you'll see as you start to get better at this, you start to shorten up the recovery times. So yeah, I take that into serious account.

When you base everything off of kind of the heart rate, and most people aren't going to be at their gym using a heart rate monitor in the middle of their workouts? And I always go back to RPE, whether people know what actual failure is, and then a percentage of that. It's just like an easier way to communicate at times. But how would somebody go about kind of understanding heart rate and then being able to compare that to some sort of RP. So in the middle of an 15 minute workout, they can actually have a tactical way to get through that workout without hitting the red line at minute eight. Well, first of all, you know, you said to yourself that I work from heart rate.

If you tell me you're not going to use a heart rate monitor, then spending money with me is a waste of time. There it is. Because what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to define what specifically is occurring because you develop your perception over time and your perception can be a monster enemy. You know, what you're accustomed to relative what you might be doing, which has changed, is definitely something to consider. I'll give you another example. It's kind of off the wall, but it's a good example because I teach runners how to run. It's one of my things.

Gate analysis, gate correction, I teach them how to run to become more efficient, be able to run faster, lower the cost of work. Okay. And so I may be guiding them on a treadmill to do something, but perceptively they feel like they're doing, in fact, they're doing something else. For example, I might say, look, run on your toes, because you're so far away from being on your forefoot, that I need to overemphasize where I want you to be so that you might mitigate and land right where I want you. Because in fact, where you've been is on your heels thinking you're on your toes. So what I started to do was introduce your ability to see what you're doing, which helps to validate what I'm telling them. So I hook up a camera from a side view and put up an iPad in front of them

so they could see a side view of what they're looking like while they're running. And I'll tell them, pick your knee up a little bit, and their knee doesn't move at all. But it feels like they're going to knock their teeth out because their knees are going up so high. So the perceptive mechanism, when it's skewed, can just toss your workouts completely out the window. And so when you start talking about perceived exertion in your workouts, you're just going to start comparing it to what you've always felt. Yeah.

And if we're trying to solicit to a specific end of the energy system, you're never going to be able to feel that because it became, I'll have people like, for example, I need you to run at 140 beats per minute. I'm trying to build their endurance. They think they could sustain 160. At 160, they're completely soliciting to the wrong part of the energy system. But they can do it for now because they don't run out of gas, but they're not going to get the adaptation we're looking. But they can do it for now because they don't run out of gas. But they're not going to get the adaptation we're looking for because they're not where they should have been. So it kind of goes in keeping with what we're asking here is that when you're training in the gym, if you don't have this data, you're not going to be as precise as

you could have been. Now, you may not need, you might change your perception. You might get a new normal where you don't really need to wear your monitor all the time after that. Yeah. It's just a, another analogy might be like teaching people to eat. You know, I want you to eat 300, 3000 calories a day and I want your meals to look like this, you know? So for the first week you weigh your food, right? Yeah. But then you start to develop a perception of what those meals look like. You don't need to do it anymore.

I'm really interested in the long-term improvements that people are able to make in training this way. And the first person that comes to mind is always Jen Ryan because she is a freak of nature. I'm really good friends with her, so we can talk about her at will, and I will totally just call her and say, hey, you're awesome. But I have been watching her get better. I want to say I was there the first day like 10, 12 years ago when she started CrossFit at the gym that I was at in South Carolina, which was in grad school.

How does she keep getting better at 40 years old? I mean, obviously, she does all the things right, but at some point, you would assume that all of these systems would just be like, okay, you've reached your genetic potential, but she doesn't seem to have ever hit it. She finds someone like you, and all of a sudden, it's like this new bump in performance. How does it happen? Well, again, it was a leap of faith. And I introduced her to the concept of doing this. I had this, I invited a bunch of people to take part in this study. And I said, all I need you to do is just do the work, you know, do the work, you know, to do the work, you know, give me your honest opinion of how it's how it's faring. And it was really starting to work for

her. She started to notice she said, Look, I'm not doing as much work as I used to do. You know, the amount of workouts that I would do and how often I would train, I just did what you told me to do. And I started noticing that I'm able to produce more work my fatigue levels were so much more in check and I was just able to do more work and when I when I introduced the idea of her coming back she jumped she goes you know whatever you had me do was really really working for me yeah and uh so she was all about getting more of it and it didn't take her any time at all to get Lauren to jump on. So I don't know. I think there's probably something to be said for the genetics.

She's probably just got the gift to be able to produce the capacities that she does. I'm sure that her intellect, just the fact that she's got a real staunch approach to making sure she does things right more often than not. There's a lot of variables. It's like, you know, you mentioned Hunter. It's like people, how the hell does Hunter do what he does? Yeah. You know, I mean, CrossFit, he's pretty strong, but he's not a hitter, right? Yeah.

But as an endurance athlete for his size, pretty amazing. I mean, listen, I had a guy – I used to coach him. I said, I tie him to my bike. I have a cruiser bike that I use, a big beach cruiser, big fat tires. Hook him to a rubber band. Start out right in the middle of my cul-de-sac out in the middle of the street. Do 180-pound shrug, like a dead to a shrug, right? start out right in the middle of my cul-de-sac out in the middle of the street do 180 pound shrug like a dead to shrug right 10 reps hook them to my bike we have them drag me around my block

i'm on the brakes i'm 250 pounds and i'm literally skiing behind him like water ski i got video you see it's funny and uh I clock him at a six minute and 10 seconds for a mile dragging me on the bike six rounds like that five rounds dragging me doing the the weight work first on the final round I cut him loose and I just chased him around. He ran a 440. On mile six, he ran a 440 at about 205 pounds after five rounds of dragging me on the bike around the block. Who does that? Yeah. That's me.

Who's even close to that? Like who's top 10 in the world that's even like over 180 pounds? As an endurance athlete as an ocr guy or or endurance or yeah there's listen there's running a marathon at that speed that's 200 pounds yeah well uh yeah he was talking about doing a guinness book of world records for a marathon at his weight and we talked about it a couple times i think it's kind of a dumb idea, to be honest with you. It would be his first one, right? Yeah.

Inside of about 10 miles, he's a force to be reckoned with. And if you introduce the fact that he has to lift weights, then run, to answer his question, I know most of the guys that are in the sport that are thought of as being elite, competing at an elite level. And there's only a handful of guys that are 200 pounds. And there's none of them that are anywhere near the zip code he's living in when it comes to performance. Nowhere near. Um, one, when you mentioned hill sprints earlier, um, and you were talking to two people that will go sprint a hill at any second that there it's like a reunion. If we find a nice hill to go try and massacre our legs on.

That's actually exactly where I'm heading after this call record. I'm already scheduled to go to the park and go run hills for us. I'm on it. I moved to central North Carolina, and there isn't a hill within an hour of me. And I just moved from San Diego where I had the most gnarly, brutal, beautiful hill right outside my house. And it's, like, depressing that I don't get to go just punish myself on it on a weekly basis. But the reason I thought about this is because we met at Tahoe, and there is like a four-mile – it feels like four miles.

It may be less than that. But the first climb in Tahoe is straight up. And it takes like us normal humans, I want to say like almost two hours to get to the top of it, to start the world championships. And then I look at people that are competing and they're taking off on that however many mile climb and they're hitting six and a half minute miles and not stopping all the way up. I just don't understand the physics of how you can get somebody to stay just in a fat store without gassing out

when they're staring down an effort like that. I mean, I understand it's training, but when people are running hills, does that change the game so much that it doesn't seem to be for the best in the world? I'm not sure what the question is. I don't really have one. I'm really trying to just have a conversation about what those people are doing. Well, like I said, I coach a lot of people that end up on that mountain. Yeah. And some of them doing really well with it, some of them not so much. But when I prepare a guy for that altitude and that length of a climb, I typically do a lot of short, high-intensity hill repeats,

especially if they're land lubbers where they're like at sea level. Because there's not really much you can do to battle that altitude other than to spend a great deal of time up there in that environment but you can do things to improve your VO2 max

because your VO2 max suffers at altitude and I mean it's like I think it's like for every 3,800 feet you lose 10 percent of your vo2 max so realizing if you're going to 10,000 feet you may suffer 25 percent of your vo2 score so let's say you know i'm terrible at math but let's just say your vo2 score is 100 you know you're gonna you get to the mountain it's a 75. So it's like somebody, you know, took one of your legs out from underneath you. So we do – I have workouts that are very specific to either, you know,

longer duration, sometimes carrying heavy devices. I understand there's going to be – this next competition is coming. They have a corn feed bag or something like this. What is this bag they're gonna have uh in the crossfit competition we're actually not sure yeah no i think uh lauren was telling me there's a competition coming up where you're gonna have to the men are gonna have to carry like a 150 pound feed bag up a hill it doesn't surprise me they're doing it at the original crossfit ranch where there's like a really nasty hill that they've made kind of famous so I just

haven't checked out the events but CrossFit games this weekend get excited yeah Doug's gonna be watching for sure a lot of hip work you know yeah deadlifts I have a workout called the farmer's daughter where you you know actually I fashioned this workout after Hunter, as a matter of fact. 70-pound dumbbells, about a, I want to say about a 25%, 30% grade, about 100 meters, and do burpee push-ups with the weight. Then after 10 reps, farmer carry the weight up to the top hill, drop it off, come down, sprint back up, get the weights, bring them back down, repeat. And we do like 30, 40 minutes of that.

And you get to a place where when you don't have to carry the weight and all you have is that hill to run up, it seems pretty easy. Yeah. How often do you spend time really training, going out, and just blasting people? I know Doug did – what was the show you did when you were doing the prowler drags to like near – basically to failure and then – With Julian Pena. Yeah, and taking weight off, going to failure again, but really just fully taxing that anaerobic system where you just literally cannot take another step, lightening the weight, going again, lighten the weight, go again. Are you pushing people kind of just to the brink of unable to pick their legs up?

It just depends on what we're training for. I mean, I have people that are doing high rocks now. That's the new thing. Is that still happening? Well, it's going to. I actually think it's going to do well. Once they get back to it, I think it's going to do well. But people got excited about that, and so it came down to eight one-kilometer sprints,

skier, rower, sled push pull lunges you know armor carry so it's all this short high intensity stuff so i started to make my bones in that too i got people training for that um i've got people training for 24 hour events so it just depends on who i'm working with and why um what their what their hope to do is. So I just look at, you know, to me, the body's a Rubik's Cube. And, you know, the fun for me is just trying to figure out, how do I have to manipulate this thing to get it to where I need it to be? How much strength training do you feel is important in this?

Like Hunter being a 200 plus pound person but his average competitors being in the 160, 170 pound range. Is them adding more lean muscle or just putting on some size? Do you think that would hurt their chances? And on the other side of that, Hunter maybe losing 10 pounds of muscle.

Would that help in his his position you know he likes very much to lift heavy things can't get it out of him yeah and uh i when i was coaching him we got to a place where we negotiated i said look i don't want you lifting anything more than a kettlebell you know i don't want you lifting heavy i want you to we're going to try to pare you down a little bit and really focus on developing your endurance and developing your running, running skills because we weren't going to lose a race relative to his lack of strength. Yeah. You know, that wasn't going to be a problem. Um,

but then I've got people that really need to get their strength up because they just, they fail out and they can't flip a 400 pound tire. You know, they got problems like that. So it's a, it's just a matter of needs um i don't think you're going to try if you're going to try to beat hunter in an event like uh high rocks uh i use high rocks as an example because it's there's so much force production involved there um you you may benefit by putting on a little bit of muscle but if you were faster than him you know there's a little give and take there you might sacrifice your speed or your staying power in order to gain that strength. So it becomes a wrestling match. You know, you got to, you really got to think it through. Would you be better off if you gained 10

pounds of muscle? Well, one of my guys I work with now, a guy named Vijay Jones, he's one of the top athletes in Spartan today, young kid. I've been working with him for about three years now. I got him when he was like 19. He's 22 now. He's really fast. He can outrun most anybody in the sport up to about 10 miles. You know, get him out after a half marathon, he starts to suffer. I just think his balls haven't dropped yet. He's got to grow up a little bit. But his technique is really amazing on rigs.

He's fast. He can get through rigs really fast. And he's strong enough to lift a 400-pound tire and flip it over with the best of them. But he feels like he's skinny. He feels like he wants to put on some muscle. And I'm not opposed to it. I just don't want him to think that every pound of muscle he gains is going to put him in a better place because I don't know that it will. Yeah. Yeah.

I feel like CrossFitters are always in that balance. They love lifting heavy weights, but at the same time they know they need to have a big engine and the ability to go a long time. So there's that, that delicate balance, um, of how much lifting one they should do knowing that they're going to have to go for 20 to 30 minutes as well in order to do that is have you seen any like I guess how how does overall strength play into the way that more even on a general level I know you coach individuals at such a high level but on you know for the for the average crossfitter that's going in is there like a a balance in that that you've been able to see um in which maybe taking a different approach to not setting

not training for one rm specific or um doing like the the heavier lifting Metcons like is, is where does that, I guess, where does that balance land for you? If there is kind of an overall message in there, I'm not, I'm not as experienced in that realm to give you a good solid. Okay.

This is what I've learned at answer. Yeah. I do have some guys that have, you know, toyed with CrossFit and, you know, based on my understanding of who they are and what their history has been, I may make some recommendations as to how much or how little work they should introduce. But I've zero experience taking a moderate capacity CrossFitter and turning him into a world champion.

It's never been there. Yeah. Do you teach sprinting much? Not the actual, like, form and stuff, but how often do guys go out and it's the 1RM 100 repeats? Yeah, so I coach a couple of collegiate sprinters. I have a 100-meter runner for USC and a 200-meter runner for UCLA. And both of them would have gone to the Olympics this year.

And I'm like the secret sauce they don't talk about, you know, because they can get into trouble if they start going outside the house. Yeah. Um, but what ended up happening is one girl I was working with, again, I'm not going to throw names around, but one girl I was working with, she came to me cause she was injured and she was redshirted for almost the entire season last season. And her mother being a chiropractor, um, you know, very sensitive to the injuries and whatever. And nobody seemed to be able to come up with an answer.

And I don't know how, but somebody dropped my name on her and they came out to see me. And I started working with her and I got her back into running. And she's actually running professionally now for 200. She's probably going to set a world record one day in 200 meters. But it was her mechanics. The way she was running was just really leading her to back injuries. We cleaned it up quickly. She'd come to understand what she needed to adjust. She'd been running really well. And turned out her cousin was running for the opposing school, for USC. And he just came because he saw what we did with her.

And he wanted to go fast. He needed four hundredths of a second in order to qualify for the Olympics. And in the hundred. So I started working with him. But my treadmill is an overspeed treadmill. So the top speed is 28 miles an hour. So I have a harness rig set up with a pneumatic lift and I drop these guys into speed and we do intervals that are like upwards of five second in length. So we're looking for

neuromuscular adaptations and efficiency and power and force production. And then we start extending those intervals back to 15 and 20 seconds uh no need to go beyond 20 seconds because they don't plan on racing longer than that and i might do four repeats with them and rest five minutes in between each repeat um but yeah i i do work with i used to work with people trying to get in the nfl trying to get their 440 times down. So, yeah, I've been at this a lot, you know, about 30 years in this now. Before we wrap up, I want to know the freakiest of freaks where someone hopped on your treadmill and you were like, whoa. Because if you see all the people, there still is that one that stands out

where it's just like, this is the ultimate freak well first of all when when you said ultimate freak i a name came to mind immediately and then when you uh prefaced it by saying on my treadmill oh they just go back to the ultimate freak okay so i used to do um some work with espn sports science i love that yeah i used to watch those work with ESPN Sports Science. I love that. I used to watch those all the time. I would get called in to do a VO2 max test on an athlete. I've been there, I don't know, three or four times. It's always like, okay, we got this person.

You follow race car driving? You know who Tony Kanaan is? I know the name. Tony Kanaan is a world-class race car driver. He's Formula One, right? Yeah. Yeah. So they said, we want you to do some work with Tony Kanaan.

So they bring him in, and we get on studio and I'd do some work with him. But the craziest athlete I've ever worked with was on the set at ESPN Sports Science. And, oh my god, I just had a mind fart what her name is. Tatiana McFadden.

Hold on, what sport does she play? I know the name. Tatiana McFadden is a wheelchair athlete so they they have this this her rig is this big um spool i guess for back lack of a better term that goes underneath the two wheels on her three-wheeled cart. So we attach the front wheel, and we put the back wheels on this big spool. And I do a VO2 max test on her. And from – I mean, she has spinal bifida, so she's literally got zero legs. And from the waist up, she's a beast.

I mean, just so muscular. Beautiful girl. She won the Boston Marathon, the New York Marathon, the Berlin Marathon, the London Marathon, Chicago Marathon, and Boston. Did I say Boston? Like three or four years in a row. The girl can hold about 25 miles an hour on her wheelchair for 26 miles and be at about 128 beats per minute. Now, come on. That's pretty freaky. Yeah, it's super freaky. I can barely picture someone going 25 miles an hour at all in any type of wheelchair

well without a motor on it i envisioned like the guy the cyclist that you're trying to avoid when you're driving and he's like he's going 25 in the 35 mile an hour road and you're just like you go by him but you're like jeez heez, he's going. That's like death-defying speed over there. Well, try to imagine you're out there. I'm a cyclist. So it's like you see somebody on the road ahead, and you've got to catch them, right? Yeah. You just got to.

It's built in. You have to. You just got to pass the guy, right? And try to imagine you're out there on the road. You're doing your thing, singing a song, listening to some music or whatever, and somebody comes by you on a wheelchair. You just want to shoot yourself, right? It's like – and you're trying to – can you imagine trying to catch her? You're not having any luck.

It's like you just go home, you sell your bike, right? And she's just like casually like, hey, nice day out today, huh? Great to see you. Great weather. Try and catch me. Or better than that, hey, nice day out today, huh? Great to see you. Great weather. Try and catch me. Or better than that, say, you're doing great. You look great. Keep going.

That pat on the back that's 14 inches away from the kick in the ass. Oh, it's so funny. Oh, man. Where can people find all the programs and learn more about all this? Well, I can be found on instagram which is easy it's at diaz hp or they can come to my website where the programs are there coaching is there which is diazhumanperformance.com real easy to find beautiful i'm really glad we got a chance to do this i've been waiting fantastic yeah i know sitting on i can't believe tahoe was a year ago

you know i all the memories started popping up yeah i was sitting on my rower and i was like i gotta do this thing and i i know the guy that can help me get to the place i'm trying to go well you got to get out here when you get out here you got to hit me up yeah i know i'm dying in here california when you move to the east Coast, is more than a six-hour plane ride. It's like a full immersion for a week somewhere. Yeah, I just did a clinic in Maryland last month. Yeah, is your – I guess you don't really have a clinic schedule really right now, do you? Do you have one up?

Well, yeah. The next clinic is here in January. Typically, I stay home. I used to travel a lot. I've been all over the country. I'm getting old. I'm getting tired of traveling, man. Just screw it.

We're all there. And we're not even that old. I feel so healthy being home. And then I went and traveled and I wrecked my shoulder two weeks ago. What's up with that? Yeah, I saw you were working out with your shoulder too huh yeah i had a little mountain bike accident and uh went over the handlebars about eight foot it's funny one of my friends uh dad just did that i went over the handlebar broke his collarbone i was a hundred percent

sure when i stood up that i broke mine and And then my shoulder removed itself by about three inches from the collarbone. And it's slowly coming back. I've got a pretty good range of motion this week. But it's gross. You feel how the ball goes into the socket. And as it's going back at like, there's, it's kind of like a drunk driver,

like trying to find its way. So it's like constantly banging into the, um, just all of it. It's in there and you make a wrong move, but it also is really cool to watch itself or watch it pull itself back into place and get healthy like day by day if i sleep really well the next day is really good if i don't sleep well it's like not much changes um it's anytime there's injury there's always

something cool that comes out of it assuming you get back to healthy um so i'm learning a lot but i'm really excited to get back on the rower and i was like really involved in this uh this program and i was like doing it and it was the first time i had been like on a real structured program um and in quite some time just because i enjoy training and sometimes programming is like or somebody else write it uh I believe Doug did you write that one no I believe it was Michael McElroy or maybe McGoldrick but probably I think it's McElroy yeah um yeah it's fantastic and it's it's for people that are just on uh it's built for using a rower and then for people that are running and and using the air

bike it's going to be more of an rpe based program but i was having a great time and i immediately thought of you how you could bring this whole thing together for me yeah aside from that the the thing that i thought would be interesting for me in this this this space being CrossFit is most CrossFitters run terribly. They just, just don't run very well. Yeah. And, uh, I thought that that would probably be my boondoggle right there. It's just being able to, uh, get into that space and help these guys run better. Yeah. Do you, do you have, I mean, the, we'll, we'll do that on the next time we have you on. I kind of always assumed you were, I didn't know you had the technical running side as well as. It's massive.

Yeah. That's probably the most, you know, I have more tenure doing the testing. I've been testing athletes for about 26 years, but I've been doing gait evaluation, gait correction on athletes for about a decade. And so now when I do my clinics, that's what I do. I do a gait analysis, gait correction, VO2 max, resting metabolic assessment. It's like the whole weekend is nothing but work and information. It's pretty cool, actually. I love it.

Yeah. Right on. Well, I appreciate having having you on man and and uh coming to hang out with us it's a long time coming and luckily covet happened so we didn't have to be in in person and we could just call and do this on zoom yeah but you know i'm really i feel like i suck man my lighting is wrong and oh you're good man we got we got a special little i'm building a i'm building a cave in here. It's great.

Yeah. Look at this. It's got the weights. It's a background. You get to get strong. You even got your little back pad thing on the wall. Yeah. I mean, if they're going to send me a beautiful – go over to PRX Performance

and buy yourself a rig and use the code SHRUGged if you're watching this. Yeah. Yeah, save you some cash, get some free weights. They make it on the zoom every day. Uh, Doug Larson. You bet. I'm on Instagram.

Doug will see Larson. Uh, Richard, appreciate you coming on the show, man. Uh, I really appreciate your perspective. You bet.

Yeah. I'm Anders. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are barbell shrugged at barbell underscore shrug over barbell shrug.com forward slash shrugged for all of you living in San Diego, LA, Palm Springs, and Vegas. Get over to barbell shrug.com forward slash shrugged for all of you living in san diego la palm springs and vegas get over to walmart we have three training programs hitting the shelves of walmart if you are not at those stores and you want to just save an insane amount of cash on three programs for fat loss increasing your cardio as well as gaining strength you can get over to

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