Barbell Shrugged - Episode 27 - Making Eating Paleo Easy, Best Quality Fish Oils/Creatine, CrossFit Business Advice

Episode Date: September 26, 2012

Making Eating Paleo Easy, Best Quality Fish Oils/Creatine, CrossFit Business Advice

This week on Barbell Shrug we're talking about making eating paleo easier, a couple of supplement questions, fish oil quality, and we're also going to talk a little bit about creatine and different types of brands and products. On the business side of things we're going to be talking about finding a facility and how to go about doing that, talk about insurance and where you should find it whether you're a CrossFit gym or not, and also how to build a community and basically building your client base. What's up, guys? This is CTP, and you're listening to Barbell Shrug.

Make sure you check out our video versions of all these podcasts on our website, fitter.tv. In all of our video versions, we include Technique WOD, which is our series of technique instruction videos for CrossFitters, free previews of some of the seminars we put out, and then sometimes come out of the studio and have special video segments such as cooking in the kitchen with Brandy that one time and out in the pool with Lucas and who knows what the next thing we'll do is. So make sure you check out our website fitter.tv and watch the videos as well. Hey guys, welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson.

Today we're missing Chris Moore, unfortunately. He has what we would call a real job, and we're doing this on Monday morning instead of Sunday. So, hi Chris. We have no guests today. Today we're going to be talking quite a bit. We're going to be covering a lot of questions that a lot of listeners have had and sent them to us. And we're going to try to just address those. First, I want to talk a little bit about a nutrition course that Doug is putting on free for you guys. You can go to the website and on a fitter.tv and go to the homepage and it going to be pretty obvious what you should click. Click that button, and you can go sign up for the live webinar. So tell everyone what it is they're going to be getting out of the course

and why you put it together. It's something he put together for, that Doug put together for Faction. But we're going to make it for you guys too. All right. Yeah, basically what it is is it's the live version or live online version of the course that we teach our members at faction strength and conditioning for um for how to eat paleo and make it easy a lot of people understand like what eating paleo is or conceptually like what they should be eating or everyone in the crossword world's heard

eat meat and vegetables nuts and seeds some fruit some fruit, little starch, no sugar. And you could even, you know, dumb that down and just say, if you're eating meat and vegetables, then more or less all of your worries are kind of handled. But just knowing that really isn't enough to all of a sudden eat super clean and eat perfect for the rest of your life. So we put together this nutrition course to give more or less an outline of exactly how I structure my day and my diet and actually make it happen in the real world. Because, again, just knowing what to do isn't enough. You have to know exactly how to do it. And then you have to put conditions and structures in place in your life to make those things easier to accomplish. You've got to put yourself in the right environment, so to speak.

Yeah. There's much more application, not so much science much science i mean it's pretty easy to come across science uh and there's a lot of books out there on the science of paleo eating there's a lot of podcasts um on it and all that kind of stuff if you listen to enough people long enough you'll you're like oh i got it all but you know putting it in the practice is the hard part um i know a lot of people have been through the the faction uh foods course and i know they a lot of them they already kind of knew what they were supposed to do but then after the course it was a lot easier to implement uh what is uh what's your typical morning look like for you know as a paleo eater uh for me i'm very consistent and i eat the same things frequently

which actually is one of the things i talk about in the course uh which is kind of counterintuitive and something you don't hear in a lot of nutrition programs is to is to eat the same thing all the time most people say the opposite and they say you want to get a lot of variety in your diet to make sure you're getting all the nutrients that you need and and this and that and they tell you to eat a wide range of foods which which is true in some respects but really if you think about most of the people that you know that eat very well and eat consistently you know a very healthy diet so those people tend to eat the same foods frequently over and over and over again and they tend to be people that you know don't get sick of eating the same thing over and over again and they have no problem eating the same foods frequently over and over and over again. And they tend to be people that, you know, don't get sick of eating the same thing over and over again. And they have no problem eating the same breakfast day in and day out,

which is exactly what I do. So for my mornings, pretty much every day, I have bacon, eggs, and avocado with a variety of usually berries, usually blueberries and strawberries, which is what I had this morning with some fish oil pills and then either water or water with chia seeds and then a little splash of cranberry juice to give a little bit of flavor. I also have a big glass of water and chia seeds, which is something that my girlfriend Marcy has done for years

and I've never done until recently, but I've kind of taken on here lately and I kind of like it. What are the chia seeds doing for you? They make me more regular. I don't really have regularity problems to begin with, but... I don't need any of that. You don't need any of that? No, that's funny. That's really actually how she describes it.

But for me, I really don't feel a huge difference with it. They're more or less, I kind of consider them the same category as flax seeds where they're kind of just fiber and omega-3s and why not get some more of that in my diet. So I've been trying it here lately. I'm not really attached to it but usually she's the one that makes breakfast and she always makes one for herself and then makes one for me as well. When I make breakfast myself, I usually don't even think about doing that actually. but it's something that i've been doing lately so i figured i'd share it do you grind them up or do you just drop them in no not the chia seeds you don't have to grind those

up flax seeds you do you definitely a lot more convenient huh yeah you just spoon them into glass and throw some water and give it a stir and you're more or less done i usually do flax seeds i might switch over to chia seeds if i don't have to grind them up. Yeah, they're pretty easy. Flax seeds, I'll also grind some flax seeds and put them in my smoothies, like if I'm putting something in a blender. Usually that, for me, that's in the evening. Okay. Yeah.

What about you? What do you do for breakfast? I have a morning ritual that's mostly food-based. I wake up and drink like a big glass of water, close to 32 ounces. So I put that away. Then I actually took some advice from Rob Wolf, and he took it from, I want to say, Matt Lalonde. Slow cook in the bacon. Drop up.

I still do mine in the pan, not on a grill. Drop the bacon in a pan. Slow cook it. Real low heat. And then I make juice. So I juice up a bunch of vegetables. Right now I'm juicing cucumber, carrots, kale, collard greens, ginger, turmeric. Those are both roots. Some other stuff too. Put a little bit of lemon in it too. That's good.

I get about between 12 and 16 ounces of juice every morning. I crush that and then after that, I finish up the bacon. I'll start it off low heat and then I turn it up. I say I slow cook it.

It's not that long, maybe 20 minutes. And then I pull the bacon out, drop four eggs in, scramble it most of the time. That way I can get all the fat from the bacon in my eggs. And then what I do is I press some coffee. So during, so I get my bacon and eggs on a plate and drink coffee. So that whole morning ritual takes like an hour. So if you want to do the same morning ritual,

you might have to get up a little bit earlier. But yeah, I mean, in an hour, I drink a bunch of water, a good amount of vegetables, a good amount of protein and fat, and enough caffeine to get the old brain working i like having the big glass of water at the beginning of the day something i didn't mention i don't don't consider it as a part of my breakfast maybe a part of my morning ritual though i i wake up and the first thing that i do is uh kind of like you said i drink a big glass of water which uh which i just keep on the counter

already filled up in a water bottle. So right when I wake up, I see that full water bottle sitting on my bathroom counter and I just crush it right away. And then I get in the shower afterward. That way, while I'm in the shower and getting dressed and whatnot, I've had a little bit of time to digest that big jug of water. That way, by the time breakfast comes around, I don't have that big full feeling still from drinking right you know a liter of water but it does help me it helps me wake up and i really do feel like i feel like much more clear the rest of the morning by having

that right yeah first thing one thing you're supposed to do is kind of jump start your digestion too so you haven't had anything in your stomach all night, no water, no food, no nothing. And then it's better to drop some water in there for the first thing. We're Rob Wolf talking about that. Yeah. What about afternoon? So, well, maybe go into this a little bit first. I know that both you and I do a lot of prep ahead of time. Yeah.

So like most of the time, say breakfast is the only thing i really prep on the spot and i think you're in the same boat uh so for lunch you probably just break out tupperware and heat it up i pretty much do uh and i talk about this a lot in the in the nutrition course about how to how to structure your day and structure your week to save a lot of time and a lot of that has to do with um doing two big meal preps throughout the week and for me it's sundays and wednesdays where i'll pretty much make all the meals that i'll eat during the middle of the day during those big meal prep sessions and then breakfast and dinner are the only meals that that i make like before and after the work day that actually make on the spot and so for the

middle of the day though yeah i don't want to sit down and really cook a meal. I want to be able to just pull out some Tupperware, put it on a plate, heat it up, eat it, and be done with my meal in 10, 20 minutes. So for example, yesterday I cooked a bunch of chicken wings, and I just put them in a plastic bag with a little bit of coconut oil and some smoked paprika, garlic powder, cumin, and one more thing, I can't remember off the top of my head, a little bit of salt and pepper, and then just baked them. Now I have a bunch of chicken wings in my fridge just waiting for me for lunch.

Also, I made some mashed turnips. Usually at lunch lunch I juice also which I guess I juice is one of those things that you have to do on the spot so that's really the only thing during lunch that takes me any amount of time for I guess I don't consider it lunch since I eat you know every every couple of hours but for one of my lunches I'll juice but other than that all I got to do is just pull out my my chicken and my my mashed turnips and then heat them up and i'm good to go and then usually about wednesday is about the time that all that's running out and so i'll do another big meal prep so this week i have a a big roast and

i bought some some carrots and celery onions sometimes i put daikon in it which is like a japanese radish and then this time i'm going to experiment with some jicama you have yours jicama no yeah it looks kind of like a big potato but it's not real starchy like a big potato where'd you get it whole foods okay no um i saw it actually in a recipe for tacos where you cut the jicama real thin and then you just you just soak it in water and then they become flexible but there's they still have a little bit of crunch to them and you use them as taco shells. I was about to ask, what were you doing looking at taco recipes, Doug?

It was paleo taco recipe? Yeah, it was in that Make a Paleo book. So I was learning about jicama and then it seemed like something that would go very well in a stew. And so since I was more or less making a stew or like a roast this week, so I figured I'd try and put some jicama in it. I haven't done it yet, so I don't know how it is, but I'm going stew or like a roast this week. So I figured I'd try and put some jicama in it. I haven't done it yet, so I don't know how it is, but I'm going to give that a shot this week. And that should last me through Wednesday through Saturday or Sunday

for my middle-of-the-day meals again. And then that makes my week so much easier, really only having to cook twice a day. And both times that I cook, they're very fast. Like breakfast is pretty quick. And then for dinner for me usually i just you know broil a steak which again takes you know 10 minutes and then while that's going on usually i make some type of like a big shake and in my blender you know with the

blueberries usually young coconut um you know with the water and scooping out the meat so i kind of got like my own coconut milk um a variety of berries, maybe some flax seeds, and a whole big old bunch of spinach. And then usually that's like my veggie portion of the meal. So steak and veggies is pretty much my dinner every day. And then the meat, you know, it'll vary. I'll have salmon or pork chops or whatever kind of meat that I happen to have that day. How many meals a day do you eat? If you count workout

shakes as a meal um usually it's between five and six depending on the day depends how many times i train that day so you might you might consume one to two shakes or one or three how many shakes max workout shakes yeah so you i usually have one per training session okay so if i per hard training session if it's a light session then maybe i won't but if i train twice a day then i'll have two once a day i'll have one if i don't train that day then i don't have any so if i train twice twice in a day and i count this as meals then maybe i'll have six or seven meals a day if i don't then it'll probably be like four or five okay now what about you i have no idea don't know? How many meals do I eat? I'm pretty bad.

I'm pretty bad lately. Well, I'm in preparing for any competitions. So I eat when I'm hungry, which is not good for me, for me personally. Yeah. Because I tend to under eat. I have a bad habit of getting really focused on a project or something and then forgetting about food for hours and hours on end. But if there's a competition coming up, I get extremely serious,

and then it's like every two and a half hours the alarm clock is going off or every three hours, and I eat every three hours. I can definitely tell a difference when I'm right on point and when I'm just eating when I'm hungry. I feel way better when I'm eating more frequently and on a schedule so um yeah we do the same thing we do a lot of like prep and I find that if I miss the prep the week of it totally throws off the whole week my week is screwed if I miss the prep on Sunday yeah and what lately I've been doing a lot of traveling. So Sunday is like a big prep day for me, mostly for my wife.

She does most of the food prep at my house. But I've been doing a lot of traveling. She's been doing a lot of traveling. So like Sundays have been crazy and that kind of throws off our whole week. And a lot of times I can tell a difference on those weeks where that happens. We still get back on track. It just takes a day or two sometimes. And we still make good food choices and we still, you know, we'll have to like, you know, we may go to Jason's Deli and get a salad instead, you know, for lunch so that we can,

that'll buy us some time so we can get whole food, get the whole foods and cook everything up. But this is a good example. This week, my wife is out of town for the whole week. She left on Friday, and she won't be back until Thursday night. So I'm all on my own, and I'm not very used to cooking.

I did do a lamb breast or a lamb belly, and you guys got to taste it. It was really good. It was good. A little bit of apple cider vinegar and wine with some chicken broth drop that in a crock pot for three hours on high good to go yeah it was really really flavorful um but uh most of my meals this week it's already begun is pre-made paleo

so um if you guys don't know what pre-made paleo is it's a it's a company out of uh atlanta and those guys make really great food and they uh they ship it to our facility um and we sell it to our members but it's just meat and veggies and it's they get it from uh local farms there near Atlanta and it's all really good food. Um, I'm not gonna, I'm not real good at preparing everything ahead of time. So I just do that this week. So if my,

I always have pre-made paleo on hand, like, uh, in my, in my deep freeze. So if I know that I'm going to be short on time for prepping food, I just pull that out and, and let it thaw out

and then i i have that for the week so last week i bought like 10 meals and uh i decided i was gonna live off of those while she was gone because i'm just i don't have time which means that i didn't make it a priority to cook and i made it a priority to do other stuff like hanging out with my friends. But the pre-made paleo makes that super easy. I think a lot of gyms sell that stuff, especially in the Atlanta area. I think there's a company like that near most CrossFit gyms. It's a very regional thing because it costs so much for them to ship things overnight. They ship it frozen to the gyms and stuff like that.

That's kind of what I'm doing this week. That's a couple of good strategies. I know day seven of that nutrition course is called Eating on the Go, and it's all about how to eat when you're traveling or when you're out at restaurants or when your situation isn't exactly ideal, like when you're staying in a hotel or maybe you're just going to be on the road, on the road all day long, or you're at a competition, you know, people have all kinds of questions about what to do in those situations. So we have a whole day dedicated to that exact same thing.

That's good. I mean, uh, uh wow brain freeze it's because my wife's out of town um my meals are thrown off and i can't think right yeah yeah i like jason's deli for that like that's the that's the easiest place and i i know uh ctp goes there all the time and then they probably know you by name by now huh oh yeah i've been there with him they're like hey how's it going what's up yeah salad bar is fantastic and especially if you get it to go you can get like two or three meals out of that salad because they give you a huge container you can do you just pack it full this dude gets like like a dozen eggs the whole day's worth of food packs it what what would it weigh in it like seven seven pounds? Six pounds. Six pounds salad. You're the only person I know that uses a salad bar to gain weight.

They should do like an episode of Man vs. Food where it's like not Jason's Deli, but Jason's Deli with CTP. See if you can finish this salad in 20 minutes. Anywhere that has a big salad bar is a great place for kind of emergency food when you're on the road we also like to go to you know any any japanese restaurant anywhere you can go where you can just you know get some sashimi and um and some you can just order avocado and mango or whatever you want with it oh yeah new place had it a couple weeks ago oh yeah uh i'm a big fan of like going to a sushi joint and just getting a few orders of sashimi and then i i started off with seaweed salad though oh yeah so seaweed seaweed's really good to eat maybe once a week if you can it's got a lot of iodine in it helps

remove some toxic products and stuff from your from your body. So you don't want to eat it every day. I don't know if that would be bad, but eating it every once in a while is really good. So what I like to do is I just get simple sushi order is seaweed salad and then just a few orders of sashimi. And then I'm usually nice and full. And I know I go with a lot of different people most people get the rolls because they like you know all that all the different flavors that come

with the rolls and don't get me wrong all those crazy like fried rolls with uh sour what was it was what they put cream cheese and all that other stuff like that stuff tastes really good but if you're trying to keep it paleo, seaweed salad and sashimi is perfect. I usually leave feeling really good and spending less money that way. I got something a couple weeks ago called a mermaid salad. Oh, yeah, that was good. It was fantastic. It was nothing but just a bunch of different cuts of fish

with a bunch of roe mixed in. And it was unreal. It was cheap, too. Yeah, you looked down the table at me. We were sitting quite a few people apart. I was like, man, you've got to try this. And like 30 seconds later, I was over your shoulder, like reaching into your bowl, and your girlfriend was like, what are you doing?

He asked me if I wanted some. It was a little bit. I got to taste. It was delicious. All right, let's move into move into i mean that's kind of like we we eat the same we eat like breakfast and then all of our lunches and dinners are kind of like the same type of meal we don't snack uh very much i think we're on the road nuts and beef jerky stuff like that's really good uh but a lot of people ask us about snacking and i usually just

kind of steer people. I used to give people ideas for snacks, but now I'm just like, eat another meal. Meat and veggies, every time you eat, shouldn't be a problem. Yeah, I found an easy meal on the road for me is just to stop at any grocery store and just grab a rotisserie chicken and just like a veggie platter that you would take to a party where it's got celery and carrots and cherry tomatoes or whatever in it just buy a veggie platter and a chicken and just take it in the car with you and that's a easy easy meal on the road where you get a good amount of food for like 10 or 15 dollars and and it's pretty portable yeah for sure yeah and you can usually get in and out of a grocery store and get that like in the same amount of time it takes to get, go through a drive through or something like that.

Mm hmm. So yeah. And it'll feed you and your friend. Yes. If you have friends. All right. Let's go ahead and answer some questions. Some folks have emailed us some questions.

Just so you know, there's a few ways you can contact us uh we prefer the uh website if you go to fitter.tv there's a ask a question link click on that that's the preferred method of question asking uh you can also reach us on our fan page uh the barbell shark fan page on facebook and uh i think you just email us straight up on the website too. Any method will get to us, but the ask a question button is probably, that helps us get really high quality questions. And we put some stuff on that page to kind of maybe turn the wheels for you so that you know what kind of question, help you formulate your question really well.

So we had a question on fish oil quality somebody was concerned about uh from brand to brand uh what what fish oil would be the best uh and we're going to talk a little bit about that uh and then we're also going to maybe talk a little bit any question about supplements and quality i always want to go back to like are you doing the most you can do with your food? You know, are you already eating, you know, grass-fed beef, wild-caught fish? Are you getting organic vegetables? And if you are getting organic vegetables,

are you getting, like, local organic? Like, are you doing everything you can possibly do to get really high-quality food? And if you're eating, you know, not great food and spending $200 a month on supplements, you might want to reevaluate like priorities on where your money's going in regard to your health. So if your diet's 95% of the way that it should be and you take some supplements and it kicks you up in the 98th percentile, you know, that's a good thing.

That might have been the right choice for the time. But if your diet's only 30% as good as it should be and you take some supplements and it kicks you up in the 98th percentile, you know, that's a good thing. That might have been the right choice for the time. But if your diet is only 30% as good as it should be and you take some supplements and it kicks you into 33rd percentile, then no big deal. Like nothing even really happened. You needed to fix your diet first because that's ultimately going to be where the biggest changes or the biggest, most significant changes lie. So you're totally right. You got to be eating quality food first if you try to supplement without eating quality food then you're more or less wasting your time and your money yeah so you should spend all that money you are spending on supplements on high quality food first yeah so i mean kind of getting that out of the way um and what what are people i think a

lot of people are being marketed to with fish oil uh and I know I get bombarded with it as a crossfitter you know you just sign up on some newsletters and you know probably on your your Facebook you know you're probably getting a lot of stuff your news feed and Twitter you know like buy this brand of fish oil it's the highest quality all this kind of stuff um I think first I mean what do you what do you look for in your fish oil? I know there's certain ratios of EPA and DHA and omega-3s and all that kind of stuff. In all the research you've done on fish oil, what do you think is the most ideal ratio

and the amounts that should be taken and all that kind of stuff? It's hard to know with different manufacturers of fish oil which ones are the best because oftentimes there really aren't studies specifically done in this brand versus this brand and so you really are kind of taking their word for it that their brand is better than another brand um which there's there's something to be said for for having a reputation in the market for being high quality uh but really as far as getting like quantitative data that says this this product is better than that product it's kind of hard to come by

so maybe we should back up a little bit and talk about what high quality really even means right with regard to fish oil it's it's two fatty acids epa and dha they're they're very highly unsaturated fatty acids which basically means that they have, um, uh, a high degree of oxidation. They can go bad really, really quickly if they're exposed to heat, light air or moisture. So, uh, high quality would mean that they haven't gone rancid yet. Uh, and it would also with respect to, um, cold water fish, they oftentimes what the larger fish at least have, um have heavy metals in them like mercury, which basically gets in them from pollution.

Like big plants produce smoke and whatnot or whatever. I'm not sure if smoke is the right thing there, but pollution. Water smoke. Yeah, exactly. And then, of course, everything kind of ends up in water, ends up getting trickled out into the ocean eventually. And then those larger fish that have longer lifespans tend to accumulate more of these heavy metals over time. And so things like salmon and tuna, which are larger fish with longer lives, tend to accumulate more mercury than smaller fish like anchovies and sardines and things that are very tiny so if you have fish oil that comes from salmon or tuna then it may be more likely that it has heavy metals in it or if like or uh

excuse me if you have fish that comes from the smaller fish like sardines and anchovies or maybe mackerel then it may be less likely that it has heavy metals in it. So the last study I saw on that showed that really only like one out of 50 in the ones they studied had heavy metals in it. I think they were testing mercury specifically. So it's unlikely that you will find any heavy metals in your fish oil. Even the stuff that's not marketed

is like super high quality, very pure, all that kind of stuff. Right, so yeah, even if it's a generic brand more than likely they don't have it in there i guess it's a possibility but if you see marketing that says you know we don't have this well maybe they don't but probably the rest of the fish oils that don't say that probably don't either right so that might be something that uh that you could kind of ignore in the marketing um as far as oils going bad or going rancid uh man i really couldn't tell you again that's just you're you're going off of

they're going off of what they say and how much you trust that company and how much you believe them i know i found it interesting when uh i was buying this one particular brand of fish oil and then they switched from a white bottle to a clear bottle and like as soon as saw the clear bottle, I was like, this doesn't make any sense. Why would they do that? I think they were trying to show off the product and how the fish oil looks, but you're exposing it to more light. Definitely, theoretically, as far as the quality of the fat would go, you wouldn't want to do that. I have no idea really how much that affects it i don't know if being in gel caps and having no exposure to oxygen makes it where it doesn't

really matter which might be the case but i i don't know from a scientific standpoint i've never seen anything that said no it's totally fine and not to worry about it right so again i mean it's a bit of a toss up in some cases where again, you're kind of just relying on what the manufacturer says and how much you trust them. Yeah. I know we had a, we had a really good conversation with Brad Pope.

I think it was episode four. Um, we went three episode three. I really want to have him back and discuss it again, uh, discuss more stuff in regard to, uh, just supplement,

uh, quality in general and the FDA. The FDA and the claims of supplement companies and what's really in them and all that kind of stuff. That's a conversation I think that's worth delving deeper into. And I know a lot of fish oil companies they're all want you know they talk about you know hey we had this this study done on our stuff and it's got all this stuff that's good about it and that's probably why it costs more so it costs more you know they went they went through all these steps to show you the consumer that they're okay and that doesn't mean the other guys

aren't okay too like you were saying but you But in my opinion, with the fish oil, the more money you spend, you're more assured. So if you've got money to burn, and money's not an issue, going up, a more expensive brand could be really good. But for me personally, i'm middle of the road i mean i i take the the marx system stuff the whatever comes with what i know i know the way it's primal fuel but it's called vital omegas yeah yeah so i know they've got a good good ratio in

there and actually speaking of the ratio i know uh back when back when we were uh shopping at costco more more frequently than we are today uh we used to buy the the single strength fish oil and sell that at the gym we just sold regular kirkland brand and then uh we ended up looking into the double and triple strength and initially we were like well why don't we just buy triple strength it's it triple strength. And then we started looking at it. And the single strength, I apologize if these numbers aren't 100% correct, but the two fatty acids, again, are EPA and DHA. And from what I know, EPA is a little cheaper to come by than DHA.

And so usually there's, in a regular 1 gram one gram, 1000 milligram fish oil pill, usually they're about 30% actual fish oil. And then the rest of it is, is other stuff that more than likely is just there to make the pill look bigger. I really don't know. I couldn't say for sure. And then, uh, the ratio between those two fatty acids within that small 30% is 120 milligrams of, of DHA and 180 of EPA. if I remember correctly. I apologize if that's backwards, but I'm pretty sure that's the way it is, where there's more EPA than DHA because EPA is a little bit cheaper. And if you look at the double strength, it's pretty much double that exact ratio.

But then if you look at the triple strength, it's almost all EPA added in, the cheap one added in, and the DHA and the double and triple strength is almost the exact same. And so we, for that reason, for a long time sold the double strength at our facility just because it really didn't make much of a difference for the DHA, which is the fatty acid that's a little harder to come by. Right, but it costs a lot more. I think from a cost analysis too, even if it was that way, it wasn't worth it. fatty acid that's a little harder to come by right but it costs a lot more all right from i think from a cost analysis too even if it was that way it wasn't worth the markup yeah we ran all the

numbers at the time and we found out that the double strength was the way to go so when you're when you're buying your fish at all just be sure to look on the back of it and make sure that there's a good ratio in between the two where i guess you should have about 1.5 times as much EPA as DHA. And if it's less than that, then you're probably getting shorted on your DHA more than likely. I could probably go look at some labels and pull some numbers for that too if anyone's interested. Okay. I think we covered pretty much everything on fish oil. I think the one thing that's probably missing in regard to fish oil and information is that really I have not been able to find any independent studies comparing different brands.

Every brand has studies which they fund. They fund some lab to conduct this research, And then they post the research on their website, which is not a bad thing at all. But again, you're not going to, you're not getting, you know, brand A, B, C, D, you know, lined up in one study and, you know, because who's going to fund that? You know, maybe we can get the consumers together. All right. We're going to move on from fish oil and talk a little bit about creatine.

We had a question in regard to – the question was sent to you, I think. Or you picked it up off of the fan page, maybe. Yeah. No, they really were just asking about the different types of creatine products. Not necessarily brand names, but just buying straight creatine as a product itself or buying a proprietary mix that has a bunch of sugars and stimulants and other things in it. So they asked about that. And then they also asked about loading and just using it in general, like who really needs it. It was just more or less about the basics of creatine, which i know we've been using creatine both of us for for years and years and years so maybe this will help explain um you know the excuse me maybe maybe explaining the basics of creatine first will help kind of automatically answer those questions so basically what creatine

does is if your body has three energy systems which basically means that you you can make energy three different ways so you can make energy really really fast or for lack of a better explanation really really fast kind of fast and then very slowly but but sustainable for a long period of time and creatine takes that first energy system and instead of only making it last six to eight seconds it'll make it last we'll say, seven to nine seconds or eight to ten seconds. It'll make it last just a little bit longer. So that's the fastest way that you can produce energy, but it doesn't last very long. So if you're doing a heavy set of three on squats, for example, it might let you do a heavy set of four with that same weight.

You can do an extra rep. or if you're running a 100-meter sprint and right around yard 70 or 80, instead of running 100% full speed, now you're starting to drop off to 98, 97, 96 by the time you cross the finish line. Well, creatine might let you maintain that 100% full speed for 10 or 20 yards longer. So it'll give you a little bit of edge in those very specific strength or speed or power type activities so if you're someone who competes in anything where you have to move at max speed or max strength then supplementing with creatine is a great idea any performance athlete ever yeah more or less anybody that has to go really fast and take a break and then go really fast

and then take a break so if you're an interval athlete or a strength or power athlete then creatine is probably going to be beneficial for you it's super cheap and there's been seven or eight hundred studies on it that basically shows that it works and there's negligible side effects and there's really no reason that you you shouldn't take it or have to cycle off of it if you're're one of those types of athletes. Yeah. I think, I think the, the cycling on and off thing came from, it was, they just did it in the early days in the early research they were doing cycling on and cycling off.

And a lot of times supplement companies, the recommendation for how to take their product is based on the research. And it's pretty much whatever the researcher, you know, it can be pretty arbitrary. So, uh. I think a lot of people cycle on and off creatine, but there's no need. We've been on it. I never come off.

You really don't need to. I come off when I go on vacation. One of the things that happens with creatine is that it breaks down into creatinine. If you have really high levels of creatinine, then people think that you're going into kidney failure and so some people i think i don't know if this is 100 why this happened but it might be that some people saw that they had high levels of creatinine they were like well maybe you don't want to stay on it all the time might be bad for your kidneys and that's what people used to think but if you have no pre-existing kidney conditions they basically found out that it doesn't affect your kidneys at all it does not it's not bad for you it's kind of like like having a high protein diet it's bad for your kidneys like

if you don't have any kidney issues it's totally not i think you're you're more likely to have elevated creatinine levels from just physical exertion instead of a supplement like you train real hard and then go get your blood drawn you're gonna have like elevated creatinine so yeah anytime you're sore and you've you've broken down muscle tissue then you're gonna you're going to have elevated creatinine. Anytime you're sore and you've broken down muscle tissue, then you're going to show signs of that. That's part of the reason people tell you not to train two days for a blood test, for example. I've had people say, should I come off of creatine? Is it going to make my creatinine levels go up?

I'm like, no, just don't train. It's the training that's going to elevate those. I know guys that have been on creatine and all they do is cut the training and they're they're fine their levels are perfectly fine um he also asked about proprietary blends versus pure product or 100 creatine monohydrate um yeah i mean the there's a more companies that are pumping in all sorts of weird stuff along with the creatine than not so it's probably a little bit harder to find and maybe not so much anymore because creatine's been along around for a long time but yeah you want to just buy the pure product i mean there's

a lot of supplement companies out there that make the proprietary blend they have research done on the proprietary blend and when it's you know the creatine is what's being really effective but a lot of times you know they'll throw in uh beta alanine which is actually a good product too beta alanine and uh caffeine a load a bunch of stuff in like that which are they're really cheap products uh they're beneficial but they're cheap they market way way up and then uh you know you're like oh i feel it it's like oh you feel the create the caffeine like the creatine is not gonna like make you feel like great right off the bat it takes like 10 weeks to build up in your system if you want to load you can kind of get that built up a little bit faster

but it's not exactly necessary if you're're in a hurry to get your levels really high, then sure, you can load. And creatine's cheap enough the way you could load, and it wouldn't be a problem. I mean, $20 in creatine could last you like three months. Yeah, at least. I mean, really, I think the equation for how much creatine you need is 0.03 grams per kilo,

which if you take me and just round up a little bit you could say i'm 100 100 kilo person which means three grams a day so three grams a day usually by creatine 500 or 1000 grams at a time it's going to last you months and it's only 15 or 20 dollars so it's super super cheap so yeah you're right if you uh if you do have a competition coming up a week from now and you haven't been taking any creatine and you want to get the effects of it then you probably should load which means that you take you know about three to five gram dose you know between three to five times per day um but if you don't have anything coming up and you you just start taking creatine on a single serving per day basis then you know you know, you'll be saturated in, in probably four weeks,

or maybe even less. And then at that point, you know, if you miss a day or two here or there, it's not the end of the world, because you're still going to have a ton in your system, it's not going to, it's not just going to disappear after one day. Yeah. Which also means that since your cells are saturated, and you, you have as much in there as you're more than going to put in there, if you like miss creatine in your workout shake that day, it's not like you don't have any anymore or you missed it. You just need to make sure you take it at some point throughout the day, most days of the week, and it's there.

So if you miss your creatine in your workout shake and you've got to hit a big squat that day, don't freak out. You still have it. It's all still in there. I wish Chris were here right now. He's got a funny story about that chris moore yeah it's like he uh he had like a power lifting me i think it was like his first big one he's like he goes up to columbus ohio yeah he discovers that when he gets there he gets there like the day before he discovers he doesn't have creatine in his bag like he left it at home right like he's like oh no like freaks out runs the gnc yeah he looks back on it he's like

like what was i doing i had no you know taking creatine the day of the competition yeah didn't even matter yeah i've heard guys that like they only take creatine like on the days where they have a big squat it's like that's a total waste of time if you're not consistent with it you know at least for a little while then you're not going to have you're not going to get those those benefits it's not one of those things where you take it like a pre-workout drink. You take it one day and you feel the effects like drinking a cup of coffee or like caffeine would respond. You okay?

Well, I was looking at the time to see where we were at, and then my back cracked a lot. Yeah. I'm fine. I guess we never really talk about kind of what creatine is uh creasing is not some magic substance that you can only get through supplementation all it is is just three amino acids which are the building blocks of protein all bound together and so you you get it from from natural sources all the time like if you ate if you had a pound of

beef you'd probably get a couple of grams of creatine just normally so So all it is is that same product that you would get from meat already, and you're just getting a little bit extra through supplementation. Kind of like fish oil. You get it through food, but it's easy to get it through supplementation. So if you're trying to maximize and get an ideal amount, then it's just easier to supplement with it. Yeah, it's not anything out of this world crazy. Yeah, you'd find it in food anyway.

Yeah, and if you're a vegan or world crazy. Yeah, you'd find it in food anyway. Yeah, and if you're a vegan or anything like that, you have to take it. Yeah, if you're vegan, then it's a great idea to take creatine because you're not getting a whole lot in your regular diet. It's a bad idea to be a vegan, first off. But if you are, go creatine. All right, we have a few questions and some more business-related gym running type questions. So we'll try to run through these pretty fast.

I'm not sure most of our audience is really interested in this, so we'll run through them pretty fast. Asking if there's tricky areas in starting your own business or your own gym. I'd say there's probably tricky areas for opening any business. First question is probably a facility plus insurance. I know that the tricky thing with the facility usually has to do with code enforcement. So when you go in somewhere and you figure out exactly what you want, CrossFit gyms are really

easy or any kind of fitness facility is really easy to put together it's usually a big open floor with rubber mats and then a bathroom and maybe some offices i mean it's nothing crazy so it shouldn't cost a whole lot of money and what a whole lot of money is from one person to the next can vary greatly um i know we recently uh we had a gym put together and i think the build out was twenty thousand dollars uh not bad and that included like you know redoing the ceilings and painting them got the walls uh added uh expanded a bathroom so it could be ada compliant um for people with disabilities, added a shower, and made the office a little bit nicer,

cut out so we can look out the window from the office, all that type of stuff. So the big deal on that, though, is code enforcement. They can come in and say, you know, this door isn't wide enough or, you know, you need an extra fire extinguisher. I know that on the fire extinguisher side of things, the best thing to do is just call someone and have them come install it and schedule them. They'll charge you like, you know, $50 to $100 a year. They'll come in, check your tags,

make sure the pressure's up on your fire extinguishers and just take care of it for you. If you can get as much of that kind of stuff just automated, that's good um outsource all that stuff exactly i would uh when you when you rent a place negotiate with the landlord to uh get uh them to pay the build out it might end up costing you more month to month but you can say negotiate a little bit higher monthly fee for you uh in order to get you get more money for the landlord to commit to a build out. If you're trying to do a year or two lease, you're probably not going to get anything. But if you're signing a five year lease, then you can usually get a decent amount of build out negotiated in there.

And then you can also put know put some code enforcement and code enforcement content contingencies into the lease so you know you can say hey we got to be able to get up the code or else this lease isn't going to work yeah try definitely find out all the things you need to do for code before you sign your lease yes because if they they come back in and they say oh wow you guys need sprinklers in here and oh shit well that's 50 grand yes and you had no idea and now you're in a five-year lease yeah you could have just had gotten a different building somewhere else that you didn't have to spend 50 grand on on sprinklers yeah after you sign the lease I would say the best thing we we did ever happen to us

but right as like a worst-case scenario I've heard of people not being able you know starting a lease and not being able to open for months and months and months. Best thing we ever did was I got a broker. A broker that does, she's my go-between. When you go lease a building, more than likely, you're not dealing with the landlord yourself. It's usually investors or it might be the landlord themselves, in which case you're probably in a much better scenario for you. But they've got someone representing them.

And so what you need is someone representing you. And your broker is going to get paid out of your contract. You're not going to have to pay anything out of pocket. It's totally worth doing because they're going to save you more money than they're going to cost you, I promise. So we actually use Laura Tresvent here in Memphis, and she's worked a couple deals for us, and she's really good. Yeah, she's fantastic. If you live in Memphis and you need help from a a broker i highly recommend her she's fantastic she's really nice and

there's a lot of things that went in negotiating i had no idea i have been informed and i would have i would have gotten to like without having a broker you know i i don't know how people negotiate stuff without brokers i really don't there's too much stuff that you have to know. So that's for the facility. For insurance, super easy, CrossFit RRG. If you're not a CrossFit facility, I really don't know what to tell you because we just went with CrossFit RRG, and they cover everything. I feel extremely safe with that insurance.

There's other insurance I haven't felt so safe with in the past because they're like, oh, we'll cover this but not this. There's just pages and pages of sketchy stuff. I felt like if something happened, they were going to have some crazy investigation. With CrossFit RRG, they're very much in your interest because it is a risk retention group and not just an insurance company. Yeah, if you're not a CrossFit gym and you have questions about insurance, call the National Fitness Business Alliance.

They usually have pretty good recommendations for anything that's non-CrossFit in the fitness world. Yeah. Building a client base. That's a huge question or a very broad question because building a client base is uh not just about getting people in the door but about retention as well so i mean retention i feel like starts with leadership from the coaches and proper programming. Your program has to be top-notch. It's got to make sense. It can't be random.

I think if you can't develop a community before you have a gym, then it's going to be also hard for you to develop a community after you have a gym too. It's not going to magically change once you have your own facility. If you can't get a group of people together in your garage or at the park to train, then it's going to be very hard for you to grow your gym initially. So if you can get that group of people together before you open, when you open, you'll have a community already and then it'll just feed forward. Yeah. It's on that snowball effect. Yeah. But do it before you open

though. Yes. You should have a Facebook page. You should already be having events and little CrossFit community potlucks and stuff. You should already be having all that stuff before you even open. Yeah. You're going to forget all the fancy marketing and stuff you have to pay for. You've got to really focus on word of mouth. I mean, if you can do an amazing job with clients, they're going to drag their friends in there. They may be kicking and screaming, but they'll get in there.

And then once they get results, you know, that's all you have to do. If you have a superior product, which, you know, kind of depending on what town you're in, if you have a superior product, sales is not hard. And retention shouldn't be hard either. So that's kind of focus on your programming focus on leadership as a coach first um and i think that's about it for the business side of things uh and and regard that i've been getting i've been getting uh quite a

few questions about running a gym and stuff like that and we've we've done a i think we've done an exceptional job with faction uh compared to um maybe how some how we used to do i'll compare ourselves to ourselves that we definitely hit a turning point at some point i talked to a lot of gym owners and um throw around a lot of ideas and i think it's it would be a good idea for us to put together some business products possibly so if anyone's interested in that just let us know so i do get a lot of business questions but it doesn't always mean that people want any kind of business product or something that'll make their life easier so if you want that go ahead and email us off the website too or or ask more questions about it. So whatever you want to know more about shoot questions on those

things. Uh, don't forget, we do have that, the live online nutrition course, uh, which is going to start October 15th. Yep. October 15th. Uh, basically how it's going to get broken down is that we're going to do eight total sessions and beginning Monday, October 15th, we're going to do session number one, and then it'll go monday through thursday that week and then monday thursday of the following week so monday through thursday for two weeks in a row eight sessions total if you again if you want to register for that all those live sessions will be free and then we're going to package up those recordings and it'll be a new product that we're going to sell on fitter.tv in the shop so if you you want to watch it live, it's totally free.

But then after the fact, if you, you know, if you miss a couple of the sessions, or if you want to just have all those to watch, you know, just in the future for whenever you want to watch them, then you can buy it, you can buy it as a package after the course is over. So if you want to register, like I said, go to fitter.tv and then right below the newsletter opt-in, there'll be a little banner. Just click on the banner and then it'll take you to a little opt-in box where you can, again, put in your name and your email. And right before October 15th, we'll send you all the

information you need to log into that live webinar. How long are the course or the classes going to be? They'll be between 30 and 45 minutes long. We haven't set a time for them yet, but more than likely they'll be in the evenings on those days. Okay. Probably around six or seven-ish in the evening. Excellent. Very cool. I'm looking forward to that. It's going to be fun. Yeah. All right, guys. I will see you next time.