Barbell Shrugged - Fixing The Broken Fitness System with OPEX Founder James FitzGerald— Barbell Shrugged #381

Episode Date: March 13, 2019

Inaugural CrossFit Games Champion and industry-leading educator, James FitzGerald, has dedicated his life to bringing honor to the coaching profession. As Founder of OPEX Fitness his Coaching Education and Gyms Licensing Programs have provided thousands of coaches with the tools needed to professionalize their passion. James’ flagship program, The OPEX Coaching Certificate Program reflects his 20 + years of coaching expertise and is set apart by the breadth of coaching theory and practical application taught. In early 2019, James achieved another career milestone with the release of Mixed Modal, a groundbreaking course specifically designed to educate coaches on the long-term development of competitive Functional Fitness athletes   In this episode of Barbell Shrugged, we talk about James’ background, what the system is selling vs. what you actually need, the key components of OPEX gyms, basic lifestyles guidelines, how to fix broken gym culture, creating alignment, fitness for teens,why you are not an athlete, the deeper questions of existence and why we are all here, and much more.   Enjoy! - Anders and Doug   Episode Breakdown ⚡️0-10: James’ background, why he is the person who can change the coaching system, and asking the tough question, what is the point of exercise? ⚡️11-20: The key components of OPEX gyms (hint: it’s not that complicated), what the system is selling vs. what you need, and figuring out what fitness means to your clients ⚡️21-30: The system of OPEX fitness tests, the specific fitness tests OPEX uses, and why personal training often turns into babysitting ⚡️31-40: Leading others toward being self sufficient in fitness, basic lifestyle guidelines, how bodybuilding reps add up to great expression of fitness, the “blackmark” that the fitness world put on James when he started participating in functional fitness, and the broken model that many gyms are operating under ⚡️ 41-50: Creating success for the client, coach and business owner, fixing a broken culture, creating alignment in a gym, and what do you really want as a coach and business owner? ⚡️51-60: Why you are not an athlete, the importance of language, the assessment process in OPEX gyms, and the importance of quality food hygiene practices ⚡️61-70: Changing people’s mindset around nutrition, why intention is king, how building a relationship with your clients creates a successful coaching practice, James’ research on fitness tracking technology, why the majority of the population do not need fancy recovery protocols, the seven fundamental systems   ⚡️71-80: Why health is not the focus of athletes, the recovery protocols elite athletes engage in, the definition of Mixed Modal, fitness for teens and why it’s not a good idea for them to be competing in functional fitness, and the price (health) childhood athletes pay in adult life ⚡️81-90: The STEM vs. physical activity battle, the privatization of physical education for future generations, the new fitness and health education platform for coaching kids, getting functional fitness into the Olympics, and who James has learned from ⚡️91-100: Diving into the deeper questions of life, thoughts on death, hashing out tough topics through conversation, the importance of love, the toll social media takes on young women, and the current state of the world for young women ⚡️101-113: Paul Chek, getting unplugged, losing identity, and where to find James   ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs-fitzgerald ----------------------------------------------------------------------- @organifi - www.organifi.com/shrugged to save 20% @sunlighten:www.sunlighten.com "ShruggedCollective" for $200 off + free shipping @PerfectKeto - perfectketo.com/shrugged for 20% off   ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

It looks like just a barbell, but that barbell, the weight it holds, and the racket sits on are the catalyst for everything that has happened in my life. On Monday, Mike Bledsoe resigned as the CEO of the Shrugged Collective. His legacy at Shrugged, along with the eyes of CTP and the soul of Chris Moore, radically shifted the landscape of strength and conditioning for the rest of time. My name is Anders Varner. I am not here to fill shoes or take away from these legends. I'm here to tell you a story about strength, the way I see it. For over two decades, the weight room has been my sanctuary. I have coached thousands of athletes, trained with the most famous athletes in the world, and I have something to say.

I believe in strength. I believe that inside every single one of us, there is an innate desire to uncover our true potential. I believe that developing a physical capacity, like air, food, and water, is essential to life. I believe there is a species of human, distinct from the masses, more equipped to evolve to the demands of life. A species that over time has decided the best way to live an easy life is to live a life committed to confronting adversity. We no longer live in the jungle, but the law of the jungle lives inside us. Our home is the weight room. To defy the ease of modern society, stand up to the perils of entitlement, and understand that over time effort conquers all. The barbell is a symbol of our commitment to always press forward, deeper than reps and sets, exploring the animal that lives inside us.

Because this journey of physical adaptation pushes past the musculature, bleeding into the way we experience life. Strength is a choice. Doug Larson, thank you for trusting me with Barbell Shrugged and our shared vision for the lifelong pursuit of strength.

To the audience, thank you for your support over the last 15 months. I'm so grateful for all the messages and love since taking over this microphone. None of this is taken for granted. As long as this microphone exists, I will be in your ear every Wednesday, delivering you the best conversation and strength. I have spent my whole life training for this single moment, and now that it is here, it is clear that the work starts today, and we are just getting started. James Fitzgerald, the CEO of OPEX, shaper of strength conditioning, and the first winner of the CrossFit Games is our guest today.

Enjoy the show, and as always, pursue strength. Good to go. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Warner. Doug Larson, Alex Macklin, James Fitzgerald in the house, all the way from Scottsdale, Arizona, right? Yes. I got it right.

Sometimes nothing else happens in Arizona in general except those like Scottsdale and Phoenix. So it's like 50-50, just roll the dice. That's true. Scottsdale, nailed it. Hard not to like Scottsdale and Phoenix. So it's like 50-50. Just roll the dice. That's true. Scottsdale. Hard not to like Scottsdale. It's a great place. For sure.

We're hanging out at the FitAid booth. Per podcasting usual, I have to have my FocusAid. I don't recommend it for longevity. But for a short-term solution to talking all day long, FocusAid is yours. Oh, phenomenal product. How's it going? Welcome to the show.

I'm good, man. Can you bring that a little bit closer? Yes. You're so soft-spoken. You have so many things to say. You could just yell them out if you'd like. Maybe I'm just more careful with what I say now. We turned the gain down on these mics

because there's so much background noise, so talk a little bit extra loud, and it'll pick up a little better. Okay, I'll try. Cool. So you just got done doing a talk talking about KPIs for elite athletes? Yep, for mixed modal athletes in general.

If no one knows my background, it's got a good history in the sport of CrossFit. Yeah, I would love to start there. You were the initial winner. Yeah, I won in 2007. I remember. I was there chasing you on the message boards. Who is this guy up in Canada? There's no strong people in Canada.

Us Americans should win this sport. Actually, I wasn't strong. I was beating you guys in capacity. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, so I've been doing it for a long time. And over that period of time with experiences like you gain in sports, you get to extract these things that are quite particular to what creates an increase in performance. And I think my time as a coach and athlete, that experience has led to me like pulling those things out.

And what I'm trying to do now is create some organization and structure around the sport um for numerous different reasons but i think it needs it um and i think it's uh not to sound like a dick but i think i'm the only person who can do it you've been in and off i think people trust you i would agree yeah yeah and i'm not sure if if trust has anything to do with it because marketing can can change up what that looks like today. Well, marketing short term, you've been around. You've put the work in. Yeah, I'm inspired by it.

I'm excited about it. It gets me up in the morning to try to give these athletes and coaches a lifetime in the sport. Why do you feel like you're the only one who can do it? You just have a different vision for what it should be than other people? Yeah, I think, well, two things. things i have the resources and that resources is my brain and um also time um so i i've been in it for a while where i'm not really sure that uh that leadership is going to take place inside the current system um and for multiple different reasons i think it's going in a a direction for other reasons outside the coach and

athlete longevity. It's around commercial interest and a bunch of other factors, which is not wrong. It's not the way it's going to go. So I think that plus my experience in it, but being an outsider, I'm not, you know, from what the market knows, I'm not deep in CrossFit. I did. I think this also probably adds to it.

I did. If I ever drank the Kool-Aid, I bathed in it. Yeah. You know? Sure. So to give you an idea, like I'm not a hypocrite on what's inside or not that I haven't experienced it. And so I think having that outside perspective gives me maybe an opportunity

to structure that stuff effectively. For people that don't know you or details about your background, where do you feel like you cross over and there's similarities between what you now believe and practice and what CrossFit you believe CrossFit believes and practices and where you are uniquely different? I can't speak to them, but I can just say from what I see on the outside looking in, I think we first have to define what CrossFit is.

And just because it's down in words, that doesn't mean anything to me. So if we define CrossFit as constant, varied, high-intensity functional movements, then my belief is that in an individual design, people shouldn't get that. And when it comes down to business, long-term it won't work when you define what business is. And my definition of business is different than theirs, which, again, is just the way it goes. But I think there's a lot of attributes that are very similar in terms of work ethic, the positive side of intensity, and what we can extract from that.

So those would be some broad ones. There could be a lot more if you want to pull out either or. I would love it. I definitely want to pull it all out. Well, you want to ask, I think, because that's as broad as I could be in terms of the differences. But fundamentally, it's... Do you have an actual issue with the

definition itself and that people should not be doing functional yeah for my coaches and my yeah for my coaches and my clients i do because it's not that's not what i believe in you know so if you were and then you got to pull out you know again it because it gets really gray because you know you start then arguing upon well you know who are you to say that is or people love this or it's participation. We just attract all these other emotional factors to what the definition of success is for it. Yeah. And that's where it gets muddled. Yeah.

Well, if we were to take somebody that knows nothing and raise them through a strength and conditioning world, what does that process look for you look like for you because i yeah that may be able to define kind of your perception a little bit well first we got to figure what the fuck exercise is yeah no like no one is no one has decided to like take on that role to talk about its intention now for what it means right yep like honestly and i'm i'm still on the like 85 percent zone of it you know i'm caught up in what you're supposed to do exercise we have to do kettlebells and we have to run right but it's all been for like metabolic processes and not for function long term i think that got all fucked up because the body beautiful and high intensity yada yada yada but that's where i'd first go is

like why fucking do any exercise because in a biological sense it makes fucking absolutely no sense yeah and if your argument is well that's what people do that's not a good argument for exercise that's really new but the other reason why it's not a strong argument because if you do it to fix a bad lifestyle that's also not a good reason to do exercise doesn't mean you don't do it does it make sense so i'd start there and then next go to intention like what's your what's your overall goals for exercise and where does this fit in and this is where the two lines cross obviously the crossfit conversation or opex right is that we think there's clearly defined lines right here and i'm not sure if crossfit believes

that i don't want to speak for them but i have very clearly defined lines intention for athlete is pleasure and pain and points and prizes yeah and they don't give a fuck about health. Because that's the intent. And the other side, and then the other side, and like, if you're saying, oh, you know, this may not be good for your knees, they're like, who the fuck are you? Like, I don't care about that.

So if that's not the conversation over here, over here is a completely different conversation on intention. I think that all the things that you have to say are going to be really, really important. But at any point, we could change CrossFit with NASM, ACSM, all of the big branches of certifications. Am I correct in that? Like your way is different than all of them. CrossFit's just the one that introduced you into what you're doing. No.

Go back and ask that question again. Okay. So if CrossFit is just like the governing body of functional fitness or constantly varied functional movements done at high intensity, and NASM has their thing, and ACSM has their thing, and you're different than all of those. We could, instead of saying, like, CrossFit's wrong, you're saying NASM is also not correct in what they're doing, and ACSM is also not correct. The CSCS has holes that we need to be talking about

because they're probably not talking about exercise as well. Yeah, my point is to not even go there because we're not even talking about intent. So I'm saying you've got to go down a level. Those are just tools. OPEX is tools. ACSM has tools. Those are just tools. How you want to yield. ACSM has tools. Those are just tools. How you want to yield those or wield them,

that's up to you. But it's a useless conversation, is what I'm saying, of those tools. I don't even want to bark about high-intensity interval training. I can if you want, but what's the fucking intention? That's right. You need to go back to that. CrossFit can do a whole lot of help for a certain audience right and the argument is very strong for it right tribal participation percentages of

people making good movements if they're beginners you're just moving right you did nothing and now you're moving hey who the fuck of us to judge that right but when you get you got to get into then say well what's the intention for that client and that coach and that whole group long term? And, yes, there isn't a lot that I believe in besides my own for that long-term success for that entire audience. Yeah. Right? Because we connect it to intention. Sorry.

Oh, good. So when you're working with a new athlete, what does that look like as far as the intake process with really digging with, like, really digging deep, figuring out, like, why they're really here, what they really want to get out of this? Have they thought about all the different perspectives necessary to make the training what it really needs to be, both in the short and long term? Yeah. I'll discuss it first for our gyms. That's our OPEX gyms.

And that's for general population participation, okay, for exercise. Yeah. Because that's a pretty systematic process, right? People that are not competing. Yes. Gotcha. Okay. And then don't, if I forget, bring me to the exercise,

I was going to say exercise addiction audience as well. You can stop there. That's good. That's a subconscious slip there. Well, it takes one to know one. It takes one to know one. So you have a competitive audience. So in our OPEX gyms, we have a system. The OPEX

gyms shines a beacon. And as you guys all know, with marketing and advertising, you shine the beacon to get the right message. So you get that line person in front of you. And then we get a chance to sit down and talk to them about their long-term strategies and their perception on fitness. First, like, what is your version of fitness? What does fitness mean to you? Where are you sitting right now? After that, we go through a detailed OPEX-style profile of body, move, and work, which basically just pumps out where exactly that person sits right now, nutrition-wise, behavior-wise, movement-wise, capacity-wise. And then the coach, with my training in OPEX,

gives them the principles to help that person move forward. But it's generally, we like to say that within our facilities, we try to build clients up to make them self-responsible long-term to reach autonomy in exercise. So our goal of our clients inside of our gyms long-term is not to be there. So eventually they don't need a coach. They can take care of themselves. They should be able to. Now, this is where it gets into, you know, philosophy on fitness again and exercise, right?

We are intelligently designed humans now. Like it's not about survival and reproduction anymore. You know because I think you had a background in sport of pugilism. Do you have a background in fighting? I do. I fought MMA for a long time. Okay, so that's what I was referring to. Oh, I'm sorry.

Yeah, that's why I consider two people fighting against one another. Okay. Gotcha. I wasn't sure how you were defining that, but yes, I fought MMA for a long time. Okay, so that's what I was referring to. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's why I consider two people fighting against one another. Okay. Gotcha. I wasn't sure how you were defining that, but yes, I fought in MMA for a number of years. Okay, that's what it's defined as. And the reason why I say that is because that is you have ability to survive and to work in that environment to keep you moving forward. You have to fucking survive and figure it out, right?

But humans to walk around on this planet today, there's not that many challenges to do that. That's not imposed in front of them. That's my point I was making. I'm like, we don't have to fucking wake up and go for food. You don't have to. You don't even have to leave your house. It shows up. We have to structure fucking exercise.

Think about that. We have to structure it. We have to put it into our system in order to do it. And that's what we hope our clients at those gyms eventually end up doing is like they fall in love with fitness they know it's a part of their life like fucking breakfast and they just make it part of the system if we can help them in the opex gym that's fantastic over time they'll get to maybe still have a coach for mentoring and behaviors and other things etc etc what are

some key components of uh your exercise structure the structure you're talking about? In the gyms? Sure. Yeah. Resistance training and easy aerobic work. Easy aerobic work. Yeah. Okay. What's the difference between, like, yeah, go into that easy aerobic work. Yeah. It's, well, you know, for people who you take that large group of general population, again, if it's structured design, the big question you want to ask is what should the exercise be that's going to allow them to climb a mountain when they're 95 have sex in the morning eat three meals a day and fucking be mentally acute because again what that is in reverse engineering yeah yeah and if you reverse engineer that back it is bipolar training it's extended endurance activity

and it's resistance now i could go into 10 different areas on either side why each of those are you know medically positive for all those things you know moving blood lymph drainage you know etc etc etc all the positive things over here bone mineral density you know muscle sensitivity for using fuels more appropriately, a whole bunch of other shit. And nowhere in survival is not present in function, and nowhere in their life will they ever need to train the middle zone of high-intensity training. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask,

because that's very different from CrossFit. That's what they've been selling. Right. I feel like I'm going to go into that again. That's what they've been selling. Right. Yeah. I feel like I'm going to go into that again. That's what you've been selling. The method, if you sell that method, then it's going to be popular amongst a possible commercial interest to scale it and produce it and get it large.

Because the bipolar method is not sexy. It's not sellable. And a big piece of this kind of sounds like you're telling people to go walk. Walk and lift weights. Lift weight and then go walk five miles a day or something. Yeah, for general population, that's pretty much, as you know, I mean, I've heard a lot of people on your show before, they have other tools that you add into that lifestyle.

But as far as the exercise dose response, that's all they need, not what they want or what someone tells them they're supposed to have. That's what they actually need. If their deep essence is like, I just want to fucking navigate this thing better, right? But as soon as they say, I want to compete in a competition or I want to lift a fucking house. That's when all the problems happen.

Well, no, that's when shit changes. The intention changes. It's like, well, you can't just do that and get that as well. You've got to make it specific relative to the function of what you want to do. Yeah, I see what you're saying because, like, in a typical CrossFit setting, people just go into the gym. There's no discussion about intention. It's everybody's on the same level, like intensity, intensity, intensity.

And what you're saying is that you need to define what that person's intention is. Is their intention to live a long life or to be a competitive athlete? Yeah. And there's two different things. Yeah, and the system is selling that this will give them a long life. Yes. But there's no direct evidence or empirical data that shows it will make people live longer. It actually ages people quickly.

I was going to say, the intensity seems like it would actually wear your system down. It will. I know it will wear you down. I've been there. We have too many experiences. Yeah. Just too many experiences. And with the correct intent, right,

and if someone is a beginner and they start intensity work, you've got to remember it's not intense for them. Think about that. Like it's not intense. They can't actually express intense. They're not efficient. They don't have the motor unit, concentration, coordination, all that shit. So what's perceived as being intense for them is actually just aerobic,

alactic exercise, right? What is that? Aerobic, alactic, bipolar methods because they can't express the middle zone. But here's where it gets shitty. After a couple of years, the nervous system develops. Now they can start expressing the whole continuum of the pathway more effectively.

How do you progress that, motherfucker? How do you progress that? You've got to go harder. You've got to go heavier. You've got to go longer. Because the perception is I need to get better because that's what the perception is inside the fitness model, right? That's where it gets.

And it's been long enough now. Yeah, problems start to happen in that zone. Oh, there's lots of problems. So what are your thoughts on not competitive bodybuilding? It's kind of the concept of bodybuilding. You lift weights and you do long-duration steady-state cardio to, quote-unquote, burn fat. Yeah. Dude, that's been in stone.

Were we doing it right so long ago? Well, you know, we're biased, right? We're biased. We all grew up doing that. And maybe, dude, in 20 years, you know, things will be different. But that's what we did, you know? But this is the point. We did it because that's all that was present. Yeah. Right? That's the difference.

Intensity wasn't there. How do we know we wouldn't have done that in the middle zone? We don't know. But we've done it long enough now that, you know, it's ironic that the strength and conditioning program, if it still was resistance and easy aerobic work, if we didn't change anything, we probably would have, you know, just a different light in what the exercise dose is. I want to get back to the intake and someone coming in and you guys having

that question and talking about, like, what does fitness mean to you? Are there any common threads? Yeah, we did go to the competitor athlete, by the way, for the intake stuff. Let's definitely do that. When you ask that question to Gen Pop, just normal person that probably has some fitness experience but is looking for, like, the OPEX way or just a personal trainer, someone to guide this journey a little bit more, are there some common themes that you see a lot of?

Is it the aesthetic thing, performance thing? What is the general population coming in and actually maybe objectively viewing their own life and saying, oh, I don't know what fitness really is to me. It's just this thing I was told I need to do. Yeah. Well, that's it right there. The most surprising thing that people will recognize that our coaches are asking the questions is that those people don't have a fundamental definition of where fitness sits within this whole plan. Gotcha. That's the biggest challenge we have. There's obviously all the other ones.

Yeah. Right? But not to sound like it's easy, it is a little easier when people say, I want to get to here. Yeah. Because then we just ask a lot of questions around what inspires you. Why is this existing why are we all here right and we bring it down to the the deepest relationship possible so the person then recognizes wow i can do fitness through fitness i can get this inspiration right

through fitness yeah and that makes it so that's why i was saying it's a little easier but if people come in and they have you know fuck i don't know what fitness supposed to mean yeah you gotta backtrack a whole ton of i was gonna say i wonder how many people do you have check-ins at six months we go okay now we've got six months of moving some weights around what does it mean to you now yeah how do we continue the conversation of like what does this mean to you versus new pr great is that that's a short-term solution almost to a very long-term problem. Well, that's why we created the gyms so that we could purposely, you know, try to set up a system so that you don't get a lot of that after six months because we've got to remember the beacon and the consult and everything.

We don't have people just running around in our gyms that are like, oh, let's try this out for a while. They're lifers. Yeah. Right? They're a member of that tribe, and they believe in that system, and they think that that fitness is going to take them for a long period of time.

Yeah. I wonder how much. So I feel like everyone I talk to, we all had this chunk of time where we had to go be the king of the hill. We had to go play king of the mountain and do the super high intensity everything, and now we get on the other side. It's like, man, if we walked more, we'd be healthier. Like, are we able to change the conversation in those warrior years

where it's like, I have to go prove myself under the barbell. This is why I'm here. This is my calling. This is my most important thing. And then we all get broken at 32 years old. There's like this stop point where the joints are like, dude, you're done. Time to move on. Time to find health and longevity.

Are you able to control that conversation through those like 12 years or whatever it is, 18 to 32 of. It's harder. This is a better way to go about doing this. It's harder in 2019. It's harder in 2019 because you have to think about how they were raised and their perception of connection and their perception of themselves is completely different than I'm 45.

My perception at 20 is completely different than a 20-year-old's perception at 20 today. Yeah. Okay? That's a global thing, and I'm not saying it's fucking so much of a difference, but 1992 is different than 2012. We still like to be cool.

Oh, yeah, for sure. So back to my point, though, is that I think it's fucking so much of a difference, but 1992 is different than 2012. We still like to be cool. Oh, yeah, for sure. So back to my point, though, is that I think it's up to the coach to inspire that person to see that you don't have to kick the shit out of yourself to prove your worth of anything in that period of time. Yeah. Can we get into the intake on the performance side of things? Yeah. The performance side of things, we're lucky enough, I should say right now, that the sport is self-selecting participation within it.

So we don't see, or I should say, not that it's not happening, we don't see a lot of people that are like, hey, I just fucking woke up and I saw this thing and I'm ready to rock and roll. So it's people that generally have some experience, they're trying to test out the waters, and we get them in front of us. We have a battery of specific tests that are somewhat similar to the style and dose that you would find in CrossFit settings, let's say. And we put them through those to extract exactly what areas they need to improve upon and where they sit and how they go through the testing. And if they can withstand it, it gives us aspects of resilience and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then we can just pump out the program for them either in person or online

for their performance inside the sport. Yeah. I'm sure people listening are wondering, you know, some examples of what those tests look like if you don't mind sharing. No, it's systemic. I'll talk about the system of it because that could help people, even if they don't listen to the test, be like, oh, maybe I should set that up. So I believe that in the definition of mixed modal fitness,

to be the broadest, which is why I fell in love with CrossFit in the beginning, ironically, this broad, encompassing fitness, you can be good at all kinds of things. I think that you need to be able to have absolute ability and repeatability in strength, power, and endurance. So in systems, that's where you need to be. And that's only six, right? Because absolute strength, just think of it, absolute strength in absolute strength testing as well as strength speed testing, but absolute strength

and then repeatable strength. So one of the differentials there, and I'll come back to talking about power endurance, one of the differentials there is that a lot of people can be strong or show up strong or get strong, but there's a key performance indicator of a battery that means the ability for the person to not only express great power and absolute strength, but recover faster than others to repeat that power. So you may have seen it in strength training before where someone can do a max lift and then fucking 90 seconds later they do it again. You're like, you're not supposed to be able to do that, right?

Well, I should say, you know, you can, but in terms of what we're talking about here, it's just expressed differently. And I'll give a real specific example, which is one of the tests we use. So we have a max snatch, which is very easy as a data point because you can look at, of course, mechanics and strength speed, and it's a big movement that shows flexibility, range, etc., etc., etc. And the absolute score, though, is important, right? So if you're like, well, it looks really good, but you're male snatching 135 and you've got seven years practice, that's a fucking problem, right?

So if you don't know what I mean by that, just go do your research on the data as to what you need to have as a snatch, right? So say you score 265, and we take 77% of that score, and in a couple of minutes they have to do 25 reps for time. Whoa. So for some, well, if you say whoa, that immediately gives me insight, too, into your neuromuscular efficiency or, like, how well you reproduce power, whereas you see the best will have a if not the best absolute score they'll

score two and a half to three and a half minutes for 25 reps for 77 so if you think about that if that's a true 1rm right how in the fuck is someone doing every 10 to 15 seconds basically 77 in a metabolic environment right with a snatch that's fairly complex. So that area there is what differentiates, I think, the mixed-modal athlete versus the Joe, right? Is you could still have a heavy snatch, but it's your ability to repeat under submaximal loads for that, okay? So use that example, and that's the same thing we test for power. We call it lactate endurance.

I call it shitty shit shit. It's like the shittiest of the shit stuff. Like the real shitty stuff, right? That's why you use shit three times because it's the shittiest of the shittiest. And then aerobic power and then repeatability and power for aerobics. Now some of those

tests are, there's a litany of them but you know, AMRAP muscle ups and then you have to go right into 30 for time. So it gives us an example of a battery as well for those dynamic gymnastics apparatus, right? We do 5-minute handstand push-up, 5-minute strict pull-ups. These are both strict.

So that gives us an example of the relative strength and relative battery, right, how well they can continue to do those movements. And, yeah, a number of other ones. Clean percentage, 90%. You caused a lot of problems in my gym, by the way, because we went and did the CCP and learned about all this stuff. Then we took our top, like, 10 athletes in the gym.

We were like, all right, we've got to go through these tests and figure out where things are at. Next thing you know, I've got 15 different programs going on because you can't just put the template out once you see all the things. Are you setting this up? You setting me up here? No, I'm being serious. So I don't know if you remember Brian Boorstein. He came out, and he was my business partner at the gym.

And we went and did this. And, of course, bring all the freaks over. We got to find out what the problems are. And next thing you know, we had to write 15, 17 different programs for our competitive class. Because it was like, it's become so become so obvious that like this stuff needs to be done for people that are interested in really finding the kind of the max potential. Yeah. Well, personalization is coming in multiple systems, in tech and medicine, everywhere

it's coming. So fitness, I'm just saying, you know, I didn't choose because of that, but we'll be behind severely if we don't somehow get on board with that. But the main issue is the production of great coaches to develop good design. That's the issue is scaling up, sorry, getting enough coaches out there that are educated to provide individual process for that person. What else clouds that argument is the massive marketing and participation of group fitness. And,

but they're, but they're not doing it with that intent to like, say you don't need individual, but you can see everyone. And I heard it from the notes last night on stage. No one has an answer for that. Everyone just walks around that question as to how to use, how to make group fitness work.

And the honest fucking answer is that you can't scale good coaches who can write personal designs for each of those humans, which doesn't make the group system right. It doesn't make it right. It's convenient and affordable. It is. And fuck, there's nothing wrong with that. Right? Yeah.

There's nothing wrong with that. Fuck, I mean, people don't get hurt. You come in for a sweat. You're a dude that's helping your community. You're contributing. Hey, you know, who the fuck am I to say about it? But I think over time it's going to come a – you're feeling it now anyways. One of the things that used to bother me so much is the lack of personal training,

and I actually – I don't know what it looked like 20 years ago when Glassman was in Gold's Gym doing his thing and getting kicked out and that whole story, but I always just envisioned, like, the group class to him always meant, like, three to five people on an individualized program. It was never meant for 30 people in a class with one coach with a level one trying to act, there's herding sheep into different squat racks and go to that cage, okay, try not to get hurt. Like I don't think the intent, the growth happened way faster than the systems, and I don't know if the model works. The model works very well if there's five people at a maximum, I think,

because then you have the ability to have a small group class. But on a large group class of 30 people, the coaches doesn't have a chance. There's no way in that system. And the gym owner's job is to minimize their costs. It's a square foot play, dude. It's a really hard thing. That's not a coaching future. No, it's not.

We lost sight of personal training somewhere in the whole thing. How do you guys? Sorry, I don't know if that was going to lead into a question, but we answer that question. We're kind of the middle zone between personal training and group fitness where we try to get the coaches educated enough to get that person up and going on their own design in our gyms. So they're not personal trained. So personal training, you know, and it's been thrown around.

I was a personal trainer. I don't really feel too bad about saying it, but I was babysitting people. So what you're doing is you're creating a dependent relationship. And that person's intent long term is not the right one, right? Where you're showing up and fucking towels and like setting up their weights, et cetera, et cetera. Not that that was bad thing. I cashed money doing that. And I have, it built a lot of what I have today. So I have a lot of benefits of doing that. What our OPEX gym is right in the middle. So we do program design, which is what we call

it individualized fitness. So after that intake, if you want to visualize it in two weeks, you're going to come see that person in our facility. They're on their own exercising. Now, when I say on their own exercising, this is where everyone's high intensity model group fit here has come up, where they're like, that's your problem, dude. It'll never work. Because the only thing that they're extracting from is emotions on tribe and fucking groups and community. And you've never been to one of my fucking gyms. Right? That person is being spoken to for 90 minutes numerous times from other people.

We actually have what's called rest periods where you get to, like, shake hands and fucking I get to chat with Sam about her life and doing shit. And we're working out. Right? And that's a workout. and that's 90 minutes, but it's not a class, and it's not a dependent relationship. So we've tried to fix that, which the coach can also then be inspired on the floor to help that person through their workout that day.

So we get to supervise. I call it like an orchestra conductor in the gym now as opposed to, I don't know what an example would be, as someone who everyone's got the same instrument in front of them you're just going like this that's group we have an orchestra in our gyms you said the word dependent and talking about the relationships uh can you dig on that a little bit because it's yeah because i i did it i did it for economic worthwhile and i actually thought that um i was a really good trainer if I was actually acting as the babysitter for those clients so that dependent relationship and personal training happened and

they knew I was always going to be there and I started to sense like that little shitty side of it where they wouldn't show up and they just say bill me and I got a number of those it's like that feels weird in my belly right like i'm not i'm not contributing to the larger scale outside of just that person's hour you know i'm saying yeah so it just didn't feel good it's cigar smells fantastic well i think we're at the fitness event here yeah i think i think a good thing that you're doing is you're having people take ownership of their own fitness. Yeah, or leading them towards it. Towards ownership of their own.

Right, because you need to have this for a while and this and, you know, change your knee position and don't forget about this. And there's a design component. As you guys know, there's behaviors in nutrition, lifestyle, and exercise that could take someone 60 years to get through. But we at least have that notion in our head that they need to continue to progress those skills to get to the point where they're self-sufficient. Yeah. Is there an expectation built in of, I'm going to hold your hand for this

many three months, six months, a year, whatever it is, but the expectation is that I want you to be on your own with just social interaction around you at the gym. Yeah. No time on that yet. It's just we haven't been in a long time. But the expectation, the conversation at the beginning is I'm going to get you to a place where you can show up here and get through this workout very well, efficiently, safely, and you don't need a trainer with you, but we'll have all of the education and the trainers around you in case it's needed.

That's an interesting problem to solve. have all of the education and the trainers around you in case it's needed. Yes. That's an interesting problem to solve. What kind of things do you educate clients on during this process? Lots, but I'd say the biggest one is what we call basic lifestyle guidelines, which has got an envelope of biological, evolutionary biology connection to it, of honoring the know the sun and the moon and work and rest and daily rhythm and consistency uh things like that and we uh we try to lay those out and kind of stick them home as much as possible under easy behaviors they can fix you know simple ones as easy as it sounds like to drink your half your body weight an ounce of

water per day all of us we take it for granted it's a behavior that's very challenging for a shit ton of people so take that one so take that one plus like 12 other like behavioral things you know like check your shit that would be like a list 11 out of 12 you know take a look at your poo honor that know why it's doing what it's doing, think about food hygiene practices, sitting down to eat, chew your food, all that stuff. Not sexy. That's what actually fixes everything. You were doing this even in your Hollywood debut on Every Second Counts.

I remember watching and being like, who's the weirdo getting acupuncture? You don't need that to be awesome. Yeah. Well, that was to take care of bad mechanics. How long have you been? What's that? That was to take care of bad mechanics.

There you go. But when, I guess, was it injuries and things that kind of led to this bigger conversation with you? Yeah. And doing it to other people. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm in a really interesting position, I think, where I had a slew of people only doing resistance and aerobic work prior to the advent of implementing this system.

The intense system. That was the gym in Calgary? Yes. Nice. And so I think having that perspective changed a lot because I could then also speak of the story of what's the base requirements to actually express really well in CrossFit. And guess what it was?

Bodybuilding. Bodybuilding's great. Or you can call what you want. You can call what you want. You can be gymnastics, but it was strict contractions, right? And I would say, and I've added a little bit of a more repertoire to that for a key performance indicator for movement,

and it's that you need to have an early age exposure to a shit ton of movement solutions and you may not have seen that as like bodybuilding but a lot of it was really weird contractions head to toe for many years right and matt fraser to be an example of one and it's always unfair to use the champion as that but you know if you lift weights correctly for a period of time as you're going through puberty those contractions add up such that when you want to express a real anaerobic work i mean it's you got the base support for 10 years yeah all i had to do is spend time on the rower exactly exactly or if you only rode up until you were 18 let's use the other example, right?

If you're already the strongest, being 40% the strongest is a lot easier. It's still higher than everyone else's big number. Yeah. Yeah, there's also secondary things because not everyone who's strong becomes good in mixed modal. There's also metabolic processes inside too. The NME that I talked about and how they can repeat power because there are multiple audiences of males and females that don't fit into that well where are you learning from a business marketing perspective i've often heard it taught that if you're trying to create a cult so to speak

or a falling whatever it is like rallying around a common enemy is a good way to get people to be on the same page to be aligned and to want to go do something together have similar values philosophies etc yeah so crossfit strategically rallied against bodybuilders and uh triathlon or endurance models right yeah and so when this was happening um like i understand i understand why it happened to some extent but what were you thinking while this was happening was it were you thinking like this is this is not a good thing or there's pros and cons? I went all balls in, dude. Yeah? To it. I fell in love with it.

Yeah. Oh, you were on board with that. Dude, I was so deep. I was so deep on board. I don't even know how to explain it. I'm kind of speechless on it. You were the Matt Frazier. Not.

Well, there's a different time of CrossFit, but you were the guy. I was like, we'll throw that guy out there.'s make all the videos yeah but let's go have him do helen and yeah so i i drank it and ironically i see it as a blessing because i wouldn't be here to today i wouldn't be able to spread the news on you know the experiences that i had but my i was i was kind of pushed aside in my profession. I was presenting numerous times a year through that period of time because I had been successful as a strength and conditioning coach and presenting at Canadians' versions of ACSM as an example. And then after I took that on, I kind of got booted outside of the system

because it was a black mark on me now as a professional because they all knew I was taking it on, not only as an athlete, but like playing with it, right? So, but I didn't really see that until years come, years came, until I won. Because then when I won, you know, I started to say things like, and I'm being loose here, I think I've learned some things from this high-intensity model for performance and energy system training that I could help a whole ton of people with, no one wanted to listen to me is this in Canada or in the cross everywhere really on forums yeah you know muscle media 2000 forums oh Mel Sif forums like you know you can go as deep as you want but it wasn't well accepted because I had that knack of like you're just a

dumb crossfitter yeah and but I saw immediately as I saw it, I saw it, number one, I can fucking test myself to the tilt right here, you know, as an athlete again. And secondly, this world of decades of opportunity opened up in front of me as to how to do work differently than what had been previously done. Yeah. Because you only used the treadmill or track before, or a bike, right? And now CrossFit said, you know, power cleans, ring dips, and running around the block can also be a form of work.

And people couldn't get past the point that they were just touching go power cleans. Yeah, I know that as you exited the CrossFit space, have you ever been able to go back into that and talk to the people and bring, like, your education piece to that? Or is that's not even close? Uh, it hasn't been, they don't want to hear it.

I don't know. I, it hasn't been attempted on either side. Um, but I think that, uh, you probably gave an indication as to why that probably wouldn't make sense because I'd be teaching all of their educators to do individual design. Yeah.

Do you know what I'm saying? So that wouldn't work well with the business. Well, with the business sense. Yeah. Do you know what I'm saying? So that wouldn't work well with the business sense. Yeah. I mean, I understand that part of it. I also think that there's a massive piece to the CrossFit model right now that doesn't work, and gym owners are really hungry. There's not a lot of people in their gyms.

Yep. The newness, the freshness, the hotness has worn off. But fear is what does not make the change for them. They're afraid of what people are going to think if they transition over and they're afraid of losing 40% of their clients because they want something else.

They're also afraid for multiple other reasons of the system that they're in to get out of it. With the new changes that they have coming on, it sounds like they are okay making changes. And that health aspect to it sounds like a lot more of the conversation you're kind of having of like let's have low-impact aerobic work. Let's go walking.

Let's just lift some weights. How are they going to do that? Well, that's an interesting thing. When you've written the book on intensity, and you're pulling people in with that idea of intensity. In the definition it says high intensity and that's the only thing that matters. Henshaw actually gave

us a really, through his lens and framework, gave us a really good idea of what he was talking about of how we can always have high intensity but we can test it at 60% or 70% and do it over intervals and it was... I said that 12 years ago it got kicked out. Yeah, there you go. tested it 60% or 70% and do it over intervals. I said that 12 years ago, got kicked out.

Yeah, there you go. And he said that he almost got kicked out until the top seven people in the world. Pacing won't bring people into your home. Pacing won't bring people into that house. No matter how you swipe it. Yeah. It's an interesting one. It is. Because if they don't have that, dude, you know it.

Because back in the day, we could put 5K on the board, and we'd still get 25 people show up to the class. You put a 5K row on the board today that people knowingly is showing up, you are not getting participation. That itself shows the fundamental problem. The intent of all those people coming in is to get the hit. Yeah. Right, to get the hit yeah right to get the hit if

that intention is not fixed you're gonna have a fucking lot of massaging to do to change the culture of that yeah one of the things that i try to talk to coaches the most about and this would probably be very interesting to hear your perspective on like the coaching development side of things is i every time somebody comes to me and they're like how do we be like a professional coach I want to be a CrossFit coach and then they go get 20 classes yeah and then what happens 20 hours of work that they're getting paid for they're actually at the gym for 30 hours doing the 30 minutes before 30 minutes after high fives all that fun stuff then they get their own training in and they're waxed yeah and all they've made is $20.

Yeah. $7 an hour. They're paid the $20, but they're there a time and a half without even thinking about it. And you can't live like that. And I don't see anybody really creating a space in the CrossFit model right now of like, okay, let's take half the group classes, and then let's just add ten personal training clients.

Same amount of time, triple the financial value. How are you teaching your coaches? I don't like that either. Well, just as a model, I'm throwing this out here. Well, it is a model. I don't like it. Okay. Because it doesn't survive for the coach or the athlete long term. Okay.

Yeah. Like we've got to define. My softball example. Well, like we got to define example well we get we get to define like first of all what professional is and what is success my definition of success is autonomy for the client the coach can fucking put braces on their kids right and the owner of the brand can make money right that's a solution. And if you don't have anything that resembles that, it doesn't make you a bad person, right? That's where we get caught. We get caught on moral shit around that. But let's define professionalism. Professionalism is that person making money, right? Making money. Now there's a couple of different routes. Like you said,

you can do personal training. That's great. But where I stopped on your comment inside of one micro gym, remember the three areas and the three pillars are all in one culture. So when you put different service offerings inside that culture, it fractures the culture. Whether you like it or not. Now you're spending your next five years creating management systems and CRMs and everything to fix your broken culture. New service offering. You're just fixing, fixing, fixing. But it's not sustainable as a product long term, which, again, doesn't make it wrong. And that's where I want to make my point.

If I show up to, I mean, we did a lot of this. And it does break your culture a little bit because now all of a sudden I'm in business for four years. And now all of a sudden I get my CCP and I go back to my gym and I'm like guys we got to change so many things now like this model we knew it wasn't sustainable because we got too many people and then one coach now we got two coaches and all we did was just increase our costs the product didn't get better so now okay let's get some individual design let's get some personal training type things rolling in here it's's how does somebody that has a gym and has built this culture and system for 6, 7, 8, 10 years, and then they realize,

man, we should be doing this better, now take this model, and it's still going to be broken. If you bring your system into that system, it's still broken. No, not if you switch it to my system, it won't be. Well, you're still breaking the old culture. Yeah, but you're getting rid of people. So now you only have people surrounding you who want to be there. But you're getting rid of the people that

currently want to be there. Yeah, but not in the new system. So I'm saying you're going to have a broken culture with two services in one gym. When you go to an OPEX gym, there's one service. So there's no one there in a broken culture because we're all on the same road. Gotcha. That's what I'm saying. But I know,

I know. Yeah. I think our words got minced in the differences in culture for it. But if you go to that, I think that, as I say, I'll repeat it again. The biggest issue is mindset change on behalf of the person who owns the gym. And I don't think most people are well versed in business practice or got enough like confidence in themselves to say i know this is fucking good and i know it's the right way and i want to go in this direction because they got so much shit to take care of just to keep their day going yeah so i'm empathetic to that but that's the main reason why you don't see this fundamental like wow that's, that's a fucking good idea. Why don't we all do it? Because it's really tough on behaviors.

Right? Well, it's really challenging to come in and be, well, one, you have to, it's not just, oh, this new system's rad. Now I got to go and take 310 people and turn them into this new thing. And they have, it makes no sense to them. Yeah. Why are we changing? Exactly. My abs look rad

already why do i have to go and do individual design i'm getting everything out of this that i want and now we got to double the price yep that's a hard thing for any gym owner trainer anyone to go into their gym and the people that are already paying for x to say nope now we're doing y yeah and it's double the price yeah and that's the big question you want to ask is, do you want to kill coaches or do you want to appease an audience? Because you're appeasing an audience by being half the price and giving them a workout as coaches die in your system every year. They come in, they get burnt.

Later, new coach in, get in front of that fucking whiteboard, and this is what you're going to tell them to do today. And until you get burnt, you just keep popping it. You've got no ascension for that coach. I hate the model. No life cycle. I hate that model. Right, but that's what I'm just saying.

Then what's the decision? And what it comes down to is what does the coach owner really want? And then it's having the ovaries or balls to make the decision. That's simply it. I think it came up. It's a great system because one thing that used to annoy the shit out of me, too, is like, can I just come to the gym? Well, no, you have to go to a class.

No. I know. Just think about that. Even the coaches coaching the classes are working out on their own of their own design. Right. Probably a big dog client. Right?

How is that not a fucking broken culture? Your coach doesn't even believe in it. So you're saying basically make the switch. Some people aren't going to like it. Those people can fucking leave. The people that stay will like it. And the new people that are coming in, they're coming in a new system. Eventually you have that solid culture with all the people that didn't like it being

now gone. And you may have to massage some shit for a while. We can give you examples of that. It's lengthy, but it takes a lot of massaging. Yeah, I think that there's and we could probably just walk around here. There's a zillion coaches or gym owners like that. That part used to drive me nuts of like, is there any open gym? Well, no, because under the times, all those times, like if you wanted to do your own thing, I've got 30 people downstairs in a class that no, there's no room. And no room and I don't have the time

and space and coaching and energy to see if you actually know what you're doing enough that you're not going to die in the corner by yourself. And now, if you do that, now it's really a broken culture because now I've got 30 people wondering why you're special over there. And Open Gym is

like, that's how places make money. And having people have access to what's going on. You now see it's a problem because there's a lot of people that don't allow Open Gyms. Yeah. Well, these are, like, all the things that used to drive me. They're even against, like, coming in with your own program, which I appreciate on the gym's behalf. But you should look at that and go, that's a fucking problem. Yeah.

Like, that's certainly a problem right now. And I was very, I benefit to the old days where, I don't know if you remember too, I mean, I could go to any CrossFit gym in the world back in 2005, and I'd fucking get a T-shirt. You know, I'd get to have supper with the owners. I fucking don't know how many times I did that. I'm just making that point as like, see how it just fucking went sideways. You know, it went sideways.

To what extent do you cater to people's personal preferences about what they just enjoy doing like if someone came to you and and they you know they're 40 years old they have no intentions on being a competitive athlete and they said that okay i understand your points about lifting weights and doing long long duration cardio type type sessions but i just think doing metcons are super cool yeah what can you do for me like what do you tell that person? We try to create, we go back to, remember, I'm never generally getting to that point, but I'll just talk it out because, remember, the beacon and they get in front of us, it's like, they're

coming for us, not for that. I'm sure people listening to this, they're like, hey, I want to practice that, but I know people are going to say they want to do Metcons. What do I tell them? I would say quickly go back to having consultation prowess. That means you've got to be able to have a conversation with someone and really get the true intention as to why they're doing what they're doing.

Because until you backtrack to the real intention and not like Maslow's hierarchy, self-actualization stuff, just like why are you really doing anything, right? Until you go back there, you will just go back and forth. And you'll fucking bottleneck them and then come up with an interesting workout. You'll just be doing it. I call it dancing. And dancing just burns coaches out.

So I would say to be really quick, get really good at consulting and having a conversation with someone and sit down and speak to them. And until you guys finish that conversation with them showing intent that works well, not what they want, then I think you can go in that direction. Yeah, like kind of getting to the real root of why they want to be there. Yeah. As opposed to the surface level, like I just want to look jacked or I want to lose body fat.

Yeah. Like what is the real reason? Yeah, because we also educate our coaches on the dogma, right? We don't just say, this is what you say when you get this question. Right. The sales script. Which I, well, you know, I fell prey to that before. We actually educate our coaches as to why that's the process.

Do you know what I mean? Like, why are they only doing resistance? Tell me why, James. Let me list the ways. You know, and now the coach has not only this script but they're like this is why it's beneficial i think that's a stronger way to do it because again like there's an understanding now between both the coach and the athlete of like the athlete feels like they understand me then they know what i really want and then the coach understands what they actually

want and then what they really need and then then the athlete is more open to receiving, like, what they really need. Yep. Yep. Yep. Just for a question, why do we still call those people athletes? Oh, because it makes them feel awesome. Because they feel cool. Yeah, okay, just another point.

I thought I was some correct in that thinking. Come on. We all know they're not. Do you not – what do you refer your – The athlete is someone who wants to eat your lunch. That's a mentality. It is a mentality. It's also a practice.

It's a physical aspect as well. Yeah. An athlete, you know, the Nike adage, you know, if you've got a body, you're an athlete, that's a bunch of horse shit to sell product. Ironically, the Nike thing is right inside this model too. But I think changing language is where we should start if we really want to believe in a certain pathway. You should just call them Jane or Bill or whatever.

You call Emily Bridgers an athlete. She's right there. Do you feel like that concept of calling someone an athlete kind of creates that intensity, intensity, intensity mindset, like that mindset that you shift away from? Again, it's all a sell to make the system work, right? It's a sell to make a system work. Great language, culture on tribalism

culture on cults you know it's like this is our language this is how we do our thing it keeps everyone inside that's a very interesting point i never thought of it that way yeah because they're not athletes we're going to take a quick break but i want to dig into all of those little pieces from the nutrition the language i think fitness is like the the easy one to kind of talk about yeah i think language behavior practice like the mental side of things, how you're able to educate the coaches on being able to coach that stuff to people. Cool. We'll be back in a minute. We have three sponsors for today's show.

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You don't look good right now. Right on. He knows. So we talked about program design, how you run your gyms, like the model that you have developed, so to speak. On the nutrition side of things, on the mindset side of things, let's go down some of those rabbit holes. Like what are your philosophies, the overarching principles for nutrition for you, for both the general population and for your athletes at the moment? Yeah, for Gen Pop, we get an assessment in terms of a couple things like their age their behaviors and nutrition

again how they perceive nutrition so as you say a 54 year old to have a discussion on nutrition is completely different than the generations that they've been through and how they perceive like what macronutrients are what food is today right whereas if you're speaking to nutrition to an 18 year old you have to approach it completely differently just based upon what they want to do so again it always comes back to intention and also individualization where the person is in their mindset around what nutrition means to them and then we take basic principles without let's call it a plan of attack right from the get-go and those basic principles are the guidelines i told you when it comes to nutrition it's a little more specific and that's around food hygiene practices

where our belief is that if people chew their food first and foremost, a lot of times that opens up pathways to mental acuity and fixing things or directing things that need to be fixed. That was probably a leap for a lot of people about how those things are connected. Can you dig into a few details? Yeah, so when you do ask someone to actively engage in food hygiene, that means like honoring the cooking process, smelling it, preparing yourself, sitting down, having conversation, putting your fork down, chewing your food a lot,

not drinking water with it, not having a big stress. It's not like a break in your hectic day for 10 minutes just to get fuel in your system. If people do that or we try to open that up for someone, even if it's one time a week more than they've ever done it in their life, that's better than nothing. And we start there. And that helps an individual not only through the awareness practice of knowing what satiety is, which, as you know, is one of the biggest issues. Well, you don't know. Satiety is the biggest fucking culprit that people go after with different things like protein or changing up foods with a lot of times can be fixed with like common people's nervous system down and that happens

through just calming down around their food process so that chewing also on a secondary level can allow possibly good absorption of nutrients so if you just believe in the theory of food stuffs and large foodstuffs and the energy that it takes to break it down, some people don't believe in that. It's actually quite a good argument, but I'm a fan of trying to get that shit into a mash so that people can break it down

because I think of the first consequence of what we're looking for, which is just getting it into a calm state and getting that nutrition as much as possible. And then secondary, we go into figuring out what their goals are and where they currently sit. And then we kind of tighter out macronutrients based upon lean mass and what they want to do for their exercise. And then discuss the opportunities on quality, food sourcing, et cetera, et cetera.

Then it gets a little bit more specific depending upon what they want to do. Are these done at the same time, or do you basically have someone graduate from the basics yeah i quickly went through it there but we go like well i guess we'll put it into buckets it's people have to honor blgs first right before we even get into the conversation around quality before we even get into the conversation of macros before we even get into the conversation of supplementation and detox and all that other stuff. So some people, to be honest, some people, to be honest, you know, don't get there for a couple of years, right? Don't get to like finding out how much actual protein they need to have in a day, right? They need to change behaviors that are so much further before that, that just end up in resulting in them, like, just showing they actually need to change those behaviors first.

And that could be, it could be arguable that you could change some other things and it could fix other things, and I get that. Actually, John Berardi and I next week are having a conversation on that. Oh, yeah. Because, yeah, he has some great ideas on behavioral change based upon that. And I think more of, like, a terrain approach and outside and as opposed to the food source and the energy and it doesn't make it right or wrong but that's just my thought process on it um yeah and then that's the pathway that they lead or they go towards for that and in

the end it could result in a bunch of different things i think in uh empirical evidence and what's in nutrition science um i really think that there's, you want to call them buckets of what food profiles look like for people. I think we're starting to get more smart to the idea that the general population can be put into multiple different buckets. The whole thing on top of that is protein, vegetables, and other things that are good quality sources of food. But there are some fundamental differences in there that still get people to general health measures that are that are healthy and so those could be areas of people being on higher purine higher fat diets and just greens and lower total carbohydrates some people actually feel really good have awesome mental acuity and so i mean i can go on with other

ones i pump some people go really close vegetarian, right? Every couple of days they'll have an egg or white fish or et cetera, et cetera, and they still perform well, sleep well, good general health measures. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So what's the fundamental difference inside there is that it's individualized. Right. Not only based upon what we all feel they should have,

it's based upon what they need to have in order to what we define as being general health. I think I just don't know enough, neither do I think science knows enough yet, as to what happens in the terrain, as to how each person receives nutrients. We just don't know enough. I think the key component of that is building the mindfulness and the awareness to kind of assess yourself. Again, that's tough to do because it's not a prescription. Right.

No, I mean. Because we're kind of being like, whoa, how do you feel? We forget how to do that. I mean, we're born with the ability to do that, but we forget because of all the stuff that, you know, happens in between now and the time we're born and the time we're, you know, we're coming to try to get fit. Yeah.

And awareness is super critical at all points. I mean, even if you're given a macro prescription, it doesn't make sense. If you get this macro prescription and, like, I don't feel good on it. But, like, then at this point, if you don't have any awareness, you're, like, you're spinning your wheels. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So the nutrition one is, you know, in terms of what we educate we educate in those stages um again it's i'm

gonna say honestly it's not uh it's probably not the easiest for a coach to adopt because it's it's more loose and we believe in uh i guess you'd call it biological medicine principles of healing themselves and not focusing on body fat because the large prescriptions based upon nutrition today are enveloped, whether people like it or not, on not getting heart disease, not being fat, or making you bigger. But that's not our game, right? So if a client comes in and they want either of those three, obviously we have to find good education and a good process to make that happen,

but we just don't believe in it because it doesn't work for biology yeah we have to get our clients in tune with eating to live their life effectively and eating so that such that they have great mental acuity not eating to burn fat not eating to look good naked not eating because i can i can get candy later as a mechanism of reward. You see the difference in that? Oh, yeah. The mindset has to change, which is much more challenging. And I would argue, like I coach nutrition as well, and a lot of things you're saying I'm totally on board with and jive with

because a lot of times when you find that people do these things, they end up where they would like to be anyways. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. But there's a lot of tough roads in the middle, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's not an easy process. Back to your point, you know, the question on, like, just to say someone comes in front of you is like, hey, I want to get this.

It's like that's a lot of talking. You know, and the system's not set up for talking. Yeah. Well, it's kind of the same analogy with, you know, fitness and training. It's this intensity, intensity, intensity thing, but in nutrition, it's also like, yeah, let's get lean, let's get shredded, let's, you know, whatever. It's the same type of thing, and we're

not... It's aging. Yeah, we're not thinking about, like, what's the intention here? Like, are you trying to live a healthy life? Are you trying to just, like, live and play with your kids? No, you're making people... Yeah, you're aging people quickly. Yeah. See, that goes back to the intention that we've got to change that perspective. It becomes very hard to be a client of yours, though.

There's so many things that you have to go through this process and be aware of. Yeah. In an OPEX gym, as I said, we're not really dealing with a lot of those consequences because, again, we're shining the beacon to say, if this is what you want for your fitness, then go for it. But the practice that we used to have, I would deal with all those things. And as I said, they're generally fixed through a deeper built relationship. That's most times.

But again, the system's not set up. Everyone's so focused on jumping on board with biohacking and high intensity that no one wants to be like, oh, dude, how about you just speak for two hours with someone, right? Is that that Kalo ring? Aura. Aura. Aura. Kalo, that's the marriage one.

What are you tracking on there? You just mentioned biohacking, and I instantly looked at your hand. Yeah, yeah. Well, if I was to biohack, that means that I would, like, try to, you know, use a bait pen at night to fall asleep to get my hours of sleeping. Wait a second. This just tracks my sleep.

Yeah. So this tracks sleep, tracks activity. I did research on three of these, Aura, Joel Jamison's, and the Whoop Band. And I had them each. We're using each of them for a four-month process all together. And just to prove a point that there's still a lot of work to be done in in biometrics yeah um but i wanted to put this back on honestly because i listened to a um uh podcast with peter attia on drive with uh this doc that was talking

about metformin research and insulin resistance and uh he was tracking a couple of things that he saw in the sleep patterns that I was just like, oh, fuck it, I'll try that for a couple weeks again and see if I'm picking up on some stuff. So that's generally why I do it again now. But it just tracks those things. So for some people it can be helpful, right, let you know how much you're sleeping and, you know, hours of activity, et cetera.

But where was I going with the – I was going somewhere before you picked up on the ring. Well, I was going to ask you picked up on the ring. I was going to ask you. Oh, go ahead. I think I made my point on the we want to create biohacking and we don't want to sit down with someone for two hours. What about recovery protocols or anything like that? Do you use any of those in your practices? For general population, I'm not a big fan of it. If you need recovery protocols, your program is probably incorrect

or you're probably not aligned appropriately to do what you're supposed to be doing. So in a generalist term, let's just really go back to the fundamental idea again on intention and exercise and dose response. If someone has to warm up for a half hour to do their exercise session, they probably shouldn't be doing that exercise session. That's a good point. If it's in general population right you should walk in do physical expression and walk out okay so that doesn't mean that there's like nuances in like well someone's got a fucking busted hip or

you know i'm saying if the intention changes then that's the case. But in the fundamental perspective, the academia on top of what's inside a dose response has all been performance-based, right? All been performance-based. If you look really clearly, get outside your own bubble and look at it, like, why are people doing this shit? You'll see that one time someone said, this is how athletes do it. This is what should go inside that model, um but gen pop i mean what the fuck why are you warming up to work out and if you do need recovery mechanisms it's it's a tough one to explain uh but when you do a dose response of stress i'll just call them seven there's seven different systems operating that get you back to homeostasis

after okay there's actually more of them let's say There's seven different systems operating that get you back to homeostasis after. Okay? There's actually more of them. We'll just say there's seven fundamental systems. Blood, lungs, nervous system, bunch of other things. Okay? Immune system, function, whatever, whatever. Remember, we don't even know what the fuck that stress is, but that's exercise.

You had a stress? You have a compensation afterwards where your body's like, oh, we better fucking recover from this. So the question has to be asked when you're down at that point, how do you get back to recovery that not only allows you to express effectively the next time, but gets all those systems back at the right pace? Recovery mechanisms that are sold to the general public today only recover one or two of those systems, so they're facilitating overreaching.

Facilitating overreaching. Because they have no evidence to show that all the other systems are improving as fast. Can you give some specific examples? Electrical stimulation. Like those people who are using it and promoting it, they're good. They're not good because of electrical stimulation.

And whenever they do the workout, they have natural mechanisms of recovery that bring all those systems back to get ready to recover again. Why? They're better than you, right? They're better than you. So if you really look at how to give dose response, we're going now beyond GenPOP and all the other recovery mechanisms, it's done to band-aid an improper training program and a lack of resilience. Yeah. And who buys it? The low-resilient, low-power-producing individual. Who are probably doing inappropriate programming.

Who fucking don't even need the recovery mechanisms. Why? They can't even express something to recover from it. It's fucked up. It's fucked up, man. In in your brain it's so obvious it's so did it make sense yeah i mean okay it's well no it oh the gent if you say that to the majority of the people they're like no i need intensity it doesn't make sense to them what yeah there's a massive education and experience distance that I'm sure you're here and you're trying to educate everyone of these ways and making it so obvious.

Yeah. Well, the whole system is hacking, right? The whole system is hacking. I call it the fast track model. And that's what's prevalent. You know, the pre-workout, the post-workout, the recovery mechanisms, it's all the speed up up what you biologically need to recover from your own energy your own call it chi right you speak to paul check about it he has

seven different versions of that but you know it's got to come from you did you guys water sunlight digesting food and those nutrients that's what has to help you recover at whatever rate it takes to get you there right and anything you do in the middle that tries to speed that up i can tell you there's other things you're leaving behind and that's what you say facilitates overreach it does because that shit takes months sometimes years to come back and haunt you yeah right and i just because i've been in long enough i can see that most of the people who did it, number one, are actually not even that good.

And number two, they're only getting some systems back to the recovery aspect. Yeah, it's like you follow somebody long enough, you're like, oh, how are you doing, like, 10, 15 years from now? Like, you can barely get out of bed. Exactly. And I've been in the game long enough to see that that just doesn't add up over time. And ironically, the ones with

good intention, the ones with good intention and the right resilience level, they don't really need it, but they'll promote it. So what you're saying is that if you have an appropriate training program, you have to look at the training program first. And you're hydrated and you digest your food. I think that your own self-regulation system should tell you when to go back and do something next. Yeah.

And for some, it could be six hours. For some, it could be 36. For athletes at the highest level, outside of the obvious of being hydrated and sleeping enough and et cetera, et cetera, are there any of the biohacky type of things that you do think have some efficacy? Or is it just across the board, you tend to stay away from the science?

No, we don't stay away from them because of what the current mixed modal culture is because I can't tell someone, listen, we're going to have to take eight years to do this. They have to get shit done within the culture now. So you have to do some of those things to get them from point A to point B full well knowing that it's not beneficial for them. But again, when you're in the athlete endeavor,

it's, again, health is not too important. Right. So wait, so to finish that question, like what are some examples of things that you do use in practice? I don't use them specifically, but I know athletes do. Cryotherapy, and I guess I could say, I won't name names, they could do IV therapy, which around practice could be, I guess, maybe not that well accepted. I could say, I won't name names. They can do IV therapy, which around

practice could be, I guess, maybe not that well accepted. I could be in trouble for that one. But IV therapy not around competition may not be that beneficial. They'll do nutraceuticals and supplements that are within whatever the guidelines will be that's going to be effective for that. Hot cold therapy and contrast bathing would be one. I saw Colleen over there on the ground in between her event with Norma Tech on. Yeah. So for those athletes, there is something. I don't have a litany that I'm like, hey, just go do all these things in between. But I think that's what they do.

As you say that, a nice whiff of Bengay comes flying through here. Do you know what Bengay means? No. I'm waiting for the joke. Go. Punchline. Oh, no. It's just an age thing because it was an ointment cream back in the day.

Oh, wait. They don't make it anymore? I don't know, but it just goes to show a difference in age and culture. Oh, yeah. I know what Bengay is. Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Sorry.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. And kind of an obvious question I have that just in case somebody is new to this podcast and they don't know what mixed modal is. Oh, yeah. We never brought that up. Like, what is mixed modal?

Yeah, it's a mixture of modalities. So we got into high-intensity fitness in a competitive environment because you were able to do all these modalities, weightlifting, gymnastics, and cyclical endeavors, and you put it all together and you come out on top. And that in itself is a mixture of modalities. Mixed modal is the name of how I see what it is. It's the participation of all these modalities

that people are trying to get good at in multiple different ways. Okay. Question about pre-teens, the participation of all these modalities that people are trying to get good at in multiple different ways. Okay. A question about, like, pre-teens, like kids that are, like, just starting to be old enough to compete in CrossFit. They're, like, 12, 13, and they see the athletes at the games, and they want to do that. Is the prep for those kids, well, number one, do you train anyone? It's a bad idea.

Do you train anyone that's that age? I do not train it, and I don't agree with the training of it. Not a fan of it. Teen, the whole teen thing? No, yeah. Cool, yeah, dig into that. Yeah, well, it's a tougher one because I have two young girls too, and I understand the sports specialization aspect

and the pressures that are surrounding that as a parent. I'll say that and what comes with it. You know, with experiences and, you know, you could speak to a father with a young boy in football today, right? And then the father and son are weighing out, like, there's experience that are gained into it that I can't speak of, but, you know, he turns into a wonderful human being. Curtis Martin's retirement speech, if anyone has never listened to that,

I'm not a, listen, I'm a Canadian boy, but I happen to ping into that because I'm interested in, like, the long-term implications of the sport. And he said some stuff in there that does change your mind on what the experiences you can get inside of that violent environment that he would never take him back and he would push kids in towards. The way he said it, I was like, oh, I can make sense of that. I don't think it's a good idea simply because they're not set up biologically to express what we want them to express at that time.

And if you do put them into an environment, even if it's good movement, under the idea of fatigue, you're just going to have, I believe, long-term consequences metabolically that we don't. I'm only positing it's going to cause long-term problems that I think, you know, you got to weigh out if you're going to be a fucking adult and be smart about it and not make that decision. Yeah. If you're responsible for them or if they're going to win money and be a world champion at 16 and make $7 million. Yeah. Then you see it's a different category. In the sport of CrossFit and mixed modal, there's no opportunity for a 13-year-old to

have that. And it's actually, I would see, meaning a lifestyle, meaning they're going to make $7 million by the time they're 17. There's no chance in hell of doing that. But there's always the emotional card, right? And there's always the, well, who the fuck are you to stop kids from exercising card? And I'm being the responsible adult card, saying that until they

get to 18 years of age, just based upon prefrontal cortex changes, biological maturation, and having the systems available to not only express intensity, but to recover from it, I think that needs to be indicated inside of that question.

Okay. So metconning for time is out in this conversation. What about those? If it's unsustainable methods, yes. Okay. If it's unsustainable methods. What does that mean? That means that they drop power throughout the entire piece,

whether it's to mechanical or glycolytic responses or whatever prevents them as a limitation going forward. And this is where I meet the difference in just movement because I'm not a believer in just movement because the context and how it's sold is like if you just move well, it doesn't matter throughout the workout what happens. Well, I think it does. So you can move well, but if you're in a bath lactating

you're dropping power that's a problem because you're time stamping a bad metabolic process on top of that good movement now and so for a kid who can't express that and if you're not personally training them like i mean watching every fucking joint angle throughout the entire thing you're going to have repercussions long term that we've already seen we've already seen the implications of young wrestlers or young gymnasts. And the price they pay for their thyroid, you know, long-term, right? You don't get a lot of 20-year-olds coming out saying, you know, saying, oh, I think at 12 that's a fucking fantastic idea for a shit ton of people, right?

Because, listen, they were my clients. And I'm now trying to rehab them out of those issues to be an adult, right? But at the time, they were happy. Haley Adams, we had her on the show for half of the show yesterday. She's got a legitimate shot at making millions of dollars being a functional fitness athlete. You can't stop that train. No. CrossFit has almost turned into a sport like that, though, where kids probably, it's an entire generation now,

the first gym they walk into will be a CrossFit gym. Yeah. And the health and longevity is probably a massive issue that they should be thinking about long-term, or the parents of doing that. Like, don't just do Fran all the time and fry your nervous system before getting to being 22, 23 years old. Yeah, and just because there's not 6,000 OPEX gyms out there doesn't make it right for them to go to

that gym. Yeah, yeah. If you have a 12-year-old who wants to be the best crossfitter when they're 25, how do you go about starting them at age 12? Yeah, at age 12, they're being introduced to weightlifting, so they're doing a lot of technical proficient weightlifting. They're doing a ton of relative strength gymnastics. And then they're becoming well-adversed at all the cyclical components in an endurance fashion. And that's what they're doing for a number of years because every two months they're a different human up until they're 18. And you have to be able to deal with that adjustments, which goes back to even the argument for individualization for a young kid. They walk into a gym, they're not getting individualization the way the gym you described. They're getting a group model. So they're even, I would say, 10x times important to

be individualized and not be put into a group session, which is why you see a lot of group kids sessions just turn into sprawls and jumping over boxes and playing around, which is nothing wrong with that, but you're not going to see any loads being used 12 and 10. So you're really in the middle of that conversation because they are getting to a point where I assume there's no PE really in there. Less to none. Less to none at public school or whatever school they're at. So they have to play sports.

Playing sports turns out is like a pretty challenging thing these days yeah it's not it's i i think about it all the time i have a six and a half month old so now i'm like dad guy i think about these things now and you like go by the soccer field no one's there you go to the baseball field no one's there what where do kids play there's no pe there's there's none of these things they don't learn how to play so a crossfit gym seems like a really great place to learn how to get some physical activity and move well and do all the things but maybe it's not ideal so how do you combat these things and and think about health and fitness and instilling good habits and all this stuff as a parent.

Yeah, well, I'm involved with the Brand X now. And we're building their education. We're helping them build their education to start to create that process of what does that look like from a 3-year-old out of diapers up to 18? And what should fitness programs look like? It is sad, though, that we have to create education. And we have to structure play now for kids right i think over the next five to ten years with the advent of biometrics being a lot more scaled and you know there's going to come some time where depending upon what happens in america will be the precipice of it i guarantee you whether that's a political change or whatever they're going to start to see

some issues that are arising with the direction towards STEM versus physical activity. And I think that you're going to start to see some forms of change, maybe, where it's going to be less expected within the school systems to teach kids how to fundamentally play sports, which is what it was. It taught them nothing about physical education. Not to hammer on physical education, but it didn't, right? You put them through sports. And you're going to have to now have private institutions that are going to have to be embedded inside those programs or in the system as a social component that's either paid for by the government or subsidized to ensure

that we have structured play environment, not a sports system system because the sports system is failing yeah for activity for structured play right yeah and there's just too many reasons why it fails and my kids are in sports but it's too many reasons why it fails for i think the majority of of uh the population for the future to come well i used to talk about that all the time with athlete athletes people that came to the gym of like think of this as actual physical education. Like, you don't know where your hips are. Yeah. Much less how to push them back.

They're not taught that in school. No, and that never, ever happened. So there's no, there's almost like a leap when someone walks in your gym of like, okay, where are you at in the conversation? Yeah. Like, that's a really scary thing when someone comes in and they have no idea. They've never really played sports,

which they passively may have been taught how to move properly. But they come in and it's like, okay, now we're going to learn how to squat today. And you're starting at level zero. And that's my point is that needs to be individualized. And that could take 40 years for that person to progress through physical culture. Just there's no wires from their brain to their feet. We take for granted. Like, we've been running around since we've been five maybe, right?

Yeah. We take that for granted, right? Yeah. So there's a lot of people, yeah, at 40 who've never moved. So they've got 50 years left to actually learn how to be in physical culture. Yeah. But for the kids, that's where I'm trying to make my impact. I also am not looking at birth anymore.

I'm definitely on the other side of the column and thinking about things like, what the fuck am I doing here? And why should I spend my time with you guys? And why should I do anything? You know, little things like that. And so I want to really feel like not because of my kids too, that has a big impact because I see it every day, but I want to have some form of an impact that leads those coaches to be able to teach those kids to honor fitness. And we can do that through the Brand X method and through the education to teach coaches, like this is how you give it to them, and I can guarantee you it won't be max efforts and metcons.

What is Brand X? Brand X has been an education fitness company for many years. They were connected to CrossFit for many years and helped them with their CrossFit kids program. And yeah, now they're on the outside looking in. And I'm excited to help them out, develop their education platform to teach coaches as to how to offer this fitness program from three to 18 years of age in a structured environment so that kids can turn into formidable humans long term, which is their hashtag. What's their last name again?

Martin? Jeff and Mickey Martin. Yes. Gotcha. Yeah, they've been at it for a long time. Yep. They were putting out very impressive stuff when kids were growing up. Yep.

Created some freaky kids too. Yeah, and that's why you just got to trust the system. Like, they really believe in it. They believe in it so much that their kids went through it, you know, and they had a number of little whippersnappers around them that actually followed these non-sexy program and became really fucking interesting, powerful humans, you know? And I think if we could spawn that, you know, and blow it open, I'll feel, I'll sleep good at night. Yeah, one of the things I know you've been working on just over the years and kind of

where it's at right now of somehow protecting athletes in this uh this professional setting i don't know where that conversation is anymore i remember there used to be a conversation of some like unionization of just handling some like basic levels of care and how we protect athletes how do we take care of them when they're at these events are you still working on any of that stuff yeah uh indirectly i wouldn't say that it's been a huge success but i did notice for the past couple of years there's really no life cycle in place for the coach and athlete within this sport. It's rape and pillage basically. Anyone's in, everyone's out.

If you do come in and you get kicked out, then they're like, oh, next person in. Like it's like, you know, not saying there has to be regulation stuff, but I'm part of the IF3, which is the International Functional Fitness Federation, where we're having a goal of governance for the sport and national governing bodies and then eventually moving the sport into the Olympics. Our goal is 2028. We have an opportunity to be in Tokyo in 2020 as kind of like a participatory sport, not being there as the front line, but that's our goal is to kind of be like, hey, we're over here.

We currently have 40-something countries that are in the process of being a governing body. And then, of course, I've tried numerous times to develop my own athlete program that was bought and paid for by me yeah which would just keep athletes in one place in a house and i was hoping to create like a genesis of programs that would just spawn out that would start that everywhere else that hasn't really happened um it's just you know athletes down to the crunch is that they need to spend a lot of hours training yeah and they can't be working. And so how do you have a lifestyle, you know? Well, is that part of it, though?

Like there's a lot of baseball players out there living in a bus that aren't really – no one cares about. Yeah, dude. No, I'm down with you. Like the struggle, the raise up. Yeah, that's part of it. Yeah, for sure. But this is like below poverty line opportunities, right?

Yeah. Like no time. I mean, it used to drive me crazy. But this is like below poverty line opportunities, right? Yeah. Like no time. I mean, it used to drive me crazy. And no Milwaukee Brewers cash flowing down maybe even to the. I like to make the joke. It's like if we laid out how much money everyone's made in CrossFit, it's like $8, $7, $9, $6 million. But that line is, There's no middle...

There's no people... But I don't know. Maybe it's the same. Is it the same in MMA still? Or is there like a... It's not quite as steep at CrossFit. But yeah, definitely. The earnings for UFCs are public.

And the winners of the main fights will get a half million dollars. And the undercard will get six grand. It's a pretty big discrepancy. Yeah, there's a part of all the sports. I mean, playing ice hockey. And the number of friends that I have that went and made it to the ECHL and they were two steps away. They're like, what are you going to do now? Go home, sleep on my mom's couch and try to figure out how to get a job.

That's just part of the athlete life if you don't get there. To take this a different direction for a moment, you're certainly well-known in this space for being someone that has a lot of experience. You're very well educated. You've done a lot of great things. And I'm always curious with people that I'm willing and excited to learn from who they are learning from. So what are you learning about right now and who are you learning it from? Yeah, I'd say over the past five or six years, I've kind of went outside of fitness to look at just broad principles of existence, religion, freedom of speech. It could have been because of just it being prevalent in the conversation when I moved to the United States, or it could be just my age. But

over the past, yeah yeah half a decade I've really been trying to engulf all kinds of books on truths and values and priorities from you know everyone you can think of and what you what American language would be it's on both sides of the column to the far left and the far right I've looked at all of it in between just to try to come up with some principles and guiding lights not only for myself but just to indirectly you know use principles for what I'm teaching for other people for that question like to open up what's your intention and why are we here and why are we doing any of those things and I think that so that that knowledge that I've gained through my own practice has really allowed me to like just open my eyes to a lot of things. So I'm looking for paper.

I love reading books. I travel around to listen to speakers. I'll travel across the country or to another country to listen to someone live, talk for a couple hours on a really heavy topic. For example, this summer I listened to Sam Harrison, Jordan Peterson, speak for two and a half hours where, you know, and I have no game in either person's boat, but being live and listening to the minds, I think that's, you know,

it sounds woo-woo, but that's what our society needs. We need fixes like that of everyone coming together in a live opportunity and really hashing out through critical thinking some really challenging topics you know through conversation and i felt some stuff i still get goosebumps about it but i felt some stuff that night that you know i just just give me an open eye that probably a lot of people have felt in their life that's like you know conversation is where we can fix a whole lot of things and that comes from reading and uh really having eloquent language and whatnot so that's where i've been looking to learn it's been unfortunate i've lost a number of my mentors over the past number of years but i've i've been

taking that as a sign like i just gotta i gotta lead my own path i gotta find my own way and like start searching for things that are that are uh within me i guess you could say what are uh some of your core values core principles that you've discovered or that you that you have yeah i'm uh well i've discovered i'm super curious uh that i do think about death often um and whether that's a stoic mentality of like just having it on my forearm every day as a thought process or it's a natural human fear, I think, you know, those kind of things lead into all the stuff below it. You know, I think that there's an interconnection that I believe in. You know, I can't touch it or feel it, or maybe I'm not smart enough

to speak about it, but I do think that there's a total connection, like I call it a supra-conscious, that everyone may have in their time and being some part to play with right now. I do think, though, when my physical self goes, I think consciousness turns off and, and, uh, I don't think there's anything else. Um, but that's what I believe today. And I think, uh, I'm continuing on that search to figure out, you know, what that looks like and holding that as a guiding light, I think develops some good morals for me and, uh, develop some good truths on how I should get up in the morning and what, what I should do. Uh, But I'm also very lucky. I don't believe in free will.

I think a lot of my stuff is just luck or genetics or I didn't plan on getting here and doing the things that I do. So I'm lucky that I've developed some of those things. For the most part? Yeah, yeah. I didn't know how to speak about it until I heard Sam say it. He's so clear in his thought. I'm interested in what you just said. I don't know what Sam's point is on this.

I mean, he essentially says that you don't have free will. Oh, gotcha. You didn't choose to be you, and you as a person, as this person here, I'm just doing the things I do not from my own free will, not through my own decisions, but because I am built the things I do not from my own free will, not through my own decisions, but because I am built the way I am, structure determines function, I can't not be me, kind of.

That's pretty good, dude. Yeah. That's pretty good. Because it's, I mean, like, try to explain that 15 years ago. Like, I thought it in my head, right? It's like, I just feel it, that I don't have a lot to do with that.

Because I started to see, like, choices, shit that comes up, like, head right it's like i just i just feel it that i don't have a lot to do with that because i start to see like choices shit that comes up like where did that thought come from how did i organize those things look back on behaviors like it it all makes you just went it can make you go nihilist and fucking crazy at a time but do you think that a lot of that is just because you put the work in oh yeah there's no doubt but i don't think that uh the the the basics and the light and the the shining light is to where it to where it was the uh was the starting point is that it's listen i to be honest i don't know you said it pretty darn good i don't know how to speak about it enough i just know that when someone talks about

it it just resonates with me. It's like, that makes sense to me, man. That makes sense to me. And then if I use that as my base support, then obviously that allows you to figure out, you know, what my values are and what. Because there's, you know, I understand love, right? I know what love is. I received a lot of that as a young kid. I also experienced the opposite side of the coin and adversities in my life.

But, you know, I could grasp on that. So if I can grasp on that and I know how it feels and how it pleasures me or how it helps other people, I think that's also a good, like, base support for, like, what are my values and how I do the things that I do, you know. I understand empathy. I think that's probably what got me luckily enough to coaching in having conversation with people i think i have um a gift through experience of sitting down and and listening to someone and really not really being sympathetic to but understanding and feeling them as to what that feels from my experiences um so those those traits right there i think if

you know and where they come from it depends upon your beliefs right yeah, I think if, you know, and where they come from, it depends upon your beliefs, right? Yeah. Some may think that it's from, you know, a Judeo-Christian order. Peterson does. Yeah. Or he may think it comes from a myth story sense of values that are determined based upon that. And you know what? It's all good conversation at the end of the day if any of those people no matter what their beliefs are um know what good is and know how to treat another

human and know what love is and empathy i think you're in the right direction sounds like you bring some of that to your gyms though like some of those values well yeah we'll try to extract where people sit on it you know definitely there definitely. There's definitely, I guess, an overriding like, well, there's an openness to the conversation on it. I have a parent question for you. Given that you have a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old, they're both daughters, right? Yep.

I mentioned Donovan Hite at the break, and you kind of lit up. He's a part of the Peterson, Sam Harris crowd. I was watching a talk with him the other day, and he was talking about how social media has been exceptionally hard on, specifically on younger women because it's a platform. The case he's making is that guys bully each other in the physical world. You're going to get punched. You're going to get yelled at.

It's very physical, roughhousing and all that. Women tend to bully each other in more of a relational sense and now they have these they used to they used to continue okay this is his point they used to so for 10 to 14 year olds for females right remember okay they used to be able to do that there'd be a form of bullying or he'd just call it aggressive behavior like picking on each other and figuring shit out in a tight relationship but now due to due to social media, there's an insuffering happening, which means that someone can bully or propose to act upon that group and then not have anything to do with it.

So they don't get to stay in the mix and fucking suffer like you should suffer if you punch someone in the face. So if you punch someone in the face, there's suffering that comes from that. Your fucking hand and also someone coming back at you. I just use that as an analogy, but I'm sorry to hijack that, but I get lit up on it because it's fucking so real for me right now that I can't even control the information.

I can't control the flow of how these two young women that I feel so fucking connected to and responsible for that I can't control it. And it is frustrating. His points on it, dude, that was alarming for me. The self-harm for 10 to 14-year-old females in 10 years is tripled. Wow. 3X.

Yeah. 3X. Now, you can come up with whatever fucking, like, but if you don't find a concern about that, there's a problem. There's a fucking problem. It makes that sharp turn in 2009. We saw the same presentation, I'm assuming. It makes a sharp turn in 2009 where, like, iPhones became available in 2007. More and more people had them, and then right around 2009, that's, like, when the tipping

point is hitting where most people have them, most people have social media at that point, it's not just for, Facebook's not just for people that have a university address, it's a mainstream thing, and then, then you're talking about, like, women self-harm, like, they're cutting themselves, they have depressive episodes, etc., etc., and it seems to be much more common with females specifically than, than males specifically because now women can destroy the reputation of another, girls in this case, girls can destroy the reputation of another girl 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Without suffering for it.

Yeah, without having to be in the mix. They can do it anonymously and walk away. It's like YouTube comments. It's anonymous, and so they're horrible. I was just wondering how you deal with that as a father. That sounds rough. I have three boys. I saw that, and I was like, whew.

Yeah, no. Thank God. Thanks, bro. I'm definitely having two girls. It's going to be real. It's tough, but I do, you know, so I'm educated on, like, you know, what's going on out there, but I also hold a huge percentage of that awareness of, like,

I really don't know, And I can't control it because I just see it daily and nonstop of ways that just massive opportunities to market towards them. And it's being in the schools. It's being promoted within the schools as well in terms of what they can do and how they can communicate within the schools. And, again, you know, I don't want to go in the soapbox, but, you know, there's less physical opportunities. terms of what they can do and how they can communicate within the schools um and again you know i don't want to go on the soapbox but you know there's less physical opportunities um yeah it's just uh it's a tough spot right now so i'm just i'm conscious of it i uh try to you know find that nice balance between because you got to remember that these are two humans that at this point in time in their life,

they're breaking away from the nest and trying to develop self-responsibility, but they're at a point in their life, especially on the highest level of feminine, not just for the gender, but for the feminine state, where perception and how that is all made up is a really intricate time right now. So how you're perceived and how you find security and attachment and love, this is the building point of it. Yeah. But that could quickly be diminished.

And trust can be lost very quickly. Yeah. And that's my biggest fears is what I keep thinking about is how I have to try to find controls on it. Yeah. But it's tough to control. So I'm at a tough spot for that. But all I can do is I tell my wife, you know, we just got to stick to principles. They'll always be secure in our home.

They'll always have a place to have love and acceptance. We'll always be someone that they'll be able to communicate with. And I think if you use that as your base support, everything else is going to work out for itself. Yeah. Two questions, semi-ish related. Have you read Man's Search for Meaning? Yeah, Viktor Frankl.

Viktor Frankl. And do you have any recorded conversations with Paul Cech? I didn't record any, no. Meaning that have I saved any of his podcasts? No, no. Have you talked to him and recorded it that I could go listen to just for fun? Oh, no. I consulted with Paul.

He was a mentor of mine for years. I used to consult with him a couple times a year for years. Okay. He's awesome. Secondary shaman. Oh, I know. Last year? Yeah.

So remember when I started, I was one of his initial students in the Paul Cech Swiss exercise, Swiss ball exercise program design courses. When he was traveling the globe and doing that, I was following him everywhere he was going. So I was at that precipice where, you know, Cech was getting up in front of crowds and, like, causing fucking fights, you know, because he would speak the truth, and he's just so entertaining. But he would speak stuff that

you'd just want to fucking stand up and say yeah motherfucker like in a strength and conditioning setting. How effed up is that? But he was powerful in his language. Every story tells it's 45 minutes long and you learn nine different lessons on the way up to the top of the pyramid.

But that's the thing about Paul is that he's purposely embedding that in it. Yeah. That's what I admire about Paul. We went to his office and it was like, well, one, his office is a fucking mecca. And the library in there is unbelievable. Like, there aren't libraries like that in people's anywhere. Yeah, he's well-read.

From the hand-drawn diagrams, like the works, and his garage is ridiculous. He moves rocks around for fun. And then, yeah. Continue. Yeah, it just keeps going. It goes on and on. It does. All the way out to, do you want to go meditate on these rocks so we can make real water?

Oh, you lost me, bro. You lost me. But the Stages of Life piece, when he went into that on the show, it's like a 45-minute kind of like just he just went on the Stages of Life, and I just wanted to slowly back away and be like, I'm the cliche. I'm out. I think Paul, because if you go back and track time, like he kind of exited out of the scene scene like indirectly you know how you're just doing

things and you're in it and then you're just not and he was he exited for like a decade and i think that's been really powerful for all of us because he really just tried to figure out a lot of stuff for himself on top of the fact he had read 6 000 books by that point in time and practiced a whole lot of things and developed an entire education program, you know, on the holistic exercise. Yeah. You know, and just taught, like, I mean, the books and his information that he shared back in the day are, like, biblical-style fitness shit. Yeah, you almost wonder if people just learn from him,

you kind of don't need to go many other places. No, no, no. Like the four doctor piece, when he broke all that out, I was like, this should be at the base of when you start. You should have to go read that. Yeah. You should have to learn those things. There's a lot of Paul's stuff inside of my things.

Yeah. Biological medicine, primal movement patterns, you know, the head-to-toe energy and external energies. Yep. I really appreciate, Paul, what he's contributed. Yeah. Paul's fantastic. And he's got, like, the fact that I think that he's gotten into podcasting

and, like, actually going back out to talk to people like us and just all the shows he's been on. Until he comes back into the fitness scene and goes, what the fuck has gone on for 10 years? But no one even knew who he was. Can you imagine him walking through here? Yeah. Oh, my gosh. He would love it.

Well, I was just saying that. He would be dropping knowledge on people that they would never even be able to think about. That's true. Could you imagine? He'd be standing knowledge on people that they would never even be able to think about. That's true. Could you imagine if, like – He'd be standing up on something. He'd be wearing his, like, karate things and his weird shoes and just holding service up there. Yeah. On the note of Paul Cech, how much do you prescribe, so to speak, you know, meditation, mindfulness,

potentially altered states of consciousness and, you know, going to peru doing ayahuasca that that type of thing for you know those you care about and or your athletes gen pop etc yeah the uh i'm not sure if they get there to those states or what we could if we want to call it meditation but we uh prescribe easy aerobic work long unplugged a lot so uh being out in nature and hiking is one of our, you know, highest prescribed methods for both sides of that coin, general population and for the elite athlete. Yeah, both for the physical benefits but also for the mental, spiritual, emotional benefits.

You get to stay inside. You know, you get to really connect your breath and your body together, which is the base components of just breath itself. Hopefully in nature. Yes. Yes, of course, where you have that fractal environment and nothing's all like corners and cuts like you do in your office or your computer. And there's lots of great connections to why you need to be out there for that. So that's my main prescription for that. Hoping that they're going to get a lot of those things come up through it. I don't have like, you know, say, oh, go use the Calm app or go do these things because I just want to go back to, you know,

what am I trying to fix with that intervention of something if they don't have all the pieces together, you know, initially. You're encouraging them in those moments to, you know, not have headphones in and that type of thing. Yeah, unplugged. So no phone or if you do have a phone, safety, and you're not listening to music and you're just going out for a walk. Just being totally present in nature.

Yeah, and that's, you know, just in case someone's listening, they're like, oh, I'm going to try that. It can be very threatening for some people. So you have to be aware. You don't just, like, slap that prescription, you know. Three times a week, 60 minutes, go out in nature. Because, like it or not, in some cases, some people have come back and really, like, had to change their lives because they've got some opportunities.

So I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but you've got to know what you're getting into when you make that prescription. Yeah, I mean, they're probably just out there with their thoughts, and they have to deal with them. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I did that with Eckhart Tolle listening to his stuff. If you listen to it, too, I mean, he'll put you into a trance anyways. But post some CrossFit competition, this was back in 2009,

I just started to go on walkabouts. And in listening to his stuff, then I'd go for a walk and start trying to create those mantras in my head, what he would say around just being present and the current moment, et cetera. And I couldn't remember some of the walks sometimes, like you'd be so focused on it that, uh, you get into some places where you're just wondering why you're doing anything. Cause when you get to challenge the ego and your way, and cause he proposes some questions around like, well, is that really you, you know? And I, of

course, just coming off this athletic career, I was like, that's not me. And I've tried to wrap my whole life around being that. And now if that's taken away, I don't feel as worthy. And that can be sometimes tough to deal with. One quick second. We're going to take a quick break. We're going to do some quick computer pauses real quick. Yep. Now we're back.

Okay, we're back. So you were talking about losing an identity, so to speak. Yeah. I went through it a couple times in my life, but as an older adult, like in your 30s, it's a little tougher to contend with because it feels like you pulled yourself into a shitty spot already. But it's a whole life story of me probably trying to go through these chameleon changes. But when I was 18 as a young athlete, I was that kid in the community of a small community. No one knew the community, but I was like the athletic kid, right?

And popularized because of my athleticism. And then I got injured, and then I just became a fucking number. And so I quickly realized that, you know, if you don't have those pieces inside you that are outside of how you're performing or what you're perceived in your sport, you know, you really got to find a way to make that up. So that was a good, you know, learning for me. But then after my CrossFit days, after 2009, I think, I really got messed up at the games and I shouldn't have been there competing. I did a lot of walkabouts and had to challenge

those same notions of like, you've wrapped this entire thing around you now and uh what happens when that's taken away and can you deal with that and how are you viewing yourself when that's not a part of you anymore because i had you know wrapped my entire person around it and anyways in the end it was a good learning uh but it's tough back to the point like it was very threatening yeah because i didn't want to let that go because that's what allowed me to survive and you know just just survive and what i was doing i was addicted i'd wrapped all that around me to survive and just survive in what I was doing. I was addicted. I'd wrapped all that around me to make it work, and then it was starting to get pulled away.

Yeah, well, that defined your view of your self-worth almost to a sense. Yeah. I've actually always wondered that when you left the CrossFit scene, what it looked like for the next year or two after that because it wasn't pretty, and I was a big follower fan all the things um not just of the athlete james fitcher but the the big dog blog the stuff the all the information you were putting out there was nobody really testing things that you were testing at the time and like then all of a sudden it was just gone and the process of coming back and staying in the game

and not just being i feel like it's really easy in those moments to be like, oh, just fuck it. This is just not for me. But you keep going and have to find a way. Yeah. I think it's the coaches and athletes that bring me back. It is because they're good people with great intent, and they're good humans, but they're being led astray, and I just feel like I can't let that happen. Yeah.

Yeah. I think this is a badass show. Well thanks for having me. Finally. I enjoyed this. I've wanted to have you on the show for years. I'm glad we finally did it. It was a pleasure meeting you. Thanks for the great questions. Yeah. Totally.

It's probably the Canadian thing when I hear the words come out. No. We joke about Jordan Peterson all the time where it's probably the Canadian thing when I hear the words come out no like the we we joke about Jordan Peterson all the time where it's like the way he views the world is so obvious to him and it's so like no we should all just if you just listened and just did this so many people would be benefited and when I hear you talk about fitness and how we should talk about this conversation just that like guys it's so obvious let's just do it this way and we can benefit so many people we don't have to go with the the hot sexy thing that everyone's going to burn out on or whatever it is

it's but it's that's the thing very cool for yeah that's the thing is everyone will end up everyone will end up being okay in the end. That's the thing. But the biggest fear is that the top down holds a lot of the keys. I appreciate it. Where can people find you and all the things you're working on? Opexfit.com. Everything's there. Alex Macklin.

Yo. You can find me at AlexQMacklin on Instagram and then AlexMacklin.com. And if you want to get coaching, Alexlexmacklin.com slash coaching. There it is. Look at that. So simple. I'm working on my outro. That's pretty good.

Right on. You can find me on Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. Also, Barber Shrugged every Wednesday, sometimes Saturdays. Anders. At Anders Varner, because I'm Anders Varner at the Shrugged Collective. Six shows a week going out. Lots of YouTube fun stuff. Get in there.

Like, subscribe. Leave us a nice comment. And we will see you guys next week. That is a wrap, folks. Want to thank our sponsors again. Organifi. Go to Organifi.com forward slash shrugged. Using the coupon code shrugged to save 20%.

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every Wednesday. Not this week because we had some big announcements, but I appreciate you all. As always, I never saw this opportunity coming, much less did I know that we were going to take it this far and I couldn't be here without you guys. So thank you so much. Thank you, Doug. If you're still listening to the show, um, and get over to at Anders Varner and come and hang out with me. I'm always interested in talking to the audience and answering all your questions. So thank you. We'll see you guys next week.