Barbell Shrugged - Creating Futures Through Fitness at the Fitops Foundation w/ Harrison Johnson, Anders Varner, and Doug Larson- Barbell Shrugged #448

Episode Date: March 11, 2020

Host the One Ton Challenge at your gym: http://shruggedstrengthgym.com   In today’s episode, Anders, Doug, and Travis discuss the most common mistakes in the snatch and clean and how you implement these fixes to improve your lifting technique.   Blurring the lines of behavioral health and fitness How military vets transition out of military Building a program around helping vets with PTSD What happens when military personnel enter the civilian world Understanding the depths of PTSD Bringing a future to military vets through fitness And more…   Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram   Harrisson Johnson on Instagram   TRAINING PROGRAMS   One Ton Challenge   One Ton Strong - 8 Weeks to PR your snatch, clean, jerk, squat, deadlift, and bench press   20 REP BACK SQUAT PROGRAM - Giant Legs and a Barrell Core   8 Week Snatch Cycle - 8 Weeks to PR you Snatch   Aerobic Monster - 12 week conditioning, long metcons, and pacing strategy   Please Support Our Sponsors   “Save $20 on High Quality Sleep Aid at Momentous livemomentous.com/shrugged us code “SHRUGGED20” at checkout.   US Air Force Special Operations - http://airforce.com/specialops   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   PRx Performance - http://prxperformance.com use code “shrugged” to save 5%   http://kenergize.com/shrugged use Shrugged10 to save 10%   Masszymes http://maszymes.com/shrugged use Shrugged to save 20%   ------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs-johnson ------------------------------------------------------------------   ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Snatch, clean, jerk, squat, deadlift, and bench press. Sam, every time I turn this microphone on because they're the coolest things in the world. And this week, Eagle Cap CrossFit, Ken Folk Fitness, and our good friend at Deep River Fitness in Memphis, Tennessee. Ken Folk, Eagle Cap, going off this weekend, March 9th, or May 9th. Sorry about that. We're going to be at Deep River Fitness. Doug, Travis Mash, and myself, we're going to be running a weightlifting clinic in the morning, doing the One Ton Challenge at night. If you would like to host the One Ton Challenge at your gym, head over to shruggedstrengthgym.com.

You can schedule a call with me. I'm going to walk you through all of the marketing assets that we're putting together for gym owners. Social media, pre-launch marketing, email. We're going to give you an eight-week program that you can run in your gym so everybody gets super jacked preparing for the event. And we're building landing pages and helping you with registration. On top of all of that, $20 from every registration at your gym goes to helping military veterans with PTSD get personal training certifications

through the FitOps Foundation, which today, Harrison Johnson, the program director of the FitOps Foundation is on the show explaining to you why it's so important that we support military vets with PTSD, what he is doing to build a program that helps all of these trainers have a life in fitness and what we can do to help them build this foundation. And we're lifting weights and doing the right thing. It's not just about lifting the weights, but how much good can we do with barbells in hands, smiles on faces, and people doing the one-ton challenge.

So head over to shrugstrengthgym.com. Schedule a call with me. We're going to talk about how we can help your gym using Barbell Shrugged to market your event and how we can get people stronger and cooler and having a ton of fun in your gym. Today's show with Harrison Johnson, FitOps Foundation foundation and he's the program director up there and walking you through step by step why the fit ops foundation exists how you can help and why it's so important that we look after military vets with ptsd and give them some hope going into their civilian lives before we get rolling i want to thank our sponsors over at organifi the green the red and the gold you need the micro vitamins You need the microvitamins, friends.

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So you should go over and do that. Harrison Johnson on the show. Let's get into it right now. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Harrison Johnson, program director, FitOps. We're down here in beautiful northwest Arkansas. I know it's northwest Arkansas because the airport doesn't have a name.

It's just called northwest Arkansas. It's walmart country oh yes and soon to be fit ops country we're going to grow this thing bigger than walmart imagine that coming for you right walmart your little child's play business and walmart owns this whole camp that we're at right now exactly it's beautiful i feel like we're really a camp you guys found this sweet little spot um dude before we get into all the cool stuff that you're working on what's kind of your Exactly. It's beautiful. I feel like we're really at camp. You guys found this sweet little spot. Dude, before we get into all the cool stuff that you're working on, what's kind of your background, and how did you get set up with being the program director here? So I spent 10 years in the Army Infantry.

I was most recently a drill sergeant at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and I spent a lot of time at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, and while I was there, I served with a guy named Eric, who worked with the program for a long time, helped establish the program, and Performix, our parent company, supplement line, has entered Walmart stores across the country, and if you want to enter Walmart stores, you end up at Bentonville, Arkansas. And through those conversations, it was necessary on our side to show what fit ops was all about to a very interested walmart crowd who's got a seriously large initiative to hire as many

veterans as possible and our program and a lot of the concepts we'll talk about align with what they're trying to do and the community itself itself in Northwest Arkansas is really conducive to growth for the program. And so through those talks, they wanted to host a camp, and it was kind of last minute, but it was necessary for the attention we had at the time to get a camp thrown together in Northwest Arkansas. And Eric, knowing, luckily for my sake, remembered that I was from Arkansas

and reached out and asked if I could help make some connections and coordinations to throw a camp together last minute, and we did it. That was last May, so I've been with the program since about March of last year. We got our first camp in Arkansas, which was our eighth camp in total, which was also at the camp that we're at now so i got brought on uh as arkansas and the initiative here grew my role grew and i've taken over for operations for the foundation and development also yeah we're at a high level for the audience just so they have context for the show like what what is fit ops like what's the what's the point so fit ops was a program back in 2016 drawn up by matt hesse the ceo and founder of performance and performance house as a veteran himself he identified that there's something that happens uh during the transition from service and it's

something that no transition program that the government or the army or the navy whatever branch of service you you served in can prepare you for you take that uniform off and you step back into a life that you at some point walked away from and you're expected to just kind of the word normally used is reintegrate the reality is and being a recently separated vet myself is there's there's no reintegration the person that put on the uniform the first time for me 10 years ago was not the same person that took it off 10 years later so there was no reintegration and mentally it's hard to kind of process that or in any way prepare yourself for that a lot of us go back to the same community, just like I did, that we were in before the service. And so mentally, you kind of see the same things. You see the same people.

You expect to kind of roll back into the same friends. But me, Harrison, was not the same Harrison anymore. And so processing that and not being around like-minded people that understood what you went through in the service, that understood the values you stood for because they're pounded into you for a decade in my case. They just don't understand that. And what happens is you kind of, you digress, you remove yourself. And a lot of people find losing that purpose and the purpose is what our program is built around. That purpose is really hard to find again. So Matt Hesse identified that being a veteran himself and wanted to build a program back in 2016

that helped replace it with something very common to all service members, which is fitness. And naturally, as a PerformX brand goes, fitness was also a simple way to do it. He designed a program that brought veterans in from across the country and they go through a three-week long no expenses whatsoever to the veteran three-week long program that certifies them as personal trainers but it is far from that simple we we put a very comprehensive program that spends four weeks prior to camp on a online pre-study program so that we

hit the ground running for the three weeks on camp we bring in top fitness professionals physical therapists and guest speakers like yourselves across from across the country to really build a whole image of what a successful personal trainer would be and then on top of it we have the access to performix house which is the gym that matt hesse and Performix runs in New York, housing some of the top trainers in the country to come in and really fill in the on-hand and practical application of a lot of this stuff. So these trainers and veterans walk away from this ready to get a job. And through partnerships across the country, we help them get those jobs.

Yeah. When did you feel like, or I guess kind of the process of you becoming program director it's uh jumping into a big role um was that from kind of the military background did you have something similar um and then i guess the process of actually feeling like you're putting a real program together here for for three weeks yeah it was interesting so it was a really cool story. Doug's got a hole in his coffee. I guess so. Sorry for breaking the action. Go ahead.

Don't worry about him. We got coffee. Chug. I'll chug it. Here you go. When I decided to get out of the Army, it was a really difficult decision for me and my family. I have a wife and two young boys. And it's a trap, and I don't say trap negatively, but it is a trap that you fall into in the military

where it's easier to just keep signing that dotted line, to reenlist, to keep serving because it's comfortable. It's an environment you're used to. I mean, it's a really cool thing, but it builds a structure that you depend upon as a service member, where you wake up the same time every day, you do the same thing every morning, then you go to work and you wait on the word and just execute. Yeah. But you know what you're doing every day. And if there isn't a task to be done,

you know what to train on for readiness and preparedness. So it was hard to take that leap, but I, and I'll get a little soggy here, but I was late up late with my wife one night, like I said, nine years into service. And then I was a drill sergeant. I was working four 30 in the morning to eight o'clock, seven days a week. It was, it was a rough life. And anyone that's ever done that job will tell you it's really strenuous on a family unit. I wasn't seeing my kids. They were asleep when I went to work. They were asleep when I got home.

It was rough. And I had a long talk with my wife, and my wife is the most beautiful Army wife you could ever imagine. She never once questioned what I was doing, never asked me to change directions. She just supported me and took care of the kids, and I couldn't ask for a better partner in that life. But I looked her in the eyes, and I told her I wanted to get directions. She just supported me and took care of the kids and I couldn't ask for a better, better partner in that life. But, uh, I looked her in the eyes and I told her I wanted to get out. I had, uh, had to deal with quite a few, 13 actually throughout a decade of life in the army, 13 suicides in a close circle from high school friends, my grandpa, people I served with, people now that I work with. It was a common theme and it was growing. And a lot of them, you get on social media, you scroll their feeds and you can't ask them. They're gone. So you look for answers and you can't find them. But there was a common thing. And the word, before I ever talked to Eric or talked to Matt Hesse or before they ever reached out to me,

and to be honest, for transparency, I thought FitOps was like some cool fitness camp where people just like shot social media stuff. And so when they reached out, it was a big deal. But I had already come up with this word purpose. I had reached out to the state of Arkansas and the governor of Arkansas, and I had been brought on to do a program and be the state of Arkansas and the governor's office first military intern with the goal of building, developing, and bringing veteran support programs to the state of Arkansas. Asa Hutchinson, the governor of Arkansas, has a huge initiative to bolster

and improve veteran support programs in the state. It was part of his reelection recently. And so I was set. I was ready. And within the same week of getting approved for this internship, FitOps reached out. And I was like, so I had this vision. I didn't know what I was going to do. And for the first time in my life,

I didn't know what I was going to wake up and do and how I was going to do it. But I had passion and I had purpose. And then Matt Hesse and the FitOps Foundation gave me the how. So I had this vision. He gave me the how. And so I dropped throttle, and I slammed the pedal to the ground. But through that transition, as beautiful as it was for me,

everything lining up, I'm going through all this transition stuff, and one of the things, and we focus on it here, we do a resume building workshop. One of the things that really impairs success of veterans is the service branches through transition programs do not teach you what the synonym in civilian language is for what you're doing in the service. So me, infantry guy, probably the least marketable job in the military. Good at knocking on people's doors, seeing if they're home. Really the only thing. A collector?

Yeah. You've been served. But it's really hard to market that, especially when we're not taught how to translate it as a skill. Now, you can take the most recent job I did as a drill sergeant, and people have this iconic vision of what a drill sergeant is, whether it's thanks to major pain or full metal jacket. It's none of that.

I mean, it's a lot of that, but it's somewhere in between. But it's not really marketable in the way that people think. Like, oh, cool, he's scary. We really don't need that in the cubicle space in the office, right? But that's not true. If we just simply teach them the right words to use, the reality is a drill sergeant, and over my time as a drill sergeant, two years, I impacted 1,200 entry-level

employees. I'm going to translate it for you. 1,200 entry-level employees. I took them from completely clueless about a job and in nine weeks turned them into a functional, prepared employee that was ready to be impactful and meaningful within their job field. Not only did I do that, but I transformed them physically. I managed their health and welfare. I managed their diet. I managed training. And then I managed health and welfare to like beans and bullets, right?

Yeah. I mean, for a 30-year-old kid, that should not be looked at as an entry-level employee on the back end. When I got out, I don't have the tangibles, the quantifiables. I don't have the college degree. I don't have any of that. So according to society's rules, I'm not ready for work. One thing I feel that's interesting about the military,

like if I was coming out after something like that, the work that I would be doing would feel so unimportant in comparison to what you're doing when you're overseas or getting thousands of people prepared for the next level to go to war, whatever kind of the end goal is for them. Is there a lot of that when you get out of just, you talk about finding purpose, but like like what is that struggle trying to like recreate that story of importance and then how do you guys do it here to really give people a voice that they can believe in uh yeah i mean it it's a terrible struggle uh and it's compounded by like what i was talking about where we're not thrown into equal jobs or like jobs where we're given responsibilities we're given the ability to build and create and develop and train we're not that's not what we're qualified for i used air quotes qualified for in the real world because we don't know how it's a two-way

street we don't know how to tell an employer what we can do because our records have words that you guys might pick out a couple medals and stuff that you're like, oh, that's cool. Yeah. Great job. But the rest of it is like, what the heck does that mean? And then we're not taught to translate it. And then the employer side, it's like, okay, what do I do with this drill sergeant? What do I do with this infantry guy? You know, we've got Bobby Summers, huge guy in in this program an amazing dude he was a 25 series so he was all communications but where

he as useful as he could be doing a similar job in the art in the normal world he wouldn't know how to pitch himself uh and like you were saying we like's all purpose. It's pride. You're proud of what you're doing. You're impacting people. Whether you go on the far left side and you say, you know, I'm protecting those back home. Or you go, you know, somewhere in the middle and you're doing something that makes you feel good or the people around you feel good. But you lose all of that. And like I said, it's compounded by the inability to translate it into civilian terms because we're not taught how to.

Here at FitOps, Matt Hesse identified fitness as a common language amongst all veterans because all of us have suffered at the hands of some maniacal drill sergeant, which I wasn't every day um or had a really you know embarrassing morning of pt or we ran too far we couldn't run hard enough good bad indifferent we all bonded at some point through fitness so he identified that as a common language and a way to bring all the branches together and the job of a personal trainer is so impactful upon the people that you touch. I mean, you guys experience it all the time. Like what a personal trainer can do, I mean, physically, obviously, mentally, a good personal trainer will impact you mentally, which feeds into emotionally and spiritually if you're going down that road, but there's no job like a personal trainer a good personal trainer can

change the lives of everyone they interact with yeah and so that's that really does replace that that void in a service members life yeah and what we've done is we've taught them that it's not just a certification it is an indoctrination it is a a re-institutionalization. Yeah. We haven't talked much about the PTSD side of this. It's a massive part of what we're doing here. When did you guys kind of hone in on that specific thing instead of just any vet can come in and learn how to get their training certifications?

So I think that there's some obvious realities early on. And even now where we're a very small population, there's 1,200 veterans in line waiting to come to camp. Fuck, really? Yeah. And this year will be our most active year with five camps in 2020. The most we've ever held in one year's two and a half like one overlapping two so we'll impact more this year than we've ever impacted but we'll still barely reach 200 at max

capacity so assuming as our audience grows that queue will grow as well we're going to have thousands of people needing this uh even if they don't completely understand how much they need it. But the PTSD thing, as it was small at the beginning, we were pretty selective. Originally, it was through and through, conceptually, a personal trainer certification program for veterans. And it was camp one, night one, day day one where we saw that they saw i wasn't with the program at the time but i've heard this story and it gives me goosebumps every time but because i see it every day here yeah when you fill a room with like-minded people who have not been in a

room with like-minded people in years sometimes, you see an immediate transformation. And it's something you cannot recreate with a veteran to civilian relationship. So you put these guys in the room and you realize, wow, this isn't a certification program at all. And you just see them bond. They turn into a family. Like morning one, after the first wake-up, these guys are laughing, hugging, crying, loving. it's just a beautiful thing and it's it's truly it's not replicated anywhere else in any other program

yeah and so like i said at the beginning personal trainer certification course great for veterans beautiful but ptsd came out really quick um and I'm not saying everyone that comes to camp or it's a prerequisite for coming to camp and I mean there's no way 99% of the time you ask someone if they're struggling with post-traumatic stress they probably don't know well there's a scale of it

like you could see something very gruesome or it could just be leaving and reintegrating and that's terrifying as hell trauma is a weird broad term and how people deal with trauma could just be leaving and reintegrating. Yeah. And that's terrifying as hell. Trauma is a weird, broad term of, and how people deal with trauma and even based on the scale of trauma, it doesn't really matter.

It's kind of a person-to-person thing of just what you're exposed to. And how your body and brain, you know, just processes things. I mean, even chemically, you get down to chemicals. I mean, everyone is different. And one thing that, like, I've realized and we've talked a lot about with the team is we've realized that there's a certain demographic, a certain group that gets

attracted to service. And it tends to, like, when we hear stories and we talk about what, you know, talk to each other, you realize a lot of people attracted to service, if not 99% of them, suffered from some kind of traumatic childhood. Yeah. Something happened that drew them to service. Whether they were the kid that was running away or they met a judge in the courtroom and they said, hey, you're going to war or going to jail. Something led them there. And, you know, personally, to expose myself a little,

it was a pride thing. I'd gotten into a little bit of trouble as a kid, joined a frat, terrible idea, got into some trouble in college and hit a low point where I realized looking left and right. And, you know, if you ask any of these people, they would never admit it, but I know that no one to my left or right was proud of me. My mother, my father, no reason to be proud of me. My girlfriend, who's my wife now, I don't know what she was thinking. Um, but I hadn't felt

proud of who I was in a long long time and you know that trickles into your other relationships and so i i you know i i dropped out of college and did the one thing i knew my parents didn't want me to do and i joined the army the infantry and uh i was for sure like i was like i'm gonna do three years and go back to college i'm gonna do this for me and i'm gonna do it on my way and do it on my own because you know the army pays for college and it wasn't six months in uh i was actually overseas and i knew it was that's what i wanted to do for the first time in my life i felt something i'd never felt before i was proud and the people around me were proud of me.

Assuming I came back from that first deployment, which I did. But I was proud. The people were proud. And it was a feeling I'd never had. I was like, this is it. And so 10 years later, that feeling kind of trickled away. It's exhausting and it's trying. And I put my family first and those 13 people that

aren't here to fight this battle with me, I put them before everything I wanted in the army. And, uh, I was sick of seeing the army not do what they needed to do to address it. You know, you don't see these stories. Yeah. You don't see them talked about because I mean, I assume it's because it's looked at as a failure, which it should be. There's not enough being said.

And you hear the word suicide a lot. And it's not said enough. It's something people don't want to talk about. It's a very, very difficult subject, whether you're the one that is considering it or have attempted it or the one that's been impacted by it, which I feel like most people in this society these days have been impacted by it. And the number's 22. 22 veterans every day in this country commit suicide. Why isn't that on the front page of everything?

Like the nation's most valued resource, air quotes again, valuable resource is destroying itself. It's an endangered species. And no one's talking about it. Yeah. So we have a couple people that are following our programs. One of them is in the Air Force currently. And that deployment, not that you have to go in and tell any specific stories, but what goes into the, you said you kind of found yourself in creating that pride, that sense of pride and purpose while

you were deployed. What happens when you're over there? Because I've seen that in many people where they go overseas. It's like, it's kind of like its own fit ops camp of like, everyone is just focused on this one specific thing. You do your job, you train, you're working hard, but there's a ton of like personal growth that goes on almost when you're like by yourself trying to figure out whether it's staying alive or just being a part of the group. What is, I guess, the kind of like that instrumental piece that really made you feel like you

were doing something? For me, it was, you know, and it's, doing something for me it was you know and it's this is for me uh it was the first time in my life i could kind of recreate myself you know you're stripped of everything you have no personal clothes you have nothing personal you've got your pictures of your loved ones you've got you know back then you've got you know pay phones and some internet usage here and there but you'll be able to recreate yourself, become the person you want, and your self-image. Let's make that me. You get access to the gyms.

You get to clean up your diet, whether it's voluntary or involuntary. You only get what they serve you. Yeah. But I was able to become who I wanted to be. I was surrounded by people, my brothers. We were tested. We were bound through stuff that normal people shouldn't have to deal with. There's no way to explain it.

You just find yourself being like, I'm doing something. Yeah. I was proud of it, but the pride, it wasn't, it wasn't like a catalyst. It was just all of a sudden I was doing something that made a difference in this world. And there's not another employment opportunity where a hundred percent of the people in that job field make a difference in this world. And in the military you, you do. Yeah.

And it's just, it's a complete shift in a life and so i went over there and i went from being that kid that was you know mom was you know paying for everything for me i was doing nothing impactful i was just i was taking away from i wasn't giving to and all of a sudden i was giving to and i I was proud. And, you know, when you look to your left and right, you know, every one of the people in that room are thinking the same thing. There's just no turning back. I think it's also really interesting that you can connect with the feeling. So in my talk or in working with the people tomorrow, like that's actually like a really important thing is getting people to experience emotions and being able to recognize them. And like, they don't, maybe they do, maybe they don't when they're in service of like

feeling proud, like, oh, this is what feels good. My life is fulfilled right now. And then how do I recreate that? That's where the emptiness and the loneliness starts to like really creep in, I think. And I think that strength and conditioning is at an interesting place right now where we know a lot about how to make bodies very strong, very fast, but we don't really know a lot about the brain. Like there's a lot of frontiers that we still need to be chasing down in strength and conditioning

and gut biome. And there's a lot of frontiers that we still need to be chasing down in strength and conditioning and gut biome. And there's a lot of interesting avenues to go. But behavioral and mental health seems to be this like wild, unknown, like our best answers. Like, well, maybe we should do some psychedelics and recreate all this and wipe out the past. Or maybe we should all be meditating and going on no talking retreats and but there isn't like a a real plan of action for how do we attack mental and behavioral health and i think i mean there's obviously way more variables going on with the with the brain i mean i know there's supplements all over the place that'll do this, that, and the other, break them down. They're pretty similar.

With the brain, I mean, you've got a million different disorders, whatever it might be called, a million more medications, and a million more doctors telling you it could be this. And we talk about it all the time here. There's no formula. There's no, you know, even if you break it down to the premise of the performance stuff, there's no magic pill. It's work. And, you know, you'll hear Johnny Martin talk about it. You got to put in the work, just like physically.

Mentally, you got to put in the work. And so we talk about there's no formula to mental health or formula for saving people from suicidal ideations. But the closest thing we can do at the FitOps Foundation is, like I've talked about, you bring like-minded people together and you show them that vulnerability is necessary for growth. Yeah. And, you know, I think in society men are conditioned to think that crying is unacceptable. You've got to be tough, right? Like, for the longest time, I mean, my wife's never seen me cry until I got to the FitOps Foundation.

Yeah. Until I learned that Bobby calls them exhaust pipes. What happens to your car when you plug up your exhaust pipes? Same thing. Your tear ducts are your exhaust pipes. Yeah. And being able to express yourself is something I've never. I mean, I was in that grunt world.

I don't like the word grunt, but I was in the infantry. You know, when I was around my brothers, you know, we packed our lips full of dip. We grunted and we cursed. But that was how we shared. We grew. We still spoke. I mean, we weren't crying. But we all were going through similar stuff.

So we just found comfort with each other. You remove all of that. You brush your teeth. You clean up your language. There's nothing there. There's just no programs. You know, the VA, they're doing their best. Yeah.

But when you go in and you sit down with a doctor that has never experienced a single thing that you have experienced, whether they're a veteran or not, the veterans you find at a doctor's office, they were in a different war, different generation. They're a part of the VFW, which is great, but there's a disconnect. And it will be a problem for a long time. Or it's a civilian.

How am I going to talk to you about what I went through in Afghanistan and Iraq if you've never even been on a plane before? Yeah, dude, it's really weird because and how old are you 31 yeah i'm 36 i remember in my lifetime the first half of it well i shouldn't say the first half but a good chunk of the first half we just didn't have war and then all of a sudden war became a part of our life and it's like never in my eyes not going to be a part of our life like it it seems like it's not going anywhere it's not going to be a part of our life. Like it seems like it's not going anywhere. It's only going to be expanding almost.

Yeah. But I never thought about like war or military or vets or anything. And I lived in Virginia Beach my whole life. It was never something that was like on my mind. And then all of a sudden, like we were back in war and it had been 10, 15, 20 years since there was like an actual war where it was like on national headlines.

And now it, it, it feels like we went from this like peaceful time where we didn't have to worry about any of this stuff, just thrust into the point where there's a bunch of 18 year olds that are now 28, 35 years old. And they're just for, there's a bunch of 18-year-olds that are now 28, 35 years old, and there's just no resources.

There's nowhere for them to go to actually be able to deal with the ship because there was such a gap in where it was and where it is now. Friends, we're going to take a quick break to talk about the NorCal Classic. The One Ton Challenge is going to be there Saturday and Sunday. We've got people qualified. We've got people registered. It's going to be totally badass. And you are going to have a chance to do the One Ton Challenge if you're a spectator on Sunday, which is super cool. We're going to have the big competition on Saturday. Heat's stacked all day. It's going to be super rad. And then people in the audience or you listening to the show are going to have the

opportunity to do it. Have fun. I'll probably lift the weights because I like lifting the weights, and that's going to be on Sunday. On the CrossFit side of the house, get over to thenorcalclassic.com, and they have their online qualifier going through this Friday. They're super rad. I love them for putting their necks out and taking on this new cool event, creating the world championship for for the wanton challenge and i want to support them and make sure you get over and do the online qualifier if you're only interested in the crossfit uh the norcal crossfit or the norcal classic.com the norcal classic.com get over it's like 20 bucks they got dope workouts

get into the qualifier. That's the CrossFit piece. Once on Challenge is going to be Saturday and Sunday, and you'll have a chance to do that too. But do the online qualifier. It's rad. I love them. Back to the show.

Now we've been at war so long, I've served with guys whose 18-year-old sons are in the Army. Yeah, that's wild. They deployed together. They went to airborne school together i mean that that's never happened yeah um i mean it might have happened but not in the same continuous war and it's just crazy um and there's just it's there's nothing being done about it you know and it was weird my most most recent deployment, last deployment, I was talking to my buddies back home here in Arkansas, and some of them were like, we're still in Afghanistan?

Yeah. And I'm like, yeah. We're never leaving. No. They got big resources over there. Yeah. I mean, but at this, to be honest, at this point, like, and this was 2017, end 18 uh you know there there was no more combat than you would find in the backwoods of arkansas you know you'd find a farmer with a shotgun at some point in the backwoods

arkansas who didn't want some foreign soldier tromping through their crops yeah that i mean there's nothing over there and it's hard and that's even that's a part of the compounding problem that's a part of the problem where you've got these guys sacrificing and girls sacrificing so much for what what's the mission now and so you you know the mental struggle is it's not getting easier yeah i mean we're in a a place where you know it's not compare incomparable it's to like the surge in iraq yeah you, not the same thing going on at all, but you've replaced that with a lack of mission and a lack of clarity where, like, the people back home aren't supporting us.

They don't think we need to be there. So you're losing that pride in service because you just don't know what you're doing before anymore. I mean, you're following orders. Roger that. Let's go. But the people back home aren't on your team yeah it's really easy to focus on what we're doing wrong and where the problems

are but what are we doing right like where is the the conversation headed in the right direction to help currently obviously fit ops is a big piece of it um and and what you guys do i can't believe you have 1200 people in queue to get here. That's wild to me. Um, but I guess like, what is the government doing, if anything, to help that transition? And then like what programs and how are you learning about behavioral health to be able to fill the void of that loneliness that's there? I mean, I think that there's a lot of studies being done. I know within the service there's a lot of emphasis being put on programs,

even in the service, trying to prepare people. The stigma of behavioral health, mental health within service is going away for the longest time. The thought was is if I admit to having bad thoughts in my head you know i'm not going to be successful because that was the reality yeah you know if you if you weren't available for training on a certain day because you were at you know the shrink well then you're not a good soldier anymore so you just you'd avoid it i avoided it for 10 years i never went and even when you did go you knew exactly if i wanted to continue serving because there were mandatory check-ins here and there i mean when i went to certain schools i was required to pass a mental evaluation but my goal was to get to school why would i expose myself

in any way what the way that they wanted me to expose myself yeah when is like the perfect time to actually maybe not perfect but when is it like, if in your ideal world, when would you meet people in their transition out? I imagine it's like a year or two before to provide them with the skills to understand what's coming. Do they have resources like that when you're on your way out? Yes. So like the Army has SFL TAB tap it's the soldier for life transition assistance program

and it's a mandatory week-long workshop with additional opportunities to go to other classes and stuff whether it's there's a resume building class a budgeting class uh you know there's a little workshop about federal jobs jobs that you can apply for before you even leave the service. But the problem is, is the people in those rooms have already made up their mind. They want out, get me out. So you go through this week long transition workshop and you're just like,

let's get this over with. Let's go. I got to get, get to my new life. Um, and it's a week. Yeah. That's not 10 years.

Yeah. 10 years in a week? Yeah. Let's unravel some stuff. Okay, you're out. I mean, it's a lead a horse to water situation. You can get something out of it if you want to conceptually. I believe with most Army programs, military programs, beautiful concepts, not great at execution. If every program in the government was working to its maximum potential,

we'd have no problems in this country. It's kind of like that whole thing of like everyone in the class may be interested, but if the professor or whoever it is is only like half bought in and they know they have to get through this curriculum, and even if people are falling behind, they still have to get to friday and they do it every week of their life they're probably chucking up c pluses and that's good enough just make sure you sign in every morning and you know i mean it's the same problem with school teachers you know you underpay people you get what you underpay for yeah uh it's difficult and but i mean there's a lot of programs

you're regarding the the community aspect of FitOps, as far as I can tell from all the books I've ever read on happiness or any happiness research I've ever seen, in aggregate, there's many things that can influence happiness, but the main thing seems to be the strength of your social ties, which is your community. Do you have a place where you feel like you belong? And I feel like that's part of what fit ops it really provides it's like a for these camps at

least there's a temporary community of people that that you can relate to and feel understood by but how do you how do you expand on that for people that they come to these camps and then they go back out in the real world how do they find community where they live? Right. So, we, I mean, Matt Hesse and I brainstorm daily on how to do that. One of our, admittedly, our biggest failures early on, not failures, but just due to limitations of our, you know, the size of our program and what we had going was our aftercare. How do we maintain that connection? You know, you come to camp, three weeks, beautiful, lots of growth, lots of happiness. I made best friends. And then, you know, you spread back out across the country and, you know, we talk a lot about it. We can try, we try to avoid, but we compare ourselves to other nonprofit programs, focusing on veterans and community. And all of those programs, as huge as their populations are,

I mean, you get online, you fill out a little thing, you get a T-shirt, you show up, you're part of the family. That's great. That's not our program. You know, we have about 300 veterans across the country that have graduated a three-week-long program building a community step by step. So at that small number, how do we keep them connected?

You know, because 300 people across the continental United States, it's difficult to keep connected. You know, there's a small focus of populations within metropolitan areas of the bigger ones, Dallas, LA, there's some. But without hard-standing structures, gyms, and a larger population, it's hard to bring them back together. We brought Johnny Martin on. He's got 21 years of counseling experience and growth experience, and you guys will talk to him at some point.

But he's completely changing our aftercare program. He's taking over the aftercare program, and he's building something that will make FitOps just the first step of an infinite number of steps towards building this community. The first thing we're going to do, I mean, it's a simple step, but it's a step. We're building a video conferencing platform, not our own, but we're using a product called Zoom, and we're going to bring on a biweekly basis, bring we're using a product called zoom. Um,

and we're going to bring on a biweekly basis, bring these guys back together face to face, obviously over the computer and, and let them continue to share. And as a personal trainer, any personal trainer knows that interaction and growth and innovation is how you can become a better trainer, right?

Like you've got to talk to each other. What are you doing to be a better trainer? But it's more talk to each other. What are you doing to be a better trainer? But it's more than that. It's what are you doing to be a better person? I talk about all the time, you know, veterans who primarily and solely identify as a veteran are going to struggle. Veterans have to figure out how to identify primarily as a valued member of society with an additional toolkit of being a veteran right so there once we become that we'll be fine but the ones that primarily

i'm a veteran i'm a veteran well that goes back to that integration versus reintegration we're not the same person so let's figure out how to integrate back into society as a valued member and part of that is just talking building building building and that population will continue to grow and make it easier and easier and as we conceptualize fit ops gyms across the country in these larger metropolitan areas and hopefully we're able to empower um our graduates to open their own gyms under the FitOps name. That's a big mission of ours. But it's going to continue to be difficult to maintain that glue holding us together.

But it's at the forefront of our priorities. I think it's really interesting, too, because we have this issue of getting people to understand their value as civilians, getting them learned, trained to become coaches. And then they have to be coaches. That's the part that we end up talking to a lot of people about. They're like, oh, I love coach or I love training. You know, like I'm working with some people, but like how do I make money doing this?

Because it's not an easy thing to make money and actually survive. Like it's a very difficult business to actually get into um for many reasons but one of them being like the easiest route to going to do it well there's multiple routes but one of the routes is like you go to 24-hour fitness you show them your certification they hire you and now you have to make sales and then you're getting paid 30 bucks a client or you're running small groups at 50 bucks a head or something like that whatever it is like you're making sales and now you're making 35 grand a year and you can't live on that it's hard to raise a family on that and you're facing kind of the behavior issues plus the professional issues like there's there's so many steps along the way um i guess where where do you see the the program going in obviously here we have like the

personal development piece and creating value and then um kind of the professional development going forward of where where we can implement a lot of just business strategy and helping people on the professional side so being that we're in the beautiful state of arkansas yeah the hometown of walmart yeah uh it was something we talked about from the second i started getting involved which was also the same time walmart became involved uh we built and it's not specifically with walmart we're just talking about a concept of a wellness employee now it's more than a personal trainer that's one of the buckets that exists in this this new profession that we're working on building a program around it is i mean imagine showing up to your gym or a fitness facility of some sort and you get classes.

Imagine being in a large wellness center and you get a class from a certified personal trainer on a weekly schedule. You get, you know, nutrition, supplements, whatever it may be. You learn and then it's applied within the store. You're taught how to buy food. You're taught how to eat. You're taught how to shop. You're taught how to utilize equipment. And then you're also met with that same person building a continuity

and a whole image of wellness in your gym. And so you're building a community and a community of wellness, right? So it's finding ways. And, you know, you touched on early on, like how, how do I use my skills? I've been training and developing people for 10 years. Everyone in there, and I'm pointing backwards at 35 veterans in the other room, has trained, led and mentored and motivated people in their careers yeah it's a very rare skill but now we're filling in the gap of fitness health wellness and nutrition and so you can put these people into a community and you're not just selling snake oil you're not

here's your amrap or your wad it's written on the whiteboard. Go do it. Execute. That's not a personal trainer. You are impacting the entire life and a whole wellness image of entire communities. So that's the end state. How do we make fit ops in our certified veteran fitness operatives, which is what we call our graduates. It's a very unique certification. How do we make our CVFOs staples in communities and veterans the face of it? Yeah. And so as our program turns from a three-week long certification program and family building and purpose building platform program, we will continue to add on in the in the coming months and years uh additional

programs follow-on training that will fill in the other gaps whether it might be a nutrition which we'll hear from stan efforting and damon mccune this week about or supplementation which we have people coming in to teach everything and all about supplements which is an important word in our industry and understanding that word alone is a big deal. But building these guys into true fitness professionals is the end state. And once they can do that and see the impact they can have on a human being,

that purpose is back. That seems to be a reliable way to deal with a variety of mental health issues, is to wrap yourself up in helping other people. Like not making it about yourself and what you need to deal with, but if you're helping other people, that seems to be a very fulfilling thing that pulls people out of tough spots, whether they're depressed or whatever. Yeah.

Selfless service is one of the main values of all service branches. Learning how to give of oneself fulfills your own self, right? And there's nothing better. And for people who struggle with so many things, that is the easiest way to feel good about your life. I mean, Bobby Summers has struggled with a lot of stuff. He found peace in the kitchen, cooking and making people smile and making people full, literally full.

And that's where he's found his peace. And from a guy who was at rock bottom, there was nothing left for him in his head. Now as the director of nutrition for the FitOps Foundation, the head chef, and easily the most motivational speaker I've ever witnessed, he's filling people up every day. And it's beautiful. So, yeah, giving of oneself and selfless service is the easiest path to a purpose-driven, impactful life. Yeah.

When you guys go into Walmart or into, there aren't many companies that size, but specifically Walmart. How is it, I guess, perceived when you come in and you say, we'd like to really start hammering corporate wellness or bringing these people in? Is it like a, whoa, hold on, I don't know if this is the right time, or are they pretty open to the idea of bringing in vets? I know they have these missions inside their companies to bring vets in, but it's kind of a radical shift in the corporate landscape

to be able to... I've done the corporate wellness thing. I had to leave the corporate wellness thing because it became very... I was like, whoa, this is very far from strength and conditioning, which I'm very comfortable in. But it's so needed. It's terrifying what goes on in those places.

They need it so badly. Are you on time crunch, by the way? No. Looking at your watch? No. That's the worst thing about Apple watches. Shock therapy. That's how they addict you.

Someone wants me. I'm wanted. It makes me feel wanted. that's my wanted watch um it's just my mom but no uh yeah no i mean every like this is my job like i go out and find people who are interested in helping and genuinely helping veterans and that genuinely is a real world word like it's an issue because everyone i, you won't find someone that won't give a dollar figuratively to a veteran. Everybody wants to give back. But doing it genuinely and in an authentic way that will actually help veterans.

I mean, there's programs out there. I mean, I talk to a guy pretty frequently. He was given a house. He's 100% disabled. He was gifted an entire brand-new home. Yeah. And he looked at me. He was like, it was great.

I was suicidal. I was depressed. I was addicted to opioids. And then I was doing the same thing in a brand-new house. He was like, nothing changed. You can get free t-shirts. You can get free houses. You can do all types of things for these veterans.

But it's not changing anything. And I will never take away from a veteran organization or a nonprofit or a program that supports veterans because they're doing something. But it is very hard to find and truthfully to figure out how to actually impact the lives of veterans and we're a special group of people yeah and so i can go in anywhere and then we're like yeah i'd love to give you some free stuff cool thanks i mean i love free stuff right um and it is very important and for our program i love giving high quality good things to our veterans because it

does make them feel appreciated you know people concerned all the time hey i'm a civilian you know are they gonna react okay to me being there and talking yeah veterans want to feel appreciated we absolutely do but we also want to be genuinely understood so i can go out and walmart has been awesome i mean most companies are awesome but they're businesses yeah so i try when i started this campaign for my job honestly i had to really like tweak and translate some of my skills and figure out how to be good at what I'm doing. I have to figure it out every day. Like I said, I don't wake up and do the same thing every day anymore. I have to create my day.

I joke about it all the time. The most stressful part of my life, leaving the service, is picking out my outfit. I wore the same thing for 10 years every day. Yeah, there was no question. Picking out clothes. What do I wear? So many options. Yeah. Well well originally there was like three options i had to start shopping but yeah it's like you go in and they want to help they really do and but you have to find a way

that what i had to develop was a simple thing in my head. I never go and ask for money. I ask for advice. I never go in and expect something without being prepared to offer something. And then military, something I found in anyone that's been successful in the military or even in a business, in a job, knows that you won't be successful if you just go to your boss all the time with problems, problems, problems, problems. Be the guy that even in a business in a job knows that you you won't be successful if you just go to your boss all the time with problems problems problems problems be the guy that comes with a solution right come with a solution to a problem fix it and say hey i can improve your

organization right and i learned that in the army and there's the only way to get noticed in a huge you know sea of people trying to do great things there's a lot of whining right a lot of people trying to do great things, there's a lot of whining, right? A lot of whining and moaning, but not a lot of problem solvers. So I tried my best to always do that. And so now when I go in, you talk to someone like Walmart, you might have a 45-second pitch to make an impact, you know, that elevator pitch. And I had one of those with good old Matt Hesse when I originally wanted to get involved.

And I brought the heat. I brought passion. I brought my Northwest Arkansas goals, dreams, connections, hopes, and wishes for veterans in this area. And I guess at this point it worked. But with Walmart, you know, I wanted to, with Walmart-like companies, I want to come to the table with something. And a veteran employee that understands all facets of fitness and health and wellness is an invaluable asset.

So not only am I fulfilling their initiative to hire 250,000 veterans by 2020, I'm giving them those veterans, but I'm giving them highly trained, ready, prepared employees that can impact not only the ranks within their organization, their existing associates and employees, because there will be cross-training done inherently, if not deliberately, but I'm impacting and improving sales. I'm improving what they're doing. I'm improving all types of things.

And then just the general wellness. Yeah. It's addictive. It's contagious. And you're doing it with a veteran. You're not going to get turned down with that. Yeah. And so it's been fun.

Fundraising is a big piece of this. Nah. Nah. Nonprofits, stuff like that. I guess kind of where do your efforts go in that? Is that part of your role as program director? Absolutely. Yeah. What works? How do people help? What's the spectrum of fundraising that you guys are working on? So 2019 was obviously our biggest year for fundraising. Originally Performix was a big supporter, still is,

but primarily Matt Hesse and Performix started this program with the support of investors and outside investors. A lot of product was donated over the years, and then John Cena came along. That guy. Have you heard of him? i've never seen him i can tell you some good stories but i didn't even catch that right off the bat does that one that one yeah you got me i'm sorry you're good a lot of people didn't catch that a lot of people did

yeah but uh i've been asked by my employer to not make those jokes around john cena so we're moving. Do you want to know a very embarrassing story of mine? Absolutely. So good. He rolled in and his intro song was just on a Pandora playlist that we had. And because he was a member at the gym, every time it would come on, the members would be like, da, da, da, da.

Your time is up. My time is now. And he just happened to roll in, and he was putting his shoes on. But clearly, you don't make him feel super special when he walks in, even though you know he's in the room. And there was a class going on. There was something going on. He's getting ready to start training.

And it was like, da-da-da-da. And he just looked at me, and he was like, really? And I sprinted to the stereo, and I was like and he just looked at me and he was like really like sprinted to the stereo and i was like i am very sorry like he didn't give a shit at all but he was just like i don't need to hear that song right now i'm not a wrestler right now i'm training right now absolutely um it was like it was like he just like at no point in the four years of training with him did he ever look at me and he was like, no. But when that song came on, he was like, no. I am not here for wrestling right now.

This is my sanctuary. That's showbiz, baby. You see him run out real quick. Get his wristbands on. I did, and no lie, the same exact thing. We were here at camp in Arkansas. I'd met him in passing at a New York event when the partnership was established a month or two before this. And I'd been tasked with setting up this camp and the gym and you know i've been asked to help kind of figuratively lay out the red carpet you know john cena's coming

it's important for us to not impress him and i've learned over the you know the least you do the better yeah seriously we learned that one yeah um the more it's a gym and i i said this exact same thing last night i was like i i can't i don't feel comfortable in a gym without music and what song or what other song are you gonna play like i don't know what he likes but i know what he'll get i know what he'll get to i love this you were so unprepared you didn't know it wasn't cena that looked at me. It was Matt. And they pull up in a white Suburban.

And this gym, when we did it there, was outside. They pull up on the far side. And I've got everything, like, awkwardly staged, clearly, because that's me. And play. And Matt, two basketball courts are between us. Huge PA system. Pretty loud. I feel Matt look at me. And I was like, beep. two basketball courts from like are between us yeah huge pa system pretty loud i feel matt look at me and i was like i felt that look yeah it was like one john i don't even think it absorbed into john's ears but matt no go yeah i i know that look that was that look was me

sprinting across the gym to turn it off as fast as I possibly could. Like the feeling of awkward where it was like, no, no, no, this is John Cena, the businessman walking in, not the wrestler. Oh, he's all business. He's the best. Yeah, he's the most authentic man I've ever known. Greatest mentor of my life. Yeah. And, yeah, so he came in last year

and obviously changed the game of fundraising for us, challenged the world to donate a million dollars and he would match it. We reached that goal by Veterans Day last year. And so we raised $2 million in a matter of like I think two months. GNC had a big, big role in that. Lord and Taylor had a huge chunk of that. And then obviously individual donations had a big role in that. Lord & Taylor had a huge chunk of that. And then, obviously, individual donations had a huge chunk of that. And then bits and pieces here and there from some events. We, on a smaller scale, and we'll continue that capital fundraising campaign,

especially as we work towards, and we can hit on this later if you want, work towards building our own facilities, it will have to continue because a dollar here and a dollar there ain't going to build a large-scale national training center like we want. But one of the things we do ask for, and I'm delicate when I say that because we will never ask a veteran for anything in return for FitOps. It is a gift um but we do ask them to pay it forward if they can yep and the easiest way to do that is through small gym events and you guys know all about those right um done at least one ton of them um there it is yeah there it is. Yeah. There it is.

We dropped it in there. But we asked them to do, you know, hey, $20 buy-in. The easiest ones are CrossFit boxes. $20 buy-in. Run the workout. All proceeds go to FitOps. You know, it costs about $3,500 to $4,000 to send a veteran through Camp FitOps. It's not a small price tag.

Especially when you multiply that times 1,200 people waiting to get here. Yeah, and it will continue to grow. But we ask each veteran in preparation for camp if they can do something. A non-certified personal trainer can't really host a workout, so post we turn it into a pay-it-forward situation. If you feel it in your heart like giving back and giving this opportunity to another veteran is the right thing to do please do um you can always go to fitops.org and click the bright red donate button and give of yourself

yeah um but that's the easiest way and you know we we constantly find small little partnerships where proceeds portions of portions of proceeds go to this and that. So it's a cyclical, continuous effort, though. I don't like going back to the same people and asking more of them. I would never and we will never ask more of John Cena. I fully and wholeheartedly expect him to continue being involved at the FitOps Foundation for as long as he possibly can because, like we said, he's authentic and he believes in this.

But there are other people out there that will believe in this, and it's just getting a microphone to the right mouth and spreading the word. And it's contagious. Yeah. And there's not a single veteran, yet again pointing behind us, in that room who won't change the life of someone by telling their story after they leave the FitOps Foundation.

What are you guys, you talked a little bit about kind of building a big gym, having a big plot of land where we can bring everybody. What is the vision of, I i guess where you guys are going well the first thing will be to have the cena playlist on loop it's just like big speakers in all corners of the forest yeah your time is up my time is now yeah and there's no play or pause button it's just yeah you got to deal with it yep this is part of it yeah um it. It's in the contract. You can't see me.

My time is now. Matt has, he will kill you. But he won't. So as part of my role and my connections and history in Northwest Arkansas, and I mean, and I don't want to be, everyone mocks me cause I'm like Arkansas's

biggest champion but I'm passionate about the community and so much of our program is built around the concept of community right and I believe in the right people are necessary to be to build this program I don't want to just walk into a generic place hey here's a five million dollar check I mean that'd be great right But if there's no weight behind it, no authenticity behind it, it means nothing in the long run. It will obviously help, but it's important to us to build a community of supporters that understand, believe, and will be passionate about the same things we are because you'll never question any of those people along the way, right? In northwest Arkansas, and it's just a typical mini-mecca in the Midwest, it's the hometown of Walmart, hometown of Sam's Club, obviously,

the hometown of J.B. Hunt, and the hometown of Tyson, so the largest retailer, food processor, and logistical company, and trucking company in the world, and a town of 30,000 people. So you can imagine there's quite a bit of money here, and these corporations have done a really good job where baseline, you know, like if you do X amount of business in Walmart stores, you have to have a physical presence in northwest Arkansas.

So boom, you've got the fastest growing small town in the country, top five best places to live in the country, best school system. You've got everything fastest growing small town in the country, top five best places to live in the country, best school system. You've got everything because of a good community and a lot of disposable income. Yep. When gas is $1.99, milk's $1.99, and you're getting, like I said, a four-bedroom house with a half acre of land, brand new for $175,000. You can afford to do things. You throw in a Whole Foods, I'm here.

There is a Whole Foods. I'll move here. Isn't there a Whole Foods? I don't know. No, there is. I'm saying that. I believe you. Whole Foods is here, guys. Yeah, we're moving the headquarters.

I love it. No. Yeah. We've even got dial-up internet. Big sign when you enter. got dial-up internet. Big sign when you enter. Yeah. Free dial-up. Wi-Fi password's password.

But it's just an awesome community, and that's the first thing. If I had the opportunity to get you guys out and just walk around in downtown Bentonville, and everybody that comes here says the same thing. Even John was like like everyone's just happy they're just good people yeah and they're looking for good organizations to support and bring to the area and when you're a purpose-driven organization with authentic people powering it and a real impact that you can have and make in a demographic of people that genuinely need it you see all these words repeating themselves,

you're going to make a difference. This is the place to do it. I came to town. I told you I had the connection with the state government. The message was clear. This was the place to do it, and I promised Matt Hesse that I would make it happen. So building our national training center is ongoing and happening in northwest arkansas and the goal is by january

2021 we open the doors to the first at-home fit ops camp by that time it'll be camp 15 camp 16 uh we'll be at our own facility and once can run, we talked about this, if you look at our schedule right now, there's a four-month block in the middle of the year, which unfortunately is also the nice part of the year in summer, where we can't run camps because the only facilities nationwide, much less here in northwest Arkansas, that can sustain a program like us with enough beds, a gym, a full-time cafeteria is typically a summer camp for kids. So during the summer, which is unfortunately also when a lot of veterans who are going

to school are free, we can't run camps. So if we're able to, you know, we've got a platoon-sized element back here training. If we're able to run year-round camps with multiple platoons operating simultaneously, so imagine four platoons of 35, 36 people operating simultaneously in a self-sufficient home base national training center for the fit ops foundation that 1200 we start taking a we take start taking chunks out of it real quick yeah and you know then there's the realities logistically and operationally life just gets easier yeah i have to recreate the wheel and my team has to recreate the wheel every time we pop up camp i mean our our belongings and our equipment get traveled around and banged up.

It's just part of the realities. Life's more expensive when you're nomads. So having our own home base. Stability is good. Yeah. Yeah. And, I mean, providing stability to the veterans. Totally.

It's a game changer. So that's number one priority right now. Yeah. On the large scale, building our operations, and then at the program level, aftercare. Beautiful. Where can people find you, donate, do everything they need to do to help out? www.fitops.org.

fitops.org. There's a great three or four minute long video, and if that video doesn't catch you and hit you right in the feels, well, give me a call Doug Larson find me on Instagram dude I'm stoked you invited us down here I really appreciate it I

don't want to be too far ahead of myself because by the end of the weekend I hope this is a final thing but our ability to use the one ton challenge and working with a bunch of sponsors to create really cool packages, connect you guys, and turn the one-ton challenge into a big charity lifting event to raise a bunch of money for you guys. So that's where we're headed.

We have a meeting with Matt on Saturday to kind of finalize everything. And kind of exactly what we were talking about, $20 donation, the ability to get a massive kind of swag bag after the donation to be able to get as much savings and free stuff from cool sponsors. So we're bought in. People are great here. I love coming down. We're only two days in, and it's just a great vibe and good people. A little cold.

What's that? A little cold. Yeah, it's February. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We're the Shrug Collective at the Shrug Collective, OneTongueChallenge.com, the lifelong pursuit of strength. You can get over to OneTongueChallenge.com forward slash stronger, 97-page e-book, snatch, clean, jerk, squat, deadlift, and bench,

the lifetime goal of 2,000 pounds, 1,200 for you ladies. And you can join up at OneTongonChallenge.com forward slash join. Come get super jacked and join the One Ton Club. We'll see you guys next week. That's a wrap, friends. ShruggedStrengthGym.com ShruggedStrengthGym.com Affiliated owners, if you want to host the One Ton Challenge, stand out from the crowd

of all the craziness that goes on across the space. You want to do a competition that actually is different, shrugstrengthgym.com. Schedule a call with me. Let's get it. Organifi.com forward slash shrugged. Save 20% on the green, the red, and the gold.

Masszymes.com forward slash shrugged. M-A-S-S-Z-Y-M-E-S.com forward slash shrugged. That saves you 20% on the digestive enzymes. And get over to thenorcalCal classic.com to do the online qualifier friends. Peace out. We'll see you on Monday.