Barbell Shrugged - Episode 17 - Talking Strength

Episode Date: July 4, 2012

Talking about getting strong.

Hey guys, this is CTP with Barbell Shrug. For the video version of all these podcasts, go to our website, fitter.tv. That's F-I-T-R dot TV. Check out the video version of all of them. They're a lot cooler. They're super juicy and tasty. Dude, I've been up since 4 a.m. I'm going to be slow tonight.

I got an extra shot of espresso in here. How do you know? You may have paid for one. I trust the barista. I think she liked me. Steve Tyler? Yeah, here in Memphis, we have a Starbucks barista. You know Steven Tyler, too?

Everyone knows Steven Tyler. Get on the mic. Who did that? Steven Tyler. Oh, no way. Yeah. That's a very elaborate ruse. I know. Incredible.

Hilarious. This is Barbell Shrug. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson, Chris Moore, and CTP. You can find us on iTunes, and you should like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Especially me personally. You should definitely be following me personally on Twitter because I say all sorts of interesting stuff on there. Not all strength and conditioning related.

If you haven't figured out yet, this is a strength and conditioning podcast and we do discuss the nutrition topics as well. You got attacked by a rogue microphone. I'm going to create a Facebook. I am trying to give my announcement. I mean Twitter. Shut up.

Everyone make sure you go to fitter.tv and sign up for the newsletter. That way you can be notified of all the cool stuff that we do. I think everybody already has. New newsletters, seminars, talks. Chris, how many? Naked JPEGs.

Yeah, definitely. You'll get naked JPEGs and gifs in your email we'll get this just forgo all the attempts to add actual content the world let's just do porn now it's tough because you can't just sell the porn but you can do some sort of advertisement porn it's yeah you gotta you can do some sort of average but you'll get a lot of traffic to the site so advertising must be possible so chris how many how many uh people we've got download us on itunes now a lot a lot is it exciting did you ever think that you'd be part of something so big and wonderful

did you big and wonderful let me point out that my microphone stand is being held up by harry potter the goblet of fire and the four-hour work week by tim frayer so that four-hour body yeah the four-hour body yeah so we've got some work to do. Yeah, so did I ever think I'd be here? So I guess we got a great use for that book finally. Hey, that one. Not the Goblet of Fire. That shit is good. Yeah, Goblet of Fire is sweet.

The fifth one, it gets weak because Harry's all like, wah. Tim's book's pretty good. No one likes me, meh. Too whiny. Did you read the four-hour body, Chris? I skimmed it. I have a signed copy. Did you get any pearls, Adam?

You got a signed copy? Well, my stepmom has a signed copy. I thought you were going to say your stepmom signed it. Your stepmom tells you, Chris, here's the key. Ignore all your emails except once a week, and then answer them. That's what I want you to do. Did your mom tell you any kind of crazy shit like that?

She's never said that. Make money by telling most of your customers to fuck off. And then they'll want to buy your stuff. I don't know if that's Tim, but it's some sort of variation of something Tim has said. 80-20 your customers? Yeah. No, I mean, most people probably need every customer they can get,

unfortunately. Yeah. Because the economy is so tough. It is. It's a mother. I actually really liked Before Our Work Week. Before Our Body was hit or miss.

I feel like if you didn't have, if you don't have a really good filter, if you don't have a good base value, it's like, the key to getting happy is finding your passion. Then step two, build a profitable business off your passion. Then you don't have to work anymore.

That's literally 80% of that book. 20% of it. But it just doesn't give you any tips about how to maybe find your passion. Like, step one, investigate these areas of your life. Step two, do this. I think that'll probably help you. No, he just says, just find, what are you super passionate about? Just do that thing for money. So what are you super passionate about? Just do that thing for money.

So what are you super passionate about? Man, I don't know. Everyone knows what they're passionate about. Not necessarily. Well, Scott English, our great buddy in the gym, made a good point about passion. He's like, my problem is I found my passion. I was a professional basketball player for like 10 years,

and now I can't play anymore. I'm not going to find anything as passionate In my life as that Because then it turns to make a living And now it's just depressing Yeah, everybody's got to make a living You raise a good point What is my passion? I don't know

There's lots of mini passions I said passion, not mini passion You can't make a living with mini passions If you look at your blog, I think it's obvious what your passion is. What is my passion? Life. Wow. Should we start the show now?

You're like your regular Deepak Chopra. Chris, you gave a really good seminar this weekend. I guess I did. I got some compliments. I'm pretty happy with that. So you got compliments from people other than myself i don't well yeah i mean i always like to comment that's probably the best one of people go you know that was really good like they clearly expected one thing and got something different and that thing that was different they really enjoyed and liked or they just assumed that you would say something a certain way and

then you did it in a very novel way. So we had a good approach to that seminar. We talked about many interesting things and broke it up, gave people a chance to get coffee, and it flew by, and I think they really enjoyed it. You were a little concerned that it wasn't going to go as long as we had scheduled, but... Well, I've done quite a bit of lectures in my day and many countless business

and academic-style presentations and stuff. But the longest time I've ever talked in my life in one period is an hour. You know, that's usually the duration of an average lecture. And most business presentations or scientific presentations or academic presentations, whatever, are like five to 20 minutes max. So I was like, well, I don't know how much really I need to fill eight hours of time with my musings and blabberings on strength training. But it turns out I had plenty of illustration and story and allegory, I guess, to easily fill the eight hours. I never felt like it was dragging on, so that was a good thing.

Yeah. And I guess, you know, it's probably, it's really hard to avoid that feeling even when those things are good, so I'm quite proud of that this is what really really impressed me and a lot of times when we have like uh our own seminars or we have like guest seminars uh they're whoever's presenting is presenting stuff that i'm like extremely familiar with say someone's presenting a a topic and i'm just like and i don't feel the need to be there and i can step away with your seminar even though i went to school learned about programming their periodization all the stuff you talked about on saturday um i've been practicing it and writing programs for years and years and years i've been coaching

and trying to figure it out on my own and i was was sitting there as a, as a semi-experienced coach and you got my wheels turning. I didn't expect that. I didn't expect that. I thought that this was going to be something for just beginners. I really thought you were going to try and make it as simple as possible so that beginners could grasp it which interestingly enough you did do that but then you also kept us more experienced guys i know doug and i i think i think doug did too we just sat there and like i was entertained the entire time and you really got me thinking about how i planned a program for the next year for uh for the crossfit athletes and and for the weightlifters and everything it really kind of you made me think of things from a different perspective i thought was super

insightful that's cool i mean i think one thing i realized a while back but there's all these fancy words for or use and periodization schemes and coaching schemes i mean like sports scientists are guilty of it because they overcomplicate everything and try to look for answers when the athletes and everybody knows that through experience. Like, that's silly. You don't need to do that. You need to do this.

So it's overcomplicated for one reason. Then there's these collegiate coaches and all kinds of strength coaches and personal training coaches and private coaches who do all these programs and try to carefully balance out all these exercises and they select exercises just for the sake of selecting exercises and use words like undulating and conjugate and concurrent periodization when really they don't

know what those things mean i know and i know what things you change and when they don't really understand the true nature of why it's like when you talk about a period of time and training or a stimulus and you apply a word to it you take your attention off the just the simple nature of the thing you're describing like there's periods of time but there's no need to really define it or give words to that because you just understand it as time simple enough everybody gets that part everybody can get ideas like spinning plates to apply focus to something you don't have to call it any of those periodization words you can give people an idea for you know you don't pick numbers like sets and reps and rest periods just because mathematically you're looking for the right

combination or some kind of over complicated answer like that you just you got to learn how to feel when your body is working a certain way. Like why are five to five good? Well, it's not because five to five is special because it's a good mix of things that demands a lot of work and effort out of your body. That's why it's effective. Don't get caught up on numbers and stuff and names. Those things are meaningless. One thing that made me think about was, uh, there's a lot of programs out there that get zero feedback. So you were talking a lot about programming with lots of feedback like say a coach was you weren't you weren't using that terminology specifically but you were talking about listening to your body and stuff like that i mean all too often people

use and people throw their body into a program and totally ignore um really how they feel or any adaptations that are happening. And here's the thing. Kind of like you were talking about, they were getting slow. Like I went to a program after the power to meet in January where I was doing lots. My volume was pretty up. Twice a week I was doing five to ten of some kind of pressing.

And then the other day I was doing some sort of intensity-rich activity. Like maybe instead of all the reps, I was going for a sub-max set of five, something fairly heavy. And on books, on the books, five sets of 10 in the off-season is a good idea because you're getting in work, your volume is up,

you're going to get some specific positive adaptations to that that will support you when you go back to doing things heavier later in the year. It's a basic sort of tenet of periodization the problem is when i do that my power and max strength ability is way to shit way way to shit at a level i don't feel like i'm getting a good adaptation of that and my wrist gets really inflamed and my bicep tendonitis got so so inflamed i couldn't put a barb in my head all of a sudden, within four weeks, but I could put somebody else in the gym, who's

of a different preparation stage than me, somebody younger, somebody who just likes reps, and they'll take that, and maybe get stronger because of me, because it's something new, and it's something novel, and they're getting work done, so this idea that there's a certain good way, and a certain bad way, is this complete hokum,

that doesn't apply. It doesn't mean anything. For me, the answers are different, but I have to pay close, close attention to my body. Two things I said, pain and speed, were the indicators I think that are most beneficial. When you slow down, that's probably always a bad idea. If you're going to slow down bad, you might want to think about doing something to minimize that or turn it around. If you have a crippling pain that pops up when you hit a certain amount of work done, you've got to avoid that work.

Because if your wrist is crippled and you can't lift a bar, then what are you training for? I know we talk about it in the gym sometimes. As a weightlifter, I feel sometimes I have pain, but I just train right through it what's the difference to you when it comes to you know training through just being a little beat up what's the difference between being beat up and i'm starting to like i'm going to start having that that's interesting i do because the pain i have very specific kinds of

pain that pop up after all these years of training they said i'm only 31 but i've been training for since i was like nine i say training i mean i got experience lifting weight seriously in my body's backyard then we started going to a gym then i got into sports pretty quick so i've got mileage on my body when it comes to the barbell so the kinds of pain, like we just said, I get these specific pains that are clearly correlated to lack of rest or too much work. Like when I do any, if I press more than once a week heavy, I don't keep a lot of variation on my presses. I don't alternate quickly between a press and incline press and a bench press variation. I don't keep it always moving. Bicep tendonitis flares up super quick.

And it's specific and it's sucky and it stops my progress pre-deadness tracks. And if I unload for a week and then start back with speed work, it always goes away. And I'm strong again. So that's a split kind of pain. But then there's a kind of pain I get in my back when I say I go through a phase where I'm trying to do frequent pulls of any kind. It's this general lack of fresh feeling in the back. And then if I keep it up, I start getting little sort of achy pains. Like every time I put my shoes on, I'll bend over.

I'll have this extended soreness. And that kind of pain is specifically due to doing one thing too much again. But it's like a delayed onset. It starts building and building and building and building. There's always pains you'll have luckily because i trained smart and i choose my attempts sort of wisely and i've built up with training heavy frequently uh injury pain like acute pulls and strains and stuff almost never happen i think that happens because you're silly in the gym yeah you covered that in the seminar and talked about yeah like i can feel i can feel when something could go wrong i got a strain in my chest i got a strain like i have a problem with my right glute will sometimes not enjoy the heavy squats so i hit

like an 85 or 90 lift and it starts straining and pulling ever so slightly but it's telling me just don't take another one you're fine so i stopped therefore i never get serious injuries i actually really enjoyed the quote that you you mentioned from the surfer laird hamilton yeah yeah maybe you could run through kind of quote to the best of your ability yeah laird was i'll paraphrase later was commenting on uh you know no one ever tried to take on the kind of waves we we take on we do these things. The situation is, if you're riding waves like in Tahiti, is it James? Where's that monster? There's this wave. If you search monster Tahiti wave, Tahitian wave, you'll see this wave.

It's just really incredible. It's just hundreds of thousands, if not millions of tons of water right above you. It looks like 30 feet of water. Underneath there's razor-sharp coral. So he says the way we approach this is we always think of it like we have to survive to surf again tomorrow. You know, we know when to catch our waves, know when to get out. We try to have that approach to it. You don't leave it all out there today.

And that gave me the idea for a – I sort of thought of that one day when i was running sprints it's amazing how no one ever feels awesome from the first sprint like sometimes you weren't quick on those but usually like this sucks the first few are always really slow pretty ineffective if you're talking about sort of training adaptation and get out of that and it's easy to then say well i'll do five and it's not working for me it's not my day i'm over trained you know whatever kind of shit people will think and then just stop i'll come back tomorrow and i'll try it again but sometimes if you just well oftentimes if you just stick with it and do a few more and give your body a chance and just keep the focus like i found this one time

by the time i got to the 10th or 11th sprint i was just riding this intense wave of just like feeling really great being very happy and motivated i was doing this the speed of every set even though i was pushing the pace was increasing i was really pushing the sled really strongly and then by the time i got to 14 15 16 i was clearly off that high so i think probably now is the real time i should stop I think that's pretty interesting idea because I think it also applies to everything you do with your body like if you're doing a heavy snatch workout lord knows if you're going with heavy the easiest thing to do is to warm up warm up feel pretty good miss a couple lifts and go okay well I missed so I'll stop you know yeah and the crazy thing about the olympic lifts especially snatch, is that you need to put the bar with a very maximum weight

because at that time we're talking really skill-driven activity. It's not like a deadlift. Max weights are truly practice with a snatch, I think. So instead of stopping at two or three bad attempts, there are people who do 10, 20, 30 attempts that way until they get it. And oftentimes they eventually do get it in that session. People are really quick to sort of give up on it. But then you have to be wise enough to say, okay, I got my true awesome work in,

whether that was five sets, whether that was 10 sets, whether that could be 20 sets. And now I stop. Now I've done enough to call it a day. Yeah, fine. It goes with that feeling issue that if you don't pay attention to how you respond to whatever you're giving your body, you're just not going to understand

whether it was truly effective. Because there's nothing special about your training program, your five sets of five, your eight sets of three, your speed training, your max effort training. If you didn't get what you're after,

you've wasted your time. I find with something like the snatch, I mean, it does take some experience to realize if you're just getting smoked or if you just need to do a few more attempts to get it. Every rep is sucky form, so you probably won't get truly smoked. You'll probably just get frustrated and want to quit. Right.

For me personally, it's more of like I can tell if I'm just not getting enough hip extension, getting that speed, and that bar is out in front of me every time. I know it's probably time to call it a day on the snatch. If I'm losing it due to the balance or I'm losing it behind me or I'm getting it there and I'm just, my, my elbow's a little bent, then I know I just need to do more reps. Kind of like what you're talking about. And you just got to be tuned in to like, I think it takes a certain level of experience with certain movements to know

when it's time to call a day or when it's time to push it. You're going to get that experience by, we talked a lot about the idea of just practice. You have to practice a lot to get good at something that's so complicated. People practice a couple weeks by doing just a few sets heavy, and they go, they miss, and they go home. But really, I mean, the amount of work you're doing, the amount of practice you're actually getting, if you just compare it to any other athlete who's practicing

for whatever they're trying to get good at, you're doing just far too little work to get any real adaptation at it. If you really want to move the needle and get a really solid adaptation of something, you really have to work hard at it. I mean, really hard. Like, hard enough to where

you're really devoting a good chunk of time towards it. You can spend a whole hour of your workout working really hard to snatch some people just do like 5-15 minutes and go oh snatches are hard man i'm frustrated kick the bar walk away and go do something else go do their metcon you're not trying that's why your snatch sucks you're not trying we got a we got a good question and it right in line with what you're talking about posted on Facebook. This is why you should follow us on Facebook. Social networking. You mean like us on Facebook?

Like us on Facebook. You follow us on Twitter. They know. They know. They know. The Googles are smarter than that. Quick question. This is actually from somebody that was at the seminar.

Chris, you sucked. These are all lies. They needed something to be cleared up. And this is a guy that's fairly new to training, period. I think he's been training for less than six months, I would have to guess, or around six months. And here's, I'll just read it verbatim. I have a question from Chris's seminar Saturday. I'm a complete beginner to weightlifting.

And should I, uh, should I use the lifts and the wads for practice? Or if I want to get better, stronger, should I spend time outside of the wads practicing the lifts? Plus being 45 years old and zero flexibility. Is that a real,

real, I know the flexibility things. I have terrible injuries have racked up on my elbows and stuff. I have really bad flexibility. But the good news is you can always get better at it. Real quick on our programming. So there's a person that's in our gym. In our programming, we have a dedicated amount of time to strength and skill work.

And it's only about 20 minutes. So warm-up, 20 minutes, and then you do a Metcon. We do that just because that's what's good for the average person right maybe he's in fundamentals he doesn't do the no he's so he's basically asking is that 20 minutes long enough to get good at something and we're really good at we're really good about uh having at least a month-long progression with these movements so people are exposed to them repeatedly, at least once a week. What he's asking is

what do you think? Does he need to do some extra work outside the WOD? The problem with the WOD is you probably get pretty tired and you probably practice bad for them. I think it's fine to do the lifts for reps i mean lord knows they are hard and they get a huge metabolic demand out of you but you're probably going to have bad form especially if you do that when you're not

experienced to begin with so you have to have time outside of it for sure well i mean in 20 minutes before you do the metcon it's better than no minutes outside the metcon but depending on how how many times a week he's training like if he's 45 and training like three wads a week he's gonna do extra work in front of each wad you might want to be somewhat cautious about how much extra you do on top of that but you know if he was doing one tough wad and a couple easier wads and he wanted to put more focus on the weightlifting i'd say you could probably do extra sessions that are just coming in warming up with a barbell over and over again and it's drilling and drilling and drilling that form you could probably spend an hour just

with a bar drilling form i think that's probably monumentally beneficial i just listened to a discussion with max ada he's talking about you know what would you do if you were going to teach somebody how to do a lift if they're a crossfitter it's like well i'd say that you don't want to do it you don't want to like an hour of practice two three days a week that's really not going to do it you have to immerse yourself in it and spend a lot of time for maybe six month period just really making it a huge priority to learn those mechanics you have to put a whole lot of effort into it and luckily you know you can you can just practice with empty barbell and get a lot of benefit. Just drilling and drilling the overhead positions and the hip

extensions over and over. That has probably little true recovery demand. So, I mean, if he can come in extra and just do that over and over again, I think it'd be great. I think it translates. But you're talking about just, you're talking about practicing the skill of the movement and maybe not... You don't have to have weight necessarily. Okay. A good approach is coming in, doing some mobility,

doing a very light Metcon, and then spend some time practicing, practicing, practicing hip extension and being comfortable in those overhead positions and everything else. I think the more practice, the better, probably. Because Lord knows a true Olympic weight olympic weight is gonna spend a lot of time with very just a broomstick or a barbell just getting super super super comfortable with all those movements then you just can load the hell out of it later but everyone i know that's gotten really good at olympic weightlifting spends a lot of time with the pvc going over just like like most minute

details of of the movement if they're really trying to perfect the movements if you want to just throw a weight over your head in the metcons and you don't care about the technique then you know you can go out there as long as you have a somewhat neutral spine for majority of the movement you're not going to totally throw your back out and then then go for it but a lot of people want to get good at it you're gonna have to do it with just an empty bar at some point powders are the worst because they go oh i can do this stuff oh you're clean and snatched they want to start with like 135 what do you think about it's terrible form and then they go off just as stupid screw this that same question applied to powerlifting

not weightlifting because i do know that some people he may have used the word weightlifting and your our our brains automatically jump to the sport of weightlifting. Olympic weightlifting, yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, do you think the same advice would apply to somebody who wanted to get stronger in their squat, bench, and deadlift in regard to training outside of the regular WOD schedule? Yeah, you've got to be very careful. And how would you do that?

Because, like, if you add in extra, if you add in bench press practice, there are really good powerlifting programs that are sort of bled over from weightlifting. And basically, the approach is that you do the lifts a lot. Like maybe you pull speed lifts and a deadlift three or four times a week. You squat heavily, frequently. Like John Brose has a powerlifting program that's sort of Bulgarian-ish in nature where you take heavy lifts and those exercises as much as you can i think for me my i know what

happened with me if i tried that i'd probably start getting some signs of overuse in my shoulders and bicep tendons and wrists from all the bench pressing because bench pressing is pretty gnarly on experienced shoulders so i say that i mean anybody who's been in the game for a while kind of grows to hate the bench press. It gets to where it hurts pretty bad. I'm actually pretty lucky now. I'm in a stage where it feels okay to bench, but,

uh, I'd say you can't add in some extra benching and it'll help you get stronger. You just got to measure that out against how many wads you're doing with thrusters and push presses for time and bench push-ups for time. That stuff will eat into that. The deadlift, I'm not a fan of pulling heavy frequently on. If you think, I've got to get better at the deadlift,

so I'm going to pull heavy deadlifts multiple times a week, you probably don't have the ability to recover from that. I mean, I've only seen a handful of people who really can do that. But you can do some speed deadlifts to maybe improve your form and stuff improve your power but if you're doing lifts and you're doing the occasional deadlift and you're doing kettlebell swings and back raises and glute ham raises and glute ham sit-ups and all the stuff odds are you don't need extra work for those muscles really that's not overly complicated in techniques it's not like it's a huge demand you don't have to practice practice practice to

get that better. If you're hitting occasional heavy deadlift and occasional explosive pulling and you couple extra work for your lower back and your glutes and your abs and your hamstrings with that, you're going to get better at deadlifting. So powerlifting, I think it's less important to do it frequently. I mean, squats, I'm a fan of doing them. Pretty much a decent squat most every day. The older I get, the more I squat. I've squatted Friday, Sunday, Monday, and then today all heavy,

and I feel great. But each time I do it, I just do something different. I do front squat and back squat and pause. Box squat, squats with chains, squats with safety bar. The squat you can probably get away with doing more often. And that tends to, what are you doing man james just about walked off he had headphones on plugged into the laptop and he about pulled the laptop off the stool so if you've seen the south park list we're gonna say long story short uh no you don't have to practice so much in

powerlifting wait in the thing let me let me tell you what happened i'm just like so soon by the sound of chris's voice I forgot that I had the headphones on. Are you saying that my voice is not soothing? That's exactly what I heard. Yes. Shocker brow. Shocker brow. Sweeten our. Your voice is more abrasive than mine. My voice is not

abrasive at all. What are you talking about? Your voice, you sound like a Tomcat in heat. All the time. They called me a frog in high school. There's this general screech, like scraping. More like a tom caton heat all the time they called me a frog in high school there's this general screech like scraping more like a ribbit ribbit yeah what were we talking about well i i was just saying i don't think you need to practice so much for the power lifts which are the squat bench and deadlift than you do for the olympic lifts if you want to get better at those lifts practice them as much as possible and you're when you're in your living room you're getting ready for bed

you're watching tv get up grab your broom hold it overhead do some overhead squats do some little hip thrusts and hip extensions practice your arch position in the bottom practice getting your knees back do it all the time while watching barbell shrugged yeah while watching barbell shrugged if you hang out with us very much at all, you'll find that we're always practicing what we do. When I benched my all-time record, I benched like 675 when I was like 25 or something. I had a pretty strong bench because he was pressing a lot of weight frequently.

But I would just sit around in class practicing locking up my elbows and feeling the bar on my hand. That's exactly what I was about to say. I remember when I first met you. Yeah, I would'd do it all the time we'd be walking around doing stuff and you'd be like yeah i'll i'll i'd practice that simple it's simple you lower the bar to your chest or my case your gigantic belly at the time hugely fat but very strong and i could out jump me now i could probably you know crush the box jump wise now, even when I was like

370. I was strong. But even a simple exercise is lower and push it, lower and push it. I had mastered every well,

like consumed with every waking hour. I can't, I bench more, how to bench more. It's silly. It's maybe unnecessary,

but it really works. I don't think it's unnecessary. I mean, everyone I know that's great at what they do, like Doug walks

around like punching air. Like, he'll be having a conversation with you and he's doing this and then if you're if you're exactly what's going on The girls are going what is wrong with Doug? I had Doug for a summer school class and in between his lectures sit there If you're walking through the grocery store And you're gonna pick up a watermelon and put in your shopping cart Pick it up scoop your knees back thrust your your hips, and put it in your cart. Every chance you get to practice that, do it.

Like a stone. Yeah, every chance you get to practice, practice. Something I think that people really don't connect with until they've been doing CrossFit or just training in general for a while is that we're not teaching you how to lift weights. We're teaching you how to move and using barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells

just happen to be these really convenient items in which to teach you to move with. They're really easy to scale. It's going to really profoundly change the way you do business in life. It's very awesome to know how to lift something efficiently, explosively. That's a great way to put it. That quote made me think about the bedroom. The bedroom?

What's the context, man? Well, you know, after you learn all this stuff and get really good at it, you know, it'll change every aspect of your life. And I was like. The bedroom? What's the context, man? Well, you know, after you learn all this stuff and get really good at it, you know, it'll change every aspect of your life. And I was like... In the bed. Fortune cookie translation. That's right. You will learn how to use hips in bed.

Oh, man. No, but being strong is like anything else. You have to practice. You have to practice this over and over again. This has come easy. If you could learn it in 30 minutes, three times a week, then more people could do it. You have to devote yourself

to it. You have to practice it. You have to get over the fears that hold your confidence back. If you want to get good at lifting a weight that's really heavy, there's no other way you can do that other than trying. Slowly building and trying in smart attempts, but you have to take your shot.

You can't squat 500 by never trying to squat 500. slowly building and trying in smart attempts, but you have to take your shot. You can't squat 500 by never trying to squat 500. Well, I do 400 for 10. Well, I'm sorry, but you need to put weight on the bar and actually feel what that feels like. I'll get 150 push-ups. I could bench 300, right? No, absolutely not. I do remember, I think it was the 08 games and they were they had

like a really heavy deadlift it's not heavy now but at the time everyone was like i can't believe they programmed 315 deadlift for reps in there now athletes like oh it's a joke yeah they're all the same but basic talent levels and all that but just when they when somebody rich comes around says what's easy i can do fucking 40 of those they go oh well maybe i can do more than two i say all expectations all everything is expectations of what you think you're capable of now can you wheel yourself into being a 900 pound raw squatter at 200 pounds that's probably reserved for the rare combination of confidence and genetic ability and drugs and optimal leverage and everything. That being said, if you squat 300 now, why couldn't you not squat 400?

Well, I could never do that because I'm 40 and I just can't. I got a job. Well, no, you can actually. It's not that big a deal. Yeah. Lots of people do it and you can too. That's the first step is buying in the fact that you're able. Well, what I found was interesting is at the 08 games they were interviewing some of these guys afterwards and they're like oh what's the most these guys that rolled right through 315 for like

i think it's 21 reps i can't believe i remember this um they rolled through these really fast like oh what's your best deadlift and like a lot of the guys were like oh 365 they they're dead they'd never deadlifted over 400 pounds but they were able to take 315 and do 21 reps like unbroken it's like uh i'm pretty sure you deadlift over 400 but it kind of goes what you're saying is like these guys probably don't show you why they don't need to actually pulling all those heavy deadlifts like they're doing other shit that helped them deadlift just fine yeah they just were being pussies and never actually knew and tested. They probably just never

tested a really heavy weight before. They were being pussies. Yeah. No, yeah. I mean, I don't want to offend, but yeah,

basically. I never heard a bunch of games athletes been called a bunch of pussies. When it comes to that, I'd say, yeah, I mean, it's either,

oh, 315's heavy. That's not heavy for you i mean you you can pull do 100 pull-ups and uh all this shit i mean 315 is not well that was the first time that you just have have have a chance to believe in yourself they do now to their credit no longer pussies now boy no well that was the first time 315 had ever been introduced in the competition and uh on that that's that's You bring up another point. I might interject, but people count plates and go,

oh, three bills, bro. That's heavy, bro. Frat boys don't even think what it actually weighs. It's like in... One bill, two bills, three, four bills, bro. It's all about those... And you think, no one could ever do more than four plates.

And some pilot walks in and benches like 495 for 10 you're like like their whole world is completely just train wrecked oh god and that 400 doesn't seem that heavy maybe now they have a better shot at doing themselves yeah four plates four bills yo shock a bro shock yeah but my advice is for people to get over it. Believe in yourself and get over the mystique. It's nothing fancy. The WADs just got announced last week for regionals. And, again, it's heavier this year.

It's like last year there was a lot of speculation. I think we even talked about it with Michelle Kenny on episode 8. And we were talking about how last year was heavy, so what skill are they going to be biased towards this year? I think a lot of people expected maybe it was heavy last year, so it would be very gymnastics or it might be more endurance-based. But what I'm looking at regionals right now, it's just heavy. It's like they took a bunch of CrossFit football wands.

That's cool. And they multiplied it by four. So none of them are short. They're just heavy. They're all long and heavy. There's some people complaining they're not exactly testing the broad spectrum. People complaining about CrossFit? Why can't we do more softball throws for distance broad time is not being tested or broad time is the only thing being tested or no long time but not broad time

model domains power keywords crossfit no yeah we got a long time. I guess it's like long duration of time. Like lots of seconds. I've been up since 4 a.m., people. Lots of seconds. What would be broad? You're totally blowing my mind with a broad time. No, not like seconds, but like the width of a second.

The other dimension. Like how wide is the second? Fucking wrap your head around that. Fitness. That's like when I see these commercials or these videos on YouTube like little clips about let me explain

to you what the fourth dimension is. I go whoa what is going on here? That was sort of that moment there. That snuck up on me on a TED talk

the other day. I was watching a really cool TED talk and then he starts four dimensioning me and I'm like aww. Shocker brah. Part of me goes that doesn't't make any sense i don't want

to believe you it seems like you're just going let me convince all these assholes that there's actually a fourth dimension maybe even like 20 dimensions and there's really strings that form the fundamental basis of all existence they don't know they're just gonna stop listening we'll seem really smart i wonder if it's a secret conspiracy amongst the the TED talk groups the TED talk groups yeah

that's a South Park episode everybody I bet everybody in Austin's lecture was like ah shit my brain so what's the rationale for the fourth dimension

did you listen that far into it I can't even explain it it seems somewhat... Apparently you can find an iPad app or an iPhone app that will walk you through touch-wise and how to grasp the fourth dimension. Really?

And maybe you should try that on weed. Maybe it's even more fun. But yeah, it's an abstract concept to get your head around. That's just the time right like uh differentials of time well I think I think something

I think something the fourth dimension has something to do with being able to be outside of time right yeah I don't

that's all I know I hear you can bench more in the fourth dimension the gravity particle doesn't go there so you can bench all you want yeah and have the fourth dimension the gravity park doesn't go there so you can bench all you want yeah and have you heard of the gravity particle i don't think that's a real thing do we know what the name of that app is because i'm super you probably have to just google fight that one do it later let's do it later let's entertain gotta be focused let's entertain the

masses so you're going to california, I'm going to California this weekend. No big deal. I thought I'd let the fans know you're going to be making an appearance. I think we'll talk about this later. Are you going to put flowers, sign an autograph? I am making an appearance. You got a road gig, bro. I do.

I do got a road gig. Only because, we won't tell you why I got it. We'll just pretend like it's awesome. Yeah. Speaking at Cal State Fullerton, it's like career day for college students. So, for the exercise science department, I think there's only two speakers coming, me and another guy. And we're going to be talking, telling students what they could possibly do when they graduate. Supposedly, 10% of the students want to own their own gym.

Yeah. And the other 90% want to go to PT school. And 5% of them. All of us sitting here have got a degree in exercise science, and we all know that that's very true. And then most of those, a good portion of those PT students, or want to be PT students, aren't going to be going to pt school no most of them won't get in because they they think they're qualified to do it and this is

well even the top people in my class didn't get in it's it's tough yeah it's tough like the world is tough the world owes you nothing you have to actually work hard you just don't go to class and get a degree and then get into the next school you actually have to differentiate differentiate yourself kids i'm sorry i have to bust your bubble. But yeah, going to school, getting decent grades, and then part-time personal training at a local gym is not going to get you into PT school. Do something more complicated than that.

Yeah, you probably want to get an internship at a PT clinic while you're in college. You might have to work while you're going to class, too. It might seem like a lot but you get nothing out of that pay-wise is this going to be part of your talk looking back on college and it was so actually i never really thought college was that hard but like a lot of people thought college was super hard taking 12 hours it's so hard i'm busting my brain but you know it's kind of hard not me your dad's working 80 hours a week to pay for you to be here

while you waste your time. Well, once you graduate and start working, once you graduate and start working, you'll go, oh, college was so easy. It was ridiculous.

Well, not only easy, but just truly great. You can sit around all day and philosophize about what you're hearing and romantically take notes and drink coffee in the student lounge.

All that shit just goes away as soon as you graduate. You realize that the world is about to smack you in the face. Doug and I were roommates in college. He was getting his master's. I was getting my undergrad. All we did was we had a super sweet life, actually, in college. Doug had a GA position, which allowed him to do whatever he wanted, essentially.

Super lax. I was getting GI Bill. So we both had income, and we really didn't have to work for it. The golden years. The golden years, for sure. So I just went to school. He just went to school. And then we spent the rest of our time training.

It was weightlifting and MMA for, like, two years. Like, that's all we did yeah college was way harder than graduate school graduate school was a walkthrough it was great i showed up out of a really good program for my undergrad took all my graduate school school classes felt like i'd already taken them because i pretty much did when i was an undergrad got more or less straight a's had an internship right or a ga where i could make my i could make my own my own hours and yeah i could i could do i could basically do my thesis while i was at my ga and then we trained for five hours every evening and i go home sweet gig it was a

sweet gig yeah i think it was my schedule was like i always had morning classes so i'll wake up around seven i'd be in class from eight no later than 2 o'clock Usually done with school by noon Nap 2pm Weight lift 4pm Go home Eat

Maybe snag a little nap or something Then go to MMA practice Come home Sleep Every day That does sound sweet That's really sweet For the script

My role was pizza man after school. And trying to come up with the cash to pay you assholes to train. That lasted three months, and then I couldn't afford it anymore. Wow, man. So it wasn't so glorious for me. Now look where you're at. We're all just hanging out. Yeah.

Oh, shit. Sorry, man. Shaka bra. That's the thing, too, though, is you put in a lot of hard work. When it came time for your internship, you really put forth a lot of effort to come and intern with us, and you were so good at what you did. No, you're living the dream. We didn't even want to.

It was like we weren't even at the point to hire you, but you did such an awesome job. We were like, oh, we have to hire this guy, because if we don't, I don't know what I'm going to do. KFC might. KFC. I give this dude credit. Cp is an impressive young man i was the 2011 papa john's pizza man of the year how many how many pizza men are out there let's just give the audience a qualifying hold on are we saying pizza men because there's a lot of pizza boys pizza delivery individuals ah who, who knows, man.

Billions of them? More. Trillions? I mean, the turnover in that business. We'll count only our three dimensions that are common to us

in that realm. In this vector. Does this include Pizza Hut? Let's just say there's 5,000. Is that fair? What are we talking about? He's number one out of all of them.

Yeah. Oh. We're trying to fucking world champion pizza. Size me up here. You need to just, we just need to take a picture of that thing you got. Did you get like a trophy or something? Yeah, trophy. Was it a trophy?

Mm-hmm. Oh, shit. Do you have it here? No. I also have a five-year pin. Yeah, didn't you get that and then put it in your two weeks like? He handed it to me and I said, yeah, and I'm putting in my two weeks today. Oh, he got a little sad face on you.

I think he really was bummed that I wasn't wearing it around, though. He's like, no. No, bro. I threw it in the trash because I'm a rebel. Now you can always say, if somebody says, CTP, what have you done with your life? You can go, shit. You stay around and go, well, won that fucking trophy, best delivery guy.

They'll never take that away from you. Smash that. I want to talk a little more about the strength seminar. Doug, I thought you had some questions for Chris. He's had time to think. That's part of the good questions. We talked a lot about a bunch of random stuff,

but for those people that weren't at the strength seminar, some of that might not have had quite as much context as it had for us. So real quick, maybe run down kind of how you outlaid your seminar and the stuff that you covered. Yeah, we started with a general introduction. You know, people can think about strength in lots of ways. You can think scientifically about it. You can call it the ability

for your muscles to produce force. You can think of it in terms of performance. You can lift more weight than anybody else. That makes you strong. Or if you meet a standard, you can do X times something,

you're strong. You can use strength as something you want to achieve to differentiate yourself. But really, I laid it out as being something we're going to work on in terms of refining ourselves and working towards honest, good goals and viewing strength as something we will become in time when we put our work in.

So I wanted to set a good attitude setting forward. It sort of quickly broke out into talks about how to actually approach your training. And I presented a good, simple tool that is sort of deceivingly simple. It seems straightforward, but actually there's a lot of hard-fought observations and mistakes that are wrapped up in that that I think make

it a very powerful simple tool. Setting honest goals, maintaining focus, how to learn how much work is enough and how much isn't enough, how to escalate week to week, and then how to observe what you've done in order to make the next round of your training more effective. So I think that went over pretty good.

Then we got into a little bit of how to organize different kinds of training so you get the most out of each. You don't push through everything really hard and hope to get better at everything all the time it's just you can do that initially but you can't do that forever and usually what happens is you get plateaued in something and then you get frustrated so we talked about how to get around that so with that i remember from the from the seminar you're saying if you're trying to build strength and improve your endurance and gain muscle mass and lose body fat and do all these things at the same time, you're not going to make progress at any single one of them. It's not an honest, fair, reasonable expectation of your body to take on all that at once and get better at it.

People think maybe I can and hold out hope and they try it and it just won't work. You have to sacrifice something to get okay at everything. You're just not going to excel like that. That's going to mean, I'm not talking about getting really, really awesomely good at something. I mean, you will sacrifice your personal goals that you've established if you try to push for everything all the time. I like your spin and plates thing. Yeah, I think that's the easiest way I've ever come to think of it. If you're going to put on a show and spin five plays for the audience you can't let any fall

and crash so what's your strategy we have to spend spend them one at a time really hard and make sure you come back to them in a in a repeated manner so you can keep all the momentum going if you try to spend them all equally fast all the time it's just impossible for you at the same time you don't want to spend one thing so hard, so frequently that the other ones fall and crash. So the CrossFitter who pushes the Metcon all the time, super hard, chasing the PRs,

is doing too much of that one thing and then cannot devote enough energy to truly move the needle on the things that they also need to improve in terms of gymnastics skills or strength skills. And the power, there's the same way because the powder who thinks us be big fat piece of shit,

who's out of shape and doesn't have to do conditioning, but I'll be really strong and huge. I say that mostly because I have experience in X eight. That was like that for a long period of my life. You're, you're so devoted to the other side of the equation that you don't see how being in shape could benefit you. And you don't see how taking time to get better your fitness and letting your strength come down a little bit

ultimately in the long run can make you much stronger and it's really hard because people think i can't i can't get any bigger because that means i'm getting fat i'm getting unfit they don't realize that you can get a little bigger get stronger and then end up at the end of the year much leaner and fitter because you developed a strength that will carry through to the other goals. And they think, well, if I get out of shape at all, I'm going to totally destroy my fitness. Well, no, you can let your WOD time come down a little bit, do enough of it to where it doesn't go down too much, and use that extra energy and put that towards your weight to get better at that.

Because then that will allow you to crush Fran later on when your thruster is so much better. Learning how to accept trade-offs to get the benefits was a key message of that. Every time we do, for our competition cycle folks, every time we do a strength cycle

at the end, I just had him do Fran yesterday, in fact. I feel like I'm out of shape. It's because they haven't felt the crushing sensation of a Metcon, even though it doesn't mean anything. I think everyone that did Fran yesterday PR'd it by a good bit.

We saw 20% PRs and stuff like that. Speaking of Fran... I did not PR on Fran today. Chris did Fran today. Another thing I'm talking about is I'm experimenting. I'm putting my money where my mouth is and taking myself way out of the comfort zone. I'm actually doing three CrossFit WODs a week in addition to some heavy lifting.

You know what better way to learn about it than actually get in it knee deep. So we've done a bunch of WODs. Today, Scott, my fellow member in the Unfit for CrossFit nation, decided we would do Fran. I go, whoa, shit. My only experience with Fran is that I did it for the CrossFit cert. And I got through the 21 thrusters unbroken but was feeling it and then did jumping pull-ups. So I can reach up and grab the bar with my toes on the ground

and then i flicked my heels and pull myself up you know just a good far range of motion jumping pull-up i got through like i think i had the first round of that and sometime and just was crushed couldn't do anything so i really fought hard to get through the second round of thrusters and i had to get on a little plyometric box and to do my jumping pull-ups like some 80 year old little woman going like this my arms weren't moving and weren't functioning so i had that memory this time around today i was like you know what i know the thrust is okay and it was i did 21 thrusters unbroken and i did 15 thrusters unbroken then nine thrusters unbroken so i crushed it but in between at the jumping pull-ups, when you're 300 pounds, it's only so quickly you're going to get that done.

So I'd do like three or four, stopping, grabbing a bar, jumping, getting my chin over, then going down, then letting go, because I can't reverse myself. But long story short, I did it in 12.30, which is not good at all. But when you're 300 pounds, you're doing all those pull-ups, and you actually crush the thrusters, I was pretty pleased with that. Yeah, that's cool that you did all the thrusters, I'm reckon. Yeah, it's actually pretty easy. I'm pretty comfortable.

I have a huge kick in those areas from being good at the press and being okay at squatter, and being confident and calm. The biggest thing is people do that, and they get all uptight, like MMA or anything. I've got to do Fran. I'm going to do this Frusters and I'm going to crush it.

No, man, just pick it up and do the least amount of effort to come down, bounce out of the bottom, get a good rhythm, and just kick it overhead with relaxed arms and bring it down. Just stay cool and relaxed and you'll get through that much easier. Yeah, I still get butterflies. If I'm going to do Fran, I still get butterflies. I don't know if it's because it's so hyped up or if it's because every time I do it,

I'm in excruciating pain afterwards. But I still get the butterflies. I think I'm experienced enough to relax while I actually do the movement. But I think a lot of people do get the butterflies and that transfers over to gripping the bar too tight and not breathing when they're moving so boy it's like the worst example you guys know is firsthand is like when you're doing jujitsu and you're super tight and you're really muscling the guy you almost instantly beat to shit the key is really being so loose

it's ridiculous so i guess that's a even when you're doing kettlebell swings and even like dumbbell presses and stuff, you have to just sort of keep your focus on being calm and relaxed and just being athletic with the weight and moving it. And it's like muscling

and pushing everything around. We were doing that with Marcia the other day. We sort of gave her some cues when she was doing those incline presses. She was like lowering it and stopping

and pushing up like really squeezing, working hard, doing good stuff. Bodybuilder style. Boys taught her, relax, get it down quicker,

kick it off your chest, squeeze it, then get it back down and she crushed the remaining sets like with half the effort. Yeah. So you just,

our focus is moving around weights, moving with weights efficiently and athletically. More work, less time. Which is something I didn't understand

for a long time, but really should be everybody's focus. Don't get intense and throw this weight around. You have to sort of dance with the weight sometimes. Get a lot out of it.

Be as efficient as possible. That's how you get better at this stuff. Don't just go, I'm going to crush Fran and just go, and then sloppy, muscly pull-ups.

You're just not going to get better doing that. You're just going to beat yourself up. In the long term, you're not going to be very successful with that kind of

meathead attitude. Most people, either you get wise to that and you change yourself or your body will not allow you to do that anymore with time. So you were saying

you were doing CrossFit to switch it up to get out of your comfort zone and that was kind of one of your points. Yeah, I had no goal. Yeah. Specifically. I talk a lot about goals, but I'm doing it because I understand that the basic –

You don't have CrossFit goals. No, the basic exercise of doing something that's really hard for me is going to be better for me. And I understand because I've been around the block once or twice, I know that my squat will probably go down a bit. My press will go down a little bit. I know that. I'm okay with it.

Is it safe to say that your goal is enlightenment? Yeah. It's very zen of you, man. It's the journey, man. I'm looking out of my third eye right now, bro. No, but I mean, yeah, if your goal is always just to be good at stuff and be the best and make progress, that's an awesome goal. But isn't that boring in time?

Like if you're always just trying to be the best at something and you master something, after you master it, shouldn't you just try something else and like see if your ability to solve problems and make observations and have creative ideas can also translate to something new and different and important like can't you see if you can also do activity never tried and be successful at that with what you've learned from the other thing like that's an interesting comparison so that's what i'm trying to do now i could just be an okay power up there and be happy with that but it'd be really cool to be have some level of success and support maybe have to come back to after doing cross but maybe at two weight classes down or something. That's interesting to me. Two weight classes down, higher work capacity. Yeah, I mean, it's

worth it just for taking the ride. The journey is all the pleasure in it. I'm not too hung up on goals and how successful it will be. I just want to go through it. I can't stop thinking about your third eye. Where is it? It's right here. If you get a third eye, goals and how successful it will be. I just want to go through it. I can't stop thinking about your third eye.

Where is it? It's right here, right? If you get a third eye comment, you can hang out with us. It exposes out of your brain once you take some interesting things. That's not what I meant. Never mind. You know what her third eye actually is, dude?

Peneal gland. Yeah, that's technically right. That's what people think. For the audience, your third eye is apparently what you see out of once you take mind-altering hallucinogens. Or when you sleep. That's when the god chemicals get in your brain and make you

all crazy. Make you see the interesting stuff. But, yeah. What's up, Doug? Doug's like Rob Topic. We work through those topics in some way I forget now what point I made before that was there anything else with a string seminar I wanted to do talk about that I got a couple quit I think we have anyone else asking questions did you get any more questions off the webpage from the let me check from the audience

I gotta check the twitters too any feedback I did have a lot of people tell me they really enjoyed it I got nothing but great feedback

off it that was my primary goal if they had fun they weren't bored then they'd feel like they made a good investment

by coming what do you think the biggest takeaway was for people did you get to talk to anybody after it was over I did

oh yeah what do you think what was your take based on the feedback you have the biggest takeaway was for people? Did you get to talk to anybody after it was over? I did. Oh yeah? Mm-hmm. What do you think? What was your take? Based on the feedback you have and what you received from the other people. Well, the feedback that I got is that it was super personable.

And for some reason, having it be your story that ended up telling all the things that they needed to do, the specifics, but wrapped up in like a, for some reason that translated super well. And like, had it been packaged another way,

that maybe it would have just went over their heads or something like that. Yeah, I mean, I think any time you can make somebody identify with what you've gone through, they're going to be really receptive and understanding what you're trying to give to them. That was my goal. I know that a personal story I can tell that illustrates a point is a million times more useful than some slide that's got periodization terms on it, which every other strength seminar is.

Because people don't understand actually what they're talking about. I think one of the things I really liked about it was you had a slide that had a macro cycle, yeah and for a fencer yes what it was complicated and it was extremely complicated you look at it it's very overwhelming you're like where would I even start and then you you went from that you we went through other slides and maybe another half-hour explanation and then we kind of came full circle and you explained periodization in a way that was that was understandable to just about anybody and it

made a lot of sense it was one of those things where if somebody had presented periodization to me like like you did like five six seven, seven, eight years ago, I would probably be in a much better spot now. Because when it was explained to me, it was all these words confusing. I didn't get it six years ago, so I couldn't have been there to help you. Yeah, so...

I was in the corner going, undulating periodization. But so here's what I'm doing for my mesocycle and my microcycles. Yeah, it's not... Block, conjugate. It's not that we don't... Dynamic, max effort. I was doing for my mesocycle and my micro cycles. Yeah. It's not conjugate. It's not that we dynamic max effort. I was doing all this stuff. It was just,

and we're all familiar with, I mean, all, all of us in this room have had, have been, you know, the academic version of programming and periodization. We've all,

and people at home feel that way too. Like you, you see all this stuff about diets and training. I think that is a lot like training in that there's all these ideas and approaches and terms, but really your body doesn't think of approaches and terms and ratios and all that stuff. Your body just sort of assimilates and there's a result. It just happens organically.

If you have that organic fundamental understanding of why you're doing something, you don't need all the complicated stuff surrounding it. Right. I think having all the stories really helped. I just didn't want to give a seminar talk that anybody could hear any day of the week anywhere else in any other forum. Yeah, it felt like barbell shrug, but seminar dish. Yeah, I knew my experience would be something they...

A lot of people can explain complicated things better than me, but no one has my take on it, no one has my experience and my injury history and all that stuff that I know would set that seminar apart. So I think that's what happened. Yeah, it was not like a boring seminar like what I would get at NSCA. You go to NSCA in Vegas and you sit there and you're like, first off, I'm hungover because I'm in Vegas. And then I'm sitting here trying to listen to these guys.

Some guy who looks like he's clearly never lifted a weight. Yeah, that's the thing, too. So what do you do for training? Well, I like to cycle and jog. Why am I listening to you about anything? Yeah. Like, you fucking ride a bike. I really...

Nothing wrong with riding bikes, but these guys don't know anything about strength training. I really love my life in sports science. It was super fun, and all the people were really great. But, you know, if you sit around trying to do a study to figure out how to get strong, ultimately you need to get out and train with barbells and train other people with barbells

to understand what makes people strong. It's a whole lot of art and romance to it, not just ratios and percentages and timing. It's less. But bottom line is, when you look at the training of really, really strong, impressive people, maybe some really fit people in CrossFit, they don't have this complicated plan.

They don't do these things. They may have a general phase or two they go through, but they have this really fundamental natural understanding of what they need to do to get better and their training is so simple it seems like it couldn't be so simple like a really good weightlifter and the height of like the bulgarian weightlifting team what were they doing they're doing things that are so simple and rudimentary but that's what allowed them to get so good he did You could have also done other things may have been successful too, but you clearly didn't have to have those things.

So it shows me that all this complications is unessential. And if people are doing really complicated programs and getting results, and would it be interesting if you stripped away most of those things and just to see if you kept getting better or didn't get worse or whatever, it should show you that all this stuff is just taking your focus off of the ball. Kind of like when you're in your life, you're so busy trying to figure out life and set out goals and accomplish things in business or whatever that all the interesting little fine details of life escape you and pass you by.

That's the same way with training. It's the simple elegance of lifting a barbell and feeling how it feels in your hands and knowing when's enough and when you haven't done enough. Just paying attention to all the interesting bits of training. Get washed out by all the maniacs who want to overcomplicate it and state claims of certainty and expertise

are just complete hokum. Silliness. As you were talking, I just had this visual of someone squatting with chains. Is it a spiritual experience? What's going on? I just had a visual of someone squatting with chains, and they're squatting 95 pounds,

and then they have chains on top of that, and their knees are diving in. They're saying it's 200, and so I'll squat 200. Their technique for just a the regular squats not there, but they've got chains on the bar. And they're obviously not anywhere near their potential because they're squatting 95 pounds. I approach all that stuff the same way for the powders in the audience. They get caught up on, like people describe Westside Bravo training,

they get down to math, man. They know just what to do. If you sit on a box with a blue band and a green band on each side and you squat 450 and you do that for 5-6-2 and each set is done at a certain speed, meters per second, then those things add up to you're going to squat 600 pounds in a meet. Therefore, if next time I squat a blue and a green and a purple band, which gives me 30 pounds at the top,

then I execute those 5-6-2 with certain RPMsms and all this stuff then at the meet i could probably squat 650 because that purple band gives me extra 50 pounds bands at your top all this shit is stupid i used to really really believe it and there's nothing that's so wrong with it but it's just that you can explain why a band and chain can help an advanced athlete very simple you can say it makes the bar feel different and harder in many ways and adds extra load to the top. So building confidence with those tools can help you kick over a plateau. All it does is make the bar feel a little harder.

So you train a little harder, and training hard is what makes you better, not silly little gadgets. Yeah, I've got a friend. He just discovered. He's been doing CrossFit for a while, and he's been doing CrossFit football-type stuff with his son and things like that, and he's been trying to get his son to play football. And he just discovered a Westside barbell,

which is, I don't know how that happened. Like, he's hanging out with Doug and I for a couple years, and then he just now discovers. I'm'm like maybe we just assumed that he knew and it just somehow never came up in conversation so i had lunch with him one day and he was talking about uh like a lot of the the methods used at west side and uh and he was one asking about like if it'd be good to use on his son who's like 12 or 13 and i'm no, no, no. And I'm thinking, let's just squat right. We're still mastering goblet squats. You know who said it perfectly?

Forget about Westside. We're not mastering anything. Not yet. Easy. I kind of have to use his name. Who's the guy from CrossFit Ball? John Wellborn. Yeah, John.

John had a discussion. I think he was talking on Rob Wolf's podcast one time. Yes. I think it's episode 86. Holy shit. What a fan. But he described his experience. He was doing Westside.

You've got to listen to it. He was doing Westside. John was. He was prepping for maybe doing a competition, a powerlifting competition. And he had a buddy who was a pretty good athlete who was doing it. And then they had a friend who was maybe less qualified they're all doing a similar approach they are doing a day devoted to dynamics efforts which is eight sets of three or eight sets of two in a bench and squat and also the deadlift sub max weights max force and then or max effort then you go and do an actual

max every day which is you pick a random exercise, fucking anything, and test your max on that day. And after both days, do a bunch of assistance works to build all the muscles. So John did really good and was squatting like in the sevens, and his buddy did good, and the other buddy who was less experienced regressed big time. So he asked the question, why was that? And for people who understand training and understand it from a beginner

and an intermediate athlete and an advanced athlete get it immediate in that. If you have a history in strength training and you've exhausted simple methods, you've done progressive barbell lifts for years and years and years and years, and if you're a really good athlete, if you go to a highly varied program, which Westside is, you get a huge benefit out of that because you can sort of get more benefit out of variation with time. But people who don't have the

developed experience just lifting a simple barbell in a progressive way frequently and keeping the variation very low until they get the basic tools, if you add in extra variation here and there, you never get the repetition in to build the foundation of strength and then you never get the foundation in to build the foundation of strength and you then you never

get the foundation of strength so when you can't you're not really training the squat and the dead lift and the press and bench press and row and all that and the clean if you change everything you do every time you never get good at those things versus john who did squats and cleans and dead lifts and press and everything for like 20 years of his life yeah i was really good at all of them then tried variation and my other point would be that west side bravo is a is a plan that is tailored to make powders very good at a high level and if your son's not a high level power lifter if he's a little child then you have to question why you would take on such a program yeah i think he's common sense I think our friend just you know

he just thought that was that's like the Mecca powerlifting I know about I spent many years I spent many years training with Louie

you guys have been the west side you've had breakfast with Louie you've had great talks he's an amazing man right yeah

and he's got awesome ideas and you should probably read everything he's ever done because he's a great source of information but you just have to know when it's a great idea and when should probably read everything he's ever done because he's a great source of information. But you just have to know when it's a great idea and when it's not.

And it's not a good idea for beginning athletes. I mean, some of those tools can be quite useful, but you just have to make sure you get a foundation in your athletes first and get into an intermediate stage and then start playing with those things. I think a few minutes ago you said something that was spot on. I think everybody should hear is if you're a beginner, three sets of five, five sets of five, stick with the back squat, front squat, press, very little variety.

And as you become more experienced, more variety. I think a lot of people who are beginning weightlifting and CrossFit both, because those are the two things that i coach a lot of people they see the variety of the metcons and they they very quickly um lose sight of like what true progression is yeah i think that they want they want the variety because it's just more fun that way but as a coach i want them to have a lot of consistency and a lot of repetition and they don't see the value in that as much as they do because they they get they can get across it.com and see just a shitload of variation and i think it's i'm talking years before you start adding a

lot of variety and it wasn't until it wasn't until like this past, even for me, that I recognized that I needed... I had to start adding more variety because I was actually doing too much of the same. But I've been weightlifting for six years. You exhaust all the simple tools, then you consider it. Yeah. Weightlifting for four or five years with simple methods. You've got to have a little bit of variation in that. CrossFit does that perfectly fine with the Metcons.

I mean, it can be boring just to grind on the fundamentals over and over again. And it's maybe fun to do a little WOD where you do some silliness. And that's great. And you get a good metabolic stimulus out of that. But rest assured, if you do kettlebell swings this week and then randomly at the end of next week, you're not going to fucking get better at swinging kettlebells just maybe if you're a beginner but you can't really master kettlebell swing that way so if you approach barbell train that same way you're

never gonna get better lifting barbells i want to apply that to another sport biking you you you can start off biking that's fine but let's wait a little bit until we get the stretchy neon suit. The guys who are like, let's wait a little bit. Let's get a couple miles in. A pack of like 10 guys who wear those competitive looking gear. I was wondering where you were going with that. They're all fat and overweight and clearly not cyclists, even though I know nothing about it. They feel the need to dress professionally like they're a team.

Dude, ride a bike just you can wear pants you can i think i've done it i think we have a hard time understanding it'd be like me showing up the weightlifting like coming in the weightlift every day with a singlet on like strapped up and everything yeah but you're what you're competitive i don't do that every day i wouldn't think we got like once a month if a beginner crosser came in wearing a singlet, I'd be like, this is bougie, man. This is bougie. That's what the cyclists are doing. They're wearing their singlet to every weightlifting practice.

Douche points for you, man. Douche points. It's okay. I was wearing tube socks every day of the week. Well, that's just to protect your fragile shins from the rope. No, it was just to look hot. Were you wearing your booty shorts, too? Chicks dig hot.

No, but we are going to have barbell shrug booty shorts soon. Just because I said it just now. Because now it's on tape and we have to do it. We do need swag. Thanks, CTP. No problem. Should we take a break? I've got to pee.

Yeah, me too. All right, we're going to break, guys. Come back for part break? I got to pee. Yeah, me too. All right. We're going to break, guys. Come back for part two of this week's episode of Sweeten Up. And I'm not going to play any sweet videos. You're not? I want. What?

Jumping jack handstand burpees. Oh. Jumping jack handstand burpees. Are we good, James? Yeah, we're good. We got to fucking hit it. Welcome. Please edit that out.

Welcome back, everybody. You're with Barbell Shrug, the world's leading podcast on strength and conditioning because we say it is. Boom. Boom. Yeah. And these guys, they decided they wanted to ask me some questions. Because I'm always the one asking questions. They were going to ask me something. Who's these guys?

And instead of just letting you guys ask questions, I think I'm just going to talk about what you guys are going to ask me. All right. What are we asking? So what is Team Workhorse? Yeah. Team Workhorse, for sure. Yeah.

I'm not going to turn around, but the back of the shirt says Forever Grind. That's kind of the motto or mission statement or something. Yeah. Team Workhorse, there's one of the guys that trained in our gym last year. He's out of UT Chattanooga, I believe is where he's at. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Trey. What up, Trey?

Trey's a good guy. CEO of Teamwork Horse. The horse. They are starting an apparel company, and they sponsored me with this t-shirt. What an enterprising young student and athlete. Well, see, the back is my favorite part. Just so y'all know, I'm a very cheap sponsor.

I can be bought. You can be bought With a t-shirt With a t-shirt But the beauty of that shirt Is the back It says forever grind Because there's a lot of times

That people like Oh that dude grinds hard Yeah but they never know How long Forever Forever Hand the guy That's a long time

Yeah Well and I also have And you're wearing it right now Is the wristband The latest in grind apparel. And I wore mine for a little while, but I can't wear anything on my wrists or around my neck. That kind of stuff just bothers the hell out of me. Did you notice that your performance tanked when you took it off?

I did. I was no longer PRing on my snatch. Yeah. I should probably put it back on. Ionizing copper. You got to grind that snatch. Cobalt chrome beads. Well.

Are you going to wear your teamwork horse out to Cali here soon? Maybe. I'll think about it. This weekend, and I think Trey will be very happy about this, John and Shereen, we had their engagement party, and we all signed this. And these are members of our gym, close friends, people who have no idea who John and Shereen are at all.

They're cool. They're getting married in October and I'll be officiating the wedding. You can see them in CTP cam. Video 12.2. Boom. Boom. Just two booms. So you're going to be a the reverend figure in these proceedings. I think so.

That's what they've told me they want. They trust you, boy. I know. I'm going to just probably just say a bunch of stuff. Wait think so. That's what they've told me they want. They trust you, boy. I know. I'm going to probably just say a bunch of stuff. What are you doing? He's going to marry John and Shrein. Isn't that illegal? No, they're going to be

just the best wedding ever. James thought I was going to be married to both of them. Oh, Utah style. This is why you're working the best wedding ever. James thought I was going to be married to both of them. Oh, Utah style. This is why you're working the camera, James. Anyways, on there, there's a picture we were all signing and I was like, Ashley's like, what should we write?

First thing that popped in my head was, Forever Grind. So Trey, thank you. I think it's a... Oh, I thought you were going to say you came up with that. No, no, no. No, he came up with incredible. I don't come up with anything. I thought you were going to say You came up with that No no no No he came up with Incredible I don't come up with anything

I thought you were Going to Winklevoss As that guy's innovation By the way If anyone out there Wants to buy Incredibler.com Contact me

Alright It's worth at least Five million Yeah So what are you Going to talk about In California Alright so yeah

I'm going to California We're going to talk A little bit You see that transition Yeah like boom I tried Mine was really good earlier. Mine was smooth.

Yeah, but it wasn't time. Yeah, I guess not. Fuck me. It's not really a transition. It was more of a cutoff. I'm cutting it. We're going. It's a career day for exercise science. I can't talk except for now.

Next Monday, I actually get to coach some weightlifting on Monday also. That's going to be cool. Cool. Whole fresh batch of kids. Fresh batch of kids. Oh, my God. Is that weird? That's super weird.

That was maybe a clumsy way to phrase it, yeah. Fresh batch of kids. Wow. weird that's super weird that was maybe a clumsy way to phrase it yeah wow i i love coaching uh weightlifting to people that aren't very experienced no keep it tighter i wasn't picking up on it but i'm assuming you that sounded really creepy. You're going to teach young kids. Anyways, I'm going to present twice. Basically, I'm going to tell them about how awesome it is to run a gym, how much hard work it was, kind of my journey from being a student and just wanting to coach CrossFit and weightlifting

to having to run a gym and the business side of things, and doing it well going from doing it very badly to very well i i remember opening the gym up uh rob and i decided to open up crossfit memphis and uh i was like oh yeah i'll just i'll show people how to work out it'll be awesome and easy and i had no idea that people didn't know how to move really i didn't understand the concept of teaching movement i i'm a visual learner i like to see someone else do it and i try to do what they do so i'm like you just do it like this and people weren't learning it i'm like these people are stupid and. Give me your money. I came to realize I looked back on it and I was not a good coach.

I didn't have a lot of resources. There weren't as many resources then as there are now. With the advent of faster internet speeds and stuff like that, I mean, really, maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough, but there's definitely a ton of stuff that you can buy and stream videos. CrossFit Journal has gotten much more deeper and stuff like that. They've got a lot more information on it. Now that we've been doing it for a while and coaching, and we've gotten really good,

and we've educated ourselves on not just business but on coaching also um now we're working on helping to educate other coaches so um but i think the the focus of my top my discussion next week will be on the business side of things because i think most exercise science students are really focused on coaching and not focused. And they probably think they're awesome coaches. No one's told them anything. Just like I thought I was a genius when I got out of school. I knew a lot about exercise science.

I got a degree. And now I look back on what I actually knew is nothing. Silly boy. But, again, I probably would have been a lot better off if I was more focused on business and less on trying to learn coaching thing secret in the world. So I'm going to try to hopefully, um, inspire some of those folks to, uh, get a little more, uh, business side of things going and, uh, approach it more seriously than I did at first. God bless you. I mean, really.

That's a good idea because I had no idea what I was going to do when I left. Well, most of them are sitting around going, I'll open the gym and I'll just do that

because I'll go to the bank and ask for money and then I'll just have people show up and they'll pay me to train them. That's probably the working knowledge of most people

when it comes to running a business, I'd say. What about this, that, and the other? No, I didn't really think of that. I spent the first two years treating it like a hobby. I thought two years treating it like a hobby. I thought I was treating it like a business. But I almost don't even consider us having been in business for four and a half years.

And I almost think about it like we've just been in business for like two and a half. The first two years, I had my head up my ass. If you're going to a gym, you should probably be able to write a detailed business plan before you even get serious about that right would you would you agree no well oh no i didn't get that one right well here's the thing is when i opened the gym i actually did have a super detailed business plan that was completely wrong and i I bought a book. I didn't know anything. And I bought a book on how to write a business plan. And I still have the book.

And I still reference it. And I think it's a really good book. But going from. Only thing I had known was military. Being a student. And now I'm starting a business. In an industry I really don't know anything about. And I didn't know anything about business really either.

What are you doing, James? I can't see anything. It's iPhone. He's showing his iPhone. It's a nice iPhone. You got there, James.

Do you insinuate that we're running out of time or we need to, so, uh, what was I talking about? Shocker, bro. Your real world experience was much more important than what you tried to model out of a textbook. And the typical business plan that you'd bring to the bank is important,

but there is something I discovered a little bit, maybe a year ago. There's a book I really like called a business model generation. And as far as figuring out how you're actually going to make money, I think you need to do this book called business model generation, work through that entire book first, and then, you know, start your business plan that you're going to write for different, you know, investors and for yourself and all that kind of stuff. That's the bottom rung. I hope you found your passion.

God, I hope you found your passion. After you read that, or else you're never going to succeed in business. You're going to fail. You're going to be a horrible failure. Next week, I'm going to talk a little bit about how to get clients through a website, how to get the potential client's email address, and how to market that specific person after you get their email address. I'm going to talk a little bit about how much money they can save by

doing it like that as opposed to buying a billboard or an ad in a magazine or something like that. I'm going to talk very specifically about how everything should be. You should have basically a sales funnel for getting clients and stuff like that. And if you would have said anything like that to me when I first started, I would have been like, sales what? I had a hard time asking for money. You don't mean a real funnel. is figurative it's a figurative

funnel jesus that's what you would have sounded like it's a digital it's a digital funnel so yeah honestly i didn't even care in the beginning and uh i i want to say i i felt like i was like being idealistic like I don't need that. The training we're offering is so cutting edge, and we're so good. People, you know what? We'll just put a sign out front, and we'll have a website where we blog, and people just busting down the door because we're the only CrossFit in town. That was stupid.

Build a dream style my my idea of how big and how uh popular we were going to be was i was overshooting big time there were just because i was passionate about it didn't mean that everyone else was gonna be passionate about it too and that's where like passion can screw you up like oh i'm so passionate about. Once everyone somehow becomes aware of this, they're going to be just passionate about me and they're going to pay me and they're going to show up and it's going to be awesome. And we're going to have, we're going to max out our membership in the first year. And, uh, make a good point. Cause there's people in this world who are really passionate about like having 27 cats in their house. Oh, I love cats. Your passion is pretty crazy.

You want to work on that passion of yours. Well, even if you have passion for something that has potential for making money, like running a gym, you know, you have got to step back

and be realistic about how you're actually going to make money doing it. And I think a lot of people aren't realistic about it just because they don't know what the first step would be because they don't know. It's like they avoid it. It's like, I don't know what the first step would be because they don't know it's like they avoid it it's like i don't know what to do so i'll just

you know subconsciously they're they're getting away from it so um that's kind of the goal of my presentation next week is kind of confront the potential uh gym starter uppers with hey these are these are some things you have to think about or else you'll be out of business. Yeah, I think that's a good idea. Give it scared straight style. Like the order of the show. Like, you little son of a bitch is going to start a business?

Let me tell you about starting a business. Pull your belt tight and move your pants up. You'll have to let us know how that goes next week. I'm going to try to record it because I think I'm going to put the PowerPoint together. I'm actually going to use that new nifty tool, Keynote. By the way, there's a Keynote remote. I can link up my phone to this and I can just walk around and use that. So I'm going to be giving that presentation.

I've got to put it together. I think it's going to be sweet because I can put together presentations. They'll be super awesome in a very short period of time, but it's going to be really fun. Are we running out of battery memory? Alright, guys. Does anyone have any questions about what I'm going to talk about this weekend? I got it down.

I was there for the whole thing. Tell me about 3rd TV and what I'm going to talk about this weekend? I got it down. I was there for the whole thing. Tell them quickly about Fitter TV and what we're going to offer soon. Yeah. Actually, I think Doug would be the most. F-I-T-R dot TV. Dot TV. So, Doug, tell us about what people are going to be able to find on Fitter TV by the time this episode is up, actually.

We should have Technique WOD switched over to the site here pretty soon, and we're going to start offering all of our seminars that we film at our gym here in Memphis. So we did Chris's strength seminar the other day. Hopefully that will be up on the site soon. We'll try to offer these in a couple different mediums. We want to have video products to sell on the website.

Also, we want to have audios in case someone wants to just pop it in their headphones when they're driving around just like you can do with the podcast. And then we might also transcribe and make some e-books

out of them too. So we might have a couple different things for Sarah here in the near future. Oh, I want an e-book. I call myself an author. You are an author. I have many books. I actually am an author.

I'm published in many medical journals. You know what, Chris? I think what you ought to do is actually not bullshit. We did film your strength seminar this week and I think what we ought to do is write a short e-book on programming for strength and let that accompany that seminar. What do you think about that? That's a good idea.

Yeah, sure. Just write a book. There you go. I mean, I think you should do like a sample training cycle and stuff like that. You know, some application. So that's Barbell Strug Thong or booty shorts and Chris strength programming ebook. What else?

Coming soon. Boom. Oh, we should be having a Paul's Paul's nutrition talk. Paul, I, she was on a couple episodes back. He did a nutrition talk at our gym,

uh, beginning of the year. And so that should be up there also. And then MMA. Um, Oh yeah. I have a, um, not necessarily just a seminar, but I also put together a more comprehensive actual program that you can download and follow the workouts for called MMA Training Day. So if you're an MMA fighter and you're looking for a good program, I have a beginner, intermediate, advanced, and kind of elite eight-week training cycle that you can follow up until your fight. So I did a seminar

here a while back. So there's a video to watch where you can kind of see the rationale behind the training. And then there's also, like I said, there's an ebook explaining how to do all the programs. There's templates for you to use. There's clickable links on all the exercises, which will take you to our YouTube account and to show you what the exercises look like so it's very comprehensive that's that's more of a total package rather than just getting a presentation so you can download that and use it for about eight months or so damn yeah eight months worth of programming and uh you've got a fight coming up for you, right? I do have a fight coming up here

in about two months. Not only can he tell you how to kick ass, he will go out and show you how to kick ass. Because he will kick ass. I better not lose now that Chris has showed me. You're 6-0 now, right? I'm currently 6-0. About to be 7-0. Boom, we're calling it.

Oh shit, we're putting bad mojo on him, man. I know, man. Let's just redact that last bit. Am I going to be in your corner this time? Yeah, you can be in my corner. In the past, I've been in his corner, and then I haven't really done anything. He just stands there and cheers for me. You can hold the spit bucket.

No, you're doing good. Hey, why don't you punch him a little bit harder next time? Tell you what, when the fight's over, kick him in the nuts. We'll track that video down. We'll track that video down and post it.

Win or lose. Of me kicking a guy in the nuts for two seconds left in the fight. Oh, man. Poor guy. See if you can tie that in. Clip it into this episode. It's pretty funny.

Just right now, flash. Oh! Ooh! Is there Anything else you want to plug? We'll also have Mike's weightlifting seminar. I'm finishing that up. Shit's cool. Very true. We got all kinds of stuff coming up. You'd be a fool not to get these products.

No, they're good, man. We have a lot of talented people, man. I think they're going to enjoy them. We like ourselves. Well. Can we put a little clip of those things up so I can have a lot of talented people man I mean I think they're gonna enjoy them we like ourselves well we put a little clip of those things up so they can get a taste

of it and then get hooked we definitely have a lot of talented people and it's about time we try to tap that tap that oh god

tap that knowledge ass alright that's like what you're looking for on that note that's right we're gonna have barbell shrug t-shirts that's what it's gonna say on the back tap that knowledge ass see you not a bad idea oh man all right thanks guys