Barbell Shrugged - Episode 20 - How to choose your CrossFit Gym + OPT w/ James Taylor

Episode Date: August 3, 2012

-Shout out to the fans - What is Fitr.tv? - James Taylor from OPT - What is OPT? - Doug's training history - How to choose your CrossFit gym - and more

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. Mmm. Coffee sounds like it tastes good.

It's so good. French press? It was French press. It was Doug French press. I'm getting good at it. Coffee's new to me in general, but French pressing, brand new. I love it way better. Yeah, yeah. It's delicious. There's no no drip that tastes better no matter what kind of coffee you

got we ready all right let's do it well this is episode 20 of barbell shrug so we've made it 20 weeks now we've been in one every 21 a week not one every 20 weeks. We've been blowing up lately on our website and on iTunes downloads. I just want to thank everyone for checking us out and leaving comments and for giving us good feedback. Not all the feedback's been positive, but that's okay. That's helped make our show better. So keep it up. If you haven't figured it out

we're a podcast about strength and conditioning uh we own a gym a faction strength conditioning home of crossfit memphis so we're very crossfit oriented so most of our discussions are going to be uh talking about that not 100% of the time but most of the time. Make sure you guys visit the website, fitter.tv, F-I-T-R.TV. Go there and sign up for the newsletter. We'll let you know when new podcasts come out, new technique wads come out, and just what we're doing in general. We try to do cool stuff. So if you want to be plugged in, make sure you go sign up for the newsletter. The other thing too, is I don't think we've done a really good job of explaining

that Chris Moore has a really awesome seminar on our website. If you go to the shop and you look under seminars, there's a seminar called Simple Strength. And it's, it was really awesome. The I came out of his seminar, with a fresh perspective on how to program for the athletes at faction. And then also just, you know, I it helped me think about what I've done in the past and why it worked and why it didn't work. And it really made program made me think about programming in a new way. And I actually came out of that with you know I went home and I got my computer and I started like changing the programming that we had coming up and it's been really beneficial it's been about two months now and I used I think that

was a huge step for me and changing the program programming and and everyone on our team is seeing a lot of benefit out of that. Yeah, I saw the table of contents or the overview of Chris' stuff. I haven't seen the whole thing, but I was like, wow, that's interesting. That's something I want to check out. Yeah, it's pretty comprehensive. It's not just about getting stronger, but just about programming in general. There's three and a half hours of video in that product, And, uh, there's probably, I think like 80 slides,

at least a lot, a lot of slides. Um, and you'll have access to instant streaming. So it's not like you buy the product and you have to wait five days for it to come in the mail. You'll buy the product. You'll instantly be able to,

to have access to the videos. So that's one thing I don't like about buying like, you know, a seminar online. A lot of times. It's like, oh, I'm going to buy this. I want it now, but I've got to wait for the DVD to show up. It's not like that with us.

So it'll be really awesome. Our guest today is James Taylor, and he is stopping through Memphis on the way to Scottsdale from Atlanta, and he's going to be going to join OPT, and Scottsdale joined that team. Can you tell us a little bit about why you're going out there? Well, I'm really passionate about fitness. I've been looking for a while for a way to make fitness a career for me just because it's kind of become a lifestyle where, you know, I love eating healthily and I love the way, you know, working out with functional movements makes me feel.

And this opportunity came up to try to build a personal training practice with James Fitzgerald at OPT in Scottsdale and I jumped all over it because I really think the way he thinks about fitness is thought-provoking most of all. He asks a lot of questions and he's always trying to take fitness to the next level. Definitely. And for those people that are new and never heard of OPT, what does OP stand for it's a optimum performance training and you said that james fitzgerald runs opt it's a lot of people refer to him as opt or james opt i've heard all kinds of variations um so what's kind of the the main audience that he caters to or who is that excuse me um i think that a lot of clients are CrossFit athletes, people that are looking for performance. And he writes a lot of programs, like program designs for athletes that are looking to take their game to the next level.

But there's also a focus on just improving the health of, uh, any client that wants a great prescription. So it seems like in my experience, most people I know that follow OPT's programming are very serious about, about competing in CrossFit specifically. And I know he has on, on his blog, he posts a couple of different workouts for each day. He function, being, and will, which is kind of like beginner, intermediate, and advanced is my understanding. He also has a new women's programming specifically also. I just started that not too long ago. He kind of niches his programming down for the specific needs of a couple different audiences,

whether you're a beginner, advanced, and advanced is truly advanced. He's got some guys that, you know, have a lot of training history and are, you know, very strong and have great technique. And, you know, it's almost like a full-time job, sometimes training, you know, two or even three times a day, multiple days a week, excuse me. Yeah, that's totally the separation is training volume, which dictates those programs. How much volume can you handle? And that doesn't change quickly over time. So I think that's great that there's several different options. What exactly is your background?

How did you get to Memphis on the way to Scottsdale? Well, I ran track and cross country in high school and college. And after college, I got into CrossFit. I was thinking of it as a way to stay in shape. And it is a great way to stay in shape. But, you know, it became more than that for me. And now I'm accepted this position to work with OPT. And I just called up Mike McGoldrick here in Memphis on my way. And I was like, Hey man, uh, can I crash with you? I mean, you got a place to stay

for me. I'd love to talk, you know, talk to you guys about fitness and hang out for a little while on my way. And, uh, here I am, uh, you know, with the guys from faction strength and conditioning, I just worked out with, um, Mike Bledsoe today. And I really enjoyed seeing their gym. And it's a huge, great facility. If you're from the Memphis area and you haven't seen the Faction Strength and Conditioning Facility, it's an amazing place. Thanks. Yeah, appreciate that.

Yeah, for those of you that don't know Mike McGoldrick, he's one of our faction athletes, and he's probably one of our best athletes by far and he's been following James OPT's programming for a long time and got some great results off of it. That's how you guys know each other from what I know. Unfortunately, Mike's

out of town right now or we probably would have had him on the podcast also. He was on our last episode with Andy Galpin. How'd you find opt well uh i actually attended a seminar that opt put on at the garage games in 2011 in woodstock georgia yeah i went to that as well and uh yeah it was a it was a few hour talk and it was kind of eye-opening for me i don't have have a background in exercise science like you guys do, and it was eye-opening in terms of the type of things that he was thinking about,

you know, in terms of long-term development for athletes. And after that, there was a little bit of time where I wasn't following his training, but then I began to follow his training on his blog and just posting my results to comments. And I think that, you know, in terms of, you know, that's another thing I was going to mention is listeners of Fitter TV, you guys should post comments and, you know, talk about what brings you to Fitter TV because the program is ultimately, you know, for the, for the audience. And the more comments you post,

um, the more interactive you feel with the hosts and the better they can serve you. So that's kind of what happened with OPT when I was posting my results to comments. It's hard to know what you should be podcasting or, or teaching people how to do or programming if you're not getting feedback. Exactly. I had a hard time for a while with some of our athletes.

We have a competition team, and I was like, I need your feedback. And a lot of times they wouldn't post feedback if they didn't have a good workout. You know, they weren't impressed with their own numbers, so they just wouldn't post. I was like, I need to know these things. Sure. I need to know when people are tanking, you know, and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, those are the most important days to get feedback.

Yeah. Those are the days that you learn something. Definitely. Yeah. So, yeah, that does apply to Fitter TV as well as, you know, we don't know what kind of guests to try to get. If we're not getting a lot of feedback, it's hard for us to know exactly what topics people need to know about. So good thing is we have gotten a couple of, I got a couple of emails this week with people asking really good questions. And we'll address them at the end of the show.

We'll all be able to give our input. It's good to have everyone's input because it'll be a little bit different. Sure. So how can we post comments, Mike? I loved your example video in the last episode. James and I watched that episode last night since I wasn't here, so we watched

it on the TV. If you haven't seen the Dr. Andy Galpin episode, episode 19, about halfway through the episode, Mike has a little cut in where he talks about how to post comments and he stumbles over his words a pretty good amount and then almost loses control

in the middle of the video. It's pretty funny that Chris caught it all in film. So if you haven't watched that yet, go to episode 19 and watch the Dr. Andy Galpin episode. Watch Mike stumble over himself on camera a little bit. Yeah, because usually I've got it all together. Like 100%. Yeah. And not only that, it was great listening to Dr. Andy.

Andy had a lot of great stuff to say. Yeah. That guy's super smart. Dr. Andy Galpin, if you haven't seen the episode yet uh just got his phd um a little over a year ago and then uh from ball state and then went out to uh cal state fullerton is now a professor out there in bioenergetics he teaches uh exercise physiology and metabolism and a few other classes and so he had he had tons of cool exercise science, muscle physiology type stuff to talk about last week

with respect to performance and training. So that was one of my favorite episodes that we've done so far. I really enjoyed watching it. That was my first episode that I saw. Everyone I've talked to said it's their favorite episode because Mike wasn't there. Yeah, when people were like, that was my favorite episode, I was like, is it because it's like we're getting better is it because of the guest or is it because i wasn't there no i was pretty upset about that um and you have a you have a really

strong background in running yes and uh you you were you said uh you ran track and through college actually um and how does that apply to like now like you before the show we talked a little bit about running pose yeah i ran track at georgia tech and uh my my freshman year of college there was uh my coach uh coach alan droski uh had had us all tried to switch to landing on our forefoot in terms of running. And that was something all throughout high school I landed on my heel. And I wasn't even aware that that was a problem. What distances were you running for this?

Like 5,000 meters on track and cross-country, like 8Ks in college. Okay. So 5 and 8K, a couple miles. Yeah, three to five miles as opposed to sprinting or running four or eight hundreds so i was longer distances running long slow distance a lot okay um but the idea of running on your forefoot was kind of new to me i mean you see people at the olympics run on their forefoot and like if you watch the olympics coming up you watch the 5 000 meter final or

the 1500 meter final, you'll see those guys flying and running on their forefoot. And you'll think, well, that's for them. You know, that's, that's not for me because they're really fast and I'm not an Olympian, but you know, the same can be said for weightlifting, right? You see guys weightlifting at the Olympics and you should try to replicate their form most likely. I mean, yeah, they might have stylistic differences, but they're lifting heavy weights because they have good form, right? Most definitely. So the same way with running.

I mean, I didn't run pose in college, and so that was kind of new to me, the idea of running pose using your hamstring and glute to pull your foot off the ground is, is, was kind of new to me, but now I've integrated it into my form and I like the results because for the first time I felt like I was, my hamstrings were tired during a,

you know, like an interval running workout. And it really makes sense because they're, they're tired instead of your hip flexors, which are weaker muscles. So, you know, if you, if your hamstrings are getting tired, then you feel like you're being more efficient. I kind of think of pose as like slower sprinting.

Like if you, everybody runs pose after a certain speed. If you go on a slow jog and you heel strike and you run a little faster, you might still be heel striking. And then once you get to a certain speed, you automatically switch to pose running. If you ran a full speed 40-yard sprint, you would land midfoot or forefoot or however you want to say it automatically, especially if you did a barefoot

and especially if you're on concrete. You run barefoot, I don't care how fast you're going, you're going to avoid heel strike. That's totally true. But I would say that forefoot striking is not all there is to pose tendon, like every day for two months, uh, before I finally was able to feel like it was more natural. And, you know, I think that that's a big deal for a lot of people that say, Hey, I want to switch to pose running. Um, but I don't want to lose a lot of training volume.

And my answer is just kind of, well, you kind of have to, because if you're running, the definition of running, right, is that you're entirely in the air. That's what differentiates it from walking. So you're entirely in the air. You come down with a certain landing force. You can't mitigate that in any way. The only thing you can do with pose is to distribute it better.

So you're distributing it more, absorbing more of the force in your ankle, whereas if you're landing on your heel, it's all being absorbed by your knee. So it reduces a lot of knee injuries. But like even when I ran on my forefoot in college, I was still kind of had the idea of pushing off the ground and landing with my foot out in college, I was still kind of had the idea of pushing off the ground and landing with my foot out in front of me. Whereas Pose says land with your foot right underneath you

and don't let your foot get far away from your midline. You were reaching? Yeah, reaching. Essentially? Exactly. What I think is funny is when barefoot running was kind of introduced to me I was still wearing like you know the big shoes and you know the thick heels and stuff like that and

I was a huge heel striker and then I I pretty much couldn't relax when doing pose drills unless I was barefoot but I started doing that because I heard that there were some track coaches that if you suffered any kind of injury that from like a running injury they would have their athletes pull their shoes off and run in the grass yeah and I go oh wow if it if it helps make you healthier when you're injured it'll probably make you healthier when you're not injured oh that's totally true goes for a lot of things right eating. Eating well, I mean, anything. You know, the people that are sick, sometimes the things that are making them better

is what you should be doing when you're not sick. Exactly, yeah. A lot of people do stuff just to try to get better, and as soon as they get better, they go back to what they were doing, which seems really silly. Protecting yourself against injuries in sport is kind of a funny thing.

Like, if you wear big padded heels and you heel strike because it would hurt your heel otherwise. So you put a big pad on your heel with big puffy shoes. And then now you can heel strike and it doesn't hurt anymore. But then the force just gets transferred up to your knee because you change your running technique, which is, you know, the force has to go somewhere. So now it's not on your heel. It goes into your knee and you start to get patellofemoral or knee pain. Kind of the same thing where they keep making in football, they keep making safer helmets. If you play football with no helmet on and you hit head to head, you're going to end

up with big, huge bruises and maybe crack your skull. So you put a helmet on and all of a sudden now you don't get any bruises anymore and your face feels fine but then you end up hitting people really hard because it doesn't hurt anymore and then you end up with brain damage and concussions. They talk about that in the Freakonomics. Oh, yeah, he does. Freakonomics is a great book. It's super entertaining.

The football helmets don't actually reduce injury at all. It just makes them worse. It makes it into a longer-term internal thing rather than a short-term external thing. Exactly. It's kind of like boxing versus MMA. If you put big puffy gloves on, well now I can hit you 1500 times in a 12 round fight and you're going to end

up, you know, having, having brain damage as a result because I hit you 1500 times and yeah, you got a swollen eye cause I hit you 1500 times in the face. But in MMA you got these small gloves. So, you know,

you'll get, you'll get you'll get knocked out after a couple of punches you don't get brain damage because right you didn't have that big puffy thing protecting all your kind of external structures and as a result having your brain slosh around you know 1500 times you get knocked out way easy and then i'd imagine if we just did no gloves and just went bare knuckle in a fight it only lasts for 10 seconds you go out there you hit each other a couple times and then it's over yeah and there's no longer term internal damage because the outside of your body can't take that kind of punishment yeah so pros and cons to both of them for sure i think it's a

great analogy for for running you know with a minimal shoe or barefoot versus the big padded shoe is you know yeah the big padded shoe might feel good for you know a few years even but you're gonna end up with hip issues i know a lot of people are like end up with like lower back issues and stuff and it's like man you're just sending that that shock right up to your back yeah you just end up with different but sometimes worse injuries yeah i know a great cook the guy that came up with the functional movement screen, he's a physical therapist, and he came up with the concept of, oh my God, I just forgot what it was in my head. Self-limiting exercise, excuse me.

So self-limiting exercise is something where the exercise will only go for so long before you have to fail automatically and the exercise stops. So doing double unders is a good one. You can only do double unders for so long before you get a little bit of fatigue and then you fail and you can't do it anymore. As opposed to doing something like a leg press where you have no stability or coordination demands at all. And you can sit there and push and push and push. And there's a benefit there for, for a lot of things but um but as far as keeping your joints healthy since they're they have no right like proprioceptive or stability stability demand you can really take them to the limit which for muscle growth can be

a good thing don't get me wrong but it can really eat up your joints over time so you're there's a trade-off there so self-limiting exercise is almost all the stuff we do in CrossFit, any type of functional fitness. You can only kettlebell swing for so long before your form starts to break down. You have to stop. Well, you should stop. Yeah, you should stop. If you're in a competition, as long as they're counting the reps,

just keep going. But if you're training, then once your form breaks down, then you're supposed to stop. A lot of people don't but you really should i've been in some crossfit gyms i've been so you but you should probably stop deadlifting right now yeah there's been a lot of gyms where their form was never good to start with so it doesn't really matter if they're you know they got to take the weight off and just learn from kind of the ground up but i think there's a lot to be said.

I try not to be that guy, or we try not to be that gym. We're going to take a break real quick, guys. When we get back from the break, we're going to answer some questions. Say what? Technique WOD, fool. Oh, yeah. If you're watching the video, you're about to view a new Techniquad. You're welcome, Chris.

This is why I'm here. 100% on point all the time. You need a big poster just to hold up, like, Techniquad, announce it. All right, cut it. Normal 9 to 5, but he makes a lot of really good money just buying domains and then reselling them later. And so there's been like a couple of words like he invented. Like he invented this word.

I wish I could think of one off the top of my head. One starts with like a Z. He goes, all the domains are going to get taken up and then people are going to start making up really cool words. So anytime I think up a cool word that doesn't exist, i'm going to buy the domain so that's a long-term plan yeah so i was like i thought incredibler i don't know i was thinking about tumblr or something like that i was like i'll buy incredibler.com and someone will want to buy it from me for like five million dollars no one's i've had it for a year no one's made an offer well it could be one

of those things where uh someone has a business on incredible.com and they want to buy up the similar oh yeah i don't know it might take you know 10 years but i'll you're gonna get that 10 dollars back though one way or another yeah i'll make like 50 bucks off the deal but i will it'll been 10 years of paying 10 a year yes i knew i damn it sounds like a genius investment all right guys we're we're back here with uh barbell shrugged is the show i'm mike bledsoe uh with my other host doug larson and our guest james taylor uh we're gonna talk a little bit we should have done this at the beginning of the show. I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself. I've been running a CrossFit gym for about five years. Before that, I was competing in Olympic weightlifting. And since I was about 15 years old, so 15 years ago, I started nerding

out on nutrition and fitness. So I've been invested in this for a really long time. And that's why you should listen to me. You're staring at me. Does that mean it's my turn? Tell people about yourself, Doug. All right. I'm Doug Larson. I'm Mike's business partner at Faction Strength and Conditioning.

I had actually a pretty privileged upbringing with respect to strength and conditioning where I was very fortunate to have a solid strength coach, Mark Real, of Real Performance in Washougal, Washington. Mark helped me out every single day, all through high school and throughout a good chunk of time in college as well, where I had more or less free strength and conditioning, where he was just a guy who loved training people and didn't do it as his primary business. Had his real job at Hewlett Packard and made good money there. He just trained us for fun because we were super motivated kids and we loved doing it. He loved coaching us. We would learn solid strength and conditioning, Olympic weightlifting, good power lifting. We had gymnastics rings and all that stuff.

All the CrossFit stuff before I ever even heard of CrossFit, you know, for 10 years before I even heard of CrossFit. And I never thought that the type of gym that I grew up in and basically in someone's garage with bumper plates and gymnastics rings would ever be this big thing. It just happened to happen. I happen to be super lucky that I knew a whole lot about this new growing market. So having done gymnastics when I was a little kid for about five years, and then learning how to do Olympic weightlifting from, from Mark real, who learned Olympic weightlifting from coach Bergner and having, you know, met and trained with coach Bergner at a number of conferences for years before I even knew what CrossFit was. I kind of was just super lucky that this new market called CrossFit emerged and I had this background in gymnastics and weightlifting already. Then Mark had encouraged me the whole

time to go to college and get my degree in exercise science since I had such a strong interest in training. In so in graduate school, me and Mike were doing competitive weightlifting together, and we learned what CrossFit was and decided that it was something super cool, and it wasn't one in Memphis. So Mike actually asked me originally if I wanted to start a gym with him, and I told him no.

And he said, screw it, I'll do it anyway. And I told him when I got back from Australia, because I went to live in Australia for a little while, when I got back from Australia, if things were looking up with the gym, then I'd buy in and we would run it together. That's exactly what happened. I still let him do it.

That's really cool. Yeah, it worked out really, really well. Now we've got a pretty good thing going here in Memphis. A lot of great people and a pretty cool training facility. It was rough going there for a little while. I mean, we lived above the office in a crawl space for like a year and a half we were homeless and didn't make shit for money but once we decided that it was actually a business and not just something that we were going to do for fun on the side and we actually wanted to have apartments

and we should probably try to make enough money to pay rent somewhere we didn't have any debt and we we did it the hard way and the long way but now that that that phase is over it was in retrospect the right thing to do because we don't have a whole lot of debt and and we got a great business and a great lifestyle so we're pretty lucky yeah i hear about guys starting gyms and with a mountain of debt. That scares the hell out of me. Although back then, CrossFit didn't have the same notoriety it does now. Now you open up a gym and you'll have people knocking on your door. Five years ago in Memphis, no one knew what CrossFit was at all.

Building that clientele, we didn't know if it was at all. So building that clientele was definitely, we didn't know if it was going to be big or not. I just thought it was going to be, but there was nothing saying it was. Now if you open a gym, you know that there's interest in CrossFit. Sure. No doubt. So that's a little background with me and Doug. We wanted to address a couple questions that uh some guys sent me uh the first one is from uh brad landry oh you're gonna have to edit out his full name no uh from louisiana i was just

gonna say the first name i threw me off fail uh basically he's got a really big training background really big strong guy uh can squat a lot bench a lot uh and he uh found our podcast and i think he's basically kind of in a roundabout way is asking uh how what his next step in training should be. And he's heavily interested in CrossFit. And he says there's a CrossFit near where he lives. So he's kind of wanting to start a dialogue with us a little bit about what we think he should do, I think. And I think it's really fortunate we have James here to talk about a little bit because he'll be basically stationed at one of the best gyms. And he's sitting with two guys that have one of the best gyms. And he's sitting with two guys that have one of the best gyms in the world.

And so we got a good group. And I think we all have some opinions on about how to select your CrossFit gym. So I'll talk to you first about it, James. In selecting a gym to go train at, what do you think is important? Well, first, I think that Brad, it seems like he wants to do CrossFit, right? Yeah. I think that's a big step in realizing that you want to do CrossFit because you want to make sure that what you're doing is fun and enjoyable.

And you're going to be more successful at it if you like love going to the gym every day and you want to train and get better because i mean if if you have huge squat and bench numbers you obviously have already demonstrated that you enjoy training but if you're looking for something different then maybe it's got a little stale um and crossfit can mix it up for you and be you and you'll probably see improvements in your endurance and conditioning in addition to either maintaining or the owners are invested in the gym. And by that, I mean that they coach some of the classes. They like being there. You know, there's a great community feel where you feel welcome at the gym.

And you also want to make sure that they're doing some type of lifting you know like some some gyms i think neglect lifting in itself they'll just get in there and do you know 30 minute workouts where try to name as many different exercises you can do and just make it really tough and i don't think that's the best way to do CrossFit. Would you guys agree? Most definitely. Yeah, I totally agree with that. You can't just Metcon all the time without working on specific skills and specifically for strength and expect to make long-term progress. In the short term, it'll make you in much better shape. But if you don't focus on strength,

then eventually you're going to plateau, especially when you start trying to do heavier Metcons. It's going to plateau, especially when you start trying to do heavier Metcons. Sure. It's going to kill you. I find gyms that, gyms that, which I would not want to attend myself. They just, you walk in, you do Metcon, back out in 30 minutes, or they constantly do really long Metcons all the time. You know, just a degradation of power output.

I mean, you might, you know, if you're completely a novel athlete, you might see, you know, a lot of benefits there. But once you have any training volume under your belt, something like that's going to be no bueno. I also think what's really important in selecting a good gym is, is do they offer a trial? You know, if they're a really good gym and they really believe in what they're doing, then I really think they should be offering a free trial. Even if it's just one day or a week, we offer two weeks of free trial

because that's how we sell. We don't try to sell people. If you walk in and you get a sales pitch and they want you to sign up that day one, their focus is not on training most likely. Their focus is probably more on sales. And a sales-oriented gym is not going to have great coaches. I mean, that may not be the case every time, but in my opinion, they're putting their focus too much on one thing like that.

And the other thing is having a fundamentals class. Even if it's just three you know, three classes long and you get maybe some one-on-one time with a coach, if it's only three classes, we do 12 classes, and we make sure that we have at least one coach, say, every eight people or so. And it's 12 classes long. And they're getting nutrition advice on top of learning how to move properly and we have and i think it's obvious if you were to walk into our gym versus some other gyms in regard to like how

the fundamentals is conducted and i think if they don't have a fundamentals class or a beginner's course or something like that and they're not doing free trials then you know they that i think that's a red flag yeah the free trial is huge we know after two weeks if you come to our place for two weeks you're going to be addicted to it because it's awesome and we really believe it's awesome and so we just let people have the experience of training at our place and then we don't have to try to convince them of anything because they did it they understand they they understand how they're going to feel after the workout they understand that all they have to do is show up if they're not everything is taken care of for them and they'll automatically work hard because there's other people there to push them and cheer for them and and they're watching

the clock and so they want to get a good time and so it's competitive so they'll automatically push themselves hard all you have to do is drive there park and walk in the door and it'll take care of itself yeah and if you're not addicted after two weeks you don't belong there that's exactly right All you have to do is drive there, park, and walk in the door, and it'll take care of itself. Yeah. And if you're not addicted after two weeks, you don't belong there. That's exactly right. And if you don't belong there and you don't want to be there, then I don't want you there. We have a small gym and a very solid community, and I want only super motivated, awesome people to be around all day. And if you're not motivated to be there and you're kind of a Debbie Downer,

then get the fuck out. I don't want you at my gym if you're like that. You're going to bring everybody down, including the staff. And we've got a pretty cool lifestyle and I can maintain that cool lifestyle by hanging out with really awesome people all the time. And most of our members are pretty awesome.

Yeah, that goes into selecting the gym is what James was talking about, is the community. You walk in and there's a lot of Debbie Downers that are regular members. Maybe you should be looking somewhere else.

Totally. So what I would suggest, was it Brad? I would suggest going to try to find a gym in your area and hopefully there's more than one and try them all out.

I think it should be pretty self-evident which one you should choose after you try them out. A lot of times people will ask me, are you familiar with the gyms in this area? Sometimes if I'm friends with one of the gym owners in a different town, I'll plug their gym real hard. If they do a good job, if I know they do a good job, that's the only time I'll plug them. But I'm like, just try them all out. I mean, figure out, you know, this gym might be great, but they may not fit your schedule

or something like that. And that's something that I can't tell you. But yeah, you just got to try them out. But if you've only got one, maybe you should plug yourself into that one. And if it's not exactly what you think it should be, you should try to help make it what it should be. It's probably small,

and you can have some kind of effect on it. So move on to the next question. Andrew in Florida. This guy, actually, I was stationed with him in the Navy, and I had to rescue him one day. I don't know if i should tell that whole story or not so that's the you're lost in the ocean story that's right i let i let this guy

jump off an oil rig into the water and he got swept away by a current so i had to put down my things jump in he couldn't swim back he was like having a hard time sorry andrew i'm not telling your last name on the show i had to have him take his pants off you're dying take your pants off and you know if you're in boy scouts or if you're in the military or anything like that you have like that that safety class where you like you take your pants off and tie the ends of your pants together create a floating device that's right you create a floating device out of your pants basically you trap a bunch of air yeah's right. You create a floating device out of your pants. Basically you trap a bunch of air and you know, you basically get it behind you and you throw it over and you turn your pants

into like a life jacket. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So, uh, took his BDU pants and did that whole deal. And, uh,

so he was pantless in the water floating there. And so we're just floating, waiting for the, the boat to come rescue us. Just floating around, tickling each other. That's right. Floating around. I'm like, oh, my gosh, I hope we don't float into Iranian waters. Because we're fairly close.

And there's horror stories of guys, the compass goes out on the boat or something. And they end up in Iranian waters. You get picked up, and now you're an international incident. Like, you're not going to get in trouble for that and i don't want to be in iranian jail uh so we're like kind of floating away we only floated for like 45 minutes so we didn't get too far away but we were out in the middle of nowhere and there was like some tankers we could see in the distance those big boats and uh they finally came and pulled us out it was real funny uh this was like a month before i was getting out of the navy so so I was nervous they were going to yank my rank right before I got out,

and they didn't. They were pretty cool about it. But they pulled us out. I hopped up in the rib, the boat, and they pulled him out. He was wearing nothing but his whitey tighties, and he just looked terrible. Everyone was trying not to laugh, but it was pretty funny. All because I told him to take his pants off.

And you got like a purple heart or a silver star. Which maybe saved his life. I didn't lose my rank. Oh, there you go. Basically the same thing. Because we weren't supposed to be doing that in the first place. He was like, can I go swim? And I was like, go for it.

I was known as the guy. I was wondering how you let him go swimming or let him jump off of an oil rig. That was your fault. It was for morale. Well, I outranked him. He had to ask permission. Oh, okay. So we were out doing something.

We weren't around many people. And so we were waiting for the boat to come back and pick us up. So he was like, hey, Mike, can I go do this? I'm like, i was always big on morale even if it was a little dangerous and that time it didn't pay off okay all right we are so off topic it's not funny i'm not telling you it's like i don't know if i should tell the story but you guys were telling me beforehand to tell the story yeah it was good whatever all right first one's on general nutrition he says i drink uh i drink a an espresso in the morning and use a teaspoon of brown sugar in there.

I know refined anything is considered crap. I eat white table sugar and brown sugar can be partially refined or unrefined. So is this something to do away with? I'm trying to get on top of my diet and rid myself of the blubber around my midsection. I think the fact that you're asking the question kind of gets you out of yourself. Yeah, if you're asking the question, you know the answer. Most likely, yes. Is this bad?

What do you think? The answer is yes. If you're asking me, you know it's bad. Yeah, I think it's probably not ideal because in terms of diet, a lot of it can be psychological and it kind of begs the question, why are you interested in starting off your day by getting some sugar in? You know it's spiking your insulin, and sugar can be addictive.

So if you're starting your day off with sugar, maybe you should consider not, and seeing if throughout the day, you tend to, you know, crave sugar less. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, what you do first thing in the day can set the tone for the rest of your day and not going to be a bad way of doing it. Doug was bringing up a good point about, you know, making up such a small fraction. It's like, maybe we should be looking at other things too. That's true. It may not be your biggest problem.

Yeah, more than likely if you look at the diet or his diet holistically, that one thing has probably not hit the biggest issue. That's probably not the thing that caused him to get fat. There's probably something else in his diet. I'm sure if we looked at like a three-day diet record that we could spot a variety of other things that would cause somebody to get fat or at least if we look at

historically what his diet has looked like even if he's cleaned it up lately so you know for example if he's having we say a teaspoon or a tablespoon in his coffee yeah it's uh that's a teaspoon yeah teaspoon i i don't know off the top of my head exactly how many grams it is we'll say it's five grams right it's five grams it's? It's five grams, 20 calories. Assuming he eats a two or 3000 calorie diet, depending on how big he is, we'll say that's less than 1% of his diet. So, you know, if you're having three meals a day, we'll say they're the same size and they're 33% of your diet. Well, maybe if we altered your lunch and made your lunch a little bit better and we, we threw out, we'll say he's eating a sandwich, maybe he's not, I'm not suggesting he is, but say he's eating a sandwich and we take that sandwich

and we give him something else where he's eating fajitas with no tortilla, he just has chicken with guacamole and some bell peppers. Well, making that change fixed 33% of his diet. We fixed the whole meal as opposed to worrying about that little 1%. So it's not good, but it's probably also not the biggest thing he needs to worry about if he looks at his entire day. That's a great point. Yeah, I get a lot of nutrition questions. What do you think about this?

Well, it's kind of hard to answer a lot of questions when we don't have the entire you know three days dialogue and really kind of know where they're coming from you know so that does make it more difficult um and then the second question he had was i watched a barbell shrug episode recently where you guys discussed supplementation i take fish oils at least at the very least every morning and started started beta alanine recently now is it necessary to include a multivitamin if I'm staying athletically active? A cousin of mine who works for Optin Nutrition says the one multi she hears about most as being good in the industry is Animal Pack. But somehow 11 friggin' pills in one sitting doesn't seem normal to me.

Just saying. I completely agree sitting down and taking 11 pills that is mostly synthetic it's probably not a healthy way to do anything yeah i'm not really 100 sure what's all in an animal pack yeah i know that they've got some like digestive stuff in there like ox bile and and yeah like it's some digestive enzymes in there, like ox bile and some digestive enzymes. So if you're trying to gain weight, the thing is it's got so much stuff in there, you can't even keep up with it. So you need to find out what works and what you need for your specific goals and take those specific supplements for those specific things. I don't know.

Something like the company that does animal packs are usually so big I'm afraid they're just putting all sorts of crap in there. It may say one thing on a label, but that doesn't mean that's exactly what's in it. If you listened to our earlier podcast, we definitely covered supplement quality also. I couldn't comment intelligently about exactly what's in an animal pack, but what do you think about multivitamins in general um i personally don't take any uh i juice every morning and so do you i thought you were talking about steroids we covered that in a previous episode yeah vegetables juicing yeah we we juice vegetables every morning uh so like this morning I had in my juice, like five carrots,

five pieces of kale. I had two celeries and half a beet. And that was just like, that's how I started my day. And then the rest of my day, I'm going to be eating a lot more vegetables. Which is way more sugar than the teaspoon of sugar we were just talking about. Exactly.

Right. And at the same time of the day, wake up and you slam a thing of freshly juiced juice. There's still a lot of sugar in there, but this actually has a bunch of other nutrients coming along with it. Very nutrient. Right. And vitamins and minerals and phytochemicals. So you got antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds and live active enzymes that haven't been heat treated

and destroyed or altered in any way so there's a lot of other stuff that comes along with it even there's a lot of sugar in it moreover in your case you're not you're not that fat so you don't need to worry about it what what yeah you don't have to worry about about being lean at the moment you're trying to stay strong and you've never really had a problem with with being overweight so having some sugar in the morning for for a guy like mike or a guy like me really isn't that big of an issue if you're much more overweight and you're really trying to dial your diet down then maybe it is more of an issue and you might not tolerate carbohydrates to the same level that someone who's leaner and has more muscle mass does so exactly kind of depends on who you are a little bit in addition to that though

the the sugars and vegetables are i I mean, if you're putting table sugar in your coffee, that's just straight fructose. I mean. Yeah, there's a good portion of that is fructose. Oh, good portion. It's exactly half. Oh, exactly half. Okay.

Table sugar is sucrose, which is glucose and fructose bound together. So it's exactly half. Oh, okay. It's 50-50. I was thinking that maybe vegetables uh have was still a high percentage it's still a high percentage okay like sucrose i mean that 50 is pretty high vegetables are probably lower in uh what lower in fructose vegetables like if you're having vegetable juice so most fruits and vegetables have some some glucose some fructose

and a lot of people will say it's fruit sugar, it's fructose, and they just assume that fruits have all fructose and that's all that's in them. So again, fructose is a type of sugar and there's a couple different types of sugars. Your basic simple sugars are glucose, fructose, and galactose. And for the most part, there's a spread between all three of those in any type of naturally sugary thing like fruit. Vegetables usually are considered to be more starchy, which means they have a bunch of glucose molecules all chained together, and that's what a starch is.

Really, carbohydrates are kind of all the same. Whether it's pure glucose or whether it's starch where it's a bunch of glucoses all chained together, it's all going to kind of break down and it's going to be a carbohydrate load in your body either way that you look at it some vegetables are more dense than others potatoes are the easiest example potatoes and corn are super dense sources of carbohydrates so if i have this much potatoes then i'm going to have you know we'll say 100 carbohydrates but if i have this much kale you know i might only get 10 or 5 or however much most um most vegetable vegetables you know like leafy greens and whatnot just tend not to be so dense with the carbohydrate source not like potatoes or corn does sure um carrots on the other hand carrots and beets have a lot

of sugar in them but they're again not quite as dense as something like potatoes so and vegetables don't have usually aren't as high a percentage of fructose as they are with that's right glucose and what do you say galactose yeah vegetables usually have more starch which the glucose molecules chain together and not quite as much fructose right so fruit tends to have more fructose fructose having as much fructose. Right. So fruit has to have more fructose. Fructose. Having too much fructose can be a little bit of a problem in that it's preferentially stored in the liver and not in the muscle. So if you're training a lot,

you want to eat sugars are going to be more quickly stored in the muscle. So eating a lot of fructose as more likely to get stored as fat. I think that's, that's the story on that. Um, all right, we're going to wrap this up. We've had a pretty good show.

Hope you got a lot of information out of it. Thanks, James, for joining us. Yeah, I really enjoyed being here. You guys have been gracious hosts and I've been grateful to be on the show and hang out with you guys. Tell us where we should go for programming and website

stuff for you. Well, you can check out optexperience.com and check out our services. Check out what we have to offer and especially post to comments. Post questions to comments and ask questions. And hopefully you can get some ideas from that. What do you have to offer? Can you be a little more specific? Well, I can offer program design in terms of if you're not in the area of Scottsdale,

write programs for your goals in terms of fitness. And if you happen to be in the Scottsdale area, I'm doing personal training. So if you are or if you aren't in the area of Scottsdale, definitely check out optexperience.com. Excellent. Very cool. Thanks, James. Thanks. Go to TechniqueWOD. It's right next to the barbell shrug tab. So if you look at the top of fitter.tv you'll see technique wad click on that that's all of our exercise technique videos usually me and mike are the hosts occasionally we have somebody else one of our most recent ones was mike mcgoldrick teaching you how to do double

unders they're usually very short videos between we'll say three and five minutes and it's just us showing you how we teach different movements to our clients at Faction Strength and Conditioning. So super helpful free resource there. We probably, there's probably 50 to 70 videos in there right now. We started with weightlifting. We moved on to powerlifting. Now we're getting into some of the more gymnastics type movements. So great resource if you click on Technique WOD at the top of fitter.tv.

And make sure to check out Simple Strength if you want to learn how to get stronger. If you want to stay weak, that's fine. But if you actually want to get stronger, click on the shop on Fitter.TV and click on Seminars and you'll be there to purchase it and you'll be able to see a preview and everything. So thanks for tuning in.

Thank you. Thanks.